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Thursday, February 10, 2022

Branching Out – Connections to Cottage Grove – Part 3


In my previous post I mentioned that I discovered a connection from my childhood home at Halsey to my current home in Cottage Grove while reading a family history book at the Cottage Grove Genealogical Society library. Guess what? I read another book and found another connection.

This time I read about the Currin family. Three of this family were Donation Land Claim settlers in the Cottage Grove area: John Currin, his brother William Currin and his sister Christiana (Currin) Cooley’s son, George Cooley. It was the grandson of George that caught my eye, Dale Drinkard. You guessed it, Dale had a connection to me.

He married my 2nd cousin, Delma Falk, 19 Jun 1937 in Linn County, Oregon. Delma said that she and another cousin helped to organize the Falk family reunion which was held each summer when I was growing up. After I began my family history research over 30 years ago I again attended the Falk family reunions and almost always Delma and Dale were there. Again I have always liked this photo I took of them in 1988 at the reunion.


Delma was born in the Halsey area 31 Jan 1915. Delma’s birth certificate has been altered to include her name, since the original certificate calls her Baby Falk. She was about 3 years younger than my mother Wilma and 2 months older than my aunt Lois, although Delma’s grandfather was a much older brother of Wilma and Lois’s father. I have always liked this photo of the three of them.

Lois, Wilma & Delma

While writing this blog post, I realized that I had not been diligent in adding the available sources for them to my family tree on Ancestry (joanne genealogy). So I worked on it. It reminded me that when Dale died 17 Sept 2005, at age 93, he and Delma had been married 68 years. Delma lived for almost 8 more years and died at age 98 on 27 Jul 2013. I have missed seeing them at the reunions and didn’t have the opportunity to explain the Cottage Grove connection that I had with Dale.



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