Family research turns up Caroline Hymer's Mayflower connection

tarted Caroline Hymer's granddaughter on the search through the family tree that turned up the Mayflower connection.

The movie was about Anne Boelyn's sister; Anne Boelyn, of course, famously lost her head when her husband Henry VIII decided he wanted a divorce. Carlene Anders and her sisters watched the movie and began speculating about family ties, and whether their family was connected to the Boelyns. Carlene, who likes genealogy, undertook a search to find out.

What turned up was something different, detailed in a class report by Carlene's daughter Jessi Dowers.

"My great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather John Cooke was 14-years-old when he came over from England on the Mayflower with his father Francis Cooke," Jessi wrote. Francis Cooke was not part of the party that went ashore after the Mayflower made landfall off Cape Cod (not where it was supposed to be), but Richard Warren was. Both Richard Warren and Francis Cooke were among the signers of the Mayflower Compact; the signers agreed to involve everybody in the colony (the Mayflower carried a lot of people who were not Pilgrims) in government and to abide by majority rule. Only 19 of the 41 men who signed the Mayflower Compact survived the first winter in Massachusetts; Richard Warren and Francis Cooke both made it. They were among the Pilgrims giving thanks at the first Thanksgiving in 1621.

Richard Warren brought his family to Massachusetts when it looked like Plymouth Colony was going to survive; when she grew up, his daughter Sarah married John Cooke. Richard didn't live to see that - he died at 48 years of age, which was pretty old in the 1620s. John and Sarah made it 88 years of age and 72 years old, respectively. Their seven children all survived to adulthood (and that was really unusual in the 17th Century). John's parents, Sarah's mom and all John and Sarah's children lived to a ripe old age.

"You come from absolutely hardy stock, Grandma," Carlene told her grandmother Caroline. Caroline lives up to her ancestors; despite a fight with a debilitating disease, she's 91 years old.

Caroline Peterson was born in 1917; "a good old Swedish name," she said. Her mom was a teacher and a great believer in education at a time when a lot of kids quit high school to go to work, and made a good career out of it. Caroline's mom, however, had plans for her kids; "she was a real pusher," Caroline remembered, and she encouraged her children to finish high school - and more than that, to attend college. All her kids responded; they all got college educations.

Caroline attended college with the goal of following in her mother's footsteps. She became a high school teacher after graduation. "I loved teaching school," she said. She taught high school classes throughout her career, which lasted (with interruptions for raising children) from the late 1930s to the 1980s.

Teachers learn to juggle a lot of different assignments, and new teacher Caroline Peterson was no exception. "I had the (girls) basketball team. I'm not sure I knew a lot about basketball, but the girls did." The game was a lot different, especially for girls. Girls played a half-court game and could only dribble the ball twice per possession.

"When I met George I was teaching school," Caroline remembered. They met in Great Falls, Mont.; it was 1939, and the world would soon be at war. George Hymer, from high and dry Montana, served in the Navy.

"He was on the big guns," Caroline remembered, the anti-aircraft batteries on a destroyer named the Hughes. The Hughes saw a lot of action, from the Aleutian Islands to the Philippines; in the later stages of the war, the tin cans served as the outer defense line of the U.S. fleet and were the first targets of the kamikazes (Japanese pilots who flew their planes into American ships) when they attacked. Kamikaze attacks took a toll on the Hughes.

"People right next to him were killed," guys on his own gun crew, Caroline said. (He remembered his friends in a book of poems he published many years later. "He was an excellent poet," Caroline said.)

While her husband was serving overseas, Caroline Hymer was juggling motherhood (two children), her teaching job and a third job for the war effort, running a cannery. "I think they paid me eight dollars a day," Caroline remembered. "And I was teaching school full time."

George Hymer survived World War II with relatively minor injuries. "Luckily he came back from the war." He got a job as an electrical lineman in Montana, then he got an offer over in Spokane. He came over to Spokane to look around, and while he was over here he decided to go visit a friend in Okanogan. "And fell in love," Caroline said, with the Okanogan country. The Hymers and their children moved to Brewster in 1946.

They lived in Brewster first, Caroline remembered, in the little houses on the corner of Bridge and Main streets owned by Bertha Sears. By 1946 they were a little run down - well. "I probably shouldn't say that. She probably thought it was a good house." In fact, Bertha tried to sell the house - not just the house but all her property on the corner - to George Hymer. George politely declined, but he was looking for a house; he found what he wanted in Pateros, on Beach Street.

"Pateros was a beautiful town," Caroline remembered; old Pateros had a grocery store, a movie theater, shops, a drugstore, a park. It had a bunch of go-getters who were working to promote it. "Fred Evertsbush and a whole bunch of civic-minded people who worked really hard," she said. (Fred and his dad, who was the pharmacist so everybody called him "Doc," owned the drugstore.) George Hymer fit right in with that group.

So did Caroline. She had children at home so she suspended her teaching career, but she still valued education. She helped start the PTA in Pateros; the moms and dads in the PTA talked school district officials into starting a kindergarten program. "We were responsible for getting Lois Westerdahl," Caroline said. (Lois was a longtime teacher in the Quad City area; her husband Roy, a retired orchardist, still lives in Brewster.)

George Hymer worked full time for the Okanogan County Public Utility District as an electrical lineman "He was a good lineman, too. A real good lineman." But he liked the idea of owning a little more land, maybe an orchard. So in his travels around the county he found a little piece of ground right on the river, at the end of Sunset Avenue in Brewster.

"He bought it from a little old man that lived here that wasn't well at all," Caroline remembered. The old man had built a little old house, "oh, and it was a shack. A total shack." But "here was this sandy beach," and a patch of ground that was good for orchard. "He built that old shack into a pretty nice house," Caroline said, and he planted an orchard. He gave his kids part of that task. "George always told (daughter) Lynn and (son) Al that they were planting their college education." And in fact profits from the orchard did help pay for their education.

"He was a good planner and operator." It was George who sensed the possibilities in a nice house down by the riverbank near Pateros, a house right in the path of rising waters from Wells Dam. The owner had to sell it or demolish it, and she sold it to George Hymer. George hired a crew to jack it up off the foundation, put it on a barge and floated it down the river. It's the house that Carolyn lives in today.

Caroline went back to teaching school in about 1950, teaching English at Brewster High School, the brand new high school that had just opened for business. (With some remodeling, it's now Brewster Elementary School.) She taught English (and other things) at Brewster High School for about 30 years.

But Caroline's subject was English, not history. Family history in particular requires research, and "I would no more have the patience for that--"

So that her granddaughter is interested is a good thing; "I'm glad she's an historian," Caroline said. Carlene said she's been interested in genealogy and history since she was a teenager, but didn't do much of it because "I was afraid I'd get addicted and of course, I did," when she actually did start looking into the family past.

The cool thing about this kind of research, Carlene said, is that it makes the dates and stories in the history books come alive. It allows her to fit her family's experience into the American experience. "It's so fun. It makes everything so personal."