Hot Sulphur Springs, A Sixty-Year-Old Memory

Thanks to the Atomic Bomb there was a uranium mining boom in Colorado in the 1950s. Until that time uranium had little value on the market, but after, was highly sought in postWWII United States, gearing up for the Cold War. All over the west there were mom and pop prospectors, lone miners hoping to strike a rich vein, and large mining companies whose exploration engineers used topo maps, Geiger counters, and skilled miners to find evidence of uranium deposits. My dad, Joe Uknavage, was one of those skilled miners, a southern Illinois coal miner who caught wind of good jobs to be had in western Colorado and made his big decision to go out west.

Sometime in 1954 he packed his seabag, kissed his pregnant wife and three little kids goodbye, and drove out to Colorado with fellow midwest coal miner, Joe Gieser. Hired on by Pete Loncar, superintendent of exploration for Newmont Mining, they set up camp in Hot Sulphur Springs, Colorado. Outfitted with a small trailer for sleeping and a few tools for digging, they spent the winter together searching unsuccessfully for a sizeable uranium deposit.

Pete must have liked their work for he hired them for a job in Washington State, mining uranium on the Spokane Indian Reservation at Wellpinit. They drove back to Illinois in the spring of 1955 gathered up their families and moved to Wellpinit, Washington.

My dad was a great storyteller and to prepare us for the move he regaled us with stories of the wild west, cowboys and Indians, wild animals roaming the land. Somewhere included in those stories were tidbits about his winter just outside Hot Sulphur Springs. He told us it was the coldest winter he’d ever spent anywhere. He didn’t seem to be very fond of Joe Gieser, and their accommodations barely adequate, perhaps water carried from a nearby creek, hopefully propane to warm the trailer on the coldest nights….I don’t remember those details. My brother remembers talk of blasting so they must have done more than simply run a Geiger counter over the ground. Dad only brought two photographs back from that adventure,  one showed his clothes spread across shrubs, drying in the sun. The other captures him washing dishes in the small trailer kitchen.

It undoubtedly was an exciting time for Dad, away from the daily cares of a family, beneath the clear blue skies of Colorado, “batching” like the sailor he had been just eight years earlier. He stayed in touch with Pete Loncar the rest of his life, exchanging Christmas cards each year. After my dad died the summer of 1996 I contacted Pete and learned a little more about their working relationship and friendship. Only after Pete died April of 2014 did I learn of his long career with Newmont, and the focus of his work, exploration.

Out of the blue, sixty years after that cold, lonely winter, my cousin Lisa Rich invited me to a family reunion in Granby, Colorado for June of 2015. A check of the map showed Hot Sulphur Springs a mere ten miles further west. How excited I was to finally visit this area and fuel my imagination about this short, adventurous time in my father’s life. Happily, both my brother and sister attended the reunion and my sister and I found an hour or so to visit the local museum, talk with a curator about the history of mining there, and drive to a nearby site known to have been a place of mining activity in the mid 50s. (I don’t know for certain this is the area where they parked their trailer and searched for ore, but the name Troublesome Creek popped up in my online searches for uranium exploration in 1954 near Hot Sulphur Springs, and I found a sign for Troublesome Creek.)

We walked Fran’s dog along a side road, took photographs, looked around at the mountains and river, soaked up the nature of the place. 

That’s all I needed to satisfy my curiosity about the area and what that winter must have been like. Dad visited the site several times over the next forty years as he too was drawn to return to places from his past, a longing he passed to all his children.

Jasaitis Family of Alvitas

I've been waiting for three months now for genealogy documents I ordered from the Peoria Catholic Diocese about my Jasaitis family in Illinois. I know they have some of the documents I requested for I received a phone call from one of the nuns way back in April telling me of several she found in their archive, but she did warn me that it could take a couple of months to receive copies as they only do photocopying once a week and have a limited staff, but it's soooo hard to wait patiently.

Sister Mary told me she found several documents for Andrew Jasaitis of Westville and surprisingly his last name was spelled with a "J" instead of a "Y" in those documents, whereas in most records I've found for him his name is spelled Yasaitis. The Lithuanian pronunciation of the "J" sounds like our "Y"; there is no "Y" in the Lithuanian alphabet. Interestingly, his brothers all shortened their last name to Sites but he did not.

I just received a note from one of Andrew's descendants, a gr-granddaughter, interested in what I've learned about her Jasaitis family so rather than continue to wait for those documents about her gr-grandfather I will write what I know, or think I know, today.

I believe that at least eight Jasaitis siblings emigrated from Lithuania between 1872 and 1891, probably originally from the small town of Alvitas, Lithuania, (Polish spelling Olwita), in the county of Vilkaviskis along the western edge of Lithuania. At the time of their departure Alvitas was only about five miles from the German/Russian border. I say it that way, "at the time of their departure", for the borders of Lithuania have changed many times throughout history.

It has taken me years to piece together these relationships and there are probably errors still. I'm hoping the documents on Andrew Jasaitis will help confirm that these eight were siblings. Because their birth dates have a range of 29 years it's probable there were two mothers for these eight siblings. However, until I know for certain otherwise, I'm saying the father's name was Jacob Jasaitis and the mother's Agatha (maiden name unknown).

The oldest of the immigrants was Adam Sites, born about 1851 in Lithuania, arrived in the U.S. about 1873 and settled in Pittston, PA. There was already a man named Vicas Jasaitis in Pittston, one of the earliest Lithuanian settlers in the area. He may have been related to Adam and encouraged him to come to Pittston. I don't know that for a fact. In the 1880 federal census Adam's last name was spelled Scyte, then later Sites. He married Louisa Smith (originally Schmidt) from New York in 1878 and they had one child, William George Sites, born May 25, 1879 in Luzerne Co., PA. Adam died March 4, 1818 in Pittston.

Adam's younger brother, John Sites, was born April 5, 1858 in Alvitas, Lithuania, and came to this country in 1888 or 1889 and lived almost a decade in Luzerne Co., PA, near his brother Adam. Around 1898 he and his wife Agnes (Agota Stefonowicz or Steponaitis) Sites and three children, William Stanley, Joseph John, and Maggie, moved to Indian Territory in Oklahoma where John worked in the coal mines. In about 1906 a fourth child, Benjamin, was born in Oklahoma. Agnes died of the flu epidemic that swept the nation in 1918 and John stayed in Oklahoma with his children. He died November 21, 1929, and is buried at Westlawn Cemetery, Henryetta, Okmulgee Co., OK.

The next child of Jacob and Agatha was my own gr-grandmother, Petronella Jasaitis Uknavage (Juknevicius, Juknewicz), born June 11, 1860 in Lithuania, and immigrated in 1889 with her husband Joseph Juknevicius, changed to Uknavage in this country. They brought with them three children, Joe, Frank, and Petrona and settled in Pittston, PA. Two more children, Frances Cecile and William Joseph were born and baptized in the Catholic church in Pittston. By 1900 they lived in Westville, Illinois where Joe was a coal miner along with his two older sons. Apparently my gr-grandfather died shortly after the 1900 census and his widow lived on in Westville, raised her children there, and passed away March 6, 1938. It was her obituary printed in the local newspaper that gave me my first clue as to the names of her living siblings. Unfortunately, it didn't mention those who had preceded her in death, namely Adam, John, Andrew, and Frank. Those relationships were more difficult to establish.

Joseph Sites was listed in Petronella's obituary as a brother living in Columbus, Ohio. I found him in the census records, learned that he was a tailor, married to Catherine Rose Keelty, with three children, Joseph Francis, Agatha Mary, and Constance C. Sites. Joseph is the gr-grandfather of Tom Shaw, our Florida cousin who has done so much to bring us all together on facebook. Constance Sites Kraft had a daughter Carol who provided me with important family information about her grandfather's brother Frank and her grandfather's sister Frances. I don't know why Frances was not mentioned in Petronella Uknavage's obituary for she was very much alive in 1938 and living in Grand Rapids, Michigan...but then, I'm getting ahead of myself. We'll come back to Frances. Joseph Sites died April 2, 1945 and is buried in Ohio.

The next child of Jacob and Agatha was Andrew Jasaitis/Yasaitis, born December 23, 1866 in Lithuania. He emigrated about 1885 and married Anna Dailidie (or Dalida or some other spelling in Lithuanian) October 30, 1899 in Vermilion County, Illinois. They had five children, Andrew W., Anna Agatha, Petronella, Frances, and Joseph. The 1910 federal census says they had eight children but only five were alive by then. It also tells us Andrew was the proprietor of a saloon in 1910. Frances Yasaitis married William Pinkney Delancey, a beloved baseball pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals and their daughters and grandchildren are now our facebook friends. Andrew died April 21, 1927 after suffering burns and smoke inhalation months earlier in a house fire that also claimed the life of their daughter Petronella. As soon as I receive the additional information I've ordered from the Catholic archive in Peoria I will post that information online for Andrew's family to see.

Frank A. Jasaitis Sites is next in the birth order, having been born October 2, 1870 in Lithuania. He came to the U.S. in about 1890. He may be the "Vinc. Jeschaitis" shown on the ship's passenger list with my gr-grandparents who were aboard the Lahn, which departed from Bemen and arrived in New York in June 1889. Frank moved to Columbus, Ohio where he lived near his older brother Joseph and also made his living as a tailor. He married a local girl just as his brother Joseph did. His wife was Tina A. Leopoldine Petru, and they had two children, Anna A. and Charles F. Sites. A female relative of Tina Petru is one of our facebook friends! Frank died December 24, 1922 and is buried in Columbus, OH.

The seventh child was William J. Sites whose name was Vincent Yasaitis in the 1900 census in Westville, Illinois. He was born in January of 1872 in Lithuania and arrived in our country via Hamburg, Germany April 12, 1891. In about 1895 he married Teofilia Dereskevicius (aka Tillie Derenge) in Wilkes-Barre, Luzerne Co., PA. She was also Lithuanian. They had eight children, Frances H., Vincent Geddes, Joseph J., Anton Alvin, Aldona M., and Cecilia. William was a naturalized citizen, spoke English, and worked at various jobs such as hotel clerk, jobs other than coal miner. William died April 10, 1944 in Wilkes-Barre.

Last but not least was Frances C. Jasaitis, born October 4, 1880 in Lithuania. She came to this country as a child in about 1884, lived in Pittston for years but I don't know who she lived with. On August 14, 1899 she married Charles P. Gillis, another Lithuanian immigrant, and they had four children, Lenore Julia, Agatha S., Grace Carol, and Ernest Reymond (or Raynold) Gillis. Frances and Charles along with their children lived most of their lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, a city with a large Lithuanian immigrant population. Frances died November 4, 1966 - born last and died last, of the eight siblings.

I want to restate that some of my information may be incorrect. Those of you who study genealogy know that records for any one person vary considerably from census to census, from birth certificate, to marriage certificate, to death certificate. I am always seeking clarification, correction, and addition to my family information and welcome any comments or criticisms you may have.

I would dearly love to write the story of our Jasaitis family as it really unfolded from the time they left the old country until their deaths in America but I don't have any firsthand information. However, I believe the story would be sad, full of tragedy and pain. I think I can read between the lines enough to know that some of the siblings stayed in touch while others were estranged. Some of the parents held their children close, got them educated and then lost some of them to early deaths. Other parents, like my gr-grandmother, Petronella, had children leave the nest and never return or stay in touch. I told you about Andrew dying after suffering for months the effects of a house fire on his lungs and the psychological pain of losing his young daughter in that fire despite his best efforts to save her. I know one of the Jasaitis brothers died a painful death from syphilis. We all want and need our privacy, our skeletons in the closet that never see the light of day, so I am reluctant to write of the more sensitive or even shameful aspects of our immigrant families' lives. Even though times have changed and children born out of wedlock are "no big deal" to many in our society, in the early 1900s that was a big deal. What is to be gained by telling those details? So, I try to strike a balance and tell enough to bring these long gone relatives alive in our minds without vilifying them. That is one of the reasons I've not posted my genealogy database to ancestry.com...it contains some facts that I want to keep within our own family.

Ollie Ozias, Midwife in Early Fort Collins

Recently I came across an interview recording I made in 1988 of "The Baxter Girls", the four daughters of Larimer County, Colorado pioneer Frank Eugene Baxter (1852-1937). I reviewed the video in preparation for having it transferred to DVD to share with their relatives and came across a most interesting story, one I had forgotten.

In response to the question "Were any of you ladies born at home," Leone Baxter Thayer seemed a bit surprised by the question and then told me "We were all born at home!" She went on to explain that their mother was attended by a midwife, a woman named Ollie Ozias (she first said Annie Ozias), who, I was told, birthed many babies in the communities of LaPorte and Fort Collins in the early days of those towns. I was intrigued by Leone's description of this spunky little lady whose entire focus was on the baby "and you'd better not get in her way." Leone's memory of Ollie Ozias was so good because Leone was eleven years old when Ollie attended the birth of Leone's youngest sister, Veda in 1916. In fact, Ollie was there when Leone's older sister, Norma Baxter Salisbury, gave birth to her first child, some twenty years after she was born in 1902. When I heard that I commented that Ollie must have seemed like one of the family by then and Leone's thoughtful comment was, no, she was not special to us that way for she birthed all the babies in our area.

Leone described Ollie as a small, intense woman who wore her long, dark hair pile high on her head and moved quickly and with purpose as she attended the mother and newborn baby. About Ollie's personality, she said she knew Ollie had been married for she had a young son but she couldn't imagine a man putting up with Ollie's assertive ways. She thought the very traits that made Ollie a great midwife would make her a difficult wife.

I searched the local Fort Collins and Larimer County historical archives for information about Ollie Ozias and only found her name and Fort Collins address in the old city directories but never any reference to her occupation, midwife. Finally, there was an entry that told me Ollie Ozias was the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Veneman. Searching ancestry.com for Veneman I found Ollie, born Mary Olive Veneman in March 1861 in Ohio, the fifth child of Andrew Veneman and Ellen Martin Veneman. She married Joseph W. Ozias about 1879 and gave birth to her only child, Carlton in 1881. She and Joseph Ozias divorced but I don't know what year. By 1900 she was living in Fort Collins with her son, Carlton, and Joseph Ozias lived out his life at the National Military Home in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Thanks to a young woman on ancestry.com whose user name is evenemon I have these family photos of the Veneman family to include here. I still have not found any record of Ollie Veneman Ozias as the venerated midwife in early Fort Collins and LaPorte. There must be many families who owe this woman a thank you and perhaps some will see my post and validate her importance to the history of our area. I would like to make sure she is not forgotten by including details of her career in the historical documents of the local archive.

Ollie Ozias died December 27, 1942 and is buried at Grandview Cemetery in Fort Collins. She was 81. God only knows how many babies first felt Ollie's sure hands on their little bodies.
                                                                                                                

♫ Diggin' Up Bones ♪

On October 31, 1972, Halloween, we moved out here in the country to our little piece of heaven on earth, a small acreage with an old farm house that had most recently been a migrant workers' shack, a barn, silo, granary, and chicken house. My in-laws helped us buy the place from the nearby landowner, F. G. Martinez and his wife, Gertrude, who lived east of us at the Martinez Corner, a ninety-degree-turn on the highway that has been the site of many car accidents over the years. Bob and I were both working full time so we built on our house evenings and weekends. With limited time, energy, and money the construction of our home became a lifestyle, a long, drawn out affair that allowed us to keep the costs down but sometimes drove us a bit crazy.


We've long been interested in the history of our place and thanks to the land abstract we received from Mr. Martinez we can track the change of ownership over the years but have yet to identify the builder of the house and barn or the year they went up. We were fortunate to hear from a couple of people who lived here around 1918-1925, renters who farmed the land for awhile and moved on. The house itself revealed a few of its secrets including an old photograph that Bob found inside a bedroom wall when he was tearing out the plaster and laths upstairs. On the back of the photo someone wrote "Billy and Jack Schwartz". I've included the photo here.

I've been keeping notes about the place since 1973 but made little progress in reconstructing the history of our place until recently with the advent of the internet and the use of ancestry.com. Now I know who Billy and Jack Schwartz were and have learned much more about the August Gross family who lived here in 1920. My hope is to gather enough information to write a history of our place and flesh it out with the names of the various owners and renters. I'd like to know who planted the old apple trees and the seckel pear tree that is about 100 years old now and barely hanging on.


In about 1974 we disassembled and discarded the chicken house whose construction was much inferior to the other buildings here. We had the silo torn down for it was crumbling at its base and presented a hazard to our horses. The old barn is on its last legs too, temporarily propped up by wood poles wedged in place along the east side. The combination of strong west winds and cribbing horses took it's toll.  In 2011 we had a new roof put on the granary and braced the building on the east as it was starting to lean that way, just like the barn.

In addition to the dome we built a new pole barn on the place and an enclosed garden surrounded by cedar fencing. Aside from that the most obvious improvement to the place is the addition of trees, lots of trees. It's been almost 100 years since Billy and Jack Schwartz lived here and we've been here for forty-three. We love our home and would like to think we gave new life to this hard luck farm and made it a place of good memories for many, the Russell Place.

I'm a Ham!

With the encouragement and support of my husband whose amateur radio call sign is W0UDT, I passed my tests for the Technician and General licenses on January 17, 2015, and on the 22nd of that month my name and call sign appeared in the FCC database giving me the right to talk on the radio! I studied for about six weeks using the booklets published by the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) and took the test at the hamfest held at The Ranch near Loveland, Colorado. The hamfest is similar to a gunshow or flea market in that vendors set up tables to display their wares and interested buyers and  lookee loos walk along the rows of radios, antennas, and various related items shopping for bargains. I bought a small quilt from a woman who sat on a folding chair knitting and scowling. Traditionally, the hamfest offers the opportunity for non-hams to take the FCC tests in a room set aside for that purpose and on January 17 there was a good turnout of 27 test takers.


With the onset of the internet and cell phone ham radio operators were dying out until the FCC relaxed the rules in 2003 and declared it no longer necessary to pass a five-word-per-minute Morse Code (continuous wave or CW to hams) examination to get an amateur radio license. That part of the test was difficult for many and after the rule change the numbers of hams increased. Now the popularity of the "prepper movement" has increased the interest in ham radio even more. I decided to become a ham after a conversation with my husband, one of those conversations that couples who've been married almost fifty years sometimes have..."What will I do if I outlive you?" conversations. I told him that if I outlive him I'll want to stay right here and live alone but I might be scared and have to get a dog or a gun. He stared a me a long minute, then nodded, but didn't say a word. The next day he asked, "How about ham radio?" That sounded practical to me since he has erected several large antennas in the yard and has a hamshack with multiple radios, and I'm not good with dogs or guns.

My first call sign was given to me by the FCC...they assign them in alphabetical order with a number in the middle that denotes the calling area in which the new ham lives. I got KE0CSY, or Kilo Echo Zero Charlie Sierra Yankee, in phonetic alphabet lingo. I decided right away that I would apply for a vanity license and chose W0UKE, partly because of its similarity to Bob's W0UDT and our friend Bill's W0WST, and partly because the UKE was my dad's nickname, and that of his brother too, as in Joe Uke and Bill Uke. I know they would be proud of me being a ham and I shared their difficult Lithuanian last name that was shortened to Uke.


So here I am, almost a month since I got my license, and I've only talked on the handheld Baofeng radio, on the 70 cm band, to my husband and to a fellow who is a regular on that band here locally. His call is KF0CB, nicknamed Charlie Brown. He is a WWII veteran who encourages us all, is always willing to talk, and serves as our base station of sorts.


There are many ways to enjoy ham radio and I'm just getting started. The basic use for amateur radio is emergency communication during times of disaster. It is also used for communication at events like bicycle races in the mountains. Some people are into contesting, such as contacting another ham in every state (WAS for Worked All States), or the highly competitive contacting as many radio stations as possible in a given time period. Others like to communicate with the Space Station and use satellites to get their signals around the world. I hope to learn Morse Code and use that format to communicate other CW users in foreign countries. That will take some study and practice. The thing I like the most about being a ham is sharing a hobby with my husband, a semi-technical hobby that allows each of us some individuality in our hobby.

American Gothic Ad Nauseum

About thirty years ago I noticed that parodies of Grant Wood's 1930 painting American Gothic are everywhere! I started to collect newspaper clippings and magazine photos mostly but with the dawn of the internet more and more spoofs appeared. Most people in this country recognize Wood's painting and that must be the reason it is used so often to make a point about today's society.

I must have fifty or sixty different takeoffs of this painting and they are delightful. I even had a potholder with an American Gothic image. I chose a few of my favorites to include in this blog.





This Spuds MacKenzie picture was printed with Spuds was in his heydey as an Anheuser Busch mascot, before he was banished for influencing children to like beer.

Time Magazine has featured this parody at least once...this issue came out in August of 1994.

In December of 2008 a 25 foot tall sculpture of Wood's American Gothic was displayed in Chicago's Pioneer Court on Michigan Avenue and was very popular with camera-wielding tourists but by 2010 was dismantled and sent packing.

 Oh, there are plenty of political uses for this image. In my collection I have Jimmy and Rosalie Carter from the cover of a Punch magazine, and the entire line up of candidates from the 1988 election. I chose this one of Bill and Hillary Clinton clipped from a Colorado newspaper "back when."

I love this one of the 80's couple.

And since it is Thanksgiving I will post one of many images I've found where Thanksgiving is featured in an American Gothic parody.

I even have a photograph of my dear brother-in-law, Ken Russell, and his wife, Charlotte, wearing coveralls and posing in front of one of his dad's farm buildings with the necessary pitchfork in his hand. But my favorite of all is this little drawing by a local first grade school boy..just love it.

Next time you see one of these drawings or photographs you'll realize just how common they are.

Harbingers of Fall

On the far southeast corner of our property are two old Cottonwood trees that are the first to show fall colors each year. As I return home from shopping in Wellington on Colorado State Highway 1, I see these trees from a long way off and sometimes as early as late August will notice a yellowing of the leaves, a sure sign that the season is morphing from summer to autumn. These two cottonwoods probably sprang up from the ground beside the irrigation ditch many years ago, much to the annoyance of the ditch riders and those water users downstream. When we bought our place back in 1972 the ditch was lined with stately cottonwoods all along its banks, continuing north as far as I could see, but our neighbor to the south, Dallas Horton, came by one day to tell me that he was going to have all but one of them removed as they impeded the operation of his walking sprinkler system. He apologized but said it was necessary. So these two old cottonwoods, and one north of our place, but not on our property, are the only survivors. I'm thankful for them for they provide refuge for crows, squirrels, and owls. I've never named these trees but think of them as the harbingers of fall.