Another Dobbs Celebrity

The chart of Dobbs's I sent you yesterday will help you understand this picture.

C.E.W. Dobbs, the Baptist Minister, and his wife, Mary Elizabeth Barrett, had their first son in 1861. CEW was 21 years old and Mary was 19! The Civil War had just begun. They named their first child Willoughby Barrett Dobbs. Willoughby was the maiden name of Kedar's wife and Barrett was the maiden name of CEW's wife. It seems exceptionally egalitarian to me and perhaps I should have named my kids Adrienne Harms Dobbs Oakley and Allison Wastaferro Dobbs Oakley...but too late for that now!

Mary Elizabeth Barrett's mother was Mary Anne Foster. The Foster family was fun loving and had some great musicians amongst its members. The Foster's were also a long standing ship building and ocean vessel piloting family and made many trips across the ocean bringing new settlers and who knows what else to the new colonies!!!

Since CEW was a Baptist Minister and pastored many churches, I'm sure Mary did her share of organ playing and singing. CEW is reputed to be a great orator and educator and we can only imagine that he may have had some good stage presence!

Willoughby grew up to be a teacher, then a newspaper man, and then a lawyer. He hooked up with Theodore Roosevelt somewhere along the line and together they organized the New York City Police Department. Willoughby wrote the civil service rules and regulations and composed the entrance exam. During my recent trip to New York, I discovered a newspaper article about this exam. After Willoughby composed it, it had to be printed and this required that other people handle it. Somewhere along this pipeline, from creation to printing and back to the civil service department of the police, it was being sabotaged. Unqualified people were paying big bucks for a copy of the test so that they could study it before hand to assure their success. Willoughby was heavily involved in the investigation and the outcome of this investigation is still buried somewhere in New York. I'll leave that question for future Dobbs's to discover!

Anyway, Willoughby was quite a man! His first son, Hugh Barrett Dobbs, became Captain Dobbsie of the Ship of Joy. The story is online for those of you who haven't been subject to my long winding stories about it. Hugh married Alma Hemrich, an heiress to a Seattle Slaughterhouse fortune. They had two children, Barrett W. Dobbs and Carolyn M. Dobbs.

In order to get to the mystery of the picture, I will leave Barrett for another day. Carolyn was a debutante and a dancer and performer as evidenced by the articles in the social pages of the Los Angeles newspapers I have found online. She married a man named Jack Ray and they settled in California. Since this is all really new information for me, I don't know much about Jack Ray or their life in California.

I found out that they had two daughters. Carol Lynne Ray was born in 1941 and Jacquelyn M Ray was born in 1945.

Jacquelyn grew up to be a model and an actress and appeared on several magazine covers according to Gordon Willoughby Simpson, her mother's first cousin with whom I spoke. In 1971, she actually married the guy that she's standing with in the picture. He's hard to recognize without his mustache.

Who is it you say??? The star of Magnum P.I.???


Tom Selleck.


Jacquelyn and Tom were married all during the time he was a struggling young actor! She was also struggling to have some sort of career. All that struggling broke up their 12 year marriage and they divorced in 1982. They separated 6 months before he got his big signed contract for Magnum P.I.

Jacquelyn had a son, Kevin, by her first marriage. He was born in 1966. Tom adopted him and he goes by the name Kevin Selleck. Kevin is married and has 5 children who Tom considers to be his grandchildren. They call him "Hoppey" because Tom called his grandfather that name.

Since I am looking for all descendants of Kedar Dobbs, these 5 kids qualify! I haven't been able to find them yet. I don't have Kevin's wife's name or the children's names. This is another genealogy puzzle to solve! Anybody up for the task out there in Dobbsville???