April 2, 1916

Elsijane Trimble Roy was born in Lonoke (Lonoke County), one of five children of Judge Thomas Clark Trimble III and Elsie Walls Trimble. Her father and grandfather were both attorneys in a law practice with Senator Joseph T. Robinson, and her father later became a federal judge. She completed undergraduate studies and law school at the University of Arkansas in five years and was the only woman to graduate from the University of Arkansas School of Law in 1939. She was Arkansas’s first woman to become a circuit judge, the first woman on the Arkansas Supreme Court, the first woman appointed to an Arkansas federal judgeship, the first woman to be federal judge in the Eighth Circuit, and the first Arkansas woman to follow her father as a federal judge.