Melissa Hough

Melissa Hough, 52, of Maple Bend, died at home on Wednesday, June 17, 2026, of ALS, which she faced for two years with a short list of complaints and a long list of things she still meant to get done. For twenty-six years she worked the counter at the Newaygo County Clerk's office, where she stamped, filed, and quietly safeguarded a good half of this county's beginnings and endings — its marriage licenses and birth certificates, its deeds and its death records — and seemed to remember every one.

She was born April 30, 1974, in Newaygo, the third of Donald and Pat Aldrich's four children, and she was, by universal account, the organized one from birth — the child who alphabetized the family's board games and audited her siblings' allowances. She took a temporary job at the county clerk's office at twenty-six to tide herself over. She stayed twenty-six years. The work fit her exactly: precise, public, and quietly consequential, the daily machinery by which a county keeps track of who it is.

A clerk sees people on the biggest days of their lives, usually while they are nervous and holding the wrong form. Melissa was gentle with the young couples who couldn't hold the pen straight, patient with the widowers filing the hardest paperwork there is, and quietly, expertly immovable with anyone who tried to record a deed they had no business recording. She knew where every record was, sometimes before the computer did. She kept confidences she could have dined out on for a decade. She stayed late more than once to make sure a frantic bride got her license in time, and never mentioned it again.

Away from the counter she was a devoted and slightly overbearing aunt, a doer of ferocious crosswords in ink, a grower of dahlias, and the funniest person at any table she sat at, in a bone-dry way that took newcomers a beat to catch. When the diagnosis came she read everything there was to read about it, the way she'd have worked a title dispute, and then she got on with things. She kept working long past when most people would have stopped. She said ALS had picked the wrong clerk — she had read the fine print, and she intended to file an objection.

She got a great deal done in fifty-two years, and there was not, in the end, much left on her list. She had loved and been loved, kept her word and her records, and left the county's books — and its people — in better order than she found them.

She is survived by her husband of twenty-four years, Greg Hough; her daughter, Claire, a nurse in Grand Rapids, and her son, Kyle, a junior at Central Michigan University; her mother, Pat Aldrich of Newaygo; her sisters, Diane (Rick) Sowerby and Karen Aldrich, and her brother, Tom Aldrich; and the staff of the county clerk's office, her second family, who have promised to keep the line moving and the confidences kept.

She was preceded in death by her father, Donald Aldrich, whose handwriting she inherited and whose patience, she'd be the first to tell you, she did not.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that gifts be made to the ALS Association's Michigan chapter, toward the day some future clerk gets to file an objection that sticks.