Donna Nell Deming

Donna Nell Deming died peacefully in her sleep in the early morning hours of Sunday, April 6, 2025, after a long battle with kidney failure. She was 77 years old. She is survived by her four children, Melissa, Ron, Don, and Rich, and by seven much-beloved grandchildren. She is preceded in death by her 40+-year husband Don Deming II, who passed in 2012.

Donna was born on August 3rd, 1947, into a large family of six siblings in rural southwest Missouri in a town called Monett, where her mother Ella kept an immense garden and her father Willie worked for the railroad. She proceeded to live a full life of travel, family and work.

After graduating from Monett High School, she took her first job as an IRS analyst in Kansas City, Missouri, verifying new companies and issuing tax ID numbers. She lived for a short period of time in the early 1960s in Germany, and then in Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, Virginia and, primarily and for the last 30+ years of her life, Florida.

Donna was highly skilled as a bookkeeper and company administrator and worked tirelessly at it. Her back-office support allowed her husband Don to thrive as a contractor, helping at each step to build his career from carpenter to the owner of a bustling business building multi-family construction projects across the southeastern US and especially all corners of Florida. With surprisingly little help, she ran the administrative function through decades, tens of thousands of apartment units, and hundreds—if not thousands—of employees and contractors. The business at various times employed most members of her family, and she continued to assist her son Ron in the business with substantial bookkeeping duties until the last month of her life.

Donna had a passion for genealogy, which she started to pursue decades before its current digitally- and DNA-assisted state. She spent most of her vacations, if not with family, exploring dozens of ancestral threads through a wide variety of basement birth/death archives and cemeteries across many states. She built a library and a very specific narrative for her family of the Demings, tracing the through-line from the first settlers to arrive in 1637, who went on to found Connecticut and help write and sign its famous constitution. She went further, but with less specificity, to their departure from Essex, England and explored the possibility of emigration during the middle-ages from Eming, France (hence, d’Eming). She documented and crafted a compelling story that continues to greatly interest her grandchildren.

Donna was a kind and intelligent woman who valued family over everything else, most particularly her immediate family and extended family in Arkansas and Kansas. She was respected and admired by many, and greatly loved by her family; she will be missed.

A graveside ceremony will be held at 3 pm on Thursday at Hillsborough Memorial Gardens, 2323 W. Brandon Blvd, Brandon FL and all are welcome, with a reception for family and friends afterwards at her home in Brandon.