Ida Margaret McRonald (nee Magness) was born on October 2, 1930 and died of leukemia in Verdugo Hills Hospital on May 26, 2013.
She was born in Crumlin, a small town in Wales. Her parents were Stephen Lester Magness and Ethel (Watkins) Magness. As a young child, Ida moved with her parents and two brothers (Andrew and Bill) to Deal, a popular holiday resort near Dover in Kent on the southeast coast of England.
When World War II broke out in September 1939, she went to live with her grandmother in Crumlin as an evacuee. At the end of the war, she returned to Deal, finished school, and at age 18 enrolled as a trainee Registered Nurse at Folkestone Hospital. Following graduation as an RN, she was employed at Reading Hospital from 1951 to 1954.
In 1953, she met her future husband, Angus McRonald, a physicist from Scotland working at the nearby Atomic Weapons Research Institute. Married in 1954, they sailed to Adelaide, Australia via the Suez Canal. Her family grew in Australia, with the births of her son and daughter. In 1962, the family moved to Sydney, Australia, where they lived in the beach town of Cronulla. In December 1954 they sailed back to Britain, where her husband was employed at the National Physical Laboratory. Ida worked as an RN in Adelaide, in Sydney, and in England during these years.