January 22 » Edward VII is proclaimed King after the death of his mother, Queen Victoria.
April 25 » New York becomes the first U.S. state to require automobile license plates.
May 3 » The Great Fire of 1901 begins in Jacksonville, Florida.
August 5 » Peter O'Connor sets the first IAAF recognised long jump world record of 24ft 11.75in (7.6137m), a record that would stand for 20 years.
September 17 » Second Boer War: A Boer column defeats a British force at the Battle of Blood River Poort.
December 10 » The first Nobel Prize ceremony is held in Stockholm on the fifth anniversary of Alfred Nobel's death.
Day of death February 24, 1963
The temperature on February 24, 1963 was between -14.1 °C and 1.1 °C and averaged -6.3 °C. There was 8.3 hours of sunshine (79%). The average windspeed was 2 Bft (weak wind) and was prevailing from the northeast. Source: KNMI
May 8 » South Vietnamese soldiers under the Roman Catholic President Ngo Dinh Diem open fire on Buddhists defying a ban on the flying of the Buddhist flag on Vesak, killing nine and sparking the Buddhist crisis.
June 17 » A day after South Vietnamese President Ngô Đình Diệm announced the Joint Communiqué to end the Buddhist crisis, a riot involving around 2,000 people breaks out. One person is killed.
June 21 » Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini is elected as Pope Paul VI.
October 7 » President Kennedy signs the ratification of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
December 26 » The Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "I Saw Her Standing There" are released in the United States, marking the beginning of Beatlemania on an international level.
December 31 » The Central African Federation officially collapses, subsequently becoming Zambia, Malawi and Rhodesia.
When copying data from this family tree, please include a reference to the origin: Wesley Brown, "The Brown Tree", database, Genealogy Online (https://www.genealogieonline.nl/the-brown-tree/P7435.php : accessed January 17, 2026), "William "Billy" Thorne (± 1883-1963)".
Copy warning
Genealogical publications are copyright protected. Although data is often retrieved from public archives, the searching, interpreting, collecting, selecting and sorting of the data results in a unique product. Copyright protected work may not simply be copied or republished.
Please stick to the following rules
Request permission to copy data or at least inform the author, chances are that the author gives permission, often the contact also leads to more exchange of data.
Do not use this data until you have checked it, preferably at the source (the archives).
State from whom you have copied the data and ideally also his/her original source.