William Antino Moore My Maternal Great Uncle
52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks
Week 45 – November 4, 2025
Prompt: Multiples
Some twins share a lifetime of parallel steps.
Others part early and walk very different paths.
This is the story of my maternal great uncle, William Antino “Bill” Moore, and his twin sister — my grandmother — Elizabeth Moore Nolen.
Born Together in Indian Territory
In our family’s handwritten record dated August 10, 1908, my great-grandmother Lucinda recorded their birth:
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“My twins born in Tulsa Town in I.T. in Aug 1st, 1905 cross street in old house from railroad tracks.
Dr. McGinis name them Billy Antino and Lizzie.” |
Tulsa was still part of Indian Territory — a young frontier community of rail lines, tents, and new opportunity.
A Family Story Rewritten by DNA
For generations, our family believed the twins’ father was Josiah “Joe Moore” Coon, who claimed them in his 1907 will shortly before his death.
DNA later revealed that their biological father was George Neal.
It didn’t change their place in the family — it simply gave us a fuller truth.
Loss, Hardship, and a Mother Trying to Survive
Lucinda married Lew Boone on February 20, 1909, but just three months later Lew was murdered.
A Tulsa newspaper reported:
“He leaves a widow and three children. The family is in hard circumstances and living in a tent near the cemetery.”
By April 1910, Lucinda had secured a home in Lynn Land Township Tulsa County.
The twins appear in the census as Lizzie and Willie, with their younger sister Annie.
But on May 30, 1910, Elizabeth, William, and Anna entered the Sand Springs Home after neighborhood gossip reported their mother as negligent.
The family story is that Lucinda had locked the children in the basement while she looked for work.
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| William Moore front row, far left, with other boys at the Sand Springs Home. |
It must have been a heartbreaking moment — mother and children separated not by lack of love, but by poverty and circumstances.
A Life in Institutions
In a 1960 letter, the Superintendent of the Sand Springs Home wrote that William “did not develop mentally” and was committed to the State Institution at Norman.
In 1920 there is a William Moore working as a woodcutter in the lumber camp at the State Penitentiary in McAlester. I believe this is our William Moore.
In 1930 William is living with his mother and step-father William Scott in a tent in the Newblock Park area of Tulsa. The census enumerator indicated he was divorced and a veteran of a war but I have no evidence of either and he would have been too young to be in WWI.
His mother’s obituary May 30, 1938 included mention of her son, William Moore of Vinita.
The 1940 census confirms that William A. Moore was an inmate at the Eastern Oklahoma Hospital in Vinita in 1935 and 1940.
And again in the 1950 census Wm A Moore is a never married inmate at the Eastern Oklahoma State Hospital, a mental institution in Vinita.
A letter from “Uncle Bill” to my mother in 1960 is postmarked Vinita, Oklahoma. He writes that he is getting along alright and had been down to see Sis.
Despite challenges, he kept a thread of connection to family — especially to his twin.
A Gentle Ending
Uncle Bill spent his final years in a nursing home in Skiatook, Oklahoma, alongside his older brother Frank Coon and Robert Nolen, the brother of his twin sister’s husband.
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| Frank Coon, Leonard Nolen, Robert Nolen and Bill Moore. |
William Antino "Bill" Moore passed away on June 27, 1977.
He rests at Woodlawn Cemetery in Sand Springs, buried near his twin sister Elizabeth, and also near their younger sister Anna — the three children who entered the Sand Springs Home together in 1910 are reunited again in rest.
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| The uncertainty about the birth years is reflected in the tombstones. |
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