Monday, March 26, 2018

Cousin Hunting: Verne Carol Grooms Gilchrist (1935 - 1960)

Today I've been looking at the other children of my maternal third great grandfather William T. Slater (abt 1790-1847) which is what lead me to this fourth cousin* who was only 24 when she died on the 31st of January, 1960--and the cause of her death attracted my attention.

[South Carolina Department of Archives and History; Columbia, South Carolina; Year Range: 1950-1961;
Death County or Certificate Range: Charleston. Ancestry.com]

Next I looked for a newspaper description of the accident:
[The Charleston News and Courier, Tuesday, February 02, 1960 Charleston,
South Carolina Page 8. Newspapers.com]


From these two items we can deduce that Verne Carol was divorced and while her daughter seems to have remained with her, her two sons were described as "of Detroit, Mich."

It's too late in the day for me to go into the matter, but in 1965 her parents brought a wrongful death suit against the estate of the driver Charles Henry Zander, Jr. and there are several newspaper articles regarding that suit. Maybe I'll return to the topic in a later post.


*Here's how we're related:
[Ancestry.com]






© 2018 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

4 comments:

  1. I am Jeri Lightsey the sister of Verne Carol Grooms Gilchrist. I have all information of my sister. A lot of what you stated is not true. Please free to reach out to me for the accurate update.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Jeri, for this post I was relying solely on a newspaper report of the accident. In response, one of her sons contacted me as he hadn't even known the exact date of her death. (He had believed it happened on his birthday and that made him sad every year.) I volunteered to see what else I could find in newspapers at the time and at his request shared the clippings with him privately. Unfortunately I didn't keep his contact information because I'm sure he would greatly appreciate hearing your memories of his mother.

      Delete
  2. I am the youngest son Alan. You earlier spoke with my brother Dale

    ReplyDelete
  3. Contact me in Rolla Missouri. I'm not hard to find. Al Gilchrist

    ReplyDelete