(Also) Kin to a Corpus Christi Mayor!

Twelve years ago, I wrote about how I was kin (by marriage) to a Corpus Christi mayor - Abraham Albert Lichtenstein Jr., (of the Lichtenstein's department store family), who served from 1953 until his resignation in 1954.  Recently I learned that my husband, Mark Gresham, is related (also by marriage) to another Corpus Christi mayor - and he would get a kick out of this, since they served the City at the same time:

This is Jason Milus Luby (1929-2012), who was mayor of Corpus Christi from 1973 until he was forced to resign in 1978 when he made an unsuccessful run for Congress.  Mark started as Corpus Christi's Budget Director in April 1974, and he had a lot of interesting stories about Jason.  

Jason is in the center of the photo below, which comes from the Corpus Christi Public Libraries' Digital Archives, specifically La Retama's General Photograph Collection, with a description that reads, "Choke Canyon Dam Water Development Board.  Mayor Luby and four unidentified men.  The mayor holds a check.  A handwritten insert with the photo reads, 'City accepting check from Texas Water Development Board for second payment of loan for Choke Canyon.'"  I can tell you that the man in the darkest suit is R. Marvin Townsend, City Manager in Corpus Christi at the time.

So how is Mark related to Mayor Luby?  Well, Luby's wife was Elizabeth "Betty" Willene Lowman (1929-2024), pictured below.  The photo comes from the funeral home website ...

... where I also found a photograph that included her mother, Marguerite Maude Mew Lowman (1906-1996), pictured below.

Marguerite was the oldest child of Charles Arthur Mew Sr. (1884-1927), whose photograph below is from page 20 (image 26 here) of the 1919 La Gaviota yearbook of Corpus Christi High School, when he was serving as vice-president of the school board (and interestingly, while A. A. Lichtenstein, father of the Corpus Christi mayor I'm related to, was serving as president of the school board).

Charles was a younger half-brother of Benjamin George Mew Sr. (1879-1949), Mark's "Uncle Benny," who made him a belt and belt buckle when Mark was little.  The photo below, taken in 1919, is from page 137 (image 201 here) of the Journal of  Letters & History of George W. K. Mew by Judith Whipple, and it was probably provided to Whipple by ...

... Ben's wife, Mark's aunt, his mother's older sister, Ivis Moore Mew (1905-2004), who was one of the first (in 1930) graduates of the Spohn School of Nursing.  Ivis was a nurse in Corpus Christi and Duval County (the latter from about 1941 to 1949, nursing her husband Ben, who suffered from pernicious anemia, at their ranch near San Diego).  In 1963, she moved back home to Marlow, Oklahoma, to take care of her aging parents while continuing her career.   

© Amanda Pape - 2026 - e-mail me!

Finding Obituaries in Draugas - The Chicago-area Lithuanian-language Newspaper

This is the first in a series of three posts about researching Lithuanians in the Chicago area, where many of them settled after immigrating to the United States.  (Here is the second post, and here is the third post).

This post is about finding obituaries in Draugas, the Chicago-area Lithuanian-language newspaper, which began publication in 1909 and is still going strong today.  Here is a link to the page to search its archives:

https://www.draugas.org/archyvas-paieska-search/

This will take you to the page pictured below.  The first link under "Paieška" lets you search the archive from 1909 through 2007, which is open to everyone.

When I click on that link, it brings up the following search page.  In this example, I am looking for an obituary for Juozapas (Joseph) Guokas, my second cousin thrice removed, who I already knew (from other sources) died April 22, 1938.  I decided to start just by entering his surname in the search box.

There were only 13 results, and none of them were him.  But the search mechanism for Draugas has an interesting fluke.

As mentioned on the initial search page, in Lithuanian, they don't know why, but when searching for a last name, the search finds a larger number of results when searching by last name together with the first name or first initial instead of presenting only the last name (e.g. J. Basanavičius instead of Basanavičius).  So I decided to try that, searching for "Juozapas Guokas" (but without quotation marks), and sure enough, there was a link to him.

 

Before looking at the obituary itself, here's another way to search for them, but you'll need to know at least the year of death, and ideally the date of death or burial.  Use the index - here is the link:

https://www.draugas.org/rodykle-index/

Here's what that page looks like.  I clicked on the link for 1938.

On the page for each year, there's another search box, so I tried searching for Guokas again.

This time, it did bring up a single result, for my Juozapas Guokas.

However, before we look at the actual obituary, here's a way to look for an obituary that doesn't come up with a search.  If you know the date of death, start checking issues on that date, out to about a week later.  If you know the date of burial, start by checking the issue on that date (or the day after), and go backwards about a week.  You can also check the whole month (and, if necessary, the first part of the next month) if you only know the month the death occurred.

Note that the newspaper isn't published every day.  Also, note that sometimes there will be multiple copies of the same issue (indicated by various designations after the date, and usually because scans were provided from more than one source repository).

Juozapas Guokas died on April 21, but his obituary wasn't published until April 25.  When you click on the link for that date, you get an image like the one below.  Obituaries are almost always near the end of the issue, so I use the scroll bar on the right to slide to the last page and then scroll up, or you can enter the last page in the page counter at the top and jump to that.  Or you can do a page search for your last name, or the first few letters of it.  I found it's easiest to jump to the end and scroll up, because most obituaries have the same format.

And here is the obituary for Juozapas Guokas, on the fifth of six pages for this issue.  As you read more of these, you'll quickly learn key words and be able to pic out the names of relatives.

You can always highlight the text and copy it ...

... and then paste it into Google Translate, OCR errors and all, to get a rough translation.

Here's the important information, as far as I'm concerned, with my rough translations (in other words, what I've come to know these various words and abbreviations mean):

Juozapas Guokas died (mirė) April (Bal.) 21, 1938.  He came from (kilo) Panevėžio district (apskr.), Smilgių parish (parap.), Valiliškių village (kaimo).  He lived in (išgyveno) America 35 years (metus).  He is survived by his wife (moterj) Petronėlė, maiden name (po tėvais) Šukiutė, son (sūnų) Peter (Petrą), daughter (dukterį) Stella (Stanislovą), two brothers (du brolius): Julius (Julijoną) and (ir) Stanley (Stanislovą) and his family (ir jo šeimą), sister (seserį) Domicėlę Žukauskienę  and her family (ir jos šeimą), and many others.

The obituary goes on to name the funeral home (Anthony Petkus) and give information about the funeral.  This one is on the 26th at St. Anthony parish church (Šv. Antano par. bažnyčią) - that would be the one in Cicero, a Lithuanian parish.  Almost all Lithuanian Catholics in the south part of Chicago were buried at St. Casimir Cemetery (Šv. Kazimiero kapines), then almost entirely Lithuanian, and almost all were buried the same day as the funeral Mass. 

As you can see, these obituaries are a goldmine of information!

© Amanda Pape - 2025 - e-mail me!

Historic Preservation?

I was shocked to walk by this historic house at 501 Counts Alley, which is just a few blocks from my home in Granbury, Texas, and see this today:

This is what the house looked like about a year ago:

The stone arches on the front porch are being demolished.  So far, this whimsical flower is still there, but I have to wonder - for how long?

There's also a diamond and a dragonfly (I think) in the stonework on the chimney on the west side of the house.

I decided to do a little research on this house.  The property it is on was purchased by William "Bill" Harrison Kinson, 1889-1966, and his wife Bessie Drucilla Nash Kinson, 1897-1982, on December 27, 1933.  Bill and Bessie had married in Hood County seven years earlier, on December 28, 1926.  On the 1930 Census, she was a public schoolteacher and he was a trucker, and they were renting a house on nearby Pearl Street.  They had no children.

They may have bought the house for more space.  Sometime after March 29, 1932, the Kinsons took in the three children of Grover Cleveland Oxford (1894-1960) and Maude Ann Davis Oxford (1898-1932).  Maude had died from breast and liver cancer, leaving three young children ages 2-5, Grovina, Bonita, and Derl, and the Kinsons took them in and raised them (according to Grovina's 2015 obituary).  They don't seem to be related, and it's not clear why their father did not want to raise them.  The children are listed as "lodgers" in the Kinson home on the 1940 Census.

Tax records for the house indicate it was built in 1935.  That is likely when the mixed stone exterior walls with beaded mortar were built, as the initials in the front gable, "WK," are those of William Kinson.  The Kinsons owned the home through Bessie's death in December 1982.  Earlier that year, she conveyed the house to her former lodger, Derl Crites Oxford (1930-1989), retaining a life estate for herself.  Derl lived there until his death, and the home passed out of Kinson and Oxford ownership when it was sold by Grovina in the settlement of Derl's estate in March 1991.

However, it looks like a structure very similar to the existing house has been on the site since at least January 1905, based on Sanborn maps.  In the next two images, from January 1905 and July 1910, it is the smaller house on the left, with a (then-) house number of 110.  The yellow coloring indicates that it is a wood frame structure.

Image above cropped from http://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/sanborn/g-i/txu-sanborn-granbury-1905-4.jpg.

Image below cropped from http://legacy.lib.utexas.edu/maps/sanborn/g-i/txu-sanborn-granbury-1910-4.jpg.

Now look at the next two images, from the February 1932 and March 1945 Sanborn maps.  The 1945 map notes the stone, and you can also see a small outbuilding has been added, probably what now appears to be storage but was likely the original garage.  It's possible the stone outer wall was added over existing wood frame and siding.

Above:  February 1932.  Below:  March 1945.

This house, described as a High Style Tudor Revival, is a high priority for preservation according to a historic properties survey done by the city in 2001.  It "contributes significantly to local history or broader historical patterns; is an outstanding or unique example of architecture, engineering or crafted design; and retains a significant portion of its original character and architectural integrity."

However, a large part of that uniqueness, character, and integrity is being destroyed.  The house is not in the city's historic preservation district (HPO), so the current owners (who bought the house in January of this year) did not have to submit their plans for the exterior to the Historic Preservation Commission (on which I serve, since February 2020) for approval.

ETA 14 January 2021:  The front door that is parallel to the street has been bricked in (with similar stone), and the planter box in front of the window to the left of the porch has also been demolished.

Also, a discussion with a lifetime Granbury resident and some additional research in old newspapers revealed that Bill Kinson was elected alderman (a City Councilperson) in Granbury in April 1939.  Also, his 1966 obituary stated that the Kinsons had owned the Corner Cafe since 1958.  The Corner Cafe was in the building pictured below, at the northwest corner of Pearl and Houston streets on the Hood County Courthouse square.

Based on an early (but undated) photo of this building, it did not always have the crazy-quilt-pattern mixed stone exterior.  I have to wonder if Kinson added this as well.

© Amanda Pape - 2020 - e-mail me!

Church Record Sunday Obituary - Lorenz Pape, March 1932, Wisconsin

The March 25, 1932, Wisconsin Rapids Daily Tribune had the brief obituary at left on page 3 for my great grand uncle Lorenz Pape (1862-1932).  He died at the home of his daughter Mary Walter (not Walters) in Nekoosa, Wisconsin, on March 24, 1932, which was Holy Thursday that year (meaning the obituary was published on Good Friday).  According to the records of Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Nekoosa (in book 7), Lorenz (whose name was spelled as Leonard in the church records) was apparently buried on Easter Sunday, March 27, 1932, in Sacred Heart Cemetery (now part of Riverside Cemetery in Nekoosa). 

I was able to obtain a list of tombstone transcriptions for this cemetery through April 1976,  from the McMillan Memorial Library in Wisconsin Rapids.  Lorenz Pape and his daughters Mary Pape Walter and Petronella "Nellie" Pape Arendt are all buried there.  Lorenz is in Section E, row 2, right next to the Walter plot that has Mary's husband Herman, who died October 24, 1931.  Lorenz's tombstone says: "PAPE-Father Lorenz-1862-1932"

© Amanda Pape - 2013 - click here to e-mail me.