Ahnentafel № 4 · The compiler's grandparent
Gene Hyten
1929–2013 · of Indiana
Birth
abt 1929
Indiana
Death
6 February 2013
California, United States of America
Biography
From the Hyten family archive; subject is Gene Hyten (1929–2013), a paternal grandfather of the compiler in the PP line. This entry covers his Indiana birth, parentage, sibling, marriage to Dorothy Noonan, two sons, and his death in California. Era context includes the Great Depression childhood, midcentury westward migration patterns from the Midwest to California, and the postwar American family.
Gene Hyten (1929–2013) was born about the year 1929 in the state of Indiana, the son of Henry Hyten (born 1901) and Julia A. Hyten (born 1906). He was raised alongside his sister, Eloise Hyten, in a household whose roots ran deep into the Hoosier soil of the early twentieth century. The Indiana of Gene's boyhood was a landscape just emerging from the agricultural boom of the prior generation and entering the long shadow of the Great Depression, a period in which Midwestern families learned habits of frugality and quiet endurance that would mark a lifetime.
Gene came of age in the years surrounding the Second World War, a generation that witnessed the transformation of the American Midwest from a region of farms and small county seats into one bound ever more tightly to the industrial and military economies of the broader nation. In the decades following the war, a great many sons and daughters of Indiana departed the state in search of opportunity along the Pacific coast, and Gene was among those whose later life carried him westward to California.
He was united in marriage to Dorothy Noonan, and from their union came two sons, Bruno Hyten and Reico Hyten, who continued the family line into the present generation. The Noonan surname brought into the Hyten record a thread distinct from the family's older Midwestern roots, broadening the lineage as the twentieth century turned toward its close.
Gene Hyten passed from this life on the sixth day of February, 2013, in California, the state which had become his home in his later years. He was eighty-four years of age at the time of his death, having lived through nearly the whole sweep of the American twentieth century — from the eve of the Depression to the second decade of the twenty-first.
Gene was the compiler's grandfather on the paternal-paternal line.
Additional research
Subsequent research has occasioned several material additions to the primary entry. Foremost among these is the recovery of Gene's middle initial, "T.", preserved in the published obituary of his son Bruno V. Hyten (per Flanner Buchanan Funeral Centers). That same obituary, issued upon Bruno's death on the tenth of March, 2021, confirms that Gene predeceased his elder son, consistent with the recorded 2013 date, and further confirms that Gene's son Reico Hyten had likewise passed before Bruno — a sorrowful note in the family line not previously set down.
The obituary also enlarges the household considerably. Beyond the two sons named in the primary entry, Gene and Dorothy were the parents of at least four daughters: Cynthia Brummett, Toni Pratt, Marsha Wilson, and Dixie Perkinson, all of whom survived their brother Bruno in 2021 (per Flanner Buchanan Funeral Centers). The family, then, was considerably larger than the canonical record had indicated.
A geographic anchor for the young household has also emerged. Bruno V. Hyten was born on the fourteenth of February, 1950, in Lebanon, Indiana, placing Gene and Dorothy in Boone County, Indiana, at midcentury — before the later migration westward (per Flanner Buchanan Funeral Centers).
New particulars have likewise come to light concerning Gene's parents. Henry Hyten, his father, was born on the thirtieth of July, 1900, held an Indiana-issued Social Security number, and died in August of 1987 (per SortedByName's transcription of the Social Security Death Index). Gene's mother Julia is recorded as having been born on the first of June, 1905, and as having died on the eighteenth of February, 1999 (per AncientFaces), thus outliving her husband by more than a decade.
No independent record of Gene's California place of death was located in this round of research, and that detail awaits further inquiry. Gene Hyten remains, in the compiled archive, the paternal-paternal grandfather of the compiler, Jacob Hyten.
Family
Parents
- fatherHenry Hyten(b. 1901)
- motherJulia A Hyten(b. 1906)
Siblings
Sources
Source citations and original documents will appear here as research progresses. Currently sourced from Ancestry tree hints — to be verified.