Introducing the Franklin County Coordinator:  Donald W. Turner

Greetings!  I thought it might be nice to introduce myself to anybody who will be using the Franklin County GenWeb site.  I was recently honored to have been accepted as the new coordinator and, although I'm not sure I really know what I've gotten into, I hope to keep adding more useful information for fellow genealogists.

        Hazel Myrtle Tobias Turner 1999

Here we are a couple years ago, myself, my wife the former Barbara Dubbins and our now 16 year old son Phillip Carrell Turner.  I am a Sr. Systems Integrator for Lockheed Martin Enterprise Information Systems working virtually in Arizona for the Orlando Florida based division.  My customers within Lockheed Martin are concentrated mostly in Delaware Valley Pennsylvania, Gaithersburg Virginia and San Jose California, with a scattering of others throughout the country.  I develop web based database applications in support of their day-to-day operations.

Barbara is a 7th grade History teacher at Western Sky Middle School in Litchfield Park Arizona and Phillip is a junior at Bourgade Catholic High School in Phoenix where he has lettered in band, chess and soccer.

I began working on genealogy when I was 16 years old and lived in Tucson Arizona.  Across the street was a young couple, Ted and Karen, who were Morman and they showed me the research they were working on.  As it turned out, Karen had known my great grandfather before he died in River Falls Wisconsin in 1963.  Talk about small world.  In any case, I began by writing my grandmother who supplied me with a lot of good information to start, and I haven't looked back since then.  That was waaaaaaaay back in 1973.  Since then, I adopted my wife's family, started researching it and found we are 10th cousins.  (which makes Phillip an 11th cousin to himself - that could explain some things)

So how did I get into Franklin County so much?  Well, I blame my grandmother.  Hazel Myrtle Tobias was born February 1903 in Hampton, Franklin County, Iowa to James Harvey Tobias and Clara Ellsworth Carpenter.  She left there to attend college at Ames where she graduated in 1929.  She had met my grandfather there, Carrell Orsen Turner and they married.  He, having graduated in Chemical Engineering began working for Alcoa at their E. St. Louis facility.  That's why my father and his brothers and sister, and all my brothers and I were all born there later.

In 1957, grandma and grandpa moved to Point Comfort, Calhoun County, Texas where grandpa had designed and built the new Alcoa aluminum processing plant.  5 years later, my family left E. St. Louis and moved to Toledo, Ohio.  Every summer thereafter, we would drive down to Texas to visit on the gulf coast.  We all loved their house down their, with their back yard fronting right onto Lavaca bay.  In 1969 my parents finalized their divorce.  A year later, both were remarried, with my mother remaining in Toledo and my father and step-mother moving to Tucson, Arizona.  We all loved Arizona, so when, in 1973 my father got a new job in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, we all decided we would someday return to Arizona. 

While in Pennsylvania, I finished high school then went to and graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania in Indiana, Indiana County, Pennsylvania.  (If you never heard of it, that's OK, but my favorite actor was born there - Jimmy Stewart)  After graduating, I took a job programming with Robertshaw Controls company in New Stanton Pennsylvania.  When I was interviewed for that job, my prospective boss asked me what I wanted to do in 5 years.  I told him I wanted to move to Arizona.  He thought that was a good idea.  So, 3 years later, I got a job with Goodyear Aerospace in Litchfield Park Arizona and have been there ever since.  I planned to work there for a few years then find a real job and I've been there 22 years.  I'm still in the same place, but Goodyear Aerospace was bought in 1987 by Loral Defense Systems, then bought again in 1996 by Lockheed Martin.

Over Thanksgiving break in 1998, my father, my aunt, my uncle, and my brother converged on Point Comfort Texas to help my grandmother clear out her house.  She was 95 and had lived in the home since 1957.  Since she and I had worked for a lot of years on the history and genealogy of the family, she gave me every scrap of paper from the house.  It filled most of the bed of my pickup truck.  It includes pictures, yearbooks, newspapers, even old tax forms.  A lot of it relates to Franklin County, which brings us back to why I am doing this GenWeb coordinating thing. 

Grandma sold the house and we found a really nice independent care facility in Phoenix and she moved into it in September 1999.  Unfortunately, she couldn't quite handle living alone, so 9 months later, she moved to Ohio to live near my aunt in an excellent assisted care home.  There she happily lived, visited often by family until she passed away in December 2001, just shy of her 99th birthday.  She was a wonderful lady and we still all miss her.  So that's how I got here.