My Mother's Family History

My mother's father's mother, or my great-grandmother was named Dorris Marie Theall.  Dorris, or as I called her, Nana, was born in 1901 to Katee Burke and Henry Theall.  It is said that both of Katee Burke's parents (both Irish immigrants) died in the making of the Washington Monument.  However, I have my reservations about that claim, never the less - it is what I was told.  Henry Theall was a French-Canadian Baptist who married Katee Burke, an Irish Catholic.  My mother tells me that it was seen as being quite taboo for a Canadian to marry an Irish immigrant.  Together they had 10 children.  5 of them ended up living to adulthood.  The other 5 died due to Scarlet Fever and other various diseases.  My great-grandmother was one of the lucky ones.  It is fascinating to think about...If she had not survived I would not be here; crazy, huh? My grandfather's father's father was named Gunner Roberts.  He was a Swedish immigrant who did manual labor.  He married Anna Olsen, they had a son named Frank Leonard Roberts. But, while Anna Olsen was still pregnant with Frank, Gunner Roberts had left Anna, alone to fend for herself and newborn child.  To help raise Frank, Anna would search for odd jobs or maid work. She used to have to drop Frank off at a daycare which must have been a very desperate move.  She would travel all the way into to town to seek work on a daily basis.  When Frank was still a child, around 10 or so, he would go and work at the fishery, cleaning fish. Back then there were no child labor laws so anything went.  He worked to help support himself and his mother.  Frank would work days at the fishery and at night would go to school.  When he got his diploma he married my great-grandmother, Dorris Marie Theall. Frank would get a job at the Boston Globe and the Christian Science Monitor, which eh worked at for 50 years without missing a day of work.  They had my grandfather, Donald and my uncle, Franky Roberts.  My grandmother's father, Charles Eugene Lotreck came from Bohemia Czechoslovakia. When he was 13 years old he stowed away in a ship heading towards America.  At Ellis Island he was caught and sent back to Czechoslovakia.  When he was around 16 years old, he and his family had moved to America legally.  They changed his name from Carol Rosheck to Charles Eugene Lotreck.  When he arrived in America he started his own business. In his small business he would sell household goods and groceries.  His landlord got jealous of his success and ended up kicking him out of the apartment building.  He was a very intelligent individual. He could speak 6 different languages. I'm told he fought in battles against Pancho Villa and got injured during the campaign.  During his time injured, he crossed paths with my grandmother's mother, Helen Pomeroy.  The two got married. Helen was an opera singer and Charles got a job working for a railroad company.  He was very successful. He was able to pay off and buy a house for $12,000, for back then, that was a tremendous amount of money.  The two had 4 children, my grandmother and her three brothers. Helen sang at President Coolidge's funeral. There is a picture of her singing at his funeral but I cannot seem to find it.

My Grandmother's History

She said this is here at age 16 when she graduated

 My grandparents wedding

 My grandmother with her son, Douglas

 This is her with my uncle, Keith

My grandmother and grandfather with my uncle Keith

I interviewed my grandmother to see what her life was like and what she thought of certain events.  She is very short breathed, she does not like to get too involved in details, and does not like to relive the past.

My grandmother, was born Phyliss Margarete Lotreck to Charles Eugene and Helen Marie Pomeroy in Chicago in 1922.  Her father was an immigrant and Helen's parents did not approve of their marriage.  They looked down on him because of the negative stigma attached to immigrants.  Regardless, Charles was a very smart man.  He put himself through college and became a self-made businessman.  My grandmother's mother, Helen, was a homemaker who tended to the couples four children.  When my grandmother was 4, her family moved from Chicago to Albany New York.  My grandmother tells me that her mother wanted to be closer with her father since her mother had died.  So over the years they moved from location to location inching closer and closer to the final destination; near Helen's father.  My grandmother recounts the time during the Great Depression.  Surprisingly, both of her parents had jobs.  Her father must have been a really noble man because he wanted his wife to leave her job so that someone else could have it. They must have been really well-to-do. At age 16 my grandmother graduated high school. After she graduated she went to North Hampton Community College which she says was just a business school. Here she learned how to be a secretary and learned how to use short hand.  Short hand was an abbreviated way of writing that allowed a person to write briefly and explain a lot at the same time. She attended the college for 1.5 years.  At 18 she went out and got a job as a secretary for a year. At 19 she went to Washington D.C. where she was a secretary for the Department of Defense; she worked there for 2 years. At 21 she was approached by her best friend, who was actually an army recruitment officer, and proposed that my grandmother join the Marine Corps.  She worked as a secretary during the time of WW2.  She never saw any battle but she says she had to fire a gun as part of training.  She got the title of Staff Sergeant.  After her time with the Marines, she went on to go to Boston University. She attended for 4 years and majored in advertising.  After she graduated she went to New York where she worked with Shell for a year (as a secretary).  She did not like the company so she left and joined Exxon, also as a secretary and also for 1 year.  She met my grandfather at New York State University at the registration booth.  My grandfather said that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.  They got married in 1950 and had 5 children.  When she was 42, she worked as a teacher in Connecticut for 4 years, until my grandpa got transferred to Houston, Texas.  She held various jobs, some secretarial work here and there until she eventually went back to school to get her masters.  She always told me that in order to be a teacher back then you had to attain a masters degree.  Once she got her masters degree she taught school for about 9 years; until she retired at 60.  I asked her for her opinion on certain events.  I asked her what she thought about WWII while it was going on.  She didn't have much to say other than a generic " I wanted us to win (America) against the bad guys (Germany).  I also asked her to try and think what she felt whenever she found out that JFK had been shot.  She said she was shocked.

Football Career

I started playing football in the third grade, against my mother's better judgement.  My brother had been able to talk her into letting me play saying, "don't worry mom, let him play now, while he's young; his bones' are still 'soft' and can repair themselves." At this point in my life I was a complete introvert.  I had nearly no friends because I had just moved to a new school.  I met a lot of my future classmates through the KFL (Kingwood Football League).  When executing drills my coach kept saying, "C'mon Brandon! You can do better than that...EXPLODE!!!." Well that made me break out of my shell completely.  Instead of just bumping against my practice partner I would knock them on their butts.  I went from being tied for second place in terms of the weakest to the strongest on the team. 

This picture is showing me on the 'Mustangs' is when I was in the fifth grade.  I skipped playing football in the fourth grade for some reason I have long forgotten. My brother and I used to both get in a three-point stance and charge at one another, sort of like rams.  Now, my brother was 4 years older than I was, extremely athletic and strong, yet I could overtake him and out power him.  It was at this time in my life that I realized that I was the strongest and fastest(even thought it may not look like it) person on my football team; I feared no one.  Naturally, after that season was done with and I moved into the sixth grade. I was met with a whole new pool of athletically talented individuals.

 In the sixth grade, I was a nerd.  I would hang out with the nerdy smart types.  I seemed to have broken my introverted tendencies and would chat it up with anyone and everyone.  I knew everyone's name in the whole school with around 900 people.  Football was really challenging.  I played as a lineman for both offense and defense, as well as being on special teams(punt returning, kick offs). That means I had no breaks I was constantly winded; talk about great exercise!

 (I'm #3 on the bottom row three places to the right)

This picture is of me in the 9th grade, my last year of participating in football.  I had transferred to a private school in the eighth grade.  I went from 11-man football down to 7-man football.  This style of football was created to accommodate small towns in Texas who could not field a full football teams.  This was honestly the most fun I have had in my entire life.  I lost all of my baby fat, converted to complete muscle and was extremely popular at my school.  Since my body had changed so much I was able to just demolish and outrun anyone on the field.  I remember being matched against people 70-100 lbs heavier than me and knocking them flat on their back.  I had coined the nickname "might mouse" from my piers.  It was a truly wonderful and fun time in my life that I will never forget.

Immigrant Family

My father’s side of the family, Abran Ybarra Cordoba and Rumalda Gonzales Aguilar, immigrated to the United States from Mexico.  They immigrated during the wake of the war that was declared on November 20, 1910; the Mexican Revolution. Seeking a safer atmosphere to raise their children, the family decided to make the move to America, along with many more Mexicans.  Since the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, which banned Chinese laborers from being imported into America, the need for labor was high.  Railroad companies were quick to swoop up the newly arrived Mexican immigrants, the company needed help laying new track lines in Texas, the family would help aid in the construction of the railways.  Prejudices against the Mexican people had still not waned from the Alamo and the U.S.  Mexico War.  The family was surrounded by crime and hateful acts; it was a very troubling and dangerous time.  They spoke Spanish and had a hard time assimilating to life in America.  I do not speak Spanish, however, my father's entire side of the family does, quite fluently in fact.  Knowing Spanish has never been a priority in my nuclear family.  All my brothers and me have taken Spanish in school ( I always did rather poorly in that subject). My grandmother and grandfather (my father's parents) are both devout Catholics.  They have gone to church every Sunday. I presume that they inherited their faith and traditions from their parents when they were young.  In fact, most of the Ybarra family is extremely Catholic. However, they didn't particularly absorb many traditions from Mexico. When I asked my father if his parents ever retained any Mexican traditions passed on from their parents he said, "No not really, other than making Tamales on Christmas and certain types of Mexican cuisine".

Verify or Debunk A Family Legend

  
   My mother takes great pride in her family and the stories that were passed down from her great grandfather to her mother and ultimately to her.  One such story piqued my interest ever since she told  it to me when I was young.  This story sounds like it could be a tall tale at first, but give it a thorough listen.  My great-great grandfather, Howard Pomeroy, thirty-five at the time, lived in Haydenville Massachusetts on a farm with his wife and three kids.  This particular event took place circa 1875. The farm had been blasted by the harsh winter; everything was frozen.  While out tending to the cows and gathering milk, he decided to gather some wood for the wood-burning stove cooking their stew and for heating the house.  He gathered the sticks like he normally would and took them back to the house.  Upon throwing the sticks into and around the fire he noticed that one stick started to move.  To his astonishment what he thought was a stick was in fact a snake. The snake started to reanimate from his cryogenic slumber. Upon realizing the stick was a snake he swiftly dispatched of it with an axe.  It turns out that this may not just be a tall-tale and in fact, most certainly is the truth.  Vertebrates such as: snakes, turtles and frogs can protect their internal organs in the event of becoming frozen.  Science backs up the plausibility of my great-great grandfather’s account of what happened that day.