After publishing the first version of this last month, although I was able to trace the ancestry of 100 of my classmates, I was not satisfied. I felt the task was not finished. So, I’ve been putting a lot of extra hours into tracing the rest of my classmates. Here are my final results.
How Many Classmates?
As I noted the last time, there were 170 people in our
8th grade composite picture. And there were 144 in the 1965 yearbook
when we were juniors. What other totals are there? I’ve located my 1966
yearbook from when we were seniors. There are 157 pictures and names there. But
the supplement that was put out after graduation noted that there were 151 in
the graduation ceremony. And in looking in the 1963 yearbook, when we were
freshman, there were 163 people (all without names, but in alphabetical
groupings of 30 or so).
Finally, I also have a copy of the booklet produced
for our 50th reunion which has individual pictures of all who were
there. But obviously there were many who were not able to attend.
Part of the problem is that the count is a snapshot in
time of a moving target. Not only are sometimes people not there on “picture
day”, but people move into town and others leave. In addition, some may take
more than 4 years to graduate and have to repeat a grade – thus starting out in
our class of 1966 but not graduating until 1967. There are a couple of
individuals who had their senior picture in the 1965 yearbook, but they did not
get enough credits to graduate and so they appear again as seniors in the 1966
yearbook. There are a few others who had fallen behind and who were a year
behind (being sophomores when the rest of us were juniors). But most of these
managed to get caught up, and they graduated on time.
Interestingly, in the process of doing this, I
discovered that the yearbook staff for the 1965-66 year “cheated”! In
assembling the book and putting in pictures for the freshman/sophomore/junior
class, they merely took the pictures from the 1964-65 yearbook of the 8th
grade/freshman/sophomore class and replicated them for the 1965-66 yearbook.
So, for those individuals who fell behind but later caught up, you can’t tell
when it happened. I wonder if anyone else has ever noted this “cheat”?
In assembling my composite list from all the above
resources, I have made sure to include everyone from the 1965 yearbook (even
though it may have had errors) and 1966 yearbook as well as everyone who
attended the 50th reunion. I also went through the group pictures
from the 1963 yearbook and identified as many individuals as I could. Finally,
I have also added any names of individuals who I could remember from our
freshman and sophomore years who may have moved on and not appeared in these
primary sources.
My final list of names contained 173 individuals (172
plus myself) and I was able to account for all of the 157 individuals in the
1966 yearbook as well as all the 144 individuals in the 1965 yearbook. This
added up to 169 individuals. The other four were two people who attended the
reunion for whom I did not have any other records, as well as two people whom I
recalled from earlier years but who had left town prior to our junior year. I
was also able to recognize the faces of nearly 100 of my classmates from the
series of group picture from our freshman year. (I know that I have somewhere
in my archives a copy of this group picture together with a list of all the
names. If/when I locate it, perhaps I’ll do a follow-up posting.)
Challenges
Building out a workable list of classmates presented a
few challenges. Among them were:
· The
1965 yearbook only had a first initial and last name, so I needed to supply the
full first name from memory. This was complicated by the fact that the “DeWitt”
last name was recorded as simply “Witt” with a “first initial” of “D”. Also,
the “St Germain” last name was recorded as just “Germain”. But I was able to
overcome this challenge.
· There
were a few misspellings of last names in the yearbook, so I had to correct them
as I did my investigation, e.g., Luchinsky instead of Lushinsky, Messina
instead of Messino.
· As
much as I knew my classmates pretty well, I knew very few of their parents.
Since that was going to be crucial in my building out their family tree, I had
to look for obituaries by last name and assumed the town where they were
interred and where the obituary list the names of the children. Alternatively,
if it was a relatively uncommon name, I could just look for gravesites with the
right name and age of the parents in surrounding towns.
A Few Comments on Demographics
When I did a similar project looking for common
ancestors between myself and individuals in our church here in PA, I found that
nearly two-thirds of the people were distant cousins of myself. But the population
of our church is very much descended from the initial German ancestors in the
area who settled here in the early 1700s. And with nearly 300 years of
intermarriage with those in the area, there were many instances of families who
had roots in ome of the immediate surrounding areas (Luzerne County, New
Jersey, Maryland) where there were many of English extraction from those early
years of the country. This meant that many people had a family line that could
be traced back to the colonial English.
One might have expected that because I was looking at
a population of individuals in Connecticut, which was settled initially by
those who came from England during the Great Migration (1630-1640), that I
would find a great percentage of those were related to me. But while the
population of the area may have been somewhat homogeneous initially, there has
been a lot of more recent immigration that impacted my results.
In particular, the population of Wolcott, was settled
primarily by individuals from the cities to the south of it (Waterbury) and the
north of it (Bristol). Thus, while the population of Wolcott was increasing
dramatically during the period immediately following WWII, it tended to mirror
the recent immigration into those two cities.
The countries involved in immigration into Waterbury
at the time were Italy, and to a slightly lesser extent, Ireland. In contrast,
the immigration via Bristol was highly French Canadian (most commonly through
Quebec, and to a lesser extent through the maritime provinces that border
Maine. This phenomenon of demographic “clumping” can still be seen today in
places like Minneapolis which has a high percentage of individuals from
Somalia, or Miami which has many from Cuba.
Results
I have finished building rudimentary family trees for all
of my 172 classmates. Here are some of the final statistics:
· 59
of 172 (34%) are cousins of mine (see list below)
· 25 of my classmates (15%) have passed away. The breakdown is 7 of my cousins (12%),
but 18 of my non-cousins (16%)
· 52
(30%) have some degree of French-Canadian ancestry (16 are cousins); 48 (28%)
have some degree of Italian ancestry (only 5 are cousins); 33 (19%) have some
degree of Irish ancestry (11 are cousins). Note some of these overlap.
· The
most complicated family tree for one individual has ancestors from Italy,
French-Canada, Germany, Scotland, Ireland, and the Netherlands
· Those
with only a single country of origin are from Italy (30), England (14), Ireland
(8) and single individuals from French-speaking Canada, Lithuania, Poland,
Russia, Scotland, and Syria. Thus, 114 of the 172 (66%) are part of the “melting
pot” that is America.
· The
closest cousin to me is a 6th cousin and the furthest is a 12th
cousin
Here is a list of all my cousins from the WHS class of
1966 (note that not all graduated in 1966 as some(*) moved from Wolcott before
our senior year and some(+) took more than 4 years to graduate):
Wally Anderson, Susan Blais, Gary Booker* (deceased),
Sandra Burke, Linda Clark, Louise B Clement, Louise M Clement, Marie Clement,
Cathy Cotner, Anita Crandall, James DeWitt*, Mary Ann DeWitt*, Richard Dihlman,
Ken Duren*, Christine Eason, Judy Essex, Janet Evans, Robert Fehrs, Antoinette
Garbus, Larry Guilmette, Elaine Haddad, Cynthia Harrington, Paul Harrison, Neil
Hart, Marilyn Heidorn, Tom Hellman, Bruce Hill (deceased), Chuck Hoadley, Joan
Jager, Colleen Malloy, Mike Mazen, Jacqueline Mulholland, Ed Nearing, Karen
Nevin, Barry Northway, Bruce Ostrander+, Alan Ouelette+, Ken Overton
(deceased), Phil Pagnoni, Darlene Petosa, Linda Phillips, Ray Provancher, Linda
Pulford (deceased), Chuck Regan, Jean Rosevear, Bob Schrager (deceased), Nancy Smith, Susan Snow,
Shirley Stewart, Bob Stone, Linda Walcott, Kathy Washburne, Dorothy Watson,
Doug Way+, John Wells (deceased), Jeannie Wilson, Dave Woodward, Karen Wooster,
Gary Zimnaruk (deceased)
Here is a list of all those that I am aware of who
have passed away:
Ron Bertothy (2019), Gary Booker (2017), Rosemary Darigis (2017), Peter DeLeon (2019), Patty Grant (1998), Karen Hickey (2017), Bruce Hill (1992), Joe Lango (2013), Maria Elena Lanosa (2017), Joe Laone (2019), Ernie Legassy (2019), Janice Luchinsky (2009), Andrea MacBroom (1983), Bob McKeeman (1995), Bill McKinnon (2001), Tom Murphy (2013), Ken Overton (2004), Lois Pannone (1990), John Pikiell (2019), Linda Pulford (2018?), Bob Schrager (2008), Zigmunt Szabat (2017), Linda Velardo (2018), John Wells (2016), Gary Zimnaruk (2006)
Finally, for those who are interested, here is my
picture from 1960, 1962, 1965, 1966, and the 2016 reunion.