My Research for High School Stories about Ray Rowe

This fall I decided to refocus my genealogy research on my closest relatives—my mother and father.  Since this blog site is about the Lines of Rowe, I will be documenting what I’m doing here as I discover more about Ray Rowe, my father, before moving on to his parents (Fred Oliver Rowe and Cora May Kellogg) and his siblings.  Then I’ll go back to working with the more distant ancestors whom I’ve already started doing research on.

Obviously I knew my dad, but it was a long time ago.  He died in 1965.  So I, like everyone else who is still alive and knew him, have to dig deep into my memory files to try and uncover the stories about him and our everyday life together as a family.  I will start doing that, but, I also need to fill in the gaps about his earlier life, before I was born, and that is not so easy.

There is a reason genealogists tell you to work with who and what you know first!  Your family will not be around forever, and in my case, I was too young to “record” the stories my father may have told, or ask him the questions I now want to ask him before he died.

All my father’s siblings have also passed.  I can get some information about his life from my mother from about 1949 when my parents met and married until his death, but my mother is 87 years old now and her memory isn’t all that sharp.  So I ask simple questions and try to keep to only one subject (and question) per conversation.  Occasionally I get something I can use, but how accurate is it when it was so hard to recall?  

And just when did my childhood memories start?  To help me recall what I can I’ll look through photo albums and play the old home movies I still have.  I'll talk with my sister and hopefully I will be able to put together some stories that are accurate.

In the meantime, what do I do and where do I look to find information before 1949?  

My father was a marine serving in World War II, and I have his discharge papers and a few photographs.  I have requested his service records and upon receipt of them I will hopefully have an idea about his service time.  

I also have some early photos of his friends and family, his birth, marriage, and death certificates, and some newspaper articles about him.

Ray Rowe enlisted with the Marines on 6 November 1942—just five months after his graduation,  so I thought while I’m waiting for the service records to arrive, I should attempt to get some information about his high school years, and, with a little luck, I might be able to get information about his earlier school years while I’m at it.

I know my father graduated from West Branch High School in 1942.  I have a photograph of him in his graduation gown, his senior class group picture, his individual senior photograph and his diploma.  So, just for fun, I decided to check out if the high school had a website and, if they did, what information it contained.  What a great idea that was, if I do say so myself! 

On September 26, 2013 I found the West Branch High School Alumni website! 

There was a wonderful story about the class and their senior skip day that gave me an inside look to what was going on at that time.  The class had saved all their hard-earned money for years to put toward a great senior trip to Detroit, only to have their plans shattered by the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 and the United States entering World War II.  Now the class had to find someplace closer than Detroit to go to because of the rationing of gas and tires.  Farmers were issued extra gas rations, and the class used those extra rations to get to their new destination—Houghton Lake—25 miles away!

After reading the entire account, I thought, I wonder if anyone remembers my dad and what, if anything, they remember about him.

The Website Host, Mary Anne Whitchurch Tuck—Class of 1953, posted on the website’s “home page” that she was available for questions, suggestions, or information.  So . . . 

I sent an email to her and asked if she could pass on my name and address to the 1942 alumni, or if could she provide me with any of their contact information.  I explained to her I was trying to recreate my father’s school years, and I was hoping that a few of them might remember my father and, if so, I wanted to know what they remembered about him.  She so kindly responded (almost immediately!) that she was sending me a list of the class with the addresses of who were still alive (there were 22 of them).

Next, I wrote a form letter to be sent to each class member.  I realized that they would all be in their late eighties, so I tried to make it as simple and easy as I could to get a response.  My letter introduced me, told them my dad was in their graduating class, and included a request that if they could remember anything at all about him—good or bad, to please write one sentence about him.  I printed his graduation picture at the bottom of the letter hoping it would help them to remember him.

I also included a sheet of paper with several questions that might trigger a memory (I only asked them for one memory) and gave them a spot to write it on.  I had a check box at the top to check for those who did not remember him.  I included a self-addressed, stamped envelope, again, trying to make this as easy as I could for them to respond.

Well, it worked!  So far, I’ve gotten five responses from those who did not remember him at all (a couple of them in nursing homes with dementia, and the responses came from their children who were kind enough to try and get them to remember).  Seven people have responded that they did remember him, and each of them stated that he was quiet and shy—so maybe that’s the reason the others couldn’t remember him!  I'm hoping to hear from more, but I consider 12 responses out of 22 an excellent return.

What have I learned about my father when he was in high school?

• Dad was very shy and quiet.  He was polite.
• Dad was "kind of a loner."
• He was smart.
• He was laid back.
• He was a tall, thin farm boy.
• He rarely, if ever, went to any school activities.
• He rode the Clement bus to high school.

Ray Rowe on Graduation Day

A lot of my information came from the lady who wrote the class trip article on the alumni site.  Because the class was so small, everyone knew each other, and she didn’t think he attended West Branch High School before his senior year, but transferred in from another school from Gladwin County.  He was one of the “farm” boys who was able to get extra gas rations and therefore could take a carload of students to Houghton Lake on their Senior Class Trip.  She sent me a picture of him walking through town with two other students (a back view, but at least it was labeled in her scrapbook that it was him!).

I also heard from another woman who remembered him well, mostly as being very good looking (she was only 16 at graduation) and she was very fond of him.  She didn’t do anything socially with him and only knew him through the class and school activities.  But from the tone of her note . . . well, I remember being a teenager dreaming about being with a cute boy!

Another response came from a fellow genealogist, the niece of one of Dad’s former classmates who is now in a nursing home with dementia.  She had no children from her marriage and this niece is in charge of her affairs.  This kind woman said she kept working with her aunt to try and remember dad but had no success.  So she took it upon herself to research at the school, the library, the local historical  newspapers, and the historical society, hoping to find an old yearbook or records or something where there might be a picture of dad in a school sport or other activity.  She didn’t have any success, but did duplicate a photo of the high school, along with a photo of the community building where the graduation took place (both buildings have since been torn down and re-built), and from her aunt’s records I got a copy of the commencement program, a class picture, the graduation announcement and my father’s name card.  Talk about going above and beyond!  She even said she’d keep searching for me . . . what an amazing community of genealogists we have out there!

As I’m writing this and putting together the high school portion about my father in his life story, I have to remember to get as much information as I can NOW from my mother about her school years.  I also need to write about my school years!  If my descendants are as curious about my life today as I am about my ancestors lives, this is the least I can do for them!

This experience reinforces the importance of getting those stories about your family immediately—interview, interview, interview—all your living relatives, as well as their friends, co-workers and acquaintances, especially the older ones!  Although I have scrapbooks and photo albums from some of my ancestors, photography wasn’t as easy or cheap as it is today, and the “scrapbooking” and “journaling” wasn’t as thorough and prevalent as it is now.  So we all have to remember to keep recording our present for the future, at the same time we continue to investigate and record the past that we’re in the process of researching.

And—use every and any resource you can think of to do this.  The people you’re questioning might be in their upper eighties and nineties, and they might not remember everything you want to know, but there may just be a couple of them that DO remember something, if only just a little bit, to help you put together that story you’re searching for about an ancestor.