Cousin Dormel

Dormel's Brother, Bud; Grandpa Ed Grier; Dormel

My second cousin Dormel Arnold Lindesmith Snider was the daughter of my mom's cousin Dot (Alma Dorthy Grier) and her first husband, Melvin Arnold. I have known about Dormel all my life, but it was only the other day that I realized that her name was an amalgam of Dorthy and Melvin.

Dormel was born in 1921, in Victorville, California, I think, but she grew up in Pomona, where she moved after Dot split up with Melvin and married Cliff Lindesmith. I know little about Melvin, other than my mother's theory that Dot and Mel might have made a go of it if Dot's parents, Alma and Ed, hadn't meddled. (Mom had many opinions on a wide variety of family matters.) Cliff was a wonderful guy, though, who made Dot very happy and raised her children, Dormel and Bud, as his own.


Dormel was an active horsewoman, and I have a home movie from 1938 that captures Dormel dressed in full cowgirl regalia, performing at a horse show. As a little girl, I longed to be a cowgirl, and the video of Dormel and her horse is like my little-girl-self's dream come true—the hat, the skirt and vest with the fringe, the beautiful white horse and the young girl performing as one, while the crowd goes wild. Oh yeah!

My mother held on to many of Dot's family pictures after Dot died in 1989, as did my Uncle Bud Crozier (not to be confused with Dormel's brother Bud). I was lucky enough to end up with a treasure trove of these photos, some newspaper articles, and even a delightful home movie from 1938.

I've been having a wonderful time going through them, getting to know this part of my family better. The first time I saw the picture on the left, I was totally puzzled by the peppers, but after a bit of research, I can now guess that this was taken when Dormel competed for the title of California's Most Outstanding Outdoor Girl at the Salinas Rodeo (she was a runner-up).

Dormel Around Age 18

Dormel was also musical and played the cello. Her cello was handed down to my brother Johnny, who began playing it when he was nine. Dormel's cello became Johnny's ticket to the life of a full-time musician. Despite the fact that Johnny played that cello for many years, it has always been referred to in our family as "Dormel's cello."

Ginnifer Goodwin

Judging from photos of Dormel, and from her enchanting playfulness in the home movie, she was a beautiful (she was a dead ringer for actress Ginnifer Goodwin), fun-loving young woman, full of life and not afraid to be the center of attention, which I imagine she was a lot. The Osborne women and their husbands were a doting bunch!

Article from the Pomona Progress-Bulletin, October 1, 1941

After graduating from Pomona High School, Dormel attended Pomona College, where she majored in music. When she was 19, she married M. Shirley (yes, men used to be called Shirley) Snider, who taught music at the college. I don't know if he was her music teacher, but the romantic in me likes to think he was.

I never got to meet Dormel because she died tragically at the age of 20, following an operation of some sort (I have yet to find out the details; my mom was rather vague on the subject). That must have devastated her family!

I remember visiting Dot and Cliff as I was growing up and seeing the lovely pictures of Dormel and her brother, Bud, who also died young when he was shot down over the Pacific in WWII (that's another story to be explored later). Dot and Cliff were so much fun to be around, and I loved to spend time with them and their totally spoiled Boxer dogs. Still, there was a sadness attached to them because of the loss of their children at such young ages, both within a few years of each other. How lucky I am to be able to get to know Dormel and Bud so many years later, as I plow through my boxes of family memorabilia!

Aunt Georgia

From somewhere around the early 1900s: my great-aunt Georgia McDowell Obsborn(e) Major (1885-1962). I have wonderful memories of family gatherings at Aunt Georgia's house in Long Beach. Her husband, Uncle Leonard, would make ice cream, and there would be lots of laughter and much singing (Mom's side of the family loved to sing). 

I love this picture because it is so candid and relaxed, unlike so many pictures of that era. I'm curious about where it was taken. The family was living in Los Angeles by then, and they loved the beach. Maybe she's sitting in a little cabana at the beach?

In 1957, right before we moved from Los Angeles to Moylan, Pennsylvania, my parents flew back east to look for a place for us to live. While my parents were away, my brother Johnny and I stayed with Aunt Georgia and Grandma Crozier, who were living together in Aunt Georgia's lovely little Long Beach bungalow. Johnny was almost ten, and I was seven, and the two of us were very companionable at that age; we had a great time during our two weeks there.

Aunt Georgia had a little closed-in back porch that was filled with empty soda bottles. She and Grandma told us that if we washed the bottles(!) and returned them to the store, we could keep the deposit money, which was two cents a bottle. What a windfall that was for us! We dutifully washed the bottles, loaded them up into a little wagon, and took them to the store. We spent the money on comic books and Fizzies, two forbidden fruits in our household, since my parents were anti junk food and what they considered "junk reading." I can still remember the way the Fizzies dissolved in a glass of water; it was like carbonated Kool-Aid. My favorite flavor was root beer.

The last time I saw Aunt Georgia was in 1960. My parents, Johnny, and I drove across country that summer and visited family in Southern California. Grandma Crozier had dementia by then and was living in an apartment with a full-time caretaker, but we took her out to visit Aunt Georgia. Grandma remembered her, but in Grandma's mind, it was as if they were still children together. I remember gathering around Aunt Georgia's piano, singing hymns heartily and joyfully. As hard as dementia can be, I have such a happy picture of my grandma singing away with her little sister as they must have years before.

A Study in Contrasts

Researching my family history has become a study in contrasts. My mother was a fount of family stories. She loved to talk about her relatives and ancestors, and I grew up with the steady bubbling of tales of her beloved Aunt Pearl and her grandfather Abner McDowell Osborne, a railroad conductor who died trying to stop a derailed train.

My mother was one to embellish stories, not because she lied about things, but I knew from first-hand experience that her stories could take on rather epic qualities the more she told them. I had come to question her tale of my great-grandfather and the runaway train until I found articles from various 1885 newspaper accounts that verified the heroic drama that ended his life.

Mom saved photos—thousands and thousands of photos—of her family members, dating back to the mid to late 1800s. She also kept letters, and her family was a letter-writing group. Abner, or "Mac" as he was known, wrote letters to his wife Maggie from Wyoming and Montana, telling her of the work he was finding and giving a picture of what life was like in that barely settled area of the country in the 1880s.

I have letters my great-uncle Willie Long wrote home to his mother from Sweetgrass, Montana, in 1894-1895, begging his mother's forgiveness for disappearing for so long and promising to return to her after she obviously extended that forgiveness and begged him to come home. (More about Uncle Willie another time. His is quite a story!)

Thanks to my mother's reverence for all family memorabilia, I have the marriage certificate for Abner and Maggie Osborne, who were married in Wyoming in 1878, and it includes a little oval picture of each of them. They were quite the handsome couple, and judging by Abner's letters, they were very much in love.

In contrast, my father talked very little about his family. His mother, Pearl Effie Wilson McClellan, died in the Influenza Epidemic in 1918, when my father was only four years old. Dad would occasionally mention a cousin here and there as I was growing up, and I met a few of his relatives when I was young, but it was his step-mother, Alice, who held on to letters and photos that now give me a sense of the family history on the McClellan-Wilson side.

JY and Alice

Alice Cornwall Knoch McClellan married Joe Young McClellan, my dad's father, when Dad was about nine years old. Alice, or Grandma Mac as we called her, loved my father very much, and she and her big close-knit family took him into their fold, providing him with a mother, three new aunts, and wonderful grandparents to fuss over him. That must have meant so much to this little boy who had been through so much at such a young age.

Thanks to Grandma Mac's thoughtfulness in preserving things related to my father's history, I have a few of the letters that Grandma Pearl, as I call her, wrote to her father-in-law, John Arthur McClellan, in the early days of her marriage to J.Y. Pearl sounds like such a delightful, fun, and funny young woman, and she obviously doted on her baby boy, Graydon Elmo, whom she called "Sonny Boy." Pearl was a bit camera-shy, it seems; I have a picture in which she is hiding from the camera by ducking behind my dad, who must have been two or three at the time. I do have a few pictures of her, though, and even I can see the resemblance between Pearl and me. There's something about her that just resonates with me, and the thought of her dying so quickly at such a young age from that deadly disease adds a melancholy to my affection for her.

Pearl Wilson McClellan

A few years ago, my brother Roger and I met up in San Antonio, where he was attending a conference, and drove to East Texas—Orange, where Pearl died, and Kirbyville, where she is buried. Pearl's family, the Wilsons, were very established in that area, and there's even a Wilson family cemetery down the road from where Pearl is buried. That's one of the mysteries I'd like to solve: why was Pearl buried in a separate place and not with her ancestors? Was it because of the epidemic? Were people afraid to have those who died of something so obviously contagious buried in family plots? Or was there a falling out between J.Y. and Pearl's family? This is the sort of puzzle that fascinates me as I search deeper and deeper into my family's stories.

Pearl's Grave

Revelations

I'm so enjoying my family research, but every once in a while, I get a jolt, sometimes not so pleasant. With southern roots on both my parents' sides, it shouldn't come as a surprise when I find ancestors who owned slaves, but I was hoping generations of struggling to make ends meet would rule that out. Alas, no. It gives me such a sick feeling to see records of relatives "owning" people, but such is the sometimes sad history of this country. Time to start a blog about it.