August 26 Dinner with part of the Stocker Clan

Spent most of this day sleeping in and them relaxing at the motor home before our appointed time to meet a few of the family clan at a restaurant in Nazareth for dinner. This was supposed to be an informal get together for the "out of towners" wanting a head start on getting to know each other.

However Susie, who has done such an excellent job of making our arrangements, had this dinner all arranged with our name tags, welcome packets and a large family tree banner that spread 25 feet. The banner did not try to display the entire family but rather each of us who were to be in attendance and help us figure out our relationship to everyone else. It was a welcome tool and I can already visualize my smaller "take-home" version on the wall above my computer as a reference when I continue to work on our "roots".

We were having such a great time meeting and visiting with our new found "cousins" that Susie had a hard time getting us to settle down and eat dinner. Imagine a Stocker not wanting to eat!

At this dinner, we got to visit again with the two couples who had served as our cemetery guides during our visit in Tuscarawas County, Ohio. Also present was Ron Stocker, the gentleman who started the online family website and the source of many of the fascinating Stocker stories contained therein. After reading so many of his online posts it was great to finally put a face with the name.

Basic question everyone asks of us...after they get past "Did you ride all the way from Oregon on that motorcycle?"...they all want to know how and why our "branch" of the Stocker family moved West to Oregon.

We are still working on all the details, but first our family members moved from Stockertown (PA) to Tuscarawas County, (Ohio) with several brothers out of the family. From there Gary's great grandfather (Allen Frederick Stocker) later moved to Kansas...not sure why but we do know there was an in flux of farmers to the area after the cattle business declined.

Allen Frederick and his wife Ella Cora Stocker (great niece or second cousin to Allen) both lived and died at the family home in Wichita Kansas. However, according to the 1910 census, Gary's grandfather Orrin was living in a San Francisco boarding house with a friend, both of them working as electrical linemen.

From there he (Orrin) married Ella Billings (whose father was also an electrical lineman) and ended up in the Pacific Northwest helping to string the power transmission lines when Hoover Dam and later the Bonneville Power Administration came into existence.

We have a wonderful old photo of about 10 linemen all up a power pole hanging off all sides of it. Gary's grandfather is one of those daring pole climbing lineman.

I am sure you can tell, I love the stories behind the names, dates and pictures. Hope to continue my investigative work to discover more of it...on Stockers and then later more of our family ancestors.

More later,
Linda