Ruth Hill Barr was born in Dallas in 1903 and graduated from Columbia University in New York before moving to Shanghai where she worked with the International YWCA and married a Scottish missionary teacher, John Barr. After release from the Lunghwa internment camp at the end of the war in 1945, Ruth and her husband returned to Shanghai in 1946 and lived there until 1952. They then moved to Hong Kong until 1965 when they retired in Scotland. Ruth died there in 1990. Their daughter Betty still lives in Shanghai.