My father’s parents, Patrick Corbett and Mary Cain Corbett were immigrants from Ireland to Boston, Massachusetts. Patrick was born in County Cork and Mary in County Claire. I do not know the dates of their birth or the date or place of their marriage. They were in America before the great influx of Irish immigrants that came as a result of the famines brought on by the potato crop failures of 1846 and 1847.

Patrick and Mary had seven sons, two of whom died in infancy. The five who reached maturity were Michael (the oldest), James, William, Roger and Patrick (the youngest). My father, Roger, was born in Boston on April 14, 1844. He came to California in 1861, at the age of seventeen, not across the plains but by way of the Isthmus of Panama. Two of his brothers, William and James, also came to California, but I do not know if they came before or after my father. He had association with both of them in California between 1880 and 1900. My father and William were closely associated and devoted to each other up to the time of the latter’s death around 1895. William’s only son, Fred, who visited my father at Sawyers Bar in 1901, died at the age of 26, shortly after his return to San Francisco.

James, who resided in San Francisco and Los Angeles, had a family of two boys and four girls: James Junior, Elizabeth, Emma, Kate and Leslie. Joseph was a mechanic in the Southern Pacific Railroad shops in San Diego and later master mechanic in the Southern Pacific shops in Tucson, Arizona. He was also a member of the Arizona territorial legislature around the turn of the century.

Michael, the oldest brother, was last heard from around 1880. He was in Colorado at that time and father believed that he met death by accident or by violence. I believe his last letter is among papers stored at Sawyers Bar.

The youngest brother, Patrick, spent his entire adult life on the Boston police force, retiring as a sergeant around 1912. He was the boxing champion of the force around 1880 and father always spoke of him with deference and a little awe because he was a seventh son.

The five surviving Corbett men met in Boston around 1880 and a record of this meeting is preserved in an enlarged picture on the wall of the old house at Sawyers Bar. A second print of this photograph is in the possession of my daughter, Doll.

My father’s residence was not fixed or permanent during the eighteen sixties, seventies and eighties. He worked in mines at Virginia City and in mills at Carson City. He was in Bodie following the mining excitement in that community and the payroll of the Black Bear Mine, near Sawyers Bar, lists him as a millwright in June, 1872. He met my mother at Sawyers Bar and they were married in Oakland, California July 3, 1889. He was forty-five years old and she was twenty-four. At the time of their marriage father was working at the Union Iron Works in San Francisco. My brother, William Frederick Corbett, my only sibling, was born in San Francisco January 19, 1891. He died in Yreka January 18, 1968 and was buried at Sawyers Bar in the cemetery behind the Corbett family home. My brother had one child by his wife Bertha, a daughter who is married to Bill Young, a Forest Service employee with whom she resides at Coffee Creek Ranger Station, in Trinity Center, California. Her name is Novella and she and Bill are the parents of a girl and a boy.

My father and mother took up permanent residence in Sawyers Bar in 1892 or 1893. My father and Ted Luddy were partners in a bar in 1893 but the partnership was dissolved within a year and father continued the business until all saloons in unincorporated areas of Siskiyou County were closed by local option around 1910. Father passed away at the age of seventy-eight in April, 1922. I was teaching near Tempe, Arizona at the time and I returned home to attend the funeral. The road between Etna and Sawyers Bar was closed to vehicular traffic and I went on foot from the summit of the mountain to “Jolt Ass” where a friend from Sawyers Bar picked me up in his Model T Ford. Father suffered serious physical impairment following a stroke in December 1917 or January 1918. My mother served him with tender care and devotion during the last four years of his life. He is buried in the Catholic cemetery at Sawyers Bar.

The National Dictionary of Biography, a British publication, contains interesting comments on the spelling of the family name, Corbet - Corbett and the biography of the one Irish entry, William Corbet (1779-1842), fixed the subject’s birthplace as County Cork, where my paternal grandfather was born, probably between 1810 and 1815. This Corbet was an associate of Napper Tandy, who, according to the encyclopedia, was the hero of the famous Irish ballad, “Wearing of the Green”. My father, who had a clear tenor voice, made it a point to sing that ballad on St. Patrick’s Day. One of the verses:

I met with Napper Tandy. He took me by the hands;
I said, “How’s poor old Ireland how does she stand?”
“She’s the most distressful country that ever I have seen,
They’re hanging men and women there for wearing of the green.”

My mother, Charlotte Catherine Vincent (1865-1947) was born in Sawyers bar on February 20. Her parents, Joseph Vincent (Vincente) and Annie Dias Vincent were Portuguese. Annie came from the island of Faial in the Azores and Joseph from the Azores also, but from which one of the islands I do not know. I am not certain of the birth dates of any of my grandparents. Annie was born in the 1840s and at the age of seven was sent by her mother to an old maid aunt in Boston. I have no idea as to the mother’s motive in sending her child to America at this tender age. My maternal grandfather, Joe Vincent (a sailor) I would guess, around 1812, probably jumped ship in Boston to join the adventurers who were seeking fortunes in the gold fields of California in the 1850s and 1860s. Joe was more than thirty years older than Annie who was fourteen when they were married in Boston. They departed for California immediately and somehow found their way to Sawyers Bar. My mother was the second child of this union. She had an older brother, Albert, and another brother, Ray, who lived at Sawyers Bar all of his life and passed away in 1951 or 1952 at the age of seventy-nine. A third brother, Sylvester, died in infancy.

I do not know the order of birth of my mother’s sisters, who numbered five: Annie, Essie, Amy, Jessie and Sydnie. With the exception of Albert and Amy all members of my mother’s family are buried in Sawyers Bar, her father Joseph Vincent beside my father in the Catholic cemetery and the other members of the family in the Protestant cemetery adjacent to the home where I was born.

My maternal grandfather, Joseph Vincent, a man of great physical strength and vigor, established a homestead at Eddy’s Gulch, a mile from Sawyers Bar, where all nine children were born. He was honest, hard working and illiterate. When ropes broke on the derricks in the mines Joe’s services were much in demand since he was the only man in the camp who could splice a rope so it would run through a pulley. I recall that when I was a small boy, not more than seven or eight years old, an old miner, Joe Smith, told me that my grandfather, Joe Vincent, was the only man he ever knew who would not cheat at cards. Joe spent his active years in Sawyers Bar laboring on his claim at Eddy’s Gulch or as a laborer in one of the numerous other mines in the area. When the infirmities of age ended his career as an active miner he served in the mines as a cook. My aunt, Essie Skillen, told me how her father would berate the miners who tracked mud into his kitchen where he maintained a floor as clean and spotless as the scoured deck of a ship. Joseph was close to ninety when he passed away, following a serious loss of blood from a gash in his wrist, accidentally inflicted while cutting kindling.

My maternal grandmother, Annie Vincent, was a tiny woman, five feet two or three in height and scarcely exceeding a hundred pounds in weight. She was bilingual and her English was grammatically correct and free of foreign accent. For a person of very limited educational opportunity she had an astonishing academic competence. I recall her as a person of pride and dignity, deeply respected by all of her children and grandchildren. This little grandmother officiated as midwife at my birth at nine o’clock AM, January 31, 1898 in the front bedroom of the old family home in Sawyers Bar. Annie Vincent passed away in April, 1927.

I conclude this rambling and incomplete chronicle of my lineage with a tribute to my parents. My father and mother were both honest, industrious and unpretentious. They adjusted well to the simple rustic environment that Sawyers Bar provided. They were consistently thrifty and from childhood I learned that debt was a cardinal evil and that decent people paid their way. My parents were of limited education, neither of them having completed the eighth grade of public school. Despite their lack of formal education my father and mother were not ignorant. They both read extensively and we received the San Francisco Examiner daily, the Sunday paper arriving on the following Wednesday. Still piled in boxes in the attic at Sawyers Bar are copies of the best magazines of the period - Sunset, Harpers, Overland and Review of Reviews.

As previously noted, my father ran a bar for the last seventeen years of his active life and while that occupation may be regarded as questionable by many honest and righteous people, I feel that my father suffered neither stain of character or blight of reputation from his occupation. He ran a bar that was clean, quiet and orderly. He was temperate in his use of alcohol and he did not tolerate drunkenness or disorder on the part of his customers. He provided well for his family and left his widow with a home and the means to insure lifetime independence. He had deep affection for my brother and me and high ambition for our education and success. He had the respect and regard of the people among whom he lived and I recall numerous charitable acts involving kindness and generosity.

My mother was the gentlest, least selfish and most forgiving person I have ever known. Her devotion to and care of her mother, my father and my brother and me were evidenced in numerous incidents that bear greater significance now, in recollection, than they had in my childhood and youth. My first cousin, Vivian McHenry, of Las Vegas, visited with us for several days last month. In our discussion of our family and happenings at Sawyers Bar more than a half century ago she remarked that Aunt Lottie (my mother) was the best person she had ever known. My mother was very proud of my modest achievements in public education. She was a devoutly religious person and I treasure among my possessions one of the bibles she gave me after I was a man. May God forgive me for any pain or sorrow that I may have thoughtlessly caused her.