LDSW #8 Finding Uncle Jay Brown

LDSW #8 - Finding Uncle Jay Brown
     My Grandmother, Leila, had two brothers and two sisters. Over the years I have collected a lot of family history along with names and dates. One of our “dead ends” concerned Grandma’s brother, Jay. All she could tell us was that he had married a woman from their hometown of Cardston, Alberta named Fern Caldwell. They had three children and lived somewhere near the Alberta-British Columbia border at Blairmore, AB, a mining town. In the late 1940s Uncle Jay turned up living in Vanport, Oregon, next to Portland, where my parents lived. He had a wife called Belle. He came to visit my parents and dad took a picture of him. He got a loan from my dad, left his fine carpenter tools and toolbox with dad for collateral, and moved to San Francisco.
     He later sent dad the money he had borrowed and dad mailed the toolbox and tools to him. That was the last anyone in the family heard of him for many years.

     There was a mystery no one could solve which complicated the search for him. My grandmother owned a picture postcard Jay sent to their mother. It showed Jay dressed as an Indian brave standing next to a young Indian woman. The inscription said “Mother, how do you like my new Indian wife?” signed Jay. We wondered if he had actually married her.

      In the 1980s, my two widowed Aunts while serving a mission at the Family History Library in Salt Lake City had an opportunity to work on their own families while there. They found a death certificate for Jay Brown, who died 13 Feb 1973 in San Francisco, CA. It was the right Jay Brown.



     In 1993, mom’s sister-in-law, Edna Fisher Duce (married to mom’s brother Ken) made a trip to Oregon and she visited with mom. During the visit Aunt Edna said, “Guess who I met at my high school class reunion last week when I was in Kelowna, BC ? Mom had no idea.  “It was Jay’s son, Max Brown, who still lives in Kelowna.” Strangely, Aunt Edna was killed in a car accident just a week  later in Saskatchewan. After mom told me about Max Brown I got on the phone and called Information to see if a number was listed for him in Kelowna. It was, so I called him and asked for more family information.



     He wrote me a letter telling the circumstances of why Jay left his family, and they were very poor during The Depression. He told me about his brother and sister, and how well they liked their stepfather, who raised them. In his letter he mentioned that after they were grown, he and his sister and their spouses, made a trip to Bakersfield, CA to meet him. They were introduced to Ida, as Jay's third wife. He wrote that they had no feeling for him and supposed the feeling was mutual.


     Fast forward to August 2011. I had entered many names into my family trees registered in Ancestry.com. This is a database of family names that helps distant relatives working on the same lines find each other. Actually Ancestry sent me a message that a picture of an Ida Benn had been added to another person’s tree on the Brown family. I wrote to Rosemary Reeves, who was the granddaughter of Jay Brown’s third wife, Ida



     I learned that Rosemary’s mother died when she was young and she had been raised by Ida. In our correspondence by emails, I was able to share Jay’s history about his first family in Canada, and she filled me in on Jay’s life in California.

     There is still one question to be resolved about Jay’s life. Grandma Leila said that Jay worked for a relative she called H. D. Brown, who had something to do with owning or managing the Santa Anita racetrack. These are the memories of two kids around six to ten years old  (Rosemary and myself):


     A Wikipedia history of Sanita Anita did not mention H.D. Brown. My family tree contains several names that could be H.D. Brown born in the 1890s up to 1908, which could fit the criteria, but none in California. Perhaps a clue can yet be found, as Rosemary Reeves said her Aunt Mercy married a Weir “Blackie” Chadwick about the same time as Ida and Jay were married in the 1960s, and she thinks Jay and Blackie knew each other before their marriages while working on construction projects for the government in Nevada and California.  She wrote that Blackie’s brother drove in the sulky races at Santa Anita and his sister was an exercise girl there. I also think when Jay lived at Vanport, that he went to dog races with my dad, so he probably gambled too. This might explain what happened to his first family living in poor conditions or why he didn’t go back for them.

     I do not think all of these clues just came to me by coincidence, and I hope I can learn the rest of Jay’s story.





In 1974 I made a trip to Cardston and researched what I could glean on my relatives from the town library and looked at some old issues of the Alberta Star from the early 1900s. After I returned home I sent, through inter-library loan, for a role of microfilm from the paper. I came across a picture of an Indian couple and learned that mom’s Uncle Jay and the young woman had won prizes for having the best costumes at a costume party. That solved that mystery. He did not have an Indian wife.