|
a.
|
Note: rio-sclerosis, other condtions cerebral hemmorhage. She was only 62 years old. Newpaper article mentioned a long illness.
Social security applications and claims index says she was born 14 May 1890 in Steelton, Dauphin, Pennsylvania. I don't think so. Death certificate says she was born 14 May 1884 in Pennsylvania and died 5 Dec 1946. Father Charles L Moore and mother Carrie Dehart - same on both documents. She lived at 146 W. Louther St at death. Buried in Arlington Cemetery in Upper Darby, PA. Willard signed as the informant. Funeral director Urius D Lutz? 219 N Hanover St, Carlisle.
My mother says that Bessie Mae, and not her mother, was the frail elderly woman in the wheelchair in their backyard. "Bessie Mae Moore Smith sufferred a massive stroke which confined her to a wheelchair and, eventually, to bed. She was an invalid for several---I don't know how many---years." I thought that was who my father said it was, but Carrie also lived there and also was an invalid. My mother did not know Carrie was an invalid. If it was Bessie Mae she must have seriously aged between 1935 and 1942. My mother says that my father and Aunt Irma took turns caring for Bessie Mae in her last years.
Bessie Mae's social security application listed her dob as 14 May 1890, Steelton. She applied in Dec 1943. She was 16 in the 1900 census. Born May 1884. Her death certificate has May 14, 1884.
Willlard Smith, 76 Bryn Mawr Road, Lansdowne, PA informant. bureid ARlington Cemtery, Uperr darby, PA Funeral director Uri D Lutz, 219 N Havoer St, Carlisle. She lived at 146 W Louther St. Carlisle, at death. But perhaps it was my father's turn to look after her.
As a child, Bessie Mae was plain and sober looking, in contrast to her pretty, sulky and seductive looking sister. (They were both approximately 5 to 8 years old.) It looked as if their mother, herself an ugly duckling, had dressed up Nellie and styled her hair, but left Bessie Mae's straight and cut her bangs sraight across at a particularly ugly angle.
Cousin Dorothy mentioned tension between Bessie Mae's plain, down to earth ways and her mother and sister who I gather were into fashion and that sort of thing, and somewhat snobby. Father was a lifelong iron roller, and his father was a landless laborer, but Bessie Mae learned to teach piano playing and to be a stenographer.
Pictures of Bessie Mae as a young woman show a slim, pretty woman, somewhat dark complexion, quite stylishly dressed.
Two pictures of Bessie Mae around age 50, in Carlisle, taken by the same relatives on teh same afternoon, show variously a pleasant-faced middle-aged woman wiht nice Pennsylvania-Dutch features, and a plain dour woman. She and my 16 year old father next to her had on identical dour expressions; it was quite comical.
My father had letters from her that my sister has since destroyed, but my brother quoted from one to me. She was discussing Willard's pot belly. "But then too much beer will do that." Willard, who had a normal, outgoing and intense temperament, was the scapegoat in a basically too quiet and asocial family.
23andMe results are consistent with the notion that Willard was Bessie Mae's son, but not her husband's. Specifically, my brother and Willard's grandson do not have the same Y DNA. The difference is the call of one SNP, and I did alert Willard's grandson to several ways to verify this result.
The 23andMe results are strongly consistent with the notion that Willard's grandson and I are both descended from Bessie Mae. Specifically we share matching DNA in common from descendants of Moore and Dehart line ancestors.
I found only a single 8 cM piece of shared DNA to support thinking Willard's grandson and I share a single Smith line ancestor, where there should be a lot of them, especially to Smith second cousins. My Smith second cousins are Willard's grandson's 3rd cousins. There is only a small chance of sharing no DNA with biological third cousins. There is a slightly higher chance of not sharing it in common with me.
This is way too consistent with Willard's parents treating him like an alien life form and as a lost cause as a person. My father had no reason to doubt Willard was his full brother, and did not correctly understand what went wrong in that set of relationships. The results were tragic. My father said he thought he beat the spirit right out of my brother for throwing temper tantrums when he was two years old, when all babies throw temper tantrums, because he was terrified my brother would develop his brother's temper. Until now I thought the temper came from the Smiths, who were notoriously violent tempered, and it may have. However, Willard was an extrovert and somewhat smart alecky in a family of introverts not capable of ever being smart alecky.
Indeed, such a misfit of temperament between a child and the entire rest of his family is a frequent clue to not biologically belonging to that family.
Bessie Mae Moore was evidently quiet, introverted, and as moral as the day is long. Willard was conceived five months after her marriage. Further, Bessie Mae and her husband were extremely structured and careful people.
I think that someone forced Bessie Mae to have sex with him, or she otherwise didn't believe she had a choice.
The strong sense of something unspecified wrong in the Moore family leads me to wonder if Charles Moore could have been Willard's father. He looks more like his father must have than his mother did, though we've no other idea what his father looked like, and in some ways he also looks suspiciously different from anyone else in his family.
One telling sign that something was wrong; Bessie Mae's parents are not in her wedding photos. Her sister is probably there, though there is no identification of the young woman who is not a Smith. She looks something like Nellie Mae did as a small girl; similar facial structure. The entire Smith family was in the wedding photo regardless of whether the married Smith siblings lived at home at that point. Their spouses are all there as well. And they're all dressed up for a simple wedding in front of a justice of the peace. The Smith family were upper middle class, and respectable, and there was no valid reason for Bessie Mae's parents to have nothing to do with the wedding. Things have to be very wrong in a family before the parents don't attend a daughter's wedding.
The two other family photos I have make it clear that Bessie Mae's mother did not like her. She is dressed very plainly, her bangs are chopped off at a strange angle, and she doesn't smile. Nellie at maybe age five is seductively dressed and posed seductively. Bessie Mae did care for her mother when she was elderly and disabled by a stroke, but by then her father was long dead.
If Bessie Mae's father had a longstanding pattern of sexually abusing her, she would have tended to submit even though she was a grown woman and married.
Bessie Mae and her parents met at the bank where they both worked, I believe she was a stenographer or secretary. This family was just starting out, and William's father was known to have not been financially supportive of his sons; they were all very successful but worked extremely hard to get there. (The eldest visibly had extensive help from his mother's kin.) One must also consider that there boss might have taken sexual advantage of her.
Note: Death certificate says she died of cardio-vascular disease, due to arte
|
