Ancestor of the Week: [Not a person this week] Del Norte Baptist Church – Tucson, Arizona
Prompt of the Week: At Worship
This week I’m writing about the church that I grew up in until age 12. My parents attended Del Norte with their families at least since the late 1960s or early 1970s. In fact, my parents met there as teens in the youth group, and my dad’s siblings met their spouses there as well. My grandmother was the pianist for decades and my grandfather taught adult Sunday School for just as long. Their social circle really seemed to revolve around the people there as well. My mom’s family was also very involved. My maternal grandfather help to build the main worship center auditorium through his construction business. It was the site of several family weddings, funerals, performances, and more. We will all fondly remember the stained glass, octagonal ceiling, and rust-orange carpet. The church changed its name to New Life Baptist Fellowship around the late 1990s, but by then most of us had moved on to other churches. In later high school, my brother and I attended some of their youth group events when school friends invited us. It was a little strange going back after several years. They didn’t know it, but I had attended that church longer than most of the kids there at the time. The Fellowship Hall – location of my parents’ wedding reception, family funeral luncheons, and more – was now the youth room. When my wife and I were planning our wedding a few years later, our first choice was to have the ceremony at this church (we thanked Jesus the carpet had been replaced), since the church we attended was too small. It felt right going back and standing on the same stage where my parents said their vows 26 years before, where I performed in plays and stood as a ring-bearer as a kid, where my great-grandmothers were eulogized, and more.
Since then, the church property was sold to another church, and about a year ago, a friend posted on Facebook that several of the buildings on the campus were being demolished. I decided to drive by a couple days ago and see for myself. All that remains is the main auditorium building – which may still be in use, as a couple cars were parked outside. The old Fellowship Hall, Sunday School buildings, etc. are all gone. (New Life as a church actually still exists, is now called New Life Bible Fellowship, and has a newer building not far from my home.)
I was very surprised to stumble on a certain newspaper marriage license notice while searching Ancestry.com a few years ago. It was for my wife’s great-grandmother and her 3rd husband Jim in 1952. And it was in, of all places, a newspaper in Tucson, Arizona – where I live. Rita and Jim never lived in Tucson, so I was confused as to why they would get married here. My next step was a trip downtown to the Pima County courthouse to get a copy of the actual marriage certificate. While I didn’t really learn anything new from the certificate, (the witnesses were Jim’s sister and brother-in-law, and they didn’t live in Arizona either) it’s another item of evidence that’s important to have when piecing together an ancestor’s life. My hypothesis is that they were traveling from California to Florida and got married along the way. I have a ship’s passenger list showing Rita’s arrival in San Francisco from Hawaii on Oct. 11, 1952, and the marriage in Tucson was 13 days later on Oct. 24, 1952. They lived in Florida after that, so I just imagine them probably driving from California though Arizona along various state highways and desert roads, as I-10 and the interstate highway system did not yet exist. We may never know if their Tucson marriage was planned or spontaneous, but Tucson was definitely much more of an old west town back then, and did they feel out of place…? I can surmise that it could have been quite a novelty for them to travel through and maybe experience a little bit of the desert southwest culture.
This ancestral couple of my wife’s is the biggest brick wall in my genealogy research so far. They are a set of her paternal 2x great-grandparents. (One of their children was my wife’s great-grandmother Rita (Eccles) Bowland, who passed away in 2013 at the age of 102.) We know very little about their lives, and I can’t even say for sure Anita’s maiden name was Jones. That’s my best guess based on the few records I have found. The few DNA matches on that side who have trees all have Joneses in them, I just haven’t yet connected them to our Anita Jones. Her surname may have also been Sauvey or Sovough. Here’s what I do know: They lived in Panama in the early 20th century, and were of mostly European descent. There is a connection to the island of Trinidad as well – which was variously a European colony, and a part of the African slave trade. (A small percentage of African DNA is present in all who have tested from that line.) Anita lived in Panama up until at least 1927 when daughters Victoria and Rita left for America. The other two children were possibly named Harry and Celestine/Christina. Henry Arthur may have had a brother named Ernest who worked on the construction of the Panama Canal. My biggest questions about the family are how did they get to Trinidad/Panama, and why? What happened to them and the other siblings? When/where did they die? Who were their parents and where did they come from originally? The answers have to be out there somewhere.
My Family Finds 