Dumas Cousins / Los Primos Dumas

Virginia Dumas Robinson

1912 - 1960

Virginia Dumas was daughter and namesake of our grandmother, Virginia Robinson de Dumas and our grandfather Maximino Dumas.  She had been married briefly in Tijuana when she was very young to a friend of her father's. That marriage ended in divorce.  Later, in the latter 1940's, when she was working in Los Angeles in the garment industry, she met Jim Mitchell. Jim was a maintenance painter in the Cooper building in downtown L.A. where Virginia worked.  They married and lived in various houses in the suburbs of the city.  They had no children. Perhaps that is why Virginia was so fond of her nieces and nephews.

Jim liked to play cards and was a pretty good poker player.  Jim had a drinking problem but for the most part, with Virginia's, help he stayed on the wagon. Jim and Virginia liked to be out in the country, camping, hunting and the like. They were rock and arrowhead collectors.  Often Jim's work would take him to places out in the desert or mountains or to big job sites like the Davis dam project in Nevada.  He always found time to play cards in these outlying places and often used this means to make a small living when painting jobs weren't to be had.

Jim and Virginia usually had at least two dogs as pets.  Blanco was one of these dogs.

In the late 1950s Jim and Virginia built a cabin in the Kennedy Meadows area of the Sierra Nevada mountains.  They had a lot of help from Jim's painter friends as well as family.  They were very generous with everything they had and often invited family and friends to their mountain house.  I have many fond memories of trips with them deer and bird hunting. Virginia could cook a delicious quail, pheasant or rabbit stew.  My mouth still waters when I think of those great meals of wild caught meat.

Virginia had been fighting breast cancer since the mid 1950s.  Though she had several healthy years after the initial treatments, she eventually died of the cancer around 1960.