My Trails into the Past

My great-grandfather, Johan Anton Hork, appeared in just two U.S. census records: 1880 and 1900. He arrived in the United States in November of 1870, so missed that one. He likely appeared in the 1890 census, but that one does not survive. He died in 1906. 1880 Census The 1880 enumeration was conducted in Aurora, Kane County, Illinois. [1] The surname is indexed on Ancestry as Hark, but the vowel could easily be an o. His wife, Julia, and their first four children are listed in the correct order. Mary, who was born in 1873, is 7 years old. Ida, who was born in 1875, is 5 years old. Susan, who was born in 1877, is 3 years old and listed as Susie, a close enough name to Susan. And Albert, who was born in 1879, is listed as 10 months old. His wife, Julia, who was born in 1854, is 25. So far, these facts match with what is known about the family whose last name is Hork. Anton’s age of 36, suggests a birth year of 1844. That matches the age he put down on his marriage record when stating...

Many years ago in 1997, a kind church secretary sent me the page from the St. John the Baptist Church in Joliet of the marriage of my great-grandparents, Johan Anton Hork and Julia Ann Sievert on 6 June 1872. [1] It was the breakthrough I needed to research my German ancestors in Germany. This record named both Johan Anton’s parents and the place where they were from in Germany. The writing was hard to read but with the help of an online Westphalia Rootsweb group, we figured out the town he was from was Oberhundem in the District (Kreis) Olpe. Today, the church records of that Joliet church are now on Ancestry and I have found the records of all their children, Julia’s aunts and uncles, and cousins. I might find more when Ancestry’s full-text search includes these records. [2]   Finding German Records While researching in 2010 at the Family History Library, I used the catalog to find church records from Oberhundem. Oberhundem is in Kreis Olpe, and part of Westfalen, Prussia, ...

My grandmother, Anna Marie Sullivan Hork, was born 15 October 1892 in Anaconda, Deer Lodge Co, Montana, and died on Valentine’s Day, 1979 in Santa Clara, California. [1] I remember because my parents had a party for the immediate family and Dad got the call from one of his sisters that Nana had died. The funeral was a few days later at St. Matthews Catholic Church in San Mateo, California. [2] Afterwards, we went to my Aunt Virginia’s house where the after gathering could have been called an Irish wake. We all spoke of the great memories we had with our Nana. She was buried next to her husband in the Los Angeles National Cemetery. [3] She had married William Cyril Hork in Butte, Silver Bow County, Montana, on 30 November 1922, which was Thanksgiving Day. [4] They had five children, four who lived to adulthood. Cyril had problems with alcohol, so she left him and took her children to Napa, California, to live with her sister’s husband and start a new life. After working in his co...

Last week, I viewed Billie Stone Fogarty’s webinar titled “School Censuses: What, When, and Where” at Legacy Family Tree Webinars. Many of her examples were from Oklahoma, so I decided to check out what I could learn about the school censuses in Hamilton, Ravalli County, Montana. I view many webinars, but if one doesn’t actively apply what they learned from a webinar, the knowledge will be lost. Hamilton, Montana, is where my grandfather, William Cyril Hork, was born in 1899. He was the youngest of ten children born to Johan “John” Anton Hork and Julia Ann Sievert. FamilySearch has school census records from Ravalli County starting in 1900 and continuing until 1940. They are not indexed. They cannot be searched using full-text search. However, they are imaged. My grandfather would be in the census at least up to 1920. His siblings would be in the earlier years. Urselle was born in 1892, Raymond in 1889, Tony in 1886, Frank in 1884, Carrie in 1881, and Albert in 1879. Perhaps Albe...

When my father went off to work, it was to grocery stores or supermarkets as a produce clerk or produce manager. He worked for several different stores, but the longest was for LoRay Market and Safeway. Safeway When we lived in Pittsburg, he worked at Safeway. The city directory just says clerk, not specifically produce clerk. The directories from 1955 to 1962 identified his place of work as Safeway. In 1963, they purchased a home in Walnut Creek. My father may have already been working there, and buying a house closer to work was more desirable. LoRay The LoRay store in Walnut Creek was only a few blocks away. There were three or four LoRay stores in the county. The name came from merging the owner's and his wife's names. My father always drove to work, primarily because he started work at 5ish. This gave him time to put out all the produce that had been removed from the shelves and put into cold storage refrigerators. I believe this was before they created refrigerated displa...

As I researched the funeral Masses of my Catholic family members, I often found that the recitation of the Holy Rosary preceded the funeral Mass, or was said the previous evening. My grandmother, Anne M. Hork, died on 14 February 1979, and her funeral was held on 17 February at St. Matthews Catholic Church in San Mateo. I was present at the funeral, but I don’t remember much about it, except for the nice wake we had following it at my Aunt Virginia’s home. According to her funeral card, the Holy Rosary was recited ten minutes before the funeral Mass. Now, ten minutes is not enough time to recite the whole rosary, so I imagine they did only a portion. This past week, I attended the funeral for my cousin, Melanie. We also recited a portion of the rosary before the start of the funeral Mass. I am sure not many in attendance knew what to recite. We had no reading aids to follow along. It had been many years since I learned the parts of the rosary. It was not hard to find online. If y...

W illiam Joseph Hork and Lela Nell Johnston were married at Queen of All Saints Church in Concord, California, on 19 April 1953.[1] Lea’s friend, Barbara Boyenger, was her maid of honor and Bill’s brother-in-law, Gene Soares, was his best man. Before the ceremony, Ken Harvey, Barbara’s future husband, took photos of the preparation at Lea’s house. Barbara must have spent the night as we see the two of them having breakfast still in their night clothes.  The marriage news was written about in the Contra Costa Times and the Concord Transcript . The article in the Times is very detailed about the clothing the participants wore during the wedding and afterward for their wedding trip. They married on a Sunday afternoon at Queen of All Saints Church in Concord. Father Adrian McKenna presided over the ceremony attended by immediate family members and close friends. Because Lea was not Catholic, the ceremony was likely not a full Mass. The photo below shows the couple just at the alt...