To The Moon, Alice!

My Mom and I went to southern California when I was itty bitty to stay with her Aunt Helen and Uncle Johnny for several days. WE HAD A BLAST, as nearly every day we went some place exciting. Among our excursions was Marineland, POP (Pacific Ocean Park--an amusement park on the beach), and Knotts Berry Farm. In the evenings, we visited my cousins Connie, Bruce and Curt up the street at Aunt Joy and Uncle John's house. What fun they all were! I thought these two families lived like this all the time, visiting amusement parks and eating at House of Pancakes. I remember crying when we left. Wouldn't you?

The highlight of our trip was visiting The Most Wonderful Place on Earth: Disneyland. Walt's park was fairly new, still under construction, and brand-spanking clean. Talk about sensory overload! They used to say the best way to see Disneyland was over a several day period. It was almost too much to see in a day, as it could be exhausting. But for this five-year old, it was heaven. 

For weeks afterwards I spoke of how I got to go to the moon that day in Anaheim. One of Walt's new rides in Tomorrow Land was a spaceship that promised to take you where you'd never been before. I believed it hook, line and sinker. Despite my Uncle Johnny's admonition that if I didn't behave I would "go to the moon" as was the popular saying of the day, I was thrilled to have taken a spaceship and seen video proof on the big screens inside the spaceship that I was indeed in outer space. I was there, I tell ya'! I was.

Here's a short video from the Disney people taken in 1957 of Disneyland. Miss you, Flying Saucers!


 

Heidi Has Gone To Be With Grandfather (and Goat Peter?)

This morning we woke to the news that Shirley Temple had died in her sleep. Peacefully, I hope. She was 85. The inter-tubes were clogged for a bit as social media buzzed with the story. This particular tweet cracked me up:

"In 1938 a witness told the House Committee on Un-American Activities that Shirley Temple was a Communist sympathizer."

She was ten years old at the time.

So Many Marriage Records Online

My day job involves scouring records. My favorite hobby also has me searching and occasionally finding records. I especially like finding a new database of marriage records.

http://familysearch.org/ is uploading thousands of records each week with the help of volunteers who both scan, upload and occasionally transcribe to prepare indexes. Best of all, Familysearch is a FREE site. It recently partnered with Ancestry.com (an awesome but NOT free site) on some projects. 

Index = One of my favorite words. Without an index one must pore through page after page looking for a keyword. FamilySearch doesn't always have indexes (yet) for their many databases. Luckily there is an index for California County Marriages - 1850 to 1952, which is where I've spent the last 90 minutes.

Here are a few copies of marriage licenses of my "kin" that I was thrilled to find.

Oral Family History Can Be Lost In Three Generations

I have several relatives whose dates of death are long forgotten. Burial locations and stories about why they died young? That information has been lost. Except for census, land or military records, an outside researcher would question their existence. Good research demands proof. Because some of my living relatives once spoke to older family who had either known the missing kin or recalled stories told them by parents, I can assume The Missing Kin did actually exist. (An assumption also made because they are my great-greats.) 

When a mother of eight children loses her husband, she may only rarely discuss his death. When a marriage is not approved by parents, the orphaned child of the young couple may later find the subject of his dad a closed one. My paternal grandfather was the youngest of nine. He knew little about his father who had died before he was born. Do you know? 

Aaron Holt, archives technician at the National Archives Fort Worth:

For example, if a parent died three generations ago, the person to most accurately pass on the correct information about the death would be the surviving parent, who would tell the children. If the children are young when their parent died, they will not have accurate information unless the living parent repeatedly and accurately tells the children the story until it is engrained in them.

When they become adults, they must do the same thing for their children. If none of this is ever written down, it is increasingly difficult to get the story right through the generations.”

Holt said that in generations past, people did not talk about death and that makes it more difficult for a genealogist to sort out fact from fiction today.

“Until not too long ago, people didn’t talk about death, especially to their children,” Holt said. “There was a superstition that if you talked about it, you were calling it, and no one wanted to do that.”

A Town Where My Family Once Lived


Read more »

Ditch Directory, Please?

I was once new to genealogy groups and asked poor questions. This is an example of one I read today on Facebook. It gives no info from which to work. The writer assumes we are psychic. And the ditch comment? I laughed myself silly reading it:

I HAVE BEEN SEARCHING FOR YEARS FOR MY GRANDADDY IN OKC WITH NO LUCK. I KNOW THEY DIDN'T JUST ROLL HIM INTO A DITCH SOMEWHERE... ANYONE THAT KNEW IS DEAD, BUT I WILL CONTINUE MY SEARCH.


Joe Sillivent

My maternal Great-Aunt Helen told my husband and I once that all she ever knew growing up was that she wanted to get the hell out of Hagerman, New Mexico. She said Hagerman was pleasant enough, but times were hard in the 1930s. She was BORED. It had very little to offer a young woman. And girls just want to have fun, so the song goes. Every chance she could take, she went to the nearby metropolis of Roswell, where there was an air force base full of young men. Helen soon met a guy who worked at a filling station (is what they called gas stations back in the day). Joe was easy on the eyes and full of personality. They soon married.



Ahh, this a poor photo, I know. I had only a few kilobytes from which to resize into this grainy picture. Do YOU have any photos of young Joe and Helen? Would love to see some.

Joe Dempsie Sillivent married Helen Evelyn Coffee in Fort Sumner, DeBaca County, New Mexico in October 1940. My cousin Connie shared their marriage certificate with us. Remember to click on photos in this blog to enlarge.


From Santa Fe, New Mexico in November of 1942, Joe enlisted and served over three years during World War II. He served stateside as a radio mechanic in Massachusetts and Washington. Helen and her younger brother (Joe's buddy) John Coffee also relocated with him to Massachusetts where he was stationed. 

Jack Dempsey was THE boxing star of the 1920s. I've wondered if Joe's parents were fans and gave their youngest son his middle name Dempsie as a nod to the Champ? After serving in the military during World War II, Joe and Helen followed her family's move to central California. They divorced in 1949. Helen remarried. As did Joe--two more times, to Pauline and then Gertrude. He later reconnected with Helen, his first wife, who was recently widowed. He was by her side when she died in 2004. 

Joe died shortly before Christmas in 2009. When I last spoke to him, it was about his beloved dog, "Red," who had been such a good companion to him. 

Joe's obit reads: 

JOE D. SILLIVENT, age 89, passed away Thursday, December 17, 2009 in Hemet, California, where he was a resident for 21 years. Joe was born on June 26th, 1920 in Shallow-Water, Texas to Lewis Warren and Flora Sillivent. Joe loved electronics which led to his career as an Electrical Engineer for ITT for 38 years. He served in the United States Air Force during World War II. Joe is survived by his son, Martin Sillivent of Maui, Hawaii; son-in-law, Paul Jones of Maui, Hawaii; step-son, Richard and Lonna Owen of San Bernardino, California; niece, Debra Taylor of Riverbank, CA; a large extended family of grandchildren, nieces, nephews and cousins in both Texas and California. Funeral Service will be at Bellevue Memorial Park in Ontario, CA at 11:00 am, Tuesday, December 29, 2009.

We miss you and Helen still, Uncle Joe.