When my Uncle Tony first met Heidi, then my fiancée, he quipped with his particular brand of sardonic judgment, “She will improve the Barker gene pool.” Tony was a University of Chicago-trained lawyer, and brevity was part of the joke. There was no accompanying argument. None was necessary. He knew the Barkers.
Viewed objectively, the observation is difficult to dispute. The Barkers tended toward a certain sturdy visual normality. Heidi was different. Dark-haired, fine-featured, expressive; she appeared exotically composed beside us.
And that raises the genealogical question: where from?
The Cole and Gower Lines
From Galway and Britain to Industrial Ohio
The Gower line is the convergence of Irish Catholic, English laboring, and later American industrial histories.
The maternal side of the branch begins in Galway City. On 10 February 1846, William Lynsky, later recorded as Linskey, married Honor Henry in the Roman Catholic parish of St. Nicholas North and East.
Their daughter Ellen Lynsky was baptized in the same parish on 4 January 1849.
By 1861 the family had moved to Liverpool. The census records William and Honor as Irish-born, with two older daughters, Ellen and Mary Ann, also born in Ireland, and younger children born after the family’s relocation to England.
Nine-year-old Mary Ann Linskey is almost certainly the woman who later appears as Honoria Ann Linskey. The ages align closely, and when Honoria married Lewis Gower in Kent in 1878 she identified her father as William Linskey. The change from Mary Ann to Honoria remains unexplained, but the family linkage is strong. Honoria’s later American records also return to an Irish birthplace, making the 1881 English census entry of Nottingham, Nottinghamshire, best treated as an anomalous record rather than the controlling one.
William and Honor therefore appear to have married in Galway during the opening years of the Great Famine, raised their first children there, and moved the family to Liverpool while those children were still young. The timing does not prove that famine conditions caused the move, but it places the Linskeys squarely within the larger Irish migration into Britain during and immediately after the catastrophe.
On 12 October 1878, Honoria Ann Linskey, age twenty-seven and described as a spinster, married Lewis Gower, age twenty-nine, a bachelor and laborer, at St. Martin’s Church in Aldington, Kent. Lewis’s father, Charles Gower, was already deceased and had also been a laborer; Honoria’s father, William Linskey, was identified as a farmer.
The 1881 census finds the couple at Aldington Hill. Lewis worked as a bricklayer’s laborer. Their household already included one-year-old Alice M. Gower and five-month-old Emeline Gower, both born in Aldington.
The English civil registers then carry the family forward with unusual clarity. Emeline Gower was registered in the East Ashford district in the fourth quarter of 1880, Charles William Gower in the third quarter of 1883, and Winifred Gower in the fourth quarter of 1885. Each record gives the mother’s maiden name as Linskey.
These children account neatly for the 1910 census statement that Honoria had borne four children, all four still living: Alice, Emeline, Charles, and Winifred. Alice no longer appears in the parental household by 1910 and would then have been about thirty. She should not be confused with the Alice Gower who married Eugene E. Cole in Medina County in 1885; that Alice was eighteen at marriage and therefore belonged to a different Gower family.
The family’s Atlantic chronology remains less tidy. In 1910 Lewis reported having immigrated to the United States in 1870, and Honoria in 1876. Those dates cannot represent their permanent relocation. They married in Kent in 1878, were still living there in 1881, and continued registering children in England through at least 1885. The reported immigration years may preserve memories of earlier temporary American journeys, or they may simply be inaccurate recollections recorded decades later. What is certain is that the family eventually settled in Ohio.
By 1910 the Gower household was no longer one of parents with dependent children. Emeline was twenty-nine, Charles twenty-six, and Winifred twenty-four; all three were unmarried and living at home. The household was also economically active. Lewis, then sixty, worked as a laborer in a steel plant. Emeline worked as a clerk in a dry-goods business. Charles was a machinist in the tube mills. Only Winifred reported no outside occupation.
The record therefore captures a multi-earner immigrant household rather than prolonged childhood in the modern sense. Residence, work, and family remained closely integrated even after the children reached adulthood.
Charles’s own trajectory shows how rapidly the next generation entered the industrial economy. Born in Kent in 1883, he was already a machinist by 1910. On 11 July 1918, he married Pearl E. Cole in Ohio.
Only weeks later, on 12 September, Charles registered for the World War I draft in Youngstown. He was thirty-five years old, employed as a foreman by the Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company, and living with Pearl at 20 South Avenue. On the card he named “Wife, Mrs. Charles W. Gower” as his nearest relative.
The card proves registration, employment, residence, and marriage, but not military service. Because his draft registration occurred only sixty days before the Armistice, the card does not establish that he ever entered military service. He may have been processed but never inducted, perhaps remaining in essential industrial employment; alternatively, he may have served briefly and been demobilized during 1919.
But their marriage did not proceed smoothly. In the 1920 census Pearl Gower was living in the household of her father, Eugene Cole, with her daughter.
Charles was living with his mother and the record shows his marital status in 1920 was “divorced.”
Whatever caused the rupture between Charles and Pearl in 1920, it was not permanent. By 1930 they were again living together as husband and wife in Youngstown. More significantly, in 1940 their household also included members of the next generation of the family, the Parsons, showing that the Gower home had become an intergenerational household rather than simply a reunited couple.
The census therefore does double duty. It documents the apparent reconciliation of Charles and Pearl, while also capturing the moment when the Gower and Parsons lines had effectively merged under one roof. The immigrant generation had become the household foundation for the technically trained industrial generation that followed.
The Cole Family
Pearl’s father, Eugene E. Cole, represents a different kind of nineteenth-century movement. His ancestry appears to have reached Ohio not through a contemporary Atlantic crossing, but through Canada and New York.
The best current reconstruction identifies Eugene as the four-year-old Eugene Cole living in 1870 with John Cole and Catherine Cole. John was recorded as born in Canada and Catherine in New York. The household also contained several children whose names and ages correspond closely with the same family ten years earlier in New York.
The 1860 and 1870 records form a strong sequence. In 1860 John and Catherine were living in New York with children including Thomas, Almira, Ira, and Louisa. By 1870 the family had moved to Ohio; the older children remained identifiable by age and name, while younger children now included Frederick, Eugene, and Charles.
This makes John and Catherine the probable parents of Eugene E. Cole, although no record yet found explicitly names Eugene E. as their son in adulthood. The circumstantial case is nevertheless strong: Eugene’s age, birthplace, geography, and later residence all align.
By 1880, Eugene appears to have been living outside the parental household and working as a hired hand. That fact should not be overread as evidence of orphanhood or family collapse; adolescent wage labor and residence in another household were common. It does, however, show that Eugene entered adult economic life through work rather than inherited property.
In 1885, Eugene married Alice Gower in Medina County.
A later 1930 census reported Eugene as born in New York and both of his parents as born in Massachusetts. The New York birthplace agrees well with the probable 1870 identification; the parental birthplaces do not. The earlier 1860 and 1870 censuses consistently identify John as Canadian-born and Catherine as New York-born and therefore deserve greater evidentiary weight than a retrospective statement recorded when Eugene was about sixty-five.
A Massachusetts marriage between a John Cole and Catherine Covell remains a possible collateral clue because it offers one explanation for the later Massachusetts association, but the evidence is not strong enough to identify Catherine Covell securely as Eugene’s mother.
The broad pattern, however, is increasingly clear. John’s generation appears to have moved from Canada into New York, and the family then continued westward into Ohio during the 1860s. Eugene remained in Medina County, married there, and raised the daughter who would become Pearl Gower.
The Cole and Gower lines therefore reached the same Ohio family by very different routes. The Gowers carried with them an Irish-to-British-to-American migration extending back to famine-era Galway. The Coles appear to have moved through the northern North American interior, from Canada to New York to Ohio.
The Parsons Line
From West Virginia to the Youngstown Industrial Economy
The Parsons line can be traced with considerable confidence to John Parsons, born about 1818 or 1819 in Virginia, and his wife Cenia Parsons, also born about 1818 or 1819. Her name appears as “Ceny” in the 1870 census and more clearly as “Cenia” in the surviving 1880 census copy; Cenia is therefore the preferable working form, although her maiden name remains unknown.
In 1870 John and Cenia were living in Jefferson Township, Kanawha County, West Virginia, where John worked as a farmer. Their household included several children, among them sixteen-year-old George M. Parsons, the ancestor of the later Ohio Parsons family.
The census preserves an unusually revealing historical detail. George and his older siblings were recorded as born in Virginia, while a younger child born after 1863 was recorded as born in West Virginia, which had separated from Virginia and entered the Union only in 1863. The political boundary had changed around a family already living in the region.
That fact places George’s childhood directly within the upheaval of the Civil War. His father John was in his early forties when the conflict began and was therefore of possible military age, but no military-service record has yet been securely connected to him. Kanawha County contained both Union and Confederate sympathies, and residence in the new state cannot by itself establish allegiance.
The 1880 census finds John and Cenia still in Jefferson District, strengthening the identification of the couple and confirming their continued residence in Kanawha County. The surviving schedule is itself a later copy made because the original census returns had been received in poor condition, which helps explain minor variations such as “Ceny” and “Cenia.”
Their son George M. Parsons, born about 1853 or 1854 in what was then Virginia, later remained in West Virginia and married Laura V. [maiden name unresolved].
By 1910 George and Laura were living with several of their children, including Howard H. Parsons, Daniel F. Parsons, Pearl Parsons, and Paul Parsons. George worked as a laborer in the oil fields. The census reported that George and Laura had been married for approximately twenty-six years and that Laura had borne six children, all then living.
The occupation marks the first clearly documented transition in the line from agriculture into the developing extractive and industrial economy of West Virginia. John had farmed. George earned wages in the oil economy.
George and Laura’s son Howard H. Parsons, born about 1893 in West Virginia, carried that movement farther north and west into Ohio.
By 1920 Howard was living with his wife Edna M. Anderson and their children in Ohio. Howard’s brothers Paul and Daniel F. were also present in the household, providing a strong genealogical bridge back to George and Laura’s West Virginia family.
Howard worked in the pottery industry, while Daniel was employed as a brakeman for the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Parsons family had by then moved decisively away from farming and into the network of industrial employment that joined the Ohio River valley to Youngstown.
By 1930 the family was living in Struthers, Mahoning County, within the Youngstown industrial district.
Howard, approximately thirty-seven, was working as a machinist in a steel mill. His progression from pottery work to steel machining is important because it changes the interpretation of his son Carl’s later career. Carl did not enter industrial work as a complete occupational departure from the preceding generation. He inherited a household already familiar with skilled factory labor and the disciplines of industrial production.
Howard and Edna’s children included Joseph H. Parsons, Carl Russell Parsons, Dorothy M. Parsons, and several younger children. Their exact birth dates remain to be established individually, but the census sequence provides approximate birth years and confirms that the family was firmly established in Ohio by Carl’s generation.
Carl Russell Parsons was born on 15 December 1915 in East Liverpool, Ohio, according to his baptismal certificate. His later marriage application gives Wellsville, Ohio as his birthplace; because the two communities are neighboring Ohio River towns, the discrepancy should be preserved rather than forced into agreement. The baptismal certificate provides the more specific contemporary family evidence for East Liverpool.
Carl’s transition into adulthood is unusually well documented.
On 3 July 1937, twenty-one-year-old Carl married eighteen-year-old Eileen P. Gower in Mahoning County.
The marriage application records Carl as a steel worker and names his parents explicitly as Howard Parsons and Edna Anderson. Neither Carl nor Eileen had previously been married.
Eileen’s side of the application identifies her as the daughter of Charles W. Gower and Pearl Cole, thereby providing a direct documentary bridge between the Parsons family and the Gower-Cole ancestry reconstructed above.
By 1940 Carl and Eileen were living in the Youngstown household of Eileen’s parents, Charles and Pearl Gower.
The census identifies Carl as Charles Gower’s son-in-law and Eileen as his daughter. Their infant daughter Phyllis A. Parsons was also present. Three generations therefore occupied the same household:
Charles and Pearl Gower → Eileen Gower Parsons → Phyllis Parsons.
This continued a residential pattern already visible in the earlier Gower household. Marriage did not necessarily create an immediate independent household. Adult children and young married couples could remain embedded within an extended family economy while accumulating the resources necessary for independence.
Carl’s later résumé provides an unusually detailed first-person account of what followed. He graduated from Struthers High School in 1934, where his coursework included mechanical drawing, mathematics, and machine-shop training. He subsequently attended Youngstown College for two years in mechanical engineering and pursued additional study in tool design through the International Correspondence Schools.
His industrial career began in 1936 at the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company, where he progressed through the formal training of an apprentice machinist. From 1941 to 1951 he worked at Cold Metal Products, advancing to class “A” machinist and performing precision work across the major machine-shop disciplines.
In 1951 Carl joined Mullins Manufacturing Corporation. He began as general foreman of the tool-and-die department and later became tool engineer and department manager. His responsibilities expanded beyond machining into machinery and tooling design, cost estimation, product development, budgeting, scheduling, personnel supervision, union grievances, hiring, and coordination with other departments.
Seen across four generations, Carl’s career was therefore less an isolated leap than the culmination of a long occupational transformation: John Parsons farmed in Kanawha County; George Parsons entered the West Virginia oil economy; Howard moved through pottery into steel machining; and Carl Parsons converted machining skill into technical and managerial authority. Each generation moved farther from subsistence and general labor toward specialized industrial knowledge.
The Hoffman and Kemp Lines
Polish Identity Under Russian Rule
The Hoffman line introduces a more complicated European geography.
Frank Hoffman was born about 1871 or 1872 in territory described variously as Russia, Russian Poland, and Poland. Those descriptions are not necessarily contradictory.
At the time of Frank’s birth, no independent Polish state existed. Poland had been partitioned among the Russian Empire, Prussia, and Austria. A person born in the Russian-controlled portion could therefore be legally a subject of the Russian Empire, geographically born in Polish territory, and ethnically Polish.
The 1900 census recorded Frank and his wife Elizabeth as born in Russia.
The 1910 census was more specific, recording Frank and his parents as Russian Polish.
The 1910 census captures more than Frank and Elizabeth’s surviving children. Living within the household was Elizabeth’s father, Karl Adam or Adams, a German-born locksmith. His presence provides a documentary bridge between Elizabeth’s Russian-Polish birthplace and the family memory of her emphatically German identity. Elizabeth appears to have belonged to a German-speaking family living within the Russian-controlled Polish borderlands before the next generation crossed the Atlantic to Ohio. By 1910 Karl had remarried. His wife Minnie was Elizabeth’s stepmother, and Karolina and George were therefore Elizabeth’s much younger half- or step-relations depending upon their precise parentage, which should not be inferred from the census alone.
The 1920 census likewise appears to identify Frank’s origin as Russia-Poland.
His obituary later described him simply as born in Poland and called him a prominent Polish resident of Youngstown.
The family biography says that Frank was born in 1872, came to the United States in 1888, and reached Youngstown in 1891. Census records vary slightly on the immigration year, so the safest formulation is that he arrived in America during the late 1880s or very early 1890s.
He eventually worked as a laborer and later as a shearman in an iron works, an occupation firmly embedded in Youngstown’s industrial economy.
Elizabeth Adams and the German Tradition
Frank married Elizabeth (Elise) “Lizzie” Adams on 22 October 1892.
Elizabeth’s ancestry requires careful description. The census records identify her and her parents as born in Russia or Russian Poland. Yet the family biography remembers her as deeply proud of her High Deutsch, or German, heritage.
These claims are not mutually exclusive. German-speaking communities existed throughout the Russian Empire and Russian-controlled Poland. Elizabeth could have been born under Russian rule while belonging to an ethnically German or German-speaking family. Political citizenship, birthplace, language, and ethnic identity were separate categories.
The family biography says that Elizabeth spoke German, Russian, and English and eventually became known for her ability to interpret for immigrants and businessmen. The claim that she learned thirteen languages may contain some family embellishment, but the broader portrait of a multilingual woman in an immigrant city is entirely plausible.
According to the family account, Frank first saw Elizabeth at Mass at St. Joseph’s Church in Youngstown and immediately announced that he intended to marry her. He spoke Polish; she spoke German, Russian, and English. Their initial courtship was conducted largely through gesture and pantomime.
The story may have been polished through repeated family telling, but it expresses the social reality of Youngstown’s immigrant neighborhoods: churches, workplaces, and streets brought together people who shared religion and aspiration before they necessarily shared language.
Frank and Elizabeth later helped establish St. Casimir’s Roman Catholic Church and owned houses at 21 and 22 Coral Street, near the church.
Their household was marked by extraordinary loss. The 1910 census records that Elizabeth had given birth to eleven children, only four of whom were then living.
The four surviving children were: Rosa or Rose Hoffman, Magdalena, later remembered as Magdaline or “Lani”, Karl or Carl Hoffman, and Maria or Marie Hoffman. The 1900 census also records an infant daughter, Sophia, who had died by 1910.
This demographic fact should not be treated as incidental. Seven childhood deaths were necessarily a major fact of family life. Their psychological consequences cannot be recovered from the census, but the scale of loss provides essential context for later family memories of Elizabeth as a strict disciplinarian.
Frank died suddenly at his home at 21 Coral Street in October 1926, at approximately fifty-four years of age. He had reportedly seemed healthy until the morning of his death.
Elizabeth survived him until 8 December 1941.
Marie Hoffman and Joseph Kemp
Frank and Elizabeth’s daughter Maria or Marie Hoffman was born in Ohio about 1905 or 1906.
The 1910 census shows her as four-year-old Maria in her parents’ household. In 1920, she remained in the Youngstown household as Marie Hoffman.
She later married Joseph Kemp, who had been born about 1895 or 1896 in what the 1940 census called Austria.
Because Joseph was born before the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, “Austria” may refer to the former empire rather than modern Austria. His precise ethnic and geographic origin remains unresolved.
In 1940, Joseph was working as a machinist for a steam railroad. The occupation placed him within the same industrial system that drew so many branches of the family to Youngstown: steel production, rail transport, machining, and the skilled trades that supported them.
Marie was recorded as born in Ohio. The German identity belonged to her mother Elizabeth, who appears to have come from a German-speaking community in Russian Poland.
Joseph and Marie’s household included: Ruth Kemp, Elizabeth Kemp, Theresa Kemp, Evelyn Kemp, and Joseph Kemp Jr.
Their daughter Ruth Virginia Kemp, born 12 June 1924 in Youngstown, would eventually connect the Hoffman-Kemp family to the DiGiovannis.
The DiGiovanni Line
From Buccino to Manhattan
If the Gower-Linskey line carries the movement from Galway through Victorian Britain, and the Hoffmans the shifting borderlands of Russian Poland, the DiGiovannis embody the great migration from southern Italy.
The family’s earliest securely identified immigrant is Antonio DiGiovanni, later commonly recorded as Anthony.
Antonio was born on 24 February 1875, probably in or near Buccino, in the Province of Salerno. The precise birthplace still requires confirmation in the Italian civil register. Buccino is securely established, however, as the family’s continuing Italian home through the passport record of Antonio’s son. A later Social Security record gives Antonio’s birth as 22 February 1876, but the contemporary naturalization and draft records support 24 February 1875 more strongly.
Antonio reported arriving in the United States on 28 June 1889, when he was approximately fourteen years old.
Antonio’s occupation evolved with his American life. At naturalization in 1903, he was a barber.
By the time of his First World War draft registration in 1918, he described himself as a salesman.
The draft card again records the family at 759 Third Avenue and names his wife, Antonetta, as Antonio’s nearest relative. It confirms his naturalized citizenship and the birth date of 24 February 1875. It does not prove that Antonio was exempted from military service. It proves only that he registered.
His 1903 naturalization also had an unintended consequence for later generations.
Because Antonio naturalized before Carlo’s birth, that naturalization appears to interrupt the paternal line for purposes of later Italian citizenship claims. Antonio had secured American citizenship for himself before his American son, Charles (Carlo), was born.
Antonio’s wife, Antonetta Bruno, was also born in Italy. Her name appears in the records as Antonetta, Antonietta, Antoinette, and perhaps Antonina. These variations were common in immigrant documents, particularly when Italian names were filtered through English-speaking clerks and handwritten census schedules.
The 1905 New York State census shows Antonio and Antonetta with three children: Angiolina, born in Italy; Ellena, born in New York; Ida, born in New York.
The household records the migration almost child by child. The eldest daughter had crossed the Atlantic; the younger daughters were born after the family established itself in New York.
By 1915, the family had expanded, and its names had begun to shift toward American usage. Antonio appeared as Anthony. Ellena had become Helen. Angiolina probably appeared in shortened form as Lina. Another Italian-born daughter, Mildred, was also present, as was the couple’s American-born son Charles.
The record captures assimilation in progress, but, Italian and American identities continued to coexist within the same family.
Carlo’s Return to Italy
Antonio and Antonetta’s son was born in New York City on 5 December 1907 and named Carlo Umberto Di Giovanni.
In later American life he became Charles U. DiGiovanni, but his 1917 passport application preserves both his Italian name and the family’s continuing connection to Buccino.
The passport application states that Carlo had left the United States on 22 May 1914, when he was six years old, and was temporarily living in Buccino, Province of Salerno.
In May 1917, at the age of nine, he appeared before the American consul in Naples to apply for a passport permitting his return to the United States.
He identified New York as his birthplace, 759 Third Avenue as his permanent American residence, Antonio as his naturalized American father, and Buccino as his temporary residence. His stated purpose was to return to the United States to rejoin his father and resume residence there.
Family tradition holds that Carlo had been sent to Italy to be educated. An American-born child spent roughly three formative years in his parents’ ancestral town before returning to the United States during the First World War.
The episode complicates any simple narrative of one-way assimilation. Carlo was born American, raised partly in Italy, and returned to become Charles. His identity was formed not by a single migration but by crossing and recrossing the Atlantic.
There is one unresolved documentary problem. The 1915 New York census appears to include Charles in the Manhattan household even though the passport says he had been in Italy since 1914. The family may have reported him as a household member despite his temporary absence, or the chronology may be incomplete.
From Manhattan to Youngstown
Carlo’s next major migration occurred within the United States. In 1936, Charles U. DiGiovanni moved from New York to Youngstown, Ohio.
Youngstown had become one of the industrial furnaces of the American interior, drawing Italians, Poles, Slovaks, Germans, Irish, and English into the orbit of steel mills, railroads, machine shops, and Catholic parishes.
Charles found employment with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. In 1940 he married Ruth Virginia Kemp, joining the Italian DiGiovanni line with Ruth’s Polish, German-speaking, and still-unresolved Central European Kemp ancestry.
The 1950 census shows Charles and Ruth with their children, including Patricia and Charles Anthony. Their son Charles Anthony had been born at St. Elizabeth Hospital in Youngstown on 28 December 1945.
Charles U.’s life took an abrupt turn in 1948, when his leg was amputated. The injury ended his employment with the railroad. It did not end his working life. Charles turned instead to music and played piano professionally under the name Charlie Dee.
His obituary remembered him as a popular pianist, a member of local churches and civic associations, and a familiar figure in the Youngstown and Poland communities.
Protective Arts 