Ancestors

Hassel Mullins

Hassel Mullins was born on 8 December 1919 in Dickenson County, Virginia, the son of Lonnie Mullins and Rachel Virginia Mullins, both of old Dickenson County families and both Mullinses by birth. His parents were young, twenty-one and twenty, and the family moved over Pine Mountain to the coal camps at Jenkins, Kentucky, where his mother died in the summer of 1935 or 1936, when Hassel was in his teens. She was taken home to the Flemingtown graveyard at Clintwood. His father remarried, and on 15 June 1938, aged 39, shot his second wife and then himself in a car beside the Clintwood highway. He was buried beside Rachel at Flemingtown. Hassel was eighteen. A year earlier, in June 1937, he had gone to live with his married sister, Reba Boggs, at Jenkins.

On 13 May 1939 at Jenkins, aged nineteen, he married Helen Johnson, a Clintwood girl of the same age. Their son Lonnie Wayne, named for Hassel's father, was born at Jenkins on 1 June 1940, and a daughter Charlotte followed. Hassel went into the Consolidation Coal Company's mines at Jenkins as a brakeman, the man who rode the trips of loaded cars and worked their brakes and couplings underground.

On Thursday 24 June 1943 the trip he was riding wrecked. Several cars of coal left the track and tore down a run of mine props, and Hassel was crushed and killed almost instantly. He was twenty-three. The Dickenson County paper reported it under the heading "Hassel Mullins killed in mine accident at Jenkins, Ky." and said he was "survived by the widow, one or more children and two sisters". He was buried in the Flemingtown graveyard at Clintwood on the Saturday, with his parents. His stone carries a porcelain portrait of a dark-haired young man in an open collar and the words "Christ loved him and called him home."

Helen was expecting. Their daughter Rosa Irene was born on 5 September 1943, ten weeks after his death. The next summer, on 3 July 1944, Helen married Forester Vanover at Wise, Virginia, and Hassel's three children grew up in the Vanover house at Jenkins under their own father's name. When Rosa married Charles Reed at Clintwood in 1959 the certificate named her father Hassel Mullins, and when she died in 2009 her obituary still named "Hassell and Helen Mullins" as her parents.

If Hassel Mullins is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Hassel Mullins (1919-1943)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/hassel-mullins-1919-1943-9b74b4.