I was fortunate to have know all of my grandparents. Each was loving and kind. They were:
Albert Jackson Swan
Olive Elizabeth Moore
George Ray Robinson
Charlotte Tessie Page
I only remember two meetings with my Grandpa Swan (Albert Jackson Swan) on the homestead near Bisbee, Arizona--once when I was about two, and again when I was about seven. He died in October 1948. I remember him using a windmill to charge some discarded car batteries. His house was little more than a squatter's shack. He was very protective of us because it seemed that he had lots of junk around his place and was afraid that we might get hurt.
I remember when he died. Daddy chartered a plane and flew to Arizona to take care of the funeral. He was just getting started in the plastering business and the cost of the funeral drained his resources severely. It was emotionally devastating to him to realize that his father had committed suicide.
We never called my father's mother (Olive Moore) Grandma Swan, because by the time we know her she was married to Raymond Boyer. We called her "Grandy." She lived in Berkeley, California and worked at the Naval Shipyard in Richmond, California. When we lived on Alpine Road in Stockton she would come to visit us about once a month.
One Christmas we went to visit her. Daddy had built a "dog house" sort of a shelter to put on the back of the dump truck he used for his plastering business so us four older kids could ride in the back of the truck in relative comfort. By the time we got to Grandy's house it was very cold. So cold that it was sleeting. I had never seen sleet before.
I was given the responsibility to call and invite Grandy to our eighth grade graduation. I called and invited her for the wrong day. She came a day early and had to go back home, missing Jerry's and my graduation.
She joined the LDS Church after we did and became an avid family history researcher and temple worker. After Raymond Boyer died she moved to Stockton and lived for a time in one of the houses we had on our place on Alpine Road.
Dad is what we called George Ray Robinson. My fond memories of him are associated with his unfinished, partially dirt-floored basement of his house on Windsor Avenue in Stockton. In the part that had a concrete floor he had a woodworking shop. By today's standards it was probably frugally equipped, but it seems to me that he had everything a master woodworker would ever need. He was very strict about keeping us away from his power tools. The only thing he would let Jerry and me touch was a hand powered grinding wheel. We would go the basement and grind on a piece of wood for hours.
Dad was a wonderful grandfather. He always laughed at our jokes. I have a cousin (Brian Robinson) who is about twenty years younger than I am. He was seven or eight when I went to visit Mom and Dad one time. Brian told Dad some of the same knock-knock jokes that I had told him twenty years earlier, but Dad laughed just like he was hearing the joke for the first time. I remember Dad as a gracious Christian gentleman.
The last time I saw Dad he was almost ninety and suffering terribly from shingles which he couldn't get rid of. He and Mom were living in a nursing home in Jackson, California. Our youngest son Benjamin was with us. The minute we got outside the door Benjamin started crying. He said, "I am never going to see him again. He is so old. He is going to die." Benjamin was right. Dad died January 28, 1991.
We called Charlotte Tessie (Page) Robinson, Mom. She died September 6, 1995 in a nursing home in Jackson, California.
As a grandma she was the best. I remember spending a week with her in the summer time. Jerry and I would go to her house and sleep on the couch. She let us climb her trees, swing in the hammock, play in the sprinklers, but most of all she would play games with us. We played the card game Flinch a lot. She would coach us to help us win. Mom was unbeatable at Scrabble. She played the game well into her eighties.
She even took Jerry and me fishing once or twice. To this day she likes to tell stories to us about the things we did that she remembers.
For most of the rest of his life, Albert (better known as Bert) lived on the homestead which his father homesteaded in 1904 and Bert later purchased from his father. It is now known as the "Swan Ranch" and the road to the ranch from the Bisbee Junction Road has been named the "Swan Road". That ranch has been in the Swan family ever since 1904, except for the years from 1981 to 1989. Now Henry and his son, Alan and his family are living there.
In 1893 when Bert was sixteen, he rode a horse in the Oklahoma Run which was known as the Cherokee Strip. New territory had been opened up for homesteaders and there were literally hundreds of people at the starting line, ready run to stake their claims. The line began to bulge when people got anxious to get started, till it bulged into a break in the line and there was no stopping the people. Bert reached his goal and staked his claim. While waiting for his uncle, Henry Jackson, to come share the claim with him, another man tried to take it away from him. Bert had a gun and I think he would have killed the man had he not backed off. But for the next two years his family nearly starved trying to make a go of it and finally sold the homestead for $150. Then they had to seek other opportunities.
While living in Texas, Clarence, who was married, contracted tuberculosis so in 1904 the whole family moved to Arizona where the climate was dryer. By this time Bert was 27 years old. Their father and both boys each homesteaded 160 acres for himself. Later, both boys sold their homesteads, but Henry Hunting hung onto his. Clarence took his family to the Phoenix area and after Henry Hunting's wife died, Bert bought his father's homestead which is now the Swan Ranch, owned by Alan Swan. The man who bought part of Bert's homestead was George Elwin Moore who later became his father-in-law.
Albert Jackson Swan married Olive Elizabeth Moore on October 7, 1913. He was thirty-six. Olive was fifteen years old. George Moore did not approve of the marriage, so Bert and Ollie eloped. This made life long enemies of Bert and George.
Bert and Olive had five children. They were Henry Albert, Walter James, Hazel Elizabeth, Oliver Warren, and Rosa May. They lived a "hard scrabble" existence on the ranch and Olive was not very happy with her situation. She left home about 1931, taking only Rosa May, who was six or seven at the time, with her, and went to the Los Angeles area. She divorced Bert, leaving the boys with their father. Hazel had married when she was fifteen years old. Bert was heart broken, but accepted his fate. The boys gradually left home, leaving him alone, although Henry did move back with his family later on.
As Bert grew older his health began to fail. He had never been really well after several disasters such as a broken ankle, a broken leg, and blood poisoning which nearly killed him. On October 25, 1948 he died from a self-inflicted shot-gun wound. He had treated himself as he often did for wounded or sick animals. He never liked to see them suffer so he would shoot them to put them out of their misery. He did the same thing for himself.
However, he had taught his children many correct principles and he was a great philosopher although he lacked the drive to put into action many of the good ideas that he had.
Olive Elizabeth Moore was born on April 23, 1898 in Rice Lake Wisconsin. Her parents were George Elwin Moore and Harriet Elizabeth Warden. She was the fourth child of eight children. Her sisters and brothers were (in order of their births) Helen Ida, Harriet Alice, Florence Marian, Owen George, Rufus Irwin, Gladys Irma, and Lester Leland.
Olive moved to Arizona with her family about 1911. Her father was looking for a good place for his bees. He saw Bert Swan's ad in the American Bee Journal and thought he would check it out. He arrived in Osborn (now Bisbee Junction) looking like a hobo. After inquiring around he located Bert and went to talk with him about the land he had for sale. Bert, thinking he was just a hobo, was wary of him and didn't open up to him until he learned that the man had the money on him to buy the land and they began to talk bees. George Moore finally convinced Bert that he wasn't what he appeared to be and a deal was made between them. George went back to Wisconsin to get his family.
Some months later, the Moore family arrived. The women and children arrived by passenger train. George arrived by freight train with all of his earthly possessions on a boxcar, including bees and cattle. Bert spent a lot of time helping the family get settled, so he got well acquainted with them.
One of the children was Olive. She was a beautiful young girl with black hair and brown eyes. Her complexion matched her name. She was only about five feet two inches tall. She had a pleasant disposition. Bert was attracted to her and over a period of a year or two, she and Bert fell in love. The only problem was that he was that he was twenty-one years older than she was and her parents didn't approve of her marrying a man that age. Bert and Olive solved that problem by eloping and the ended up on Henry Hunting Swan's homestead.
Life on that homestead was difficult at best. Olive stuck with it until the youngest child was six or seven years old, then she left the ranch and moved to Los Angeles taking Rosa May with her. Bert went to California to try to persuade her to come back, but she couldn't do it. Their divorce was final in 1934.
On July 27, 1941 Olive married Raymond Wallace Boyer. That was just a few months before World War II started. They both got jobs in the war industry and moved to Berkeley, California. Ray died in the late 1950's, and when Olive retired she moved to Stockton, California to be near her sons, Henry and Walter. About 1960 she joined the Church of Jesus Christ of latter-day Saints. Olive was a widow until she married Elmer McClung in Stockton, on April 10, 1967. Elmer lived only a couple of years after their marriage. She was a widow again. She continued to live in Stockton until 1973 when she moved to be near her sons who had moved to Arizona by then.
At first she bought a trailer house and lived in Marana near Walter and I. Then she decided to go to Bisbee and visit Henry and Oliver who were living on the Swan Ranch by then. Her very first night there, she fell down a flight of stairs during the night and broke her shoulder and arm. I was not able to take care of her in Marana so we moved her trailer house to the ranch. She live there until she fell and broke her hip on July 4, 1979. She spent the next three months in the hospital, then died at the age of eighty-one on September 7, 1979 in the County Hospital in Douglas, Arizona.
Most of her adult years she spent as a widow. When she became a grandmother she wanted to be called Grandy rather than Grandma. So that's what we all called her. She spent much of her time doing genealogy work and went to the LDS temples many times. She played the organ at the Bisbee Ward for several years. She was a good woman and everybody loved her.
Ray-never called George-was a small child as he was growing up. In fact, he never reached a height of more than five feet six inches, but he never had what I call "a small man's complex". He was a very handsome young man with blue eyes, and a fair complexion and beautiful brown hair. But his hair didn't last long. By the time that he was twenty-eight years old, all of his hair was gone except for a fringe around his head. I guess he had it in his genes. His father was bald, also. But he was still handsome.
His family moved from West Virginia to Corbin, Kansas when he was four years old. Then they moved again to Mariposa, California when he was eight years old. Life for his family was difficult as they struggled to raise crops and cattle. Ray learned early in life to work hard, but he didn't mind. However, he got disgusted with his older-by-two-years brother because he could always find some excuse to get out of the hard work. Often Ray had to do his brothers share of the work, too.
The year Ray was ten years old, he and his brother lived in a tent on a new piece of property that his father had bought in Le Grand, California, so they could go to school. The rest of the family moved to Le Grand a few months later after his father had built a house for them to live in.
Ray quit high school after the first half of his Junior year because the principal and teachers wouldn't let him take the kind of classes he wanted. What he wanted was drafting an architecture. He wanted to be a carpenter and a house builder. So he quit school and went to work with his father and learned the trade.
Ray married Charlotte Tessie Page when he was twenty years old. Charlotte was sixteen years old. For several months they had to live with Ray's parents because Ray was having a hard time finding work. During the next five years they had three children, Deloris Cavell, Charles Donald and Leland Ray.
On December 8, 1924, Ray went to work for the Santa Fe Railroad as a telegraph lineman's helper. He worked for them until February 1, 1960, a period of thirty-five years, one month, and seven days. He was sixty years old when he retired from the Santa Fe. He and Charlotte moved to Santa Cruz, California then, and he worked for a church as a custodian for a couple of years. Then he retired and built a duplex, but sold it and bought a mobile home and mobile home lot in Capitola, California. Then he really retired.
They lived there until 1985 when they could no longer take care of themselves and each other. They moved to Jackson, California into a retirement home, Oak Manor, where all their needs were taken care of except their health needs. Ray died while they were living at Oak Manor at the age of ninety-one years, five months, and fourteen days. His body was cremated and his remains rest in the Pioneer, California Cemetery.
Ray was a 100 percent honest man. He was kind and caring for his family and others. He did a lot for other people. He had a great influence on all of his family because of his good example. As far as I am concerned he was a GREAT MAN!
In order to take care of her children, Martha took in washing so that she could stay home with them. Charles T. Page was one of her "customers". They fell in love and were married on May 7, 1902. Nine months later Charlotte was born. She was given the feminine name for Charles. She had six living half-brothers and sisters. At the time she was born they were Nancy Elizabeth (Lizzie), age 20; Joseph Sterling, 18; Thomas Ezra, 16; John Richard, 14; Lulu Frances, 12; and Bertha Thelma, 10.
Her father was a bridge builder for the Santa Fe Railroad. He was away from home most of the time and was not present when Charlotte was born. He was home Christmas of 1904, but left shortly after, never to be seen again. Martha never knew exactly what happened to him. Now she had another child to take care of.
By today's standards, they lived on the ragged edge of poverty, but Martha would have died before accepting charity in any form. But Charlotte says they were never hungry. Martha raised a family garden every year which was her main source of livelihood, not only for feeding her children, but also for a little cash crop for the other necessities of life.
While Charlotte was still a child, she had diphtheria and typhoid fever, both of which were more often fatal than not. The doctors said that she wouldn't live through the night with both diseases, but she pulled through with the power of prayer and the faith in God that her mother had.
Charlotte had a penchant for getting herself into trouble occasionally at school, but otherwise she was a good student. After she graduated from the eighth grade, she went to live with her oldest half-brother, Sterling, and his wife, Eva, in the town of Clarence, Missouri so that she could go to high school and help out Eva, who was pregnant with her fifth child. She lived with them through her first year and half of her second year of high school.
Then the youngest of her half-brothers, John, invited her to go out to California to live with his family. He knew that the Santa Fe was looking for young girls to train for telegraphy work. So Charlotte made the trip to California and entered a telegrapher training course on her fifteenth birthday. Everybody thought she was eighteen.
Her first job as a telegrapher was in the small town of Le Grand, California. There she met Ray Robinson. It was love at first sight for Ray, but not for Charlotte. So Ray courted her for over a year. Even when she was transferred to Antioch, California he continued to court her by taking the train from Le Grand to Antioch and back each Saturday. They were married in Merced, California on August 30, 1919.
After Charlotte and Ray had raised their children, Charlotte went to work at the State Relief Agency in Stockton, California for several years. She had always wanted to be a nurse, so when she was fifty-one years of age she took a licensed vocational nurses course, graduating tops in her class. From then until she was sixty-two years of age she worked as a nurse, most of those years working the midnight shift.
Charlotte died September 6, 1995 while living in the Kit Carson Convalescent Hospital in Jackson, California. She was always very sharp of mind and wit.
Send your comments to: jswan@ckls.org
Last Modified 3 February 2005