Working on Wednesday: Tharold Conner (1903 - 1970)

I've noticed some interest in one of my earlier posts that included members of the Conner family so here's a page from Dad's photo album with pictures he took before his family left Oregon a year or two before 1920.

[From my personal collection]

Here's the Conner family in the 1920 U.S. Census, residents of the house located on Kentuck Slough across the bay from Marshfield (now Coos Bay). It appears that Tharold was a year or two younger than Dad.

[Ancestry.com. 1920 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Images reproduced by FamilySearch. Original data: Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920. (NARA microfilm publication T625, 2076 rolls). Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29. National Archives, Washington, D.C. ]

[Detail of Plate CXXVII. Coos Bay Quadrangle, Oregon, Land Classification and Density of Standing Timber. Twenty-first Annual Report of the United States Geological Survey to the Secretary of the Interior. 1899-1900. Government Printing Office.

Source: David Rumsey Historical Map Collection]

I don't think I ever met Tharold who was living in Fresno, California, by 1930 but we visited the Conner family every year so the house was familiar to me. They still had dairy cows--I helped make butter in their kitchen one year.

[Curreys' truck and trailer in front of the Conner's house - 1948]

© 2018 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Family Friday: The Conners, the Marks (and Some Curreys) - 1948

Dad Currey had a hard time fitting all the names of the people in this color slide from July, 1948, taken at the Marks residence in Reedsport, Oregon. Actually he only noted their first names but fortunately that was enough for me to be able to supply their surname from my childhood memories.

Left to right we have (in back) Eben Conner, his wife Ada (Couzens), his sister Gwen Marks,* son Monte,** (un-named boy - probably Gwen's son Darrell, and (in front) Mother***and me, Eben's daughter Cecelia and Gwen's daughter LeVonne Marks.

[From my personal collection]

*I wrote about her husband George in this post from last year.
**Full name Eben LaMonte Conner, Jr.
***Though of course Dad calls her "Min"



© 2017 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Sunday Drive - Oh the Places You Will Go: Humbug Mountain State Park, 1954

This photo was taken  At Humbug Mountain State Park on our way home at the end of the summer of 1954. For several days we watched the pile driver hammering the poles for the new bridge* into the ground before Dad walked down to take a closer look. It turned out that the operator of the pile driver was someone he knew--George Marks, the husband of Calvin Conner's daughter Gwen and thereby some kind of cousin of his by marriage.**

[Our campsite at Humbug Mountain, looking west, from my personal collection]

[View from the bridge-site, looking back at campground (our trailer is just visible), from my personal collection]

[View of the state park campground from the road (no trailer), from my personal collection]

[View of the south side of the bridge site from the road, from my personal collection]

That weekend George and Gwen drove down from their home in Reedsport to visit us. Sadly I haven't been able to find a picture of them.

Every summer we spent a few days at Humbug Mountain on our way north and south and over the years became friends with the park ranger, Bob (a Korean War vet) and his wife Rose both natives of Oklahoma. Since almost all of the places we stayed at did not supply running water to the individual campsites and it was my job to haul the buckets of water we needed every day, I always appreciated the hook-ups here.

*The bridge built over Brush Creek in 1954 was replaced by a new one in 1998, You can read about that one here.
**Gwen and George fell into the category of what Dad referred to as "shirt-tail relatives."



© 2016 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.

Family Friday: Currey/Conner

This group posing in the garden on a sunny day in the summer of 1954 includes (left to right) Eben Conner (1901-1960), his step-mother Florence Hilda Peterson (1879-1968), his wife Ada Winifred Couzens (1904-1971) and the sanding man on the right is his father Calvin Marion Conner (1875-1958). Seven-year-old me at the center of the photo in front of Bernice Evangeline Grenfell (1902-1980) and on my left is Harold Delbert Currey (1902-1981)--the parents who raised me.

Every summer that we went to Oregon we always visited the Conners who were supposed to have some family connection to the Curreys but it was never explained to me and I haven't been able to verify the story but Dad's photo album from the 1910s has photos of various Conners.

[From my personal collection]

Looking at this picture now, I can see that we Southern Californians were dressed in brighter colors than the Oregon residents. Mother, whose hair is obviously recovering from a home perm, is wearing a mustard-colored dress that she had sewn using a narrow-wale corduroy and adding Navajo silver buttons bought on our trip to South Dakota the year before. I'm pretty sure she's pinned this Mexican silver broach to her collar; it was a favorite of hers.

[From my personal collection]

© 2016 Copyright, Christine Manczuk, All Rights Reserved.