Hyrum John Hood Hill was born June 25, 1857, at Millcreek, Salt Lake County, Territory of Utah. He was the youngest son and thirteenth child of Alexander Hill, Jr. and Agnes Hood Hill. His parents were among the early settlers of Salt Lake Valley, arriving there on October 15, 1849, and settling in Millcreek after staying at the Orson Spencer home for a couple of weeks, where his sister, Mary Hill Bullock had aided the young motherless Bullock children until Spencer returned from a mission to England. After her husband's death, Mary married Orson Spencer as a plural wife in1853.
Upon their arrival in the valley, most of the Alexander Hill families settled in Millcreek along with several other families they had known in Canada before going to Nauvoo. Millcreek was in the central Salt Lake Valley, roughly the area from State Street on the west to Highland Drive on the east between 3300 and 4500 South. He located on 30 acres of land near Big Cottonwood Creek, constructed a crude house and made a dug-out in the side of a hill, near where the creek crosses present-day State Street. The family lived in this home for two years, where the first religious services in this part of the valley were held. Hyrum was born and reared in a faithful Latter-day Saint home, his father being called as the 2nd counselor in the Millcreek Ward bishopric on April 6, 1851. He became lst counselor about two years later and served in this calling for nearly 33 years, being released on March 30, 1884.
Life in pioneer Utah was often difficult and uncertain. In the years 1855 and 1856, the grasshoppers destroyed the fields of wheat and other grain. So, the farmers irrigated the ground, plowed their fields again and planted corn, which, in spite of the lateness of the planting, did produce a moderate harvest. In the fall of 1857, shortly after Hyrum’s birth, his father built a primitive jute mill at Millcreek for the purpose of converting flax fiber, which he had raised on his farm, that Millcreek Area West of Highland Drive year, into clothing. So, Hyrum grew up with the country, receiving his schooling in the primitive schools of Millcreek and working on his father’s 30-acre farm and helping raise cattle. His older brother, William, and his sons had established a large ranch in Wyoming and stocked it with about 25,000 sheep, between 600 and 700 head of horses and from 400 to 500 head of cattle. William also owned an extensive farm and homestead near Murray, Utah. When he grew older, Hyrum went to Wyoming and broke horses on his Uncles’s ranch.
He returned to Millcreek and got a job at the Allenboy Smelter in Murray. He worked there and also helped on the farm. Hyrum married Mary Ann Sorensen November 18, 1884, in Millcreek. She was the daughter of Abraham and Mary Ann Jensen Sorensen of Mendon,
Utah. William Hill, Hyrum’s older brother, had married Mary Caroline Sorensen on January 1, 1860. She was the daughter of Nicolai and Magdalena Sorensen, who had arrived in the valley in 1857 and settled with their family in Millcreek until they moved to Mendon, Utah, in 1860. William and Mary also went to Mendon that year, but returned to Millcreek in the fall of 1862.
Abraham Sorensen, Mary Caroline’s brother, and his wife also settled in Mendon and had the honor of giving birth to the first American Smelter in Murray white child born in the town. This child was Mary Ann, born February 19, 1860. When Mary Ann was older, she came to Millcreek to help her Aunt Mary Hill in the house. There she met and married her aunt’s brother-in-law, Hyrum Hill, William’s brother. Thus, Mary Ann’s Aunt Mary was not only her aunt but her sister-in-law.
Hyrum and Mary continued to live in Millcreek until 1898. During this time, seven children were born to them. Horace Abraham, the oldest, was born 1 October 1885 and was killed by lightning on 12 July 1906 while herding sheep in Idaho; Alexander Samuel was born 31 May 1887 and died on 18 November 1888; Mary Clodella was born 7 July 1889; Hyrum Edgar was born 16 October 1891 and died 20 May 1892; Joseph Vernal was born 11 March 1893; James Leslie was born 23 October 1895, and Agnes Effie was born on her mother’s birthday, February 19, 1898.
Shortly after her birth the family moved to Erda, Tooele County, Utah, a few miles north of Tooele City and a few miles south of the Great Salt Lake, where her father had purchased 160 acres. He also bought a flock of sheep, and her oldest brother, Horace, age thirteen at the time, would herd them there and take them into the mountains for the summer range. Hyrum and Vern both registered a cattle ear mark with the state on 20 May 1901, to use on their sheep and cattle. The family often went to the mountain pastures to visit and help with the sheep. Effie remembers going there one summer when the three youngest children were still little. Horace used a meat saw to cut wheels from logs and fashioned wagons with his pocketknife for them to play with while they were there. In addition to the sheep ranching, Hyrum also worked for Paul Drubay from Tooele, who owned a ranch near the lake and ran a store in Tooele. Every week he had to kill a beef at the ranch and take it to the store to supply the butcher shop next door. The ranch was so far from the schoolhouse in Erda that Effie wasn’t able to start school until she was eight when her father, in 1906, moved his family up into Erda to a house built by her mother’s father, Abraham Sorensen, when he lived there a few years earlier.
That same year, tragedy struck the family. Hyrum and Mary Ann were in Tooele when they got word that their son Horace had been killed by lightning while herding sheep in Idaho with his uncle, William Park. They raced home in the wagon with the horses on the run to get ready to catch the train to Salt Lake City that evening. Effie remembered how her parents felt and the train ride into Salt Lake. The body was brought from Idaho to her Uncle William Hill’s home because he had a burial lot in the Millcreek Cemetery, now the Elysian Burial Gardens, where Horace was buried.
Hyrum and Mary Ann had not been married in the temple, but on 12 June 1895 they took their family to the Salt Lake Temple and were sealed to each other and to Vern and their deceased children.
Hyrum never seemed to get over Horace’s death, and he, too, died 21 October 1908 of diabetes, for which there was no treatment at that time, insulin having not yet been discovered. He was buried in the Millcreek cemetery beside his three children who had died before him.
Effie was ten years old, and Vern and Les were only fifteen and thirteen, but they had to take care of the farm and haul the hay. Effie had to go tromp the hay on the wagon. Because they thought she was doing the work of a boy, they nicknamed her “Tommy,” and called her that the rest of her life.
Life was hard for a widow and three children. There was no Social Security or Aid to Dependent Children. Grandma Hill raised laying hens for their eggs and made a pound of butter every day with the cream from the one really good cow they owned. She sold the eggs and the seven pounds of butter each week to the local store to help sustain her family. Grandma Hill incubated eggs to hatch the baby chicks in an incubator she purchased from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. About 1965 I took Mom to Erda to visit her old hometown, where we
found their farm on which was still part of the old shed or chicken coop she remembered being on the place. Remarkably, after fifty years in that shed, all battered and bent, was that old egg incubator.
For additional income, when the supervisor of the Erda and Lake Point schools offered Mary Ann the job of custodian for the Erda school, she took it. But it seems that Effie had the burden of most of the work. She recalled that the schoolhouse had only one large room, and one teacher
taught all eight grades:
Every morning I had to go to the schoolhouse early and dust, and in the wintertime, I had to make a fire. And then at night I would have to stay after everybody went home and sweep the schoolhouse, and I would leave it ‘til morning to dust it. And how tired I got of not being able to walk home with the other kids from school. But we had it for about three years. And that was my job when school started. I’d clean the schoolhouse at night and go dust in the morning. And then we finally got so on Saturday we had to scrub it out, go mop it. And on Saturday when we got through doing that, when it started to get cold weather, we had to go cut kindlin’ enough to do for a week, put them in the coal house there behind the school.... And I was only between eleven and twelve years old, so I had to help make the living at that age.
Her two brothers also went out and worked. Les went herding sheep for the Wright brothers in Millcreek. He herded sheep until after the family had been living in Raft River for two or three years. Mom’s Grandfather Abraham Sorensen and her mother’s brother, Joseph Sorensen, had left Mendon and gone to Naf, Idaho, in 1911 to the Raft River Valley and homesteaded. Vern and Les had always wanted a big farm, since they only had twenty acres in Erda, and it became increasingly difficult to grow anything but salt grass because of the alkali in the soil. This problem was worsened by the settlers drilling so many flowing wells in the area, lowering the water table. So, with the encouragement of her father and brother and at the urging of Vern and Les, Grandma Hill finally homesteaded 160 acres next to her father. In the fall of 1912, the family sold the farm and the cow in Erda, loaded the furniture, horses and hay into a rented railroad boxcar, and left for Brigham City, Box Elder County. Vern rode with the horses, and Grandma Hill and Mom rode in the passenger car hooked on the end. At Brigham City, the car was connected to the train that made three trips each week to Kelton, a little desert town at the northern tip of the Great Salt Lake, less than twenty miles south of the Idaho border on the south side of the Raft River Mountains. Their homestead was on the north Idaho side.
Uncle Joe Sorensen met the train and took the family to his home at Naf. Then he and Les took the wagon and went back to Kelton for their belongings. The previous homesteaders on their land left a shed-roofed building on the place, which they bought. Then Vern went out by Standrod and worked with somebody to cut timber and had it sawed into lumber at the sawmill there. With the lumber, Vern built another room on the back of the shed, which gave the family a primitive two-room house to live in – primitive quarters, but not too unlike what most of the homesteaders there had.
The homesteader’s life was filled with work: clearing the land of sagebrush so it could be plowed and planted in crops, hauling potable water in milk cans to the dry land farms, and fighting against the lack of water, rabbits, and the elements. For Effie, she had to attend school. According to her diploma, which is an amazing 16" x 21" in size, Effie attended school at Naf. She studied and was tested on reading spelling, writing, arithmetic, geography, grammar, history, physiology, and civil government. School was held in the log church-school-amusement hall built by the
homesteaders. Her diploma is dated June 15, 1914. She was sixteen years old. She should have graduated in 1913, but there was no one to give her the matriculation exam at the end of the year, so she repeated eighth grade. In 1914 a Mrs. Johns, who had been a schoolteacher, came out to Naf to give the eighth graders the exam. Effie got 98 percent in all subjects but arithmetic. She aced that one with 100 percent!
But life in those days was not all work and drudgery. A desert homestead may not sound like a place where you’d expect to have much fun, but the people at Naf, even though they had to work hard under trying conditions, still found time to have a good time. Their favorite activity, aside from killing jack rabbits, seemed to be dancing. As Effie remembered:
"Oh, we had dances, and everybody had to come to make a dance, young and old. And we all mingled together. They all danced with each other. It didn’t matter whether you were young or old, we all danced. A lot of dances were picnic dances. We danced a while and then we’d have intermission and serve the picnic."
The dances were held in the log community center until with the unrealized hope of the railroad coming from Ogden, Utah, to Boise, Idaho, through Kelton and Strevell, someone constructed a hotel in anticipation of a railroad clientele. The dance floor attracted people there from miles around to the dances. They came from Malta and Bridge, Standrod, even Black Pine, which was on the east side of the Black Pine mountains between Snowville and Strevell. The building would be full of people having a good time.
Another place for meeting one another was at the Naf store, owned by the Mary Campbell family, as it still is today.
They also had an active ward of the L. D. S. Church there. Joseph N. Sorensen, Mary Ann’s brother, was ordained as bishop of the ward and served for several years, until the ward was disbanded when the homesteaders finally left their failed homesteads. Effie met James Owen Hall at Church in Naf, and they were married on December 15, 1915. He served as a counselor in the YMMIA. Effie and James O. left their homestead in1918 and moved back to his hometown, Wellsville, Utah. I don’t know when Mary Ann and Vern moved away, but he
married Christina Gee in the temple on 27 June 1918 and lived in Garland, Utah, but also rented James W. Hall’s farm at Strevell on Clear Creek for a number of years. Mary Clodella, Hyrum and Mary Ann’s oldest living child married Richard Garrard of Lake Point, Tooele County, on 17 July 1911 before her family left Erda to go to Naf, Idaho, in 1912. They bought a farm in Declo, Idaho, east of Burley. James Leslie married Echo May Larsen Sorensen, a foster daughter of Uncle Joseph N. and Aunt Mary (Mollie) Sorensen, on 19 December 1915. They were later divorced. Les ran his sheep in the hills above Mendon for a number of years, and then bought a farm at Winder, Idaho, on the Cub River north of Preston. He spent most of his life as a sheep herder, herding flocks for others and his own.
After leaving the homestead at Naf, Mary Ann Sorensen lived a number of years Vern and Teenie Hill Family in Mendon living with her parents and caring for them. After they died in April and June of 1928, both over 90 years of age, she lived with Vern and Teenie in Garland for several years, and died there on 20 November 1938. She was buried beside her husband and three children in the Millcreek Cemetery on 23 November 1938.
Hyrum and Mary Ann had a large posterity. Only four of their seven children lived to marry and have families. But, except for Les, all their children had large families. Chloe and Dick had 8 children, 4 sons and 4 daughters. Vern and Teenie had 13 children, 8 sons and 5 daughters, and Effie and James O. had 7 sons. Uncle Les had 5 children, 3 sons and 2 daughters. One son died in infancy.
The picture here shows Faye, Les, Wanda and her brother, Joe, at Les’s 79th birthday celebration in 1974.
Upon their arrival in the valley, most of the Alexander Hill families settled in Millcreek along with several other families they had known in Canada before going to Nauvoo. Millcreek was in the central Salt Lake Valley, roughly the area from State Street on the west to Highland Drive on the east between 3300 and 4500 South. He located on 30 acres of land near Big Cottonwood Creek, constructed a crude house and made a dug-out in the side of a hill, near where the creek crosses present-day State Street. The family lived in this home for two years, where the first religious services in this part of the valley were held. Hyrum was born and reared in a faithful Latter-day Saint home, his father being called as the 2nd counselor in the Millcreek Ward bishopric on April 6, 1851. He became lst counselor about two years later and served in this calling for nearly 33 years, being released on March 30, 1884.
Life in pioneer Utah was often difficult and uncertain. In the years 1855 and 1856, the grasshoppers destroyed the fields of wheat and other grain. So, the farmers irrigated the ground, plowed their fields again and planted corn, which, in spite of the lateness of the planting, did produce a moderate harvest. In the fall of 1857, shortly after Hyrum’s birth, his father built a primitive jute mill at Millcreek for the purpose of converting flax fiber, which he had raised on his farm, that Millcreek Area West of Highland Drive year, into clothing. So, Hyrum grew up with the country, receiving his schooling in the primitive schools of Millcreek and working on his father’s 30-acre farm and helping raise cattle. His older brother, William, and his sons had established a large ranch in Wyoming and stocked it with about 25,000 sheep, between 600 and 700 head of horses and from 400 to 500 head of cattle. William also owned an extensive farm and homestead near Murray, Utah. When he grew older, Hyrum went to Wyoming and broke horses on his Uncles’s ranch.
He returned to Millcreek and got a job at the Allenboy Smelter in Murray. He worked there and also helped on the farm. Hyrum married Mary Ann Sorensen November 18, 1884, in Millcreek. She was the daughter of Abraham and Mary Ann Jensen Sorensen of Mendon,
Utah. William Hill, Hyrum’s older brother, had married Mary Caroline Sorensen on January 1, 1860. She was the daughter of Nicolai and Magdalena Sorensen, who had arrived in the valley in 1857 and settled with their family in Millcreek until they moved to Mendon, Utah, in 1860. William and Mary also went to Mendon that year, but returned to Millcreek in the fall of 1862.
Abraham Sorensen, Mary Caroline’s brother, and his wife also settled in Mendon and had the honor of giving birth to the first American Smelter in Murray white child born in the town. This child was Mary Ann, born February 19, 1860. When Mary Ann was older, she came to Millcreek to help her Aunt Mary Hill in the house. There she met and married her aunt’s brother-in-law, Hyrum Hill, William’s brother. Thus, Mary Ann’s Aunt Mary was not only her aunt but her sister-in-law.
Hyrum and Mary continued to live in Millcreek until 1898. During this time, seven children were born to them. Horace Abraham, the oldest, was born 1 October 1885 and was killed by lightning on 12 July 1906 while herding sheep in Idaho; Alexander Samuel was born 31 May 1887 and died on 18 November 1888; Mary Clodella was born 7 July 1889; Hyrum Edgar was born 16 October 1891 and died 20 May 1892; Joseph Vernal was born 11 March 1893; James Leslie was born 23 October 1895, and Agnes Effie was born on her mother’s birthday, February 19, 1898.
Shortly after her birth the family moved to Erda, Tooele County, Utah, a few miles north of Tooele City and a few miles south of the Great Salt Lake, where her father had purchased 160 acres. He also bought a flock of sheep, and her oldest brother, Horace, age thirteen at the time, would herd them there and take them into the mountains for the summer range. Hyrum and Vern both registered a cattle ear mark with the state on 20 May 1901, to use on their sheep and cattle. The family often went to the mountain pastures to visit and help with the sheep. Effie remembers going there one summer when the three youngest children were still little. Horace used a meat saw to cut wheels from logs and fashioned wagons with his pocketknife for them to play with while they were there. In addition to the sheep ranching, Hyrum also worked for Paul Drubay from Tooele, who owned a ranch near the lake and ran a store in Tooele. Every week he had to kill a beef at the ranch and take it to the store to supply the butcher shop next door. The ranch was so far from the schoolhouse in Erda that Effie wasn’t able to start school until she was eight when her father, in 1906, moved his family up into Erda to a house built by her mother’s father, Abraham Sorensen, when he lived there a few years earlier.
That same year, tragedy struck the family. Hyrum and Mary Ann were in Tooele when they got word that their son Horace had been killed by lightning while herding sheep in Idaho with his uncle, William Park. They raced home in the wagon with the horses on the run to get ready to catch the train to Salt Lake City that evening. Effie remembered how her parents felt and the train ride into Salt Lake. The body was brought from Idaho to her Uncle William Hill’s home because he had a burial lot in the Millcreek Cemetery, now the Elysian Burial Gardens, where Horace was buried.
Hyrum and Mary Ann had not been married in the temple, but on 12 June 1895 they took their family to the Salt Lake Temple and were sealed to each other and to Vern and their deceased children.
Hyrum never seemed to get over Horace’s death, and he, too, died 21 October 1908 of diabetes, for which there was no treatment at that time, insulin having not yet been discovered. He was buried in the Millcreek cemetery beside his three children who had died before him.
Effie was ten years old, and Vern and Les were only fifteen and thirteen, but they had to take care of the farm and haul the hay. Effie had to go tromp the hay on the wagon. Because they thought she was doing the work of a boy, they nicknamed her “Tommy,” and called her that the rest of her life.
Life was hard for a widow and three children. There was no Social Security or Aid to Dependent Children. Grandma Hill raised laying hens for their eggs and made a pound of butter every day with the cream from the one really good cow they owned. She sold the eggs and the seven pounds of butter each week to the local store to help sustain her family. Grandma Hill incubated eggs to hatch the baby chicks in an incubator she purchased from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. About 1965 I took Mom to Erda to visit her old hometown, where we
found their farm on which was still part of the old shed or chicken coop she remembered being on the place. Remarkably, after fifty years in that shed, all battered and bent, was that old egg incubator.
For additional income, when the supervisor of the Erda and Lake Point schools offered Mary Ann the job of custodian for the Erda school, she took it. But it seems that Effie had the burden of most of the work. She recalled that the schoolhouse had only one large room, and one teacher
taught all eight grades:
Every morning I had to go to the schoolhouse early and dust, and in the wintertime, I had to make a fire. And then at night I would have to stay after everybody went home and sweep the schoolhouse, and I would leave it ‘til morning to dust it. And how tired I got of not being able to walk home with the other kids from school. But we had it for about three years. And that was my job when school started. I’d clean the schoolhouse at night and go dust in the morning. And then we finally got so on Saturday we had to scrub it out, go mop it. And on Saturday when we got through doing that, when it started to get cold weather, we had to go cut kindlin’ enough to do for a week, put them in the coal house there behind the school.... And I was only between eleven and twelve years old, so I had to help make the living at that age.
Her two brothers also went out and worked. Les went herding sheep for the Wright brothers in Millcreek. He herded sheep until after the family had been living in Raft River for two or three years. Mom’s Grandfather Abraham Sorensen and her mother’s brother, Joseph Sorensen, had left Mendon and gone to Naf, Idaho, in 1911 to the Raft River Valley and homesteaded. Vern and Les had always wanted a big farm, since they only had twenty acres in Erda, and it became increasingly difficult to grow anything but salt grass because of the alkali in the soil. This problem was worsened by the settlers drilling so many flowing wells in the area, lowering the water table. So, with the encouragement of her father and brother and at the urging of Vern and Les, Grandma Hill finally homesteaded 160 acres next to her father. In the fall of 1912, the family sold the farm and the cow in Erda, loaded the furniture, horses and hay into a rented railroad boxcar, and left for Brigham City, Box Elder County. Vern rode with the horses, and Grandma Hill and Mom rode in the passenger car hooked on the end. At Brigham City, the car was connected to the train that made three trips each week to Kelton, a little desert town at the northern tip of the Great Salt Lake, less than twenty miles south of the Idaho border on the south side of the Raft River Mountains. Their homestead was on the north Idaho side.
Uncle Joe Sorensen met the train and took the family to his home at Naf. Then he and Les took the wagon and went back to Kelton for their belongings. The previous homesteaders on their land left a shed-roofed building on the place, which they bought. Then Vern went out by Standrod and worked with somebody to cut timber and had it sawed into lumber at the sawmill there. With the lumber, Vern built another room on the back of the shed, which gave the family a primitive two-room house to live in – primitive quarters, but not too unlike what most of the homesteaders there had.
The homesteader’s life was filled with work: clearing the land of sagebrush so it could be plowed and planted in crops, hauling potable water in milk cans to the dry land farms, and fighting against the lack of water, rabbits, and the elements. For Effie, she had to attend school. According to her diploma, which is an amazing 16" x 21" in size, Effie attended school at Naf. She studied and was tested on reading spelling, writing, arithmetic, geography, grammar, history, physiology, and civil government. School was held in the log church-school-amusement hall built by the
homesteaders. Her diploma is dated June 15, 1914. She was sixteen years old. She should have graduated in 1913, but there was no one to give her the matriculation exam at the end of the year, so she repeated eighth grade. In 1914 a Mrs. Johns, who had been a schoolteacher, came out to Naf to give the eighth graders the exam. Effie got 98 percent in all subjects but arithmetic. She aced that one with 100 percent!
But life in those days was not all work and drudgery. A desert homestead may not sound like a place where you’d expect to have much fun, but the people at Naf, even though they had to work hard under trying conditions, still found time to have a good time. Their favorite activity, aside from killing jack rabbits, seemed to be dancing. As Effie remembered:
"Oh, we had dances, and everybody had to come to make a dance, young and old. And we all mingled together. They all danced with each other. It didn’t matter whether you were young or old, we all danced. A lot of dances were picnic dances. We danced a while and then we’d have intermission and serve the picnic."
The dances were held in the log community center until with the unrealized hope of the railroad coming from Ogden, Utah, to Boise, Idaho, through Kelton and Strevell, someone constructed a hotel in anticipation of a railroad clientele. The dance floor attracted people there from miles around to the dances. They came from Malta and Bridge, Standrod, even Black Pine, which was on the east side of the Black Pine mountains between Snowville and Strevell. The building would be full of people having a good time.
Another place for meeting one another was at the Naf store, owned by the Mary Campbell family, as it still is today.
They also had an active ward of the L. D. S. Church there. Joseph N. Sorensen, Mary Ann’s brother, was ordained as bishop of the ward and served for several years, until the ward was disbanded when the homesteaders finally left their failed homesteads. Effie met James Owen Hall at Church in Naf, and they were married on December 15, 1915. He served as a counselor in the YMMIA. Effie and James O. left their homestead in1918 and moved back to his hometown, Wellsville, Utah. I don’t know when Mary Ann and Vern moved away, but he
married Christina Gee in the temple on 27 June 1918 and lived in Garland, Utah, but also rented James W. Hall’s farm at Strevell on Clear Creek for a number of years. Mary Clodella, Hyrum and Mary Ann’s oldest living child married Richard Garrard of Lake Point, Tooele County, on 17 July 1911 before her family left Erda to go to Naf, Idaho, in 1912. They bought a farm in Declo, Idaho, east of Burley. James Leslie married Echo May Larsen Sorensen, a foster daughter of Uncle Joseph N. and Aunt Mary (Mollie) Sorensen, on 19 December 1915. They were later divorced. Les ran his sheep in the hills above Mendon for a number of years, and then bought a farm at Winder, Idaho, on the Cub River north of Preston. He spent most of his life as a sheep herder, herding flocks for others and his own.
After leaving the homestead at Naf, Mary Ann Sorensen lived a number of years Vern and Teenie Hill Family in Mendon living with her parents and caring for them. After they died in April and June of 1928, both over 90 years of age, she lived with Vern and Teenie in Garland for several years, and died there on 20 November 1938. She was buried beside her husband and three children in the Millcreek Cemetery on 23 November 1938.
Hyrum and Mary Ann had a large posterity. Only four of their seven children lived to marry and have families. But, except for Les, all their children had large families. Chloe and Dick had 8 children, 4 sons and 4 daughters. Vern and Teenie had 13 children, 8 sons and 5 daughters, and Effie and James O. had 7 sons. Uncle Les had 5 children, 3 sons and 2 daughters. One son died in infancy.
The picture here shows Faye, Les, Wanda and her brother, Joe, at Les’s 79th birthday celebration in 1974.