Baseball and My Family

 Genealogy is my favorite hobby these days. I spend a lot of time online at several websites where I have uploaded my DNA sample, mostly at Ancestry.com. Every day I check for new DNA matches and how these people who share DNA with me fit into my family tree. A few days back I received a message from a kind person unknown to me, and I will let it speak for itself.

“Hi Pamela, I am somewhat of the Westville, Illinois historian. I wrote the Sesquicentennial book on the Village and run the Facebook page related to the history of the town. I recently was searching for Pro Baseball players from Westville and came across many articles of one of your relatives - William Ukanavage, born 1892. He was quite the pitcher in 1912 for the Westville Amateur baseball team and after going undefeated in 1912 and striking out almost every opponent he faced, he was called up to Chicago for a tryout with the Chicago White Sox in the American League. I unfortunately cannot find anything after that. Have you found anything in your research of him. I am curious if he made a roster that year. Back then marketing was everything to the ball clubs, so a lot of names were changed and he might have been on the roster under a different name.

03:14 PM

He also invented the Bask-O-Lite. Not sure if you knew that. It was revolutionary at the time and installed in Basketball Arenas throughout the country.”

What a pleasant surprise! I know some basic information about my gr-uncle William Joseph Ukanavage (he spelled his name with an extra “a” after the “k”, unlike the rest of the family who spelled it Uknavage). He was born October 5, 1892, in Pittston, Pennsylvania, to my great-grandparents Joseph Uknavage and his wife Petronella Jasaitis Uknavage. William was their youngest child. His sister Frances was also born in Pittston but the older three children, Frank, Petrona, and my grandfather Joseph, we all born in Lithuania. The family moved from Pennsylvania to Westville, Illinois, sometime between 1896 and 1900 for they appear in the 1900 national census in Westville.

Seventeen-year-old William appears in the 1910 census in Georgetown, Vermilion County, Illinois living with his widowed mother and all four of his siblings. Georgetown was adjacent to Westville and the home of many of the immigrant coal miners’ families. On May 31, 1917 he married Freda D. Pritchard, a young divorced woman with three young children. The 1920 census shows his occupation as driver in the coal mine. I am assuming Uncle Willie did not make it into the American League with the White Sox. I am happy to know that when he was twenty he played baseball and was quite the pitcher in his hometown league.(Note: photo on left is a much older William Ukanavage, not 17.)

There was a relative of Uncle Willie right there in the same town, a cousin on his mother’s side, a young woman named Frances Yasaitis who married William Pinkney Delancey about 1934 in Westville, Il. 

 

 

 

 When I mentioned this to my ancestry source he knew all about Bill Delancey and wrote this: “Well aware of Bill and Frances. I posted an article a few years ago that ancestry will not let me share for nothing, but the gist is "Bill was playing for the Danville (North of Westville) Veterans, a Three I Team of the Cardinals until 1932, when he met Frances. They married and Bill was called up to the Cardinals in time for the 1934 World Series. 

 

 

He started at catcher for the "Gashouse Gang" as the Cardinals were known. Baseball executive Branch Rickey called DeLancey one of the best catchers of all time. His career was cut short due to tuberculosis and he was even treated in Danville by nurse Genevieve Schultz in 1935 while visiting Frances's family in Westville. The picture of Schultz and Delancey was shared by the AP across the country as "Star Cardinals Catcher Fighting For His Life." They diagnosed him with pneumonia at first, but he gradually got worse and retired in 1936. Doctors recommended that he move to the west for better air and he managed multiple teams before dying in Arizona in 1946."

My father played baseball when I was a small child, so probably about 1950, in Harco or Harrisburg, Illinois. He would have been 30 years old, in good physical shape after six years in the Navy during WWII. He worked full time so baseball would have been an evening and weekend pastime. My memories are vague and I don’t recall talking to Dad about this time in his life, nor do I have a photo. His sister Petrona was married to Reuben Tucker, a mine foreman and I believe Reuben played baseball too, or managed a team. 

Reuben and Petrona’s son Billy probably played too for he named one of his boys Stanley after the great “Stan the Man” Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals. Dad’s favorite baseball team was always the Cardinals, even after he moved north where he could have favored the Chicago White Sox or the Cubs.

Baseball has been America’s sport for centuries now! There are lots of quotes from famous people about the sport, how accessible it was to men of all ages, ethnicities, and social status. The year of my birth, 1947, is when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in professional baseball by signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947. That ended fifty years of segregation in Major League Baseball.

I’d like to know more about relatives and friends who love the game.