Genealogical research

My plan is to gather here some findings from my genealogical research into the Aarstol, Willis, Ryan, Sandona, and other families. (The photo above is, from left to right, my grandmother Grace Willis, great aunt Norma Willis, and their cousin Emma Willis somewhere in Oregon in the early 1920s. Many thanks to my third cousin Misty Gardner for this picture).

It’s been difficult to research the Italian and Norwegian wings of the family that came to the US around 1900 or so, but with respect to those parts of the family I’ve gotten a lot of help from my mom’s cousin Joanne on the Italian side (Joanne has visited Italy several times and has met many of our distant cousins who live in the Caltrano area in Italy today) and from my Dad’s cousin Maxine on the Norwegian side (Maxine has visited Norway several times and studied her and her husband’s Norwegian ancestry for a number of years). I’ve gotten more traction in my own research studying the mostly British and Irish parts of the family that arrived to the US or Canada in the 1800’s or before. But all of it has been a fun experience. To me watching the migrations and the changing mix of occupations and so forth feels like opening a window into some of the real history of the last couple centuries in the United States and Canada.

Notes on eight great grandparents:

Jarvis Ryan (1873-1948) b. New Brunswick, Canada, d. Bellingham, Washington (marries Julia Cronin) – father of my maternal grandfather Herb Ryan. There was a wave of Irish immigration to New Brunswick, Canada in the early part of the 19th century. Charles Ryan (1799-1869) and his wife Margaret Dunn (?-1881) were among the ones who arrived in the early 1820s. I am fond of Charles Ryan’s epitaph which reads in part “A voluntary exile from Queens Co Ireland… [that] made his home here in this happier corner of the empire.” Charles and Margaret had nine children who then had, on average, nine children of their own in the Saint John area in New Brunswick. Jarvis Ryan (1873-1948) was one of the 81 grandkids of Charles Ryan and Margaret Dunn. He moved west in several stages to British Columbia working on the Canadian transcontinental railroad (working as an animal trainer for the horses used in the construction process) and then relocated to Bellingham, Washington to raise his family. Of Jarvis Ryan’s 80 siblings and/or first cousins on the Ryan side of his family, several settled in other Canadian provides besides New Brunswick and about 40 stayed in New Brunswick and were generally farmers, but more than 30 migrated to big cities in the US in Massachusetts (including 16 by my count to Boston alone), Maine, New Hampshire, and Connecticut to get jobs and raise a family. One of the youngest of the 80, Murray, migrated to San Francisco, California and lived blocks from where I live today. One of the more colorful characters in the Jarvis Ryan wing of the family has to be William Mark Duke (a second cousin of my grandfather Herb Ryan) who was the Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Church in Vancouver, British Columbia from 1931-1964. The Iron Duke as he was known was a hardliner who, per his obituary, was opposed to drinking, dancing and Sunday picnics.
Julia Cronin (1879-1969) b. New Brunswick, Canada, d. Bellingham, Washington (marries Jarvis Ryan) – mother of my maternal grandfather Herb Ryan. All of Julia Cronin’s grandparents were born in Ireland and migrated to New Brunswick, Canada in the 1830s or 1840s. Her brothers and sisters stayed in New Brunswick as did many of her nieces and nephews but some of her nieces and nephews moved to other parts of Canada or Massachusetts. One of Julia Cronin’s nieces, Estella Cronin (1919-2019), died recently at the age of 100 in the Boston area after a long career as a nurse before, during, and after WWII. Another of Julia Cronin’s nieces who died in recent years, Beatrice Cronin (1915-2013), was a decorated teacher with a Master’s degree in Economics from Columbia University who taught in her later years at the New Brunswick Teacher’s College and the University of New Brunswick. Despite being thousands of miles away in Bellingham WA, Julia Cronin stayed in contact with her siblings and occasionally went back east to visit them. In fact, she kept in touch with her siblings to such a degree that when I attended a summer program at Boston University in 1984 I was able to meet some of their descendants in the Boston area including two people roughly my age who were my third cousins.
Harry Willis (1869-1959) b. McConnelsville, Ohio, d. Portland, Oregon (marries Frances Crowley on January 1, 1900) – father of my paternal grandmother Grace Willis. Harry’s ancestors were partly Irish immigrants arriving to the country around 1800 and partly early English settlers arriving to the country as far back as the 1630s. Harry was an entrepreneurial guy who left Ohio and set our for Oregon around age 20. He ran a number of different businesses during his lifetime including in his later years a hunting lodge in Moose Pass, Alaska. Thanks to my uncle Gene Aarstol I have a collection of letters written in the late 1880s and 1890s between Harry in Oregon and his older brother Theo Willis who had moved to Washington DC to work in the US Customs Bureau. Public figures on this side of the family – both third cousins of my dad – include William Allen McPherson, a Harvard-trained lawyer that became the CEO of Boeing in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the photographer Walter Landon Chappell. One sad story that I’ve learned in my research regarding this side of the family is that of Cheryl Ann Manning (1961-1978). As a teenager, Cheryl hitchhiked away from her home in McMinnville, Oregon in 1978 and was killed (we now know) near the Route 101 freeway outside of San Luis Obispo in California. Her body was not found for several months and for fourteen years she remained a Jane Doe in an unsolved murder case. Cheryl’s parents died in the late 1980s believing that their daughter had run away from home in 1978 and was still living somewhere in Oregon. The crime has never been solved, but in 1992 the victim was finally identified (https://newsregister.com/article?articleTitle=40-years-after-she-was-found-murdered-mac-teen-gets-a-gravestone–1586835562–36811–obituaries) (https://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/news-columns-blogs/photos-from-the-vault/article234899742.html) when a potential match was found between a missing person report and a police sketch of a clay mask reconstruction of the victim’s face and then later confirmed using dental records.
Frances Crowley (1883-1953) b. Airlie, Oregon, d. Woodburn, Oregon (marries Harry Willis on January 1, 1900) – mother of my paternal grandmother Grace Willis. Frances’ ancestors were a mixture of Dutch and German and French as well as English and Irish settlers arriving to the country in the 1700s for the most part. Frances was born in Oregon as the youngest child of John Marion Crowley and Jane Eliza Weddle. John Crowley and Jane Weddle had both travelled from Missouri to Oregon with their families and dozens of related and affiliated families in wagon trains on the Oregon Trail in the 1840s and 1850s. The experience of John Marion Crowley’s family on the Oregon Trail was particularly harrowing with his father and several of his older sisters and brothers dying on the trail itself or shortly after arriving to Oregon due to typhoid fever and other illnesses. The experience of John Marion Crowley’s family on the Oregon Trail is one of the episodes described in the 1935 book The Trail Blazers by Alice Turnidge Hamot. Alice was a distant cousin of Frances Crowley and a descendant of a family that had travelled to Oregon in 1846 in the same wagon train as John Marion Crowley’s family. Her book and the research to to support it such as interviewing the descendants of early Oregon settlers was supported by a Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) grant. Frances Crowley’s relatives on her father’s side include Robert Earl Gibson (1898-1992), an early PhD in the School of Education at my alma mater Stanford University. Frances Crowley’s relatives on her mother’s side include Howard James Weddle (1924-2000) who received his master’s degree in Public Heath from UC-Berkeley and then taught at UC-Berkeley and UCSF near where I live today in San Francisco. The most interesting occupation among her relatives, though, belongs to Nicholas Pennington who was a bass violinist for the Atlanta Symphony and for several orchestras including the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra.
Edward Aarstol (1867-1921) b. Vest-Agder, Norway, d. Bellingham, Washington (marries Thomine Torkelsen in Norway in 1896) – father of my paternal grandfather Thorold Aarstol. Edward’s name at birth in Norway was Edward Thomassen. He changed his last name to the more distinctive name of Aarstol (the farm where he was born in Norway) after settling in the US. Edward came to the US for the first time in 1892 by working as a sailor on a ship coming around the tip of South America to the west coast of the US. After settling permanently in the US in the Bellingham area in the late 1890s he operated a farm and raised six kids. Edward’s older brothers and sisters stayed in Norway, but his younger sister settled in Brooklyn, New York and the children of his oldest sister Johanna (who died at a relatively young age in Norway) settled in Eastern Washington in the early 1900s. Edward’s descendants and relatives among the family members who migrated Eastern Washington include a grandson who worked as a cryptogropher during WWII and several people who went into academics in mathematics and other areas. One of Edward’s grandnieces, Thelma Lystad, was one of the earliest flight attendants to work for the Flying Tiger Airline. The various parts of the family that settled in Washington remained close for decades, but after Edward’s death in 1921, the family of Edward Aarstol fell out of touch with the family of his younger sister in Brooklyn. The connection is clear today, though, from census and immigration records. The descendants in the Brooklyn wing of the family include, of all things, a cat psychologist.
Thomine Torkelsen (1868-1951) b. Vest-Agder, Norway, d. Bellingham, Washington (marries Edward Aarstol in Norway in 1896) – mother of my paternal grandfather Thorold Aarstol. Thomine’s first child, Selma, was born in Norway and in 1902 they sailed together to New York City and then traveled across the country by train to join Edward Aarstol in Bellingham. Thomine’s brothers and sisters stayed in Norway and I know little about them, but one of her nieces and two of her nephews immigrated to the US in 1915 or so. All of these nieces and nephews are all children of Thomine’s older brother Ole Torkelsen. One of the nephews – the son of Ole and his second wife Patrea – settled in Minnesota. The descendants of this nephew include two long-serving Lutheran ministers and some of them appear to have stayed in contact with their cousins back in Norway for many years and even traveled back to Norway from time to time. The other nephew (Torkel Olsen) and the niece (Thora Olsen, who takes the married name Lystad) settled in Eastern Washington after coming to the US and stayed in contact with Thomine Torkelsen and her husband Edward Aarstol for decades. Oddly, the descendants of both Torkel Olson and Thora Olsen Lystad are twice as closely related to the descendants of Thomine Torkelsen and Edward Aarstol as would normally be the case. This is because Torkel Olsen and Thora Olsen’s father was Thomine’s brother Ole Torkelsen while their mother (Ole Torkelsen’s first wife) was of all people Edward Aarstol’s sister Johanna. This created what are known as double cousins in the succeeding generations. First cousins normally share two great grandparents. Double first cousins such as my paternal grandfather Thorald Aarstol and Thora Olsen (later Thora Lystad), for instance, share all four grandparents. This unusual relationship appears to make the results of commercially available DNA ancestry tests a little flaky and difficult to interpret. One impact of the double cousin situation is that the Eastern Washington relatives of Thomine (the Olsens and the Lystads) are one and the same as the Eastern Washington relatives of Edward Aarstol noted above.
Giuseppe Antonio (Joseph) Sandona (1886-1975) b. Caltrano, Italy, d. Bellingham, Washington (marries Theresa Zenari in Caltrano, Italy in 1913) – father of my maternal grandmother Irene Sandona. Joseph was born in Caltrano, Italy, which is a mountainous area about an hour’s drive inland from Venice. He came to the US for the first time 1905, went back to Italy to marry Theresa Zenari in 1913, and then returned to the US to live in Bellingham, Washington. His wife Theresa Zenari immigrated to the US and joined him in Bellingham in 1919. Two of Joseph’s brothers also immigrated to the US at roughly the same time and eventually settled in Chicago. Joseph’s remaining brothers and sisters stayed in Italy, but there was more emigration from Italy in the subsequent generations including that of a niece Theresa Sandona (Del Santo) who is alive today in Melbourne, Australia. Joseph’s older daughter Nina Sandona was born in Italy in 1914, but his younger daughter (and my maternal grandmother) Irene Sandona was born in Bellingham in 1921. Due in part to the Depression and WWII Joseph and his family never returned to Italy to visit and, remarkably, my maternal grandmother Irene Sandona never met any of her Sandona grandparents or other grandparents. One of Joseph’s hobbies was winemaking. He was part of a syndicate of Italian Americans and others in his neighborhood that would buy a truckload of grapes each year to split up. In the decades after immigrating to the US, Joseph’s family and the families of his brothers in Chicago would occasionally visit each other, but because of the Depression and WWII and distance between Bellingham and Caltrano, Italy, there was limited contact between Joseph’s family and the families of his brothers and sisters who stayed in Italy. However, thanks to the efforts of Nina Sandona’s daughter Joann Sternhagen who has made multiple trips to Italy in the last twenty years to meet our Sandona relatives and other relatives in Italy, there is significant contact between the families today. In fact, in 2017 or so I met a third cousin for the first time in my life when Michele Pittoni, one of the descendants of Joseph Sandona’s younger brother who stayed in Italy, visited me in San Francisco after visiting Joann Sternhagen and others in Bellingham.
Theresa Santa Zenari (1891-1976) b. Caltrano, Italy, d. Bellingham, Washington (marries Joseph Sandona in Caltrano, Italy in 1913) – mother of my maternal grandmother Irene Sandona. Theresa was also born in Caltrano, Italy, the mountainous area about an hour’s drive inland from Venice. She married Joseph Sandona in Caltrano in 1913 when he returned to Caltrano for a period of time after immigrating to the US in 1905. Theresa had her first daughter Nina Sandona in Caltrano and then travelled with her as a four year old in 1919 to join Joseph Sandona in Bellingham. Theresa’s younger sister Adele also emigrated to the US at roughly the same time and eventually settled in New Jersey. Theresa’s remaining brothers and sisters stayed in Italy. My maternal grandmother Irene Sandona was born in the US in Bellingham in 1921. Theresa and Joseph Sandona never returned to Italy after 1919 and none of their elderly parents ever visited the US and, as a result, my maternal grandmother Irene Sandona did not ever meet any of her grandparents. In part due to the impact of the Depression and WWII, there was not that much contact between Theresa’s family in Bellingham and the families of her brothers and sisters who stayed in Italy. However, thanks to the efforts of Nina Sandona’s daughter Joann Sternhagen, who has made multiple trips to Italy in the last twenty years to meet our Zenari relatives and other relatives in Italy, there is significant contact between the families today.