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In October 1952, three months before his life ended, Hank Williams sat down in Montgomery, Alabama, and signed a legal agreement to claim and raise his unborn child. Though he was dealing with severe spinal pain and an exhausting tour schedule, the twenty-nine-year-old singer arranged for the baby he was expecting with Bobbie Jett to have a home with him and his mother, Lillian Stone. Hank never got to meet the child. On January 1, 1953, he died in the back seat of a Cadillac while traveling to a show in West Virginia. Five days later, on January 6, and only two days after Montgomery held Hank’s historic funeral, a baby girl named Antha Belle Jett was born in the same city at St. Margaret’s Hospital. Keeping her late son’s word, Lillian Stone brought the infant home and completed her legal adoption in December 1954. That stability vanished in February 1955 when Lillian died suddenly while the little girl was just two years old. The child was placed for adoption with another family under a new name and grew up unaware of her true identity. More than three decades later, going by the name Jett Williams, she uncovered her past and went to court to establish who she was. The decisive piece of evidence was the October 1952 pre-birth custody agreement bearing her father’s signature, which proved he had never abandoned her. In the late 1980s, the courts officially recognized Jett Williams as the legitimate daughter of Hank Williams. Standing beside his grave at Oakwood Annex Cemetery in Montgomery, she finally held the family name her father had signed over to her before she was even born.

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On October 15, 1952, inside the Montgomery, Alabama, office of attorney Robert B. Stewart, twenty-nine-year-old Hank Williams signed a notarized pre-birth custody agreement that guaranteed his unborn child a permanent home.

Suffering from severe spinal pain and maintaining an exhausting tour schedule between his two marriages, the singer was expecting a baby around New Year’s Day with Bobbie Jett of Nashville. Under the contract’s terms, Williams agreed to cover all medical bills and room and board in Montgomery, while his mother, Lillian Stone, would help raise the child in his household for the first two years before he assumed sole custody.

Williams never lived to fulfill that second stage. On January 1, 1953, he died in the back seat of a baby-blue Cadillac on his way to a concert in Canton, Ohio, and Oak Hill, West Virginia. Five days later, on January 6, just forty-eight hours after more than twenty thousand mourners crowded around the Montgomery Auditorium for his funeral, Antha Belle Jett was born in the same city at St. Margaret’s Hospital.

Honoring her late son’s legal pledge, Lillian Stone brought the infant home, renamed her Catherine Yvonne Stone, and completed her formal adoption in December 1954. When Lillian died suddenly of a heart attack on February 26, 1955, however, the two-year-old toddler lost her only guardian inside the household. Instead of keeping her within the family, relatives relinquished custody, making the little girl a ward of the state of Alabama.

Placed in foster care and subsequently adopted by Wayne and Louise Deupree of Mobile, she grew up under her third legal name, Cathy Louise Deupree. Though her adoptive parents raised her knowing she was adopted and left her a small two-thousand-dollar inheritance from her grandmother when she turned twenty-one, state records remained sealed against her inquiries. Even after her biological father’s song copyrights came up for renewal in the early 1980s, estate trustees and Montgomery attorney Robert B. Stewart kept her out of the inheritance proceedings while collecting royalties SOLELY for Hank Williams Jr..

In September 1984, determined to uncover her origins, she hired Washington, D.C., investigative attorney Keith Adkinson. Within days of opening his investigation in Alabama, Adkinson tracked down a copy of the October 15, 1952, pre-birth support and custody contract tucked away in legal files—the very document Stewart had drafted and witnessed inside his own office thirty-two years earlier.

Armed with her father’s signature, she notified Hank Williams Jr. and the estate trustees in 1985 to claim her rightful share of the renewal copyrights. Rather than settling, the trustees and her half-brother filed a preemptive lawsuit in the Circuit Court of Montgomery County seeking a judicial declaration that she had no legal standing as an heir.

During the 1985 trial, the circuit judge ruled that she was indeed the biological daughter of Hank Williams, based directly on the 1952 custody contract and hospital birth records. Despite confirming her paternity, the lower court initially blocked her from collecting her inheritance, ruling that old Alabama statutes governing children born out of wedlock barred her claim and cleared the estate administrators of wrongdoing.

Taking the name Jett Williams and marrying Adkinson in September 1986, she appealed the ruling to the Alabama Supreme Court. In a series of landmark decisions culminating in *Stone v. Gulf American Fire and Casualty Co.* in 1989, the state’s highest justices overturned the lower court, ruling that estate administrators had knowingly concealed material facts about her identity from probate judges in the 1950s and 1960s to defraud an infant heir.

The court declared her entitled to an equal half-share of the entire Hank Williams estate alongside her half-brother. When Hank Williams Jr. appealed the verdict in federal court, the United States Supreme Court refused to hear the challenge in 1990, leaving her victory intact and later confirming her joint ownership of newly uncovered 1951 *Mother’s Best Flour* radio recordings.

Walking across the grass at Montgomery’s Oakwood Annex Cemetery to stand beside her father’s white marble monument, Jett Williams carried the family name and legal rights that Hank Williams had signed into existence on an October afternoon three months before she entered the world.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg2oR91_r5I

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In February 1955, after her grandmother Lillian Stone died, young Catherine Yvonne Stone was handed over to Alabama social services at age two because her relatives refused to keep her. Lillian had legally adopted the little girl to honor the wishes of her late son, Hank Williams. With her grandmother gone, the toddler was pushed out of her own family home and later adopted by Wayne and Louise Deupree. Renamed Cathy Louise Deupree, she grew up in Mobile, Alabama, completely cut off from the Williams family and her father’s music. For more than thirty years, the people controlling the Hank Williams estate hid her identity. They buried the records of her birth and adoption to keep the entire fortune and royalty stream for themselves, leaving Cathy to grow up with the painful belief that her birth parents had never wanted her. In the 1980s, she set out to uncover the truth alongside investigative attorney Keith Adkinson. Together, they found a yellowed document that had been deliberately locked away in confidential files: an October 1952 pre-birth custody contract bearing the original signature of Hank Williams. That single page proved that her father had never walked away from his child, and had instead prepared a legal path to protect her before he died. Going by the name Jett Williams, she took the estate managers to court to reclaim her identity and her father’s honor. In 1989, after a string of historic courtroom battles, the Alabama Supreme Court issued a final ruling recognizing Jett Williams as the legitimate daughter and full heir of Hank Williams. Thirty-six years after she was given away as an orphan, the promise her father signed on paper finally protected her from those who tried to erase her name.