Unnatural Phenicie Deaths

I’m finally getting around to writing a post about a story I found almost eight years ago.  A week before Christmas in 2016 I must have been doing some research on Phenice relatives, because that’s when I found this information.  I said at the time that it was a story that needed to be told.  I didn’t tell it then because I had found another story that was very tragic, and it was about a family that had some striking similarities to my own family when I was growing up.

That other story was about my mom Betty Lou Bucklin Landry and her third cousin Dolores Henke Yule and their respective families.  They were related through the Stanbrough family name.  They were around the same age, they got married around the same time, and then they moved to California after they were married.  Their first two children were born within days of each other, and each of their third children was a girl with the last name of Jean.  Then in 1961, both families got into separate accidents.  My family lived to tell about it.  Theirs didn’t.

The story that I’m talking about today is concerning relatives from the Phenice line.  In the case of these cousins, they spelled their last name Phenicie.  It has some similarities to the Yule tragedy.  Their car accident happened on Sept. 17, 1961.  The accident that happened to the Phenicie cousin was on Sept. 17, 1948.  In the 1961 accident Dolores Yule died.  In the tragedy of the Phenicie family, Dolores Davies Phenicie passed away.

I had thought about writing this post last week but decided to put it off because it was an anniversary for my great great grandmother’s birthday.  So this was to be the week that I would talk about the tragedy.  The weird thing is that I heard about two deaths at different chemical plants that happened this week.  And the two projects that I’ve been working on this week were for those plants.  The first death I’m talking about happened at a chemical plant, but that was back in 1948.

Here is what happened.  On September 17 there was an explosion in Lewiston, Pennsylvania, at the American Viscose Corporation.  A blast in the vulcanizing tank turned the door of the tank into a missile that struck Wayne Rhodes Phenicie in the side.  He died shortly afterwards.  Two other people only suffered minor injuries.  It was such a tragic event.  Wayne and Dolores hadn’t been married for very long and they had a son named Jeff who had been born at the beginning of the year.

But that’s not the end of this sad story.  Dolores was not able to cope with losing the love of her life.  The second newspaper article states that the couple had been deeply in love and that she was suffering from depression.  She went to stay with family members who were willing to help out in hopes of an improvement.  But sadly, the young widow shot herself on December 22, 1948.  In just over a two-month period, little Jeff Phenicie lost both parents before he had reached the age of one.

One of the reasons I didn’t write the story in 2016 was because Jeff Phenicie was still alive.  I thought I might contact him and see if he had anything to say about the situation.  But really, what can you say about a tragedy that happened when you were so young.  And how would I even bring that up to someone?  So I put it aside for a while.  Time passed and I forgot the names of the people involved.  I’ve got thousands of people in my online tree, and I don’t make notes about people like I probably should.  I looked half-heartedly a few times but wasn’t too concerned about it.

Then a few weeks ago I had a DNA match with the last name of Phenicie.  (Yes, they still spell it differently.  They even pronounce it differently.  They rhyme their name with Tennessee.  We rhyme Phenice with Venus.)  When I looked at the match’s tree, I saw the name Wayne Phenicie and a death date of 1948.  It seemed familiar.  Sure enough, the DNA match is a great grandchild of Wayne and Dolores.  I also saw that Jeff Phenicie had died in 2017.  In the Yule case Dolores Henke Yule was a third cousin to my mom.  With Wayne Phenicie, he was a third cousin to my maternal grandmother Myrtle Phenice Bucklin.  And what that means is that Wayne Phenicie, my third cousin twice removed, had common DNA with me.  Otherwise his great grandchild would not be a DNA match to me, my brother Rob, and my cousin Charla.

I’ve mapped my mom’s and some of her siblings’ DNA sources.  Even though the match happened at Ancestry, I can still tell how we are related.  We have some common matches that tested at other sites that have chromosome browsers.  One match named Bradley matches this new Phenicie match and me, Rob, and Charla.  Bradley also matches Aunt Loris.  Mama matched Bradley with two large segments, but Aunt Loris matches him only on one.  So since the new Phenicie match doesn’t match Aunt Loris, the connection must be through the other segment that the others of us have.  So I know that along Chromosome 10, there is a section within each of my cells that is identical to a section of Chromosome 10 that was in Wayne Phenicie on the day he died.  Evidence of a family connection.