Lawton Family History and Information
Written by: Leo Lawton I hadn’t been home for a couple of months. Home being where my folks lived way up in northern New York I mean, as I was in the Navy at the time and stationed in this little out-of-the-way place called Chincoteague, Virginia. I was thinkin about putting enough cash together for a trip up there, but […]
Read moreWritten by: Leo Lawton As a neophyte Senior Chief I had been the Airframes Division Chief for about four months in April 1967. Senior Chief McLean who had been in the Navy much longer and a Senior Chief much longer also, was the Maintenance Control Division Chief. One day he asked me to come to the Maintenance Control Office to […]
Read moreWritten by: Leo Lawton Right after Thanksgiving 1966 my brother Dell and I and our families left Northern New York for our new duty stations. Dell and his family were headed to Pensacola, Florida, while my family and I were going to Meridian, Mississippi. We traveled together in separate vehicles. We spent a night in Covington, Kentucky. We then proceeded […]
Read moreWritten by: Leo Lawton During 1889 the keel was laid for a ship named the Yumuri. It was acquired by the United States Navy April 19, 1898 during the Spanish-American War. Fitted as a Cruiser she was renamed the Badger April 28, 1898. She was decommissioned October 31, 1899, and stricken from the records on March 23, 1900. She was […]
Read moreWe Called it Gitmo Leo Lawton Of course, I had heard of a country called Cuba. Did I know anything about it? Not much! Then came the Missile Crisis of 1962 and all the world became aware of Cuba. I was attached to VF-174, the Hell Razors, a Navy Fighter Squadron located at Jacksonville, Florida at that time. The crisis […]
Read moreWritten by: Leo Lawton It had to be in 1960, ’61, or’62 because I bought the 1953 Ford in Norfolk, Virginia in 1959, and took it to Florida in the first part of 1960. Then I traded it off before our first child was born in late 1962. It was a hard-luck trip from the get-go. Our journey from Jacksonville […]
Read moreWritten By: Leo Lawton Because Cheshire was wasted in 1067 it is nearly absolute that any landowning family in it were descendants of those who had came from Normandy with William the Conqueror. However, it is during the reign of Richard the Lionhearted between 1189 and 1199, that ancestors of a branch of a present day Lawton family are first […]
Read moreCompiled by Eric Benjamin Lawton 2008 A brief historical introduction: Eurpean settlement at the Cape of Good Hope began in 1652 when the Dutch East India Company sent a small group under the leadership of 33 year-old Jan Van Riebeck to establish a victually station on the long sea route to the East. Although the settlement became permanent and grew […]
Read moreOn the afternoon of 24 September 1664, Thomas Brownell was killed in an accident while on his way from his farm at the northwest end of Rhode Island to Portsmouth. (The Brownell’s, as was typical of most settlers at that time, probably did not live on their farm. They would also have had a small lot in Portsmouth where they […]
Read moreWritten by: Leo Lawton It was a bright and sunshiny afternoon. World War II was ongoing, but that had little effect on four young lads on a dairy farm in northern New York. Bob was about 11 years of age, while Ron was around 9, Dell was 8, and I was about 6. The hay had been removed from our […]
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