The Watts Boys
My Watts cousins have asked for some background on the family tree. So over the next little while I’ll be posting some genealogy notes I have on the Watts folks. This is a picture of the Watts twins…I think that’s Phil on the left and Paul, my grandfather, on the right.
Paul died in 1929 when my mother was about eight years old. The boys were auto mechanics…the first of the breed…in and around Hobart, OK. My grandmother Luteen remarried the man I knew as a grandfather, John Clyde Hanes. Uncle Phil lived to to 96 and Aunt Ressie was 91 when she died in 1990. They had no children. Uncle Phil could fix anything and I can imagine him as one of those great mechanics and by extension his brother. These two boys were the oldest sons of Thomas Harrison Watts (more on him in a few days) and Nettie Bell Walker, both Kentuckians who came to the southwest around the turn of the century.
There’s no date on this photo. More on the early Watts family in Kentucky in my next post.
Is the second photo the twins as well ?
Durry. There was a woman around that was a nurse i think, that i thought was Phil and Ressies daughter. Mom would know hwho she was and the relation. I went to Phils place in the 70′s. His shop was full of lawn mowers and gas motors of various types. He definitely was the area fix it guy. I was told he and Paul were “the best” mechanics around.
I think we’ll have to ask Bunnie about an adopted daughter. I’m pretty sure they didn’t have kids. But then, I’ve genealogy surprises before.
They adopted a girl named Shirley Sunbeam, she married someone named Hoot (mom doesn’t know the last name), had 2 kids, got divorced. She was a nurse, lived somewhere in Western Oklahoma.
Yes. I met her during a trip to see the Hobart bunch.