Cyril, the youngest of the six children of Alphonse Dontenville and Mary
Magdalene Schurra was born in Saint Maurice, Alsace on May 10, 1898. Cyril was just
one year old when his mother died in 1899 and he was raised by his father and sister
Odile. During World War I he was conscripted into the German army and sent to fight
on the Russian Front. He became ill and was hospitalized.
Following the the war Cyril returned to Saint Maurice, where only his sister Odile remained. He found employment with the textile mill in Ville. There he met a fellow employee, Alphonsine Anstett, from the neighboring village of Triembach Au Val. Cyril eventually became a supervisor at the mill. In the early 1920s the French Government began conscripting young Alsatians who had not served in the French army during the war. Cyril left Saint Maurice in 1922 to join his only remaining brother Ernest in Southern California.
Upon arrival in Los Angeles he lived with his brother Ernest and his wife Mamie. He changed his last name from Dontenville to Dontanville as his brother and Uncle Wallace had. He found employment with Pacific Fruit Express. In 1924 he joined Ernest as a freight car inspector with the Southern Pacific Railway. In 1925 Alphonsine Anstett came to California. Alphonsine and Cyril were married in St. Peters Catholic Church in Los Angeles on September 5, 1925.
They established their home in an apartment on Solano Avenue very near the home of Ernest and Mamie. Their only child, Paul Joseph, was born on July 15, 1929. They eventually moved to a home at 3321 Merced Street, in the Highland Park District of Los Angeles, where they remained for the rest of their years.
Cyril remained with the Southern Pacific Railroad until his retirement in 1963. He died at home on March 31, 1973. Alphonsine died in Glendale Memorial Hospital on April 8, 1976. Both are buried in Resurrection Cemetery, just east of Los Angeles, in Montebello.
246.1 Paul Joseph, July 15, 1929
married in Glendale, California, 1953 to Phyllis Bonar; two daughters, Susan Marie '55, and Kathleen Ann '56;
divorced in 1959; Married in Las Vegas, March 23, 1963 to Louanne McDonald: two sons, Michael Joseph '63, and Stephen Paul '67.
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