1903 DIPLOMA Family history on a grad scale

A 1903 graduate's granddaughter will show the diplomato Rayen studentsthis fall.
By JoANNE VIVIANO
VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER
AUSTINTOWN -- The yellowed document is now safe behind glass.
"Wisdom is better than rubies," it reads before telling of the 1903 graduation of Clara M. Price from Youngstown Public Schools.
Dixie Pellin, Price's granddaughter, has framed the 100-year-old diploma. It had been rolled up in a cardboard box for years and was in danger of being incinerated when she came across it.
The diploma had made its way to Florida with Pellin's aunt, who, now in a nursing home, didn't want strangers to go through her belongings. She had ordered her sons to destroy what she couldn't take with her.
"When I think how close it came to being incinerated it scares me," Pellin said.
A rare thing
"It was very rare for a woman to graduate 100 years ago. This was really something."
She shows her collected photos of Clara Price, as a child with her brother, sister and pet dog; with husband Charles Ockerman; and with her daughter, granddaughter and great-granddaughter. Pellin remembers stories about the Price homestead on Price Road, which sat beneath what is now the Mahoning Avenue bridge, near the drive to the Mill Creek Park rose garden, and how Clara Price's father -- Charles Price -- had an ice business on the river. He also helped build the suspension bridge in the park, near the flats.
Clara Price was the mother of five children, including Mildred May Ockerman -- who married Richard Dougherty and is Dixie Pellin's mother.
Dixie Pellin is married to Ernest Pellin Sr. and has two children and two grandchildren. She watched her granddaughter Megan Pellin graduate this spring -- earning a diploma 100 years after the girl's great-grandmother.
Family tree book
Megan, a Jackson-Milton High School graduate, has been interested in helping her grandmother and aunt, Margie Pellin, create a "family tree book." Dixie Pellin said the girl enjoys learning family history and was excited to see the aged diploma.
"She's enthralled by it," the grandmother said. "She loves it."
Dixie Pellin remembers that her grandmother sewed clothes for the grandchildren and brought them Easter baskets. She loved to grow flowers and had a canary that she let out of its cage.
Charles Ockerman, a carpenter, built the couple a house in North Lima with a long wrap-around porch; before that, during the Depression, they had lived on South Avenue Extension, operating a store out of one of the rooms. They spent winters in Florida in an Air Stream trailer.
Clara Price was 17 when she graduated, her granddaughter said. She married at age 21.
Dixie Pellin, a Wilson High School graduate, guesses that her grandmother would have attended The Rayen School. She hadn't known the woman graduated.
"Until I saw this diploma, I had no idea," she said.
Pellin said the document helped fill a date within the pages of the Family Tree Book.
Sharing at school
She's been invited to take some of the book's historical documents, pictures and stories to share with a Rayen journalism class this fall. She'll also take the diploma, a silk top hat she thinks her grandfather wore and great-grandmother Flora Ella Price's silk dress that generations of Price girls have worn for Halloween.
It's clear from a wall in the Pellin family room that history means a lot. Photos of family members deceased and living hang next to one another.
In another room, Margie Pellin has framed mementos of her parents' past -- one holds Dixie's wedding handkerchief and garter, the glasses she wore when she was 4 and a black-and-white photo of her in the years after she first met her husband. The other shows off seashells, coins collected by Ernest and a knife from another collection, with a black-and-white picture of his younger self.
There is a rabbit that Margie Pellin made from a mink stole that belonged to her grandmother Mildred (Ockerman) Dougherty in the 1960s. And, in the kitchen, a blue-and-white sugar bowl was a gift for Mildred when she married in 1929.
"We get a lot of history here," Dixie Pellin said, telling the stories behind her treasures. "We make our own."