My Trails into the Past

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...

The earliest homes my parents, Bill and Lea, lived in are not completely known. After their marriage, the newspaper announcement stated they lived at 3418 Wren Avenue, which might have been Bill's mother's home.  For a wedding present, Lea’s parents, Tom and Pansy Johnston, helped purchase a home in Shore Acres housing development in West Pittsburg (now Bay Point). Below is Lea and Bill at the site of their home before its purchase. The address was 35 Wharf Drive. The purchase price is not known but Bill took out a mortgage with Bank of America for $6550. How Tom and Mam-ma helped them was probably with the down payment. If the down payment was 20%, the purchase price would have been about $8100. It is not known how long they lived there. Here they are holding me outside the home. It had a flat roof. Today the house looks completely different with new pitched roofs. There is no record of the sale of this house with the county recorder, so it is possible the bank repossessed the...

In 1905, My grandfather’s sister, Ida Hork Colmann, and her husband, Martin J. Colmann, lived at the Manhattan Hotel in San Francisco. Martin was a partner in the business of manufacturing underwear at the Colmann & Fiel, located at 1429a Mission Street.[1]  The Manhattan Hotel was located at the junction of Market, Fell, and Polk Streets and run by John P Gallapher.[2] Here is a current map from Google Maps of the intersection of Market at Polk and Fell. I looked for a fire insurance map of the streets but that part of San Francisco wasn't available. Here is a map of the area of San Francisco that shows the area that was in the burned portion. https://data.sfgov.org/-/Areas-Damaged-by-Fire-Following-1906-Earthquake/yk2r-b4e8 The story passed down is Ida and Martin had to spend time in Golden Gate Park in tents.  A tent camp in Golden Gate Park, April 1906, after the Earthquake and fire.  Chronicle Archive 1906 By 1908, they were be found living on Pacific Avenue and ...

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:  It's Saturday Night again -  Time for some more Genealogy Fun!! Our assignment from Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings, courtesy of Linda Stufflebean for suggesting the topic, is to:  1)  What is the most unusual cause of death you have discovered for your ancestors? Here's mine: I browsed through my RootsMagic database looking for unusual causes of death and found lots of deaths from heart problems, pneumonia, tuberculosis, influenza, kidney problems, suicide, and accidents. One unusual way of ending one’s own life was through drinking carbolic acid. My great-grandfather, John A. Hork, did that at a saloon in Sheridan, Wyoming in 1906. This unusual way of killing oneself caused newspapers from other places in the country to report on it even though he was not a known person. The distinctive way he died caused the newspapers to pick up the news. It seemed he asked for a drink on the house or by credit and was refused. So, he drank from a v...