Troy S. Floyd

Troy Smith Floyd (31 January 1920 – 25 June 1996)

Troy Smith Floyd was born in Kodiak, Alaska on the 31 January 1920 the son of Ernest M. Floyd (c1887-1958) and Ruth Ellen Smith (1887-1991). By 1930 they moved to Bunceton, Missouri where his sister Marian was born. At the age of 22 he enlisted in the United States Army (1942-46) and became first lieutenant (1951-52).

After Troy received his Bachelor of Journalism (1948) and his Master of Arts the following year from the University of Missouri, he moved to Colorado and got a post at the Tribune in La Junta as managing editor (1949-50). Then the year before he met and married his wife, Troy worked as staff correspondent at the International News Service in Denver (1950-51).

On the 2 July 1951 Troy marred Dorothy Isabel Ballard in Denver but eventually moved to Albuquerque where their son Larry Floyd was born four years later. Completing his Doctorate at Berkeley in 1956 Troy published his thesis as "Salvadorean indigo and the Guatemala merchants: a study in Central American socio-economic history (1750-1800)". After their daughter, Phyllis Fleming (Las Cruces) was born, he was offered the post of assistant professor at the University of New Mexico (1959).

His wife Dorothy (1922-2011), born in Washington, D.C., was the daughter of Walter Ballard and Gertrude Long and she spent her childhood in Hyattsville, Maryland. Graduating from that high school in 1939, she attended Hood College, the University of Maryland, and received her own Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Denver in 1947. Although during World War II, Dorothy worked at All America Cables and The Infantry Journal in Washington, she was later employed as a secretary at the same universities her husband Troy worked - Denver, California at Berkeley, New Mexico at Albuquerque.

The family lived in Albuquerque for 22 years, and occasionally lived abroad with Dorothy's family for varying periods of time in Germany, Spain and Guatemala. In 1965 Troy made associate professor and finally seven years later he was full professor of history until he retired in 1974.

They moved to Montrose in 1981, where Troy died aged 79 on 25 June 1996 and fifteen years later Dorothy passed away.

Selected Works

• “The Guatemalan Merchants, the Government and the Provincianos, 1750-1800,” 41:1 (February 1961).
• "The Anglo-Spanish Struggle for Mosquitia", (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1967)
• "The Columbus Dynasty in the Caribbean, 1492-1526", (Albuquerque NM, 1973), pp. 12, 1973)

Sources

1. United States Census, 1930
2. Obituaries, Boonville Daily News, 1991
3. Obituaries, Montrose Press, 2011