What’s in this name

My surname is Noragon.  I married it.  I was not interested in its origins back then; I lived every moment in the present.  My husband told me he was a Polish prince, which made me laugh.  He was German to the core.  Blond hair, blue eyes, fair.  His mother’s maiden name was Siebert, for crying out loud.  Explaining their heritage to my daughters, years later, their grandma said Bohunk. That makes me smile.

When I divorced my husband I kept the name.  Back in 1973 it was becoming common for women to resume their maiden name after a divorce.  I had two children, and felt they didn’t need their mother to dump their last name, together with their father, so I didn’t.  He married my (former) best friend shortly thereafter.  Sadly, he died of a massive heart attack at age 44.  At the graveside his wife said, in front of my (her) in-laws and daughters, that in the event we wondered why she was burying him in a single plot, she intended to marry again.  I’ve waited for a story to drop that nugget!

People inquire about the origins of the name and I’ve always responded I didn’t know, I married it.  People wanted to know if I was related to Hal Naragon, the Cleveland Indians catcher.  Especially as his wife’s name is Joan.  I would say my name is Noragon, pronounced like Oragon with an N, and that’s all I know.  Oh, and my grandmother used to take me to the ball games and from the upper deck over first base I saw Hal Naragon catch.

I used, occasionally, to clear clutter from the house via EBay.  Selling their heritage according to my daughter Beth.  It’s a joke; the girls were always offered to re-home the stuff first.  My email address always displayed my last name to my buyers, and I received more than a few friendly inquires about my name.  I can’t believe how many people knew about Hal Naragon!

One fellow from the Midwest would not let me off the hook with my usual dismissal of “I married the name.”  “Just hold on,” he said, “I will make an inquiry of my friend on the west coast, (I don’t recall her first name) Naragon.  She has traced the genealogy back to Europe and was telling me something interesting about it not long ago.”

And several days later he forwarded an email from a lovely sounding lady who assured me that her research showed that every variation of Noragon, Naragon, Naragan, Narogan, you get it, can be traced back to one Hessian soldier, sent over to fight for King George, who did not go home.  His name was—and she gave me a great long name that began with N, contained an excess of consonants, and had an Eastern European ending.  I passed it along to both my girls, one of whom was interested in genealogy, and parked the email in a Save Forever folder.  Of course that was fifteen years and umpteen computers ago, it is long gone.  Neither girl was interested enough to hang on to the information, either.

I thought I’d leave reseaching their father’s genealogy to my girls, but the little green leaves on Ancestry.com are compelling.  I’ve begun plunking in the facts I know about my husband’s ancestry.  I’m not back to that Hessian soldier yet, but I do know my lovely mother-in-law was right—Bohunks.  I wonder if the Hessian was Bohemian.

“Mr. Lytle left the family in 1918”

Mary Emma Hogue Lytle, my grandmother, left her husband and returned to Akron and her family with her children.  Mary told one of her daughters the constant moving was the reason she left George Marion Lytle and took the children back to Akron. To what would be a childhood of neglect and poverty. 

Mary Emma was born in 1889, the oldest of 10 children.  Her last sibling, a brother, was born four short months before my father became George and Mary’s first child.

I believe Mary married George, fourteen years her senior, simply to escape home and the responsibility of tending to so many younger siblings.  There would have been endless loads of clothing to be scrubbed at the board, hung to dry, taken off the line, ironed. All those younger siblings to keep an eye on and keep diapered. The sheer drudgery is depressing to contemplate.

 She was seventeen when they married. Perhaps it was a love match.  I only say that because Mary Emma was from a staunchly Catholic family and upbringing, which shunned family members who strayed from the faith. George Marion’s religious affiliation is safely assumed in knowing he is buried along with his siblings and his parents in a Methodist cemetery.  But I think the most I can give Mary Emma is infatuation, and perhaps a bit of romance in leaving with a mining engineer to live in Pennsylvania.

My grandparents were married in 1906 and, like in the home she left, the babies arrived every other year.  When Mary returned to her parents’ home in 1915, after nine years of marriage, she was pregnant with her fifth and last child.

George Marion travelled because of his job.  But Aunt Laura, the daughter Mary told of leaving because of travel, also has memories of living with her paternal grandparents in Coalmont.  Parents may tell children whatever they wish, but Mary’s story of frequent moves isn’t that plausible.  I can’t see George moving from assignment to assignment trailing a wife and four children when he had a home base in Coalmont, where Aunt Laura said they lived until they moved to Akron. 

The record I was able to get from the Childrens’ Home contained the tantalizing line “Mr. Lytle left the family in 1918.  He did not appear in court in Pennsylvania.”  This is Mary Emma’s statement to the Childrens’ Home about 1921 when she placed her five children in the Childrens’ Home.  In the years after moving back in 1915, there was not enough food or clothing, or adult supervision, according to Aunt Laura.  She says her father did come one time, she thinks to attempt to reunite, but Mary refused.

I pursued ‘He did not appear in court in Pennsylvania.” Huntingdon County, where Coalmont is located, has a wonderful historical society that provided me with some information about that entry. A genealogical researcher located George Marion Lytle in the Plaintiffs Docket for 1921, where he posted a five hundred dollar bond guaranteeing he would be available for extradition to Ohio.  And when they went to pick him up in 1922, George Marion could not be found.

I looked for the entry on the other side of the ledger here in Summit County, where Akron is located, but the Clerk of Courts found nothing.  I assume Mary Emma filed some action against George, probably in domestic court, probably concerning support, that resulted in a judgment for George to be returned to the State of Ohio.  He jumped bail and disappeared.

The last bit of this puzzle also came from the Childrens’ Home.  In their records they had a letter from Peebles County, Colorado, informing them of the death of George M. Lytle.  He died of consumption, and known by a different name, but in his wallet they found letters from his daughters, pleading for his return.  The return address of the envelopes was the Akron Childrens’ Home.

George Marion died in 1930, a full fifteen years after the separation from Mary.  I have to assume he continued working; he was working when he died in Colorado.  Over that fifteen years his children grew up.  In extreme poverty.  Who left whom is not relevant.  I don’t know why Mary came home in 1915, but told the authorities in 1918 her husband deserted the family.  The order against him likely concerned support; the legal system was as eager in 1918 to see children supported by parents as they are today. My father didn't speak of the father who abandoned the children.  His three sisters, Aunt Laura, Aunt Ruth and Aunt Helen Rita, loved their father unconditionally to the end, and had no charity toward their mother.  AuntRuth, Sister Mary Pasqueline, said they were nobody’s children and they survived.

Another story from my family tree.

The three children who did marry and have children provided homes they surely wished for in their childhood.

My parents on their wedding day.  Grandma Lytle is beside my father; Grandpa and Grandma Rolf on either side of my mother.  The only pictures of Grandma Lytle are from that day.  She was the only member of my dad's family at the wedding.  My father had left the Catholic Church, my mother was not a Catholic.  Dad's many aunts, uncles and cousins did not attend because of this.

A Civil War story

I’m piecing together a little more of my dad’s childhood by going through the family tree work done both by my cousin, Kathleen, and my daughter, Shelly.

I find those family trees deadly boring.  Real tooth gritters to sort through.  Sadly, I am barely interested in the branches; I love the people and their stories.  I found my Grandfather Rolf’s World War I and World War II draft registration cards out on Ancestry.com.  I threw them into something called my Shoebox, to go over later.  I have several neat finds in that Shoebox, out there in the clouds.

Going through Kathleen’s work I realized I have a place to fit one of my Dad’s stories.  I can take it out of my mental shoebox and give it a good look.

Dad was born in Coalmont, Pennsylvania in August of 1907; the grandfather for whom he was named had died in April of that year.  Dad lived in Coalmont with his mother and father, brother and two sisters until his mother moved them back to Akron about 1914.  I surmise they lived with his widowed grandmother, or very close by.  I have Aunt Laura’s recollection of living at the grandmother’s house.  Other male relatives in or about the house were Dad’s two uncles, Horace and Blanchard (Uncle Pete).

The Civil War story is one of the few stories where my dad referenced himself, so that I knew it was about his family. I only heard it one time. It was about two uncles in the Civil War.  The story had some daring and a little swashbuckling, and I absorbed the details, but in thinking it over years later just couldn’t square the dates, any uncles he had being the same generation as his father and too late for the Civil War.

Flipping those tree pages of Kathleen’s back and forth, I think I pieced together a real story.  Dad’s grandfather, who he never knew as he died in the spring before Dad was born in the summer, was a Civil War veteran.  A private in Co. D, 5^th Regiment, Pennsylvania Infantry and a sergeant, Co. H, 125^th Regiment, wounded at Antietam and discharged in 1863.  John William, the grandfather also had three brothers, all of whom were younger, and all of whom could have served during the war. One died in May, 1864, during the war and aged 25.  I need to look into this to see how he died..

Dad may have heard the story from these great uncles themselves; or it may have been passed along by his uncles who heard the story from their uncles.  As Dad heard the story before he was seven, sorting all those uncles wasn’t a priority.  It was a wide-eyed story.  Here it is – at last.

Dad had two uncles in the Civil War.  They were from Pennsylvania, they fought for the Union, and they were spies!  Not the sort of spies who skulk about under cover looking for secrets.  They went about their business in broad daylight, in full view of the enemy.  They were photographers who posed as itinerant photographers.  They packed their equipment on mules and went among Rebel camps in Virginia, making pictures for soldiers to give to their sweet hearts and mothers.   Information gathering was easy, chatting up the men they were photographing,  and to get important documentation they would pose their subjects in front of ammunition dumps or gun batteries. 

I imagine a small boy would be all ears for a story like that, no matter which uncle told it.  I have no idea how the information went back to “headquarters”, but we know that could be done. 

Source

We can hope these fellows went home to their mothers, their wives and their sweethearts.