A Yuletide Story

I spend a lot of time doing research.  I know that this does not surprise anyone who has been reading my posts.  During this research I come across a lot of stories.  Some stories are inspiring.  Some stories are happy.  Some are sad.  It’s not that I go looking for stories, I just find them in my search for family history.  And sometimes a story really strikes something in me that makes me want to share it with people.  I found a story like that this week.  It is a very tragic story that needs to be told.

But I’m not telling you that story this week.  I already had a tragic story picked out to tell you this week.  The odd thing about those two stories is that they both occurred on the same calendar date and both involved a young mother named Dolores.  But there are even more commonalities in the story that I am telling this week.  Plus there is a tie-in with Christmas and it definitely is more tragic.  Isn’t that what everyone wants this week?  A tragic Christmas-themed story?  Well that’s what you are getting from yours truly.

This story is about two cousins.  Actually those cousins are third cousins.  Two girls were born a bit over eighty years ago and they were great granddaughters of two Stanbrough sisters.  These two distant cousins never met.  They grew up and they both found the man of their dreams.  One of the girl’s names was Dolores Henke and she married her childhood sweetheart named Frank Yule. His name is our first Christmas connection.  (You know like, “Yuletide carols being sung by a choir.”)  The other girl was Betty Lou Bucklin, my mom.  And we all know that she married the love of her life.

After these young women married their respective husbands, both of the families went to live in California.  Not long after that, their families started to grow.  Actually they started to grow at a remarkably similar pace.  They each gave birth to their first child, a daughter with a “J” name, in California in October of 1953.  Our Jodie was born on Oct 14th and their little Janice was born just eight days later.

Though my family moved to New Mexico, the similarities continued. Both of the families had their second child, a son, born in April of 1955.  Their Scott was born on the 21st and our Rob was born just six days later.  That’s amazingly close.  Even though the families moved further away from each other geographically, a few more parallels took place.  The next child born to each of these families was a girl with the given middle name of Jean.

Now you can see why I connected with this story.  Their family started in much the same way that mine did.  It seems like a rather happy story, too.  And I suppose it probably was up to this point.  But that wasn’t what initially got my attention to look at this family a little closer.  You start looking at things in family trees and other documents.  You have to make sure the birth and death dates are accurate and make sense.  So you look at those dates closely.  When you see children with similar year of birth, you think twins.  But when you see the same year for the death of more than one or two people in a family, you think tragedy.  And that is what I found.

There is one more similarity that I know of.  In the later part of 1961, both of these families were involved in automobile accidents.  Our family got into an accident in Lake Charles on our way to my mom’s family for Christmas.  (This is the other Christmas connection.)  We were thrown around a bit, Rob was ejected from the car, but for the most part we were fine.  We were able to celebrate Christmas and a new year.  The same cannot be said for the Yule family.

The Yule family was driving on Highway 399 in Ventura, California, on Sept. 17, 1961.  They were traveling along in their station wagon when a truck made an illegal turn in front of their vehicle.  That was the day that all similarities between these families ended.  Because, you see, all five members of the family perished that day.  The father was the oldest at 34 years of age and the youngest was three-year-old Barbara Jean.  A truly tragic ending.

Safe travels this Christmas.

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Sept. 13, 2017 – Addendum

I was going through a packet of papers that I had gotten from my parents’ home in Jennings in January of 2016 and came across this old newspaper article.  My mom liked to save things.  Sometimes that was a bad thing and sometimes it was a good thing.  This time it was a good thing.