Uncle Mickey

Some time back I posted a piece in my Northen News blog about Aunt Beryl describing the difficulties that she went through during her life including what she went through with my Uncle Mickey.

http://northen.blogspot.com/2015/11/aunt-beryl.html

Recently,  I was back on ancestry.com and in searching through clues came across an order for a request for a military headstone for my Uncle Mickey signed by Aunt Beryl.  Except the first name on the request was not Mickey – it was Arnold Abram Near.

This is one of those little revelations that opens the possibility to finding out more information.  I’d assumed all along that being called Mickey, my uncle’s first name was Michael and in any genealogy search always listed it that way.  No wonder, nothing had ever turned up in a search for him. Tracing back the name Arnold Abram Near led back to a man who was born in Illinois in 1920. His father was Wellington Near, a man whose had been born in Ontario, Canada and whose family had come to the United States through Niagara Falls in 1914.  For some reason, by 1930 the family was living in Greeley, Oklahoma.

What is even more surprising, however,  is that at 18 years old Arnold A. Near is listed as being in San Quenton prison serving a term of 5 to life.  It is possible that this record belongs to another Arnold Near, but the fact that he is listed as coming from Chicago, has the middle initial A, and was the same age,  makes the probability that it is the same person very high.  He was in the military from 1942-1945 and, at least when he went in, was listed as unmarried.  My cousin Tink (Teresa) was born in December of 1946, so it is quite likely that Beryl and Mickey were married in 1946 and that they met, as was my Mom’s case, when the man was stationed in California.

Uncle Mickey died in January of 1958.  Beryl’s youngest daughter, Micki was born in July of 1958, just about the time that my family moved up to Santa Ana.  I should add that while Arnold (Uncle Mickey) is buried in a cemetery up in Norwalk, the address from which she made the request for the headstone was – you guessed it – 838 North Van Ness St.  My poor grandparents.

My guess is that Beryl must have moved in with my grandparents, pregnant and with five children immediately after Mickey died.  Then sometime prior to our arrival in Santa Ana, Beryl was able to get a place her own place only a few blocks from where we eventually moved.  It was only a year later, in April of 1959 that my mother ended up pregnant and with five children to move in with my grandparents as well. ( Easter Sunday in 1959 was on March 29, so Good Friday, the day that my Dad left must have been March 27.)

One of the intriguing things about family research is that you never know what will turn up next.  I doubt there is any family without a few surprises in its background.

The Wilkins Sisters

Those who have been following the Northen History blog, have probably noticed that the Wilkins side of the family – that is Elvera Northen’s side – has had a lot less space devoted to it than her husband’s.  That is probably especially true in terms of her own siblings.  Given the size of Victor and LaVerna Wilkins family, most family members probably feel they need a score sheet to keep track.

To help remedy that , here is the list of Elvera’s sisters,  arranged by year of birth.  She had two brothers as well, Robert Allan Wilkins (Uncle Bob) born in 1927 and Armond Victor Wilkins born in 1937.  At the date of this writing, Uncle Armond is the only member of the family still alive.  The story was that, because he was a farmer, Victor Wilkins wanted to have a lot of sons.  It didn’t quite work out that way. He had five daughters before his first son came along.  Mom always used to say that she and Aunt Lucille, who were the hardier of the three older girls always had to go out and help out on the farm whereas Elaine, who was more frail worked in the house.

There are some ways in which the chart is self-explanatory, but in other ways it needs some commentary.  The first is the AKA column which is the name by which we knew them growing up.  For example, I never knew that Aunt Ardell  had another first name until I started doing research. She was just always  “Aunt Ardell.”  The second is that the chart is set up to give a kind of overview of the women in the family.  When it comes to husbands, two of the sisters have blanks in the information about husbands.  In Elaine’s case, it was because she died in 1936 (the year before Uncle Armond was born).   In Sr.  Karen’s case, it was she became a nun.

Just as with my aunts, my uncles were not always known by their given names.  Arlen Dale Westerman – who I only met once because he lived in Texas – was Uncle Dale.  Karl Conrad Spencer was Uncle Spence.  Strangest of all is Arnold Abram Near, Aunt Beryl’s first husband.  Up until a week ago I had always known him Uncle Mickey.  As the result of a quirk, I found out otherwise.  (Uncle Mickey will be the subject of a future entry.)

The main purpose of the table is just for future reference, so that if anyone really is interested in the family history, they will have a list of basic relationships to get them oriented.   As with any table, a couple of generalizations can be drawn.  The first is that all of the women in the family married between 19 and 24 years of age with around 21 being the average.  There don’t appear to have been any shotgun marriages or any who chose to remain single.  While 21 may seem a bit young in today’s society where a college degree seems almost mandatory, it is not as young as might have been thought for a farm family.  The second point that the chart reveals is the truism I always heard growing up in California, that no one was born there – everyone came from somewhere else.   Of the six men that the sisters married, only Aunt Lucille married a man who was actually born in California.  In the case of the Wilkins’ family, this is in part due to the years during which the older girls married – the period around World War II.  California was a place where many servicemen were stationed and, like James Northen, they remained to live in the state of the woman that they married.

Bridging the Gap

Several years ago, I decided to take part in the National Genographic Project. It was a joint project of genetic anthropologist Spencer Wells and the National Geographic Society to try to track the distribution of humankind from its earliest origins in Africa. While the last thing that the project needed was another white American male of British descent, I decide to take part, curious to see what the results might be. On might part, all it required was to have samples of my Y chromosome DNA tested. (Later on I added on the mtDNA, as well.)

Though the results were interesting in their own way, charting in large swath, the likely trajectory of my earliest relatives out of Africa to end up eventually in the British Isles, they told me nothing about my actual family or anyone I might be related to. What did tell me, however, was the haplogroup to which I belonged. This allowed me to check in with Family Tree DNA to find other individuals who were tested and in my same haplogroup. The only real information Family Tree provide is the testers name, the most distant relative known, an email address to contact that person. Whenever there is a match to my haplogroup, I receive an email from them, notifying me. To date, no one with the last name of Northen or Northern appeared, either in the tester or their most distant ancestor. There have been a couple of Lewis’ must none have panned out.

Yesterday I received a notification of a match. Once again, the information was not helpful, but there was a note to log into y-search DNA, which, looks for paternal matches (through the y chromosome, as the name implies). It allowed me to do a name search, and I actually had a name match from my haplogroup. His name was Larry Northern. On 7 of 12 points our DNA matched and he listed his earliest known relative as Barret Northern born in North Carolina in 1791.

The name seemed to vague ring a bell to me, so I went to my book Families Named Northern, compiled by Dorothy Gross. When I looked in the table of contents, there was, in fact, a section called “Descendents of Barrett Northern.” He had been born in North Carolina and then, at an early age moved to Georgia where he was the remainder of his life. This was quite encouraging, until I looked back at the first paragraph that said, even though this group of people was named Northern, they could not find any direct link to the rest of the Northern family. Barrett was as far back as anyone could go and no one knew who his parents were, though the research thought it was possible his father was William or Samuel.

For Gross, this made Barret Northern a kind of dead end that could not be connected with the rest of the family. The fascinating thing to me is that now with DNA testing, the fact that Larry Northern and I have such a close DNA match means that we must be related and that somewhere, Barret Northern connects in with our first ancestors in this country. The odds of our having both the same last name and a close generic profile and not being related are extremely small. To me this is a great example of how working with DNA results, when you can get them, are a real asset in family research.