Rev. Charles Henon McGhee

Mary Cornelia's father, Charles Henon McGhee was a minister. He was ordained by Bishop John C. Granbery, Virginia Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church of the South on November 11, 1888. After serving for several years in North Carolina and Virginia he transferred to the Indian Mission Conference and moved his family to Oklahoma in 1906. In 1914 he withdrew from the Methodist Episcopal Church and joined the Presbyterian Church instead. He officiated at churches in Oklahoma City (where Mary Cornelia met and married David Oscar Rutledge) and Little Rock, Arkansas, where the Rutledges moved.

He was born 6 June 1861 in Bedford County, Virginia, son of Charles D. McGhee and Mary Anne Craddock. He married Laura Erwin Norris 15 November 1887 in Culpepper County, Virginia. They had three daughters: Laura, Mary and Charlotte. 

He was struck and killed by an automobile on 10 March 1937, while taking his evening walk in Little Rock, where he was living with his daughter. He is buried in Memphis, Tennessee, with his wife, who died there in 1933. 

Rev. Charles Henon McGhee