Harry Lee Derrick (1897 - 1980)

Hi Melissa -- Harry Lee Derrick was my great-grandfather. He married Genevieve (Jeannie) Vitone from Sudbury, Ontario. They met in Detroit when she was seventeen and he was... twenty-seven, I think? He had a wife before that who died in childbirth and is buried with their baby in (I believe) Evergreen Cemetery in Detroit.

Jeannie was working in a sandwich shop near the old train station, and Harry met and wooed her there. She was promised to a young man from home (Patsy), but when he came down to Detroit to visit, the story is that Harry ran him off with a gun in hand. Gun notwithstanding, he was a good man who worked all through the Depression as a manager at GM, and he supported the entire extended family in Detroit through those hard times. He passed when I was in the fourth grade. He died of liver cancer; all my memories are of him old and ill, but I recall him giving us "Georges" (silver dollars) and I have a lot of pictures of him and Jeannie. We also have a photo of Harry as a boy on his bike outside the telegraph office in Denison, TX, at the turn of the century.

We also have a photo of James Lafayette wearing overalls, a hat, and holding a pipe, as well as a picture of "Grandma Hessly" wearing black and sitting in a rocker on a porch somewhere in Texas!

Harry and Jeannie had three children: Amelia Derrick (stillbirth, buried in Evergreen Cemetery, Detroit), Harry Jr. (known as Sonny) who died at the age of twenty-one, and Delores Newman, my grandmother, who lived in Walled Lake, Michigan, and who passed away about six years ago. She was the amateur genealogist of the family who had the records that let me find you. I can remember hearing stories about Aunt Nora, who was a redhead, if I recall correctly (?)

Delores had four children: Valerie Leitch (d.), Scott Derrick Newman (Walled Lake MI), Daniel Newman (Everett, WA) and Jeffrey Newman (d.)

Val had three children: Sarah McClure Chirico (three kids), James McClure (d.), and Torrey McClure (two kids). Scott had two daughters: Jessica Newman (me) and Jackie Crockett (one kid). Dan had two children: Kira Newman (two kids) and Scott Daniel Newman (four kids).

There is a family tree recorded in a book called "Casper Branner and his Descendants" which ends, I think, with Harry Lee Derrick's generation (?) Someone in the family still has a copy of that book, and there is also a copy in the Burton Historical Room at the Main Branch of the Detroit Library on Woodward Avenue in Detroit.