Saturday, February 16, 2019

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - How Did Your Parents Meet?

Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!



Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible music!), is to:


1)  One of our family stories for our descendants should be how we met our spouse.  Another one should be, if we know it, how did our parents meet each other?


2)  This week, let's tell our "parents meeting" story if we know it.  If you don't know that story, tell us another one about one of your relatives meeting their spouse or significant other.
3)  Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a comment on this blog post to lead us to your answers.

Here's mine:
My mother, Betty Virginia Carringer was a San Diego-born young lady, age 21 in the fall of 1940, living at home with her parents at 2130 Fern Street in San Diego.   She had received a B.S. in Art in June at San Diego State College, and had taken a job at Woodrow Wilson Junior High School (at 39th Street and El Cajon Blvd.) teaching Art to the students of East San Diego.  

My father, Frederick Walton Seaver was age 29 in the fall of 1940 in Leominster, Massachusetts.  He had just been denied the hand of his girl friend in marriage by her father, and was tired of shoveling snow in Massachusetts for his sister, so he decided to head for California.  He drove three days west without much sleep, and arrived in San Diego in mid-December.  Why San Diego, California?  His mother's sister, Emily (Richmond) Taylor and her family lived there.  Fred managed to mail a very short letter from Columbus, Ohio to his Aunt Emily saying he would be arriving shortly.


After he arrived, Fred stayed with the Taylor family at 4601 Terrace Drive in Kensington, and got to know his cousin, Dorothy (Taylor) Chamberlain (Emily's only child) and her husband Marshall Chamberlain, and their 14-year-old daughter Marcia.

Some time after Fred arrived, and it may have been several months later in the spring of 1941, he was still at the Chamberlain home, was working for Marshall,  and during dinner one night, he said "I need a girlfriend!"

Marcia piped up "I know one!"  Marcia was taking an art class at Woodrow Wilson Junior High.  The "one" turned out to be Betty.

Betty was invited to dinner at the Chamberlains by Marcia and her mother to meet Fred, and they, apparently, hit it off, as they say.  Before long, Fred had moved out of the Chamberlains into his own place near Betty's house, and the romance turned serious sometime in late 1941.

After Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Fred got a job in Materiel at Rohr Aircraft in Chula Vista, which was manufacturing power packs for aircraft engines to support the war effort.  Betty was teaching at Memorial Junior High in San Diego during the 1941-1942 school year.

I don't know when Fred proposed to Betty, but it was probably in early 1942, and she certainly said "Yes!" They were married in St. Paul's Lutheran Church in San Diego on 12 July 1942.  Fred's mother and sister came to San Diego on the train for the ceremony, and stayed at the Chamberlains.  

After the wedding and a short honeymoon to Dana Point in Orange County, Fred and Betty rented a house at 577 Twin Oaks Avenue in Chula Vista, and Betty also took a job at Rohr Aircraft in the Engineering department.  Fifteen months after they married, their first "bundle of joy" came along.  

They lived in the Chula Vista house until Fred enlisted in the U.S. Navy in August 1944 and shipped out on the U.S.S. Halford, a destroyer that went to the Aleutian Islands.  Betty and baby Randy moved in with Betty's parents at the Fern Street house until Fred returned in late 1945.

This story was told to me by Dorothy (Taylor) Chamberlain in the 1980s after my father had died, and my mother essentially corroborated it.


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Copyright (c) 2019, Randall J. Seaver

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3 comments:

Janice M. Sellers said...

I wrote about my great-grandparents this time!

http://www.ancestraldiscoveries.com/2019/02/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-how-did.html

Lisa S. Gorrell said...

I wrote about how my maternal grandparents met.

https://mam-massouthernfamily.blogspot.com/2019/02/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-how-did.html

Linda Stufflebean said...

Here is my partial story. I've asked my cousin to ask my uncle and aunt if they know any more.