Ginny (Wilson) Thomas

Ancestors

Problems/Questions Profile manager: Ginny Thomas [send private message]

Biography

My number is 14. Like or comment on my status and I'll give you a number between 1-20. Here is my epistle of some random facts about me: 1. My parents met in Akron, OH at a dance when my father was working there at one of the rubber companies and my mother was a student at the U. of Akron in her hometown. My father had a doctorate in Chemistry and took a job in Chicago at the U. of Chicago, his alma mater, soon after they were married. I was born in Chicago and we lived there 8 months after I was born. My father didn’t like the job and they returned to Akron, OH when he got a job at another rubber company there. 2. My father’s mother (a widow) came to live with us from her home in Hannibal, MO when I was about 2. My father had grown up in Hannibal and we had made a trip there to baptize me when I was 1 year old. 3. My grandparents (mother’s parents) lived in Akron with my mother’s younger sister. After living there for 3 years, my dad took a job in Bounding Brook, NJ. I was worried about moving because I was unsure if there would be 7Up and Fritos in NJ. We lived in New Brunswick, NJ and then Highland Park, NJ until I was 10 years old. My two sisters, Nancy and Alice, were born there and were 5 and 10 years younger than I. I sang in the Cherub Choir at the First Baptist Church. One of my childhoods bug-a-boos was being too skinny. I always hated getting weighed in elementary school because I was always the skinniest in the class. My mother always sent me to the store for her when I came home from elementary school up through high school. She never learned to drive, so I would pick up odds and ends needed during the week. One thing I hated was going to a grocery store that had its meat counter where you could get cuts of meat made to order. My grandmother often wanted brains and eggs to eat, so I had to go ask for calves’ brains at the meat counter. 4. Like a lot of little girls, I was crazy about horses, so I would use the racing pages in a NY city paper to follow the races, both thoroughbred and standard bred. I still love to follow horse racing although it’s not easy in NC. I read all the books I could get my hands on about horses. Nancy Drew mysteries were also a favorite. I spent a lot of time at the library in New Brunswick. My first book that I checked out was Bartholomew and the Oobleck by Dr. Seuss. 5. We moved away from NJ when I was in 5th grade and lived in a farm house out in the country near Allentown, Bethlehem, Nazareth, and Easton, PA. My school was a 4 room building in a place called Hecktown which was in between Bethlehem and Nazareth. Nancy started 1st grade there. The 3rd and 4th grades were in another building which was closer to Nazareth. I got my first dog, Corky, who was a mix from the pound. 6. I loved living out in the country in PA where I could roam around over hill over dale. We had room for a vegetable garden and the house next door had been built in the middle of an apple orchard. We had cherry, apple, apricot and pear trees as well as a grape vine. The main part of the house was built about 1850 and the walls were of stone, so the window sills were about 1.5 – 2 feet wide. Recently I found the house on Google Street View and the white paint that covered the outside when we lived there has been removed to reveal a beautiful stone exterior. 7. We only lived in PA for a year before we moved on to Newark, DE, pronounced New-ark. My brother, Ed, was born in Wilmington, DE. We went to the Presbyterian Church and I sang in the church choir. I completed 6th grade and junior high as well as started 10th grade in high school there. Of course we didn’t stay in Newark, but moved on to Penfield, NY a suburb of Rochester where I completed high school. I enjoyed living there very much and am still in touch with several classmates although we moved to Dallas, TX a month after I graduated from Penfield High. I did not want to move to Dallas because of the assassination that had taken place there 8 months earlier. I was in my last period of the day in English class when the loud speaker began broadcasting the news about President Kennedy. We finished the school day and I went home and told my mother what had happened. A couple days later when we came home from church, I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald live on television. 8. Surprisingly my family did not move any more after going to Dallas. My grandmother, who still lived with us, died about a year after that move. I began attending Southern Methodist University and living at home. During my sophomore year I got a part time job at The Varsity Shop, a men’s clothing store across the street from the SMU campus. It is now called Culwell and Son. The owner of the store furnished the pony that SMU used as its mascot for football games. I was a math major, partly because I didn’t have to write papers or do a lot of lab work with that major so I could work about 33 hours a week to support myself for my last 4 semesters while I lived on campus and later in an apartment with a roommate. 9. Dallas never seemed like home to me, so when I graduated from SMU I decided to get a master’s in education so I could teach math, a job that is always available, and move to Boston. I was admitted to a program at Duke University where I met my husband who was in the same program. We got married a year after I moved to Durham, NC to attend Duke. 10. One of the things we began doing after we got married was attending Duke Men’s basketball games. We have had season tickets ever since the first year of our marriage. 11. We bought a house 3 years after we got married and the first thing I wanted was a dog. We got Merry, a Pembroke Welsh corgi. She lived to be 14 years old even though she had developed DM after turning 11. Progress has been made since then to isolate the gene that causes this terrible disease and a test is available that can easily be done to diagnose a corgi’s risk of developing DM. My two corgis that I have now will not develop it because Dash is clear and Bug is a carrier. Dash was just a stroke of luck and Bug’s breeder is actively working to eliminate this gene in the breed. Dash’s immediate predecessor was Dunkin’ who led me into the wonderful world of dog sports. 12. The most stunning event of my life at this point was the death of my sister, Alice, overnight in her sleep at age 41. Her official cause of death was “sudden death, cause unknown.” She left an 8 year old son, a 2nd husband, and 3 step children. She had just started a project to research our family history, so a year after her death I decided to pick up the project myself in her memory. It has been immensely rewarding and informative although I still have not achieved Alice’s goal which was to find the family of our grandfather, Edward Preston Wilson. 13. I did not thrive as a math teacher after trying it for two years. My husband was more successful in his career choice of education and worked for the same school system for 33 years. My career ended up being in Information Technology as an “early adaptor” before many people knew what a computer programmer was and as a female in a field still dominated by men. I worked at a retail tire company, a bank, a tool manufacturer, a prominent hospital, and a pharmaceutical company in IT. 14. My family still lives in the Dallas, TX area and I still live in NC. No more moving!

Sources

• First-hand information. Entered by Virginia Wilson at registration.