2026 - 28 Summer of '42: My Mother's Sixteenth Summer

Margaret Nolen, My Teenage Mother

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 28

Prompt: Leisure

December 25, 1941—just eighteen days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor changed American life forever—my Aunt Sue ("Sister Sue") gave her big sister Margaret a five-year diary for Christmas.

Margaret's five-year diary, a Christmas gift from her sister Sue in 1941. Eighty-four years later, it opened a window into one unforgettable summer.

Fifteen-year-old Margaret faithfully filled its pages with a few lines almost every day during 1942. The diary is filled with the ordinary pleasures of a sixteen-year-old girl living through extraordinary times: sleepovers, surprise birthday parties, Girl Scout and Red Cross meetings, making cookies and candy, skating on the creek, playing in the snow, late-night bowling, dancing, eating at Coney Island and Ike's Chili, and movies—lots of movies.

I opened the diary intending to make a list of every movie she mentioned to see how many I had seen myself.

What I found was so much more.

It was time to go back to the diary...

The little brown diary that let me spend one more summer with my mother.

As I read, I recognized names of family friends from my own childhood. Lon and Irene Alcorn. Howard and Dorothy Williams. George and Ella Wright. The Galloways. The Morgans. Every weekend seemed to bring another visit with family or friends.

During the war years, my grandparents often picked up soldiers and brought them home for dinner or even to spend the night. At the time, they were simply young men far from home. I suspect those visits helped shape Margaret's view of a world that was changing quickly.

On May 4, sixteen-year-old Margaret ordered her senior class ring and celebrated by going to see Gone With the Wind.

A few weeks later, her homeroom class enjoyed a picnic at 51st and Yale—today's LaFortune Park.

Then came summer.

May 27 School's Out May 28 Crystal City

Vacation began with a swimming trip to Crystal City with her brother and sisters. They packed a fried chicken picnic, rode the Whip and the Dodgem, and had what she described as "a real good time." On the way home they got off the bus at the wrong stop and had to walk the last mile.

Today, every time Bud and I drive to Ollie's for Sunday lunch, we're only a few blocks from where sixteen-year-old Margaret spent one of the happiest days of her summer, now Crystal City Shopping Center.

The very next day they went fishing at Deep Fork. They caught one fish and forty crawdads—and once again, had a wonderful time.

June brought a longer visit with the Alcorn family near Bristow. Margaret helped plant cane and corn, carried water, chopped cotton, picked blackberries, gathered peas, and helped can the harvest. Hard work during the day ended with homemade ice cream, dancing, card games, and trips to town on the tractor.

August brought another stay with the Alcorns. This time she worked in the hay field, helped grind feed, and canned four bushels of tomatoes. One evening they played horseshoes by the light of a tractor.

Back home there were boat rides on the lake, swimming, picnics, car rides, and, of course, more movies. Home was between Sand Springs and Tulsa, so her movie-going took her to the Harmony and Broadway theaters in Sand Springs, as well as the Cozy and Tulsa Theater in downtown Tulsa.

The Cozy Theatre in downtown Tulsa. Margaret saw at least five movies here during the summer of '42.

She even played pool at George Wright's native stone house—and won! That entry made me smile. I remember the pool table in the basement. As a little girl, it seemed like a mysterious place where only the men gathered. I only got to go downstairs once. My great-aunt Anna and her husband, Hank, lived in the apartment above the detached garage behind the house. The house is gone now, but every time I drive past the vacant lot on Charles Page Boulevard, I still think of George Wright's native stone house.

One day she canned grapes, something I never knew people did. She also spent hours writing letters to friends and to soldiers she had met through family and neighbors.

One entry especially made me smile. On the Fourth of July, Margaret had her first "real date" with a soldier. She wrote, "Went to a show. It was my first real date dear Diary and it was oh so thrilling." Reading it, I couldn't help but smile. Before she was my mother, she was just a sixteen-year-old girl thrilled about her first date.

Looking back through those three months, patterns began to emerge. There were twenty-one swims, four picnics, fishing trips, eighteen trips to the movies, Scout meetings, sleepovers with friends, homemade ice cream, dancing, card games, wrestling matches with her parents, and two long stays at the Alcorn farm near Bristow. She babysat for spending money, collected scrap rubber for the war effort, bought new clothes and fabric to sew another dress, and even spent a few days experiencing dorm life at John Brown University while visiting friends. It wasn't one unforgettable adventure that made the summer special. It was the accumulation of ordinary days, each one carefully preserved in a few handwritten lines.

The last summer of leisure ended when Margaret began her senior year at Tulsa Central High School that September. Although the diary had room for four more years, she wrote only a few entries in 1943 and then stopped altogether. Somehow that seems fitting. Childhood doesn't usually end all at once. It simply gives way to the busy years that follow, and one day you realize you've left those long summer days behind.

Reading these pages, I realized I wasn't simply making a list of old movies.

I was spending the summer with my sixteen-year-old mother.

I thought I was writing a story about leisure.

Instead, I found a window into the everyday joys of wartime America and got to know the sixteen-year-old girl everyone called Margie, long before she became the woman my father called Peggy.

2026 - 29 Back to the Binder: Martha McCorkle

Martha McCorkle, My Third Great-Grandmother

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks

Week 27 of 2026

Prompt: A Source I Want to Understand Better

Earlier this year I thought I had identified my third great-grandmother Martha's maiden name and parents. I even wrote a Genealogical Proof Statement and shared the conclusion in a previous blog post. Yet something continued to bother me. Martha was not mentioned in James David Hennessee's will, nor did a well-researched Hennessee family website include her. My strongest evidence was a cluster of DNA matches descending from James David Hennessee and Sarah "Sally" Wilcher, along with the shared location of Warren County, Tennessee. My conclusion fit the DNA—but not all of the records.

It was time to go back to the McCorkle binder. 

Image created by ChatGPT

I pulled the well-worn McCorkle binder from the shelf. It contains nearly everything I have collected over the years about this family—census records, land records, correspondence with other researchers, handwritten notes, and ideas I've accepted, rejected, and sometimes revisited.

The very first pages weren't deeds or census records at all. They were two pages torn from my mother's old steno pads.

The first page listed Daniel and Hester McCorkle's family:

Daniel and Hester McCorkle, parents of Thomas, Nettie/Nita (married Dr. Bettis), Elbert, daughters Lucille and Mary Margaret.

(Mattie was also one of Daniel and Hester's children.)

Then, after several blank lines, my mother had written:

1765 Joseph McCorkle

Wilson Co.

Warren Co.

The second page contained the names and phone numbers of Frederick McCorkle and Mary Warren, two of Thomas McCorkle's children. Beside each name my mother had noted that she had talked with them for about an hour. I also found copies of emails we exchanged in 2002 while trying to determine Mattie McCorkle's birth year for a new gravestone. I assume those phone calls were part of that effort.

Years ago, I used these notes to begin building the McCorkle side of my family tree.

What I had overlooked was the note about Joseph McCorkle, born about 1765.

Continuing through the binder, I found copies of correspondence from several experienced McCorkle researchers.

One was an email sent to me by Rob Rose, a descendant of Daniel and Hester's son Samuel. Attached was an earlier email sent to someone named Ralph by an unknown author. It stated that Martha was the daughter of Robert W. McCorkle and Priscilla and that she may have married Stephen H. McCorkle.

Rob also sent me a scanned descendant chart titled Descendants of Joseph McCorcle, apparently prepared by Robert and Violet McCord.

Generation 1: Joseph McCorcle, born 1765, wife Martha.

Generation 2: Robert W. McCorcle, born 1785, wife Priscilla.

Generation 3: Martha McCorcle, born about 1812, married Stephen H. McCorcle.

A third researcher, Cary, with whom I had corresponded through Ancestry, had reached essentially the same conclusion.

Suddenly I had three experienced McCorkle researchers independently placing Martha as the daughter of Robert W. McCorkle and Priscilla and suggesting Stephen H. McCorkle as her possible husband.

None of the three researchers cited sources.

That immediately raised a new question.

Were these truly three independent lines of evidence, or were they all relying on the same earlier, unsourced compilation? Until I can answer that question, I can't give these conclusions the same weight as a will, deed, probate file, or other contemporary record.

As I reread my own research, I realized something else had changed.

Over the years I had developed several theories for Martha's maiden name. Hollis and Hennessee were both based on DNA clusters. Today I am not abandoning those theories, but I am setting them aside until I can connect the DNA to documentary evidence. The DNA clusters remain. The records, however, have yet to identify Martha's parents or husband.

For now, my working hypothesis is that Martha was the daughter of Robert W. McCorkle and Priscilla and that she married Stephen H. McCorkle. It is a hypothesis worth investigating, not a conclusion to be accepted without proof.

The real source I want to understand better isn't a census record, a deed, or a probate file.

It's the research that came before mine.

Who first concluded that Martha was the daughter of Robert W. McCorkle and Priscilla? Where did that information originate? Was it based on records that have since been lost, or was it simply repeated until it became accepted as fact?

Those are the questions I hope to answer next.

Sometimes the most important source isn't the oldest one.

It's the one that tells us where to keep looking.