YORKS-YERKS-YERXA GENEALOGY

WELCOME TO THE DESCENDENCY PAGE OF

BOB YORKS

I am dexcended from Paulis JURCKXEM, the immigrant (1642), as follows:

Herman YORKS was born around Claryville, NY in the Catskill Mountains. Like his father and his male siblings, he was a lumberjack in the Catskill forests. Herman was listed as a bark peeler. He enlisted during the Civil War and served primarily as a teamster driving ammunition wagons to the front lines along the East coast. After the war, Herman moved his family (along with some of the BOWERS family) westward, first to Illinois, then back to Ohio, finally ending up as a homesteader in Grand Travers County, Michigan, near what is now Fife Lake & Kingsley.

Gerald YORKS, my father, was born in Fife Lake (probably at home). In his younger years, he was an amateur boxer. During the depression he worked for the WPA.

He developed a trade as a gunsmith, often making guns totally from scratch, cutting, boring and blueing the gun barrels from raw bar stock; cutting, shaping, decorating, and staining the stocks from hunks of selected wood. I can remember many nights that I spent watching him painstakingly cutting in the decorations by hand.

During the Second World War, he worked as a foreman at the Rock Island Arsenal in Illinois. After the war, we returned to Michigan, where he worked as machinist during the day, and continued his gunmaking at night. He made many custom guns for people all around the country. He wrote articles for gun magazines and did consulting work for some of the major gun manufacturers in the country. He died in 1984 in Muskegon, MI.

If you know that you are, or think that you may be, related through any of the above families, please feel free to contact me, if you are looking for additional information, if you want to give me information, or if you just want to "connect".

You can Email me.