Our Family Tree

"William Curtis Hill, Jr., who had bright red hair, was from Loudon County, Virginia. Will was color blind and wore glasses by the time he met Olive in 1899. He went to the preparatory schools of Lawrenceville in Lawrenceville, N.J. and Cascadilla in Ithaca, New York. He attended Cornell University for one semester, 1895-96, earning A‘s in his four law courses. He was in the class of 1898 and a member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity but did not graduate. "Apparently Willy was a charmer and almost everyone liked him. He played the piano beautifully and sang very well. Willy belonged to the Dunbarton Club and the Columbia Golf 28 Club. It was he who introduced the custom of naming everything into the family. He also loved to gamble. It is reputed that he couldn’t resist pulling to an inside straight. He preferred to spend the grocery money on poker. Through his gaming, he went heavily into debt and even pawned his wife’s jewelry to cover his losses. Gale McLean heard that Thomas Gale paid $100,000 of his son-in-law’s debts at the time of the divorce. Given Thomas Gale’s assets, which at the time of his death in 1920 were valued at under $400,000, this appears an extraordinarily large sum. There may have been more to the divorce than William Hill’s gambling. There are sections of Olive Gale’s diary which indicates that she considered him morally reprehensible.
"This may have been due to his gambling or his pawning of her jewelry, but it suggests that there may have been other factors as well. A letter from Thos. C. Bradley, the attorney for William Hill, to Thomas Gale, indicates that there was significant trouble with the law. The relevant section of the letter reads:
"As you know, the evidence upon which the decree of divorce was based was
furnished by Mr. Hill upon certain considerations, among which was his relief
from his entanglements with the criminal law in Birmingham, Alabama. The
Birmingham situation fell to the plaintiff’s counsel for attention but because
of his inattention to the matter I assumed the burden and accomplished the
composure of my client’s difficulty and saved the plaintiff’s children from
having the stigma of felony upon their father. I was told that this you were
extremely anxious to accomplish, my informant being Mr. Henry E. Davis
[attorney for Olive Gale].
"After the divorce, Willy married twice. He was traced to Arizona and to California. Gale McLean received a letter from his father in 1936 from a hotel in Los Angeles, California. Willy never bothered the family again."

"This conflicts with the story of Mary McLean shortly before her death that she and Bea had found out around 1935 that Willy was living in Arizona. They planned to visit him but he died before they could effect the trip."

father: William Curtis Hill (1848-1890); mother: Alice Barton Sturgis (1847-1905)