Jean Graham Ford, Billy Graham’s last remaining sibling, dies at age 91
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CHARLOTTE, N.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — The final remaining sibling of the late Rev. Billy Graham, Jean Graham Ford, died Thursday morning, the family announced.
She was 91.
Ford met her husband Leighton while attending Wheaton College in Illinois. Like Graham, Leighton became an evangelist and launched Leighton Ford Ministries in 1985 in Charlotte.
Jean’s nephew Franklin Graham wrote that Billy Graham sought her counsel on many issues throughout his life.
Jean contracted polio at age 11, which paralyzed her throat.
“Even at that time in her young life, and faced with the possibility of death as a child, she often said that it would not have bothered her [to die] so much because she knew she was going to heaven,” Franklin said. “She traced her faith back to her childhood, commenting that Jesus ‘was part of our family.’”
Jean and Leighton’s oldest son, Sandy, died of a rare heart disease at the age of 21.
She is survived by her husband, Leighton; son, Kevin; and daughter, Debbie.
Billy Graham, the nation’s most prominent Christian evangelist, died in 2018 at age 99.
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