Deryl Keith Hatch and Dr. Deryle Lonsdale, Linguistics and English Language
In the early twentieth century, throngs of male Greek immigrants came to Utah. They left their homeland seeking to save their families from impending poverty and to escape draft by the Greek and Turkish armies.1 The jobs they took in Utah mines, smelters, and rail yards were lowpaying and dangerous, but these were the least of the troubles waiting for Greeks in Utah. They found Mormons and other Utah residents to be inhospitable and strange, and they quickly learned to isolate themselves in all-Greek communities.
I have been interested in the relationship between Greeks and Americans (specifically Mormons) for some time because of its influence on my grandfather James Peter Heaton’s young life. While alive, he was very guarded about his childhood memories. However, initial interviews with him and his family provided a simple outline of his early experiences. Heaton’s biological mother was woman of Mormon descent, Alice Ann Clauson, who lived in Price, Utah, during the early twentieth century. In 1910 she married Greek immigrant Peter Jounakes who had come to Utah to work in the Carbon County mines. The marriage was short and tumultuous. After six years and four children (including my grandfather), Jounakes left the family. Clauson, destitute and alone, put my grandfather and his three younger sisters in an orphanage. He was adopted and raised by Daniel and Eva Heaton, white Mormons from Alta, Utah. Based on this outline and my general knowledge of Greek history in Utah, I hypothesize that my grandfather suffered childhood trauma, not only because of his broken family but perhaps also because, as a product of Greek/Mormon intermarriage, he was marginalized.
When I began working on ORCA, my research goal was to compose an article for eventual publication in the Utah Historical Quarterly which, using the case study of James Heaton’s childhood years (1911-1919), would show the forces at work behind early-twentieth-century Mormon attitudes toward Greek immigrants. At the time I constructed this thesis, I was operating under the assumption that, because Clauson’s father and mother emigrated from Europe to Utah sometime in the late nineteenth century, they were part of the mass migration of Mormon converts and, thus, were devoted to Mormonism. However, based on the information I have gathered to this point, it appears that her parents were more cultural Mormons than they were practicing Mormons. Despite this I think my study can say a good deal about historical social interaction and discrimination in Utah, even if further findings require me to exclude religious considerations. As I continue to research Clauson’s background, I will tailor my thesis accordingly.
In the course of this project, I came across several major finds. I started my research by reading numerous works about the history of Greeks in Utah, including Helen Zeese Papanikolas’s series “Toil and Rage in a New Land.” Through this process I learned about Utah’s mining industry and workers in the early twentieth century, Greek relations with Americans during this period, and Greek culture and history.
After I had done my background reading, I began to research at the Family History Center in BYU’s Harold B. Lee Library. Some of my first discoveries occurred as I searched their census records on microfilm. In the 1900 census, I found useful information about Clauson’s immediate family. Also, in the 1920 census, I found Clauson living in a boarding house in Salt Lake City, single, childless, and working as a laundress. In that same census, I found my grandfather and his three younger sisters in the Orphan’s Home and Day Nursery in Salt Lake City. The census listed the sister’s names and ages, information that I hadn’t been able to find before that point. I also learned how to search the Family History Library Catalogue. This skill helped me locate Jounakes and Clauson’s marriage license (which confirmed among other things that Clauson was 18 and Jounakes 40 when they married) and Jounakes’s burial plot in the Los Angeles National Cemetery (which revealed that he served in the U.S. Navy and died in 1935). Later, I requested his death certificate from the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder, a document which showed that he was born in 1870 in Greece and that he died of a stroke in the Los Angeles Veterans Hospital, single and 65 years old.
The Internet was another useful resource. A Google search of the name “Jounakes” displayed a burial site in the Salt Lake City Cemetery for an infant female named Delta Jounakes. I called the Utah State Archives, and they were able to locate Delta’s death certificate. She was Jounakes and Clauson’s fifth child, my grandfather’s fourth sister, whom he never knew about because she was born in 1919 after he had already been sent to the orphanage. She died of “Purpura Hemorrhagica” at the age of 7 months. I also used the Church’s FamilySearch database extensively. Guided by an interview with Clauson’s 95-year-old cousin Elva Wayne and the family pedigrees Wayne gave me, I was able glean substantial information from FamilySearch about Clauson’s background. For example, I discovered that, after divorcing Jounakes, she married a man named Lawrence Vincent and that Clauson’s sister Liza married an Italian in her later years.
One of the most difficult lessons I learned while doing this project is that genealogy records are often fallible and very difficult to obtain. Record keepers are sometimes careless, misspelling names and incorrectly listing other data. Also because of privacy issues, many repositories for vital records won’t give them out unless a certain period of time has elapsed since the recorded event or the requester is the next of kin. And, if they will give them out, it often takes weeks if not months to receive responses. For example, my request to the National Personnel Records Center (an archive for military records) will take at least six months to process. Although I have obtained significant knowledge of my grandfather and biological greatgrandparents, the unforeseen setbacks have left me with more to do. I hope to locate any living children or grandchildren from Clauson’s second marriage and/or her siblings’ marriages. Also, my interview with Diane Parkinson, the family history subject librarian at the Harold B. Lee Library, exposed a few other possible research avenues, such as foreign birth, driving, welfare, and voter registration records. Finally, I will at some point compose an article and submit it for publication. I fully expect to pursue this project for the rest of my life as I learn from the mistakes and victories of my ancestors.