Leslie Penn, who is Pete Hill’s great-niece and the granddaughter of Pete’s older brother Walter, has been kind enough to send along the following photos that have been preserved by the family. The first is John Preston Hill himself. The second is Pete’s son Kenneth and his wife Bettye, evidently sometime in the 1940s.
While the Hill family always knew that Uncle John had been a ballplayer in the Negro leagues, it seems as though the younger generations at least didn’t realize he was the same person as Pete Hill—for the very good reason that his real first name was not preserved in Negro league circles. For our part, we didn’t know he was John Hill until Patrick Rock figured it out a couple of years ago. And I wasn’t able to link Pete definitively to his family (and to his family’s origins in Culpeper County, Virginia) until Fred Worth obtained his death certificate, which gave his Security Security number, which in turn made it possible for me to get his Social Security application a couple of weeks ago.
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