Hobby history: Preston D. Orem

[VHastings]

I'm replying to a very old post but here goes....

I've been a baseball fan - though not a collector - most of my life, and I began reading Bill James 35 years ago.

I also got interested in genealogy about 20 years ago, which was a good thing, because for some reason my grandfather told my dad practically nothing about his side of the family. And what I learned was that my g-g-grandfather was a farmer who moved his family to what is now Huntersville, NC around 1853 and was widowed late in life about 25 years later.

Pappy then married a young lady, nearly 50 years his junior, who lived on a nearby farm. They had a daughter Bertie, born around 1880, and he died about 16 years later.

In 1900 Bertie married her neighbor, a young farmer named Joe Norket. They had three daughters, including one named Effie, before Bertie died in 1906. Effie's sister Lillian became a nurse and helped found what is now a large hospital in Statesville, NC; she died in the late 1980s, having never married.

But I spent years trying to find out what became of Effie.

Then another researcher answered one of my posts on a Norket family genealogy forum. She remembered meeting Effie in California in the 1930s. All that researcher could tell me that Effie had married a man named "Mister Preston" and passed away in about 1967. But I couldn't find anything else about her.

Tl;dr - Effie's husband was Preston Orem.

That discovery gave me a good chuckle, since I knew exactly who Preston was, thanks to Bill James's references to his book on baseball in the 19th century. I have no idea how Effie met Preston or wound up in California; I suspect she became a nurse just like her sister Lillian, and took a job in Los Angeles just to get away from the tedium of rural North Carolina farm life.

Effie wasn't Preston's first wife, nor was she his last. By 1940 Preston had a new wife - and an eponymous son. To my knowledge he never had a child with Effie.

So thanks for the information about Preston Orem that has been posted here. It has helped fill in a very surprising branch of my family tree.

By the way, after Bertie's death, Joe Norket remarried and had several more children. One daughter - Effie's half sister - married probably the most famous Huntersville native of all time. His name was Hoyt Wilhelm.

[barrysloate]

Great story, and excellent first post.

[WillowGrove]

Originally Posted by barrysloate

Great story, and excellent first post.

+1! Thanks for posting.