Earl Donald Bragdon

1940 census: Earl D. Bragdon was living with his parents, Phillip and Mary Bragdon, and his brother, Elvin (aged 14) on North Dexter Rd in Sangerville in 1940.  His father was a farmer, his mother a weaver in the woolen mill (probably the one in town), and he worked part time as a cook in a lumber camp.

WWII Enlistment record: Earl D. Bragdon of Maine, living in LA at the time of his enlistment in 1943, says he has a year of college. I wonder if he went to college in California.

In 1942 City Directory, Earl is listed as living in Inglewood, LA, CA, as an aircraft worker. The aircraft manufacturer there at the time North American Aviation, who made the P-51 Mustang, B-25 Mitchell twin-engine bomber, and T-6 Texan trainer. Was he also in college at the time, I wonder?

A family tree on the father revealed Earl was the second to the last of 8 children born to Elwood Bragdon and Mary Priest. He was born 2 Nov 1923 and died in 1984.

It looks like Earl went back to college at the University of Maine and graduated in 1952. He then went on to get a Master's and PhD in History at University of Indiana. He taught History at a variety of universities and colleges, ending up at Vienna, Virginia where he died, August, 1984.

He married at some time, since he has a spouse (Sally B) listed on the 1953 Orono city directory

and also in an article about him published in 1967. The article (shown below) has him teaching at Hood College at the time.

Here is Earle's wife's obituary, which tells something about their lives. Sarah Bird was from England and met Earle in Chicago. Interesting!  I think she had a beautiful smile!

Marion P. Larrabee

Marion Larrabee was born Feb 16 1924 to Leslie and Erma Larrabee. They lived in Sangerville in 1930 with her siblings, Lewis, Ethel and Hollis. Marion's father was a woods worker from English Canada. He immigrated in 1896, which was apparently when he was born.

In 1940, Marion and her parents still lived in Sangerville, except that now her mother also worked as a weaver in the local woolen mill.

In 1948, Marion married Faunce Cleaves from Sangerville. He died in 1992 at the age of 80, still married to Marion, apparently. Her name is on the tombstone but is not complete. In 2007 she was still alive, but it's not known if she is still alive. She would be 90 now.

I don't know what Marion did between 1942 and 1948, so can't tell if she was active in the war effort.

Lois Ann Knowlton

Lois Ann Knowlton was Leroy Leslie Knowlton's sister. Both the siblings lost their mother when they were young, apparently, before 1930.

Lois married a Lawson fellow in 1968; she was also married to William H. LeBlanc Jr in 1944. Don't know what happened to the marriage but she had two children with him, apparently, as they are mentioned in her obituary from last year.

While I don't see a direct connection with World War II, I do see that she was employed at woolen mills where they no doubt made materials for the war effort, such as uniforms and blankets.

Leroy Leslie Knowlton

Leroy enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 9 Nov 1942. He may still be alive; he was alive in 2013, when his sister died. He married Patricia Palmer/Hatch in 1955, then in 1987 married Pauline Hayes.

Charles C. Hodgdon

I can find nothing on Charles C. Hodgdon. However, I do find information on a Charles E. Hodgdon who lived in Sangerville with his mother and brother in 1930. She was divorced then and working as a servant for the owner of the house. In 1932 she married another Sangerville man, Orman Gray. They lived in Sangerville in 1940, but Charles doesn't seem to be living with them.

If Charles E. Hodgdon is our man, then he enlisted in November 1942. This man was the right age, born in 1924. At the time of his enlistment in the Army Air Corps, he was working in Portland as a laborer in some kind of clothing mill.

A death record for Charles E. Hodgdon has him dying in Vermont in 1980 of metastatic cancer. He is said to be the son of Ellsworth Hodgdon and Kathleen Given and was born in Rumford. In the 1930 census he is with his mother, Kathleen Hodgdon, and two other siblings. What further lends weight to this man being the right Hodgdon is that he is buried in the Sangerville Village Cemetery. Perhaps the yearbook had his middle initial wrong. One can only guess.

Norma Louise Hill

I have not found much on her. The obituary of her mother, Effie Hill, said that one of her daughters married Orman Hilton, but the only marriage record for him has him married to Norma Butler/McDermott, not Norma Hill. Could Norma have changed her name to McDermott or Butler? Hard to say. But there's no other record of Norma.

Daniel A. Carleton

Daniel Augustus Carleton Jr. enlisted in the Army Air Corps January 20, 1943 and served until December 25, 1945. He apparently never married. He was born the youngest of six children on November 17, 1922 to Daniel Carleton Sr. and Hazel B. Davis. His parents were both born in Maine; in 1930 they lived in Guilford on Elm Street. Daniel died August 5, 2008, presumably of cancer. He was born in Cambridge, MA and died there, having moved back there sometime after the war. He worked for Quincy Oil Company in Massachusetts for 25 years, according to his obituary. He is buried in the Sangerville Village Cemetery, with his parents and brother Charles and his wife, Irene Dulac, who happened to be my cousin. He was quite handsome, I think, and apparently very accomplished, judging by his high school activities alone.

Ethel Louise Grant

Ethel Louise Grant was born June 25, 1925 in Maine, which meant that she was not quite 17 when she graduated from high school. According to the 1930 census, she was the daughter of Alymer and Ethel Grant, who lived in Sangerville on French's Mills Rd. Her father was a farmer. She had two brothers, Clarence S. and Doran E. Grant. Clarence was older, born in 1922; Doran was younger, born in 1927. In the 1940 census, Ethel was going by Louise, but everything else seems the same.

In 1944, Ethel was studying to be a nurse at Paterson General Hospital in Paterson, NJ. She was what was called a Nurse Cadet, part of the U.S. Public Health Service. She was living there in Paterson, still single.

The Cadet Nurse Corps was formed to supply nurses to U.S. hospitals depleted by World War II.  It partnered with nursing schools around the country to train people to be nurses. I had never heard of this group but learned a lot from their website: Cadet Nurse Corps.  It's very interesting!

A family tree posted to ancestry.com shows Ethel as having married in 1946 to William Latham. I can find no record of that, but I can ask the owner of the tree if I need to.

That tree also shows Ethel as having died in 1990 in Connecticut. I looked up the death record and she did die on 1 November 1990 at age 65. She was widowed by that time, working as a bookkeeper for University of CT. I wonder if she didn't finish her nurse training or decided she didn't want to do that anymore. Did they have children?

Well, I ran across Ethel's obituary in the Bangor Daily News from November 1990:

So, she still has kinfolk left in Maine, a brother and a sister who apparently never left the area. Of course, that was 20 years ago so they may both be dead now. Perhaps her children can be contacted for information about their mother and her activities during the war.

I've found that her brother Doran died in 2002 and that he apparently graduated from University of Connecticut in 1950. I didn't know about the sister, Rebecca, who was on the 1920 census.  She died in 2008.