Joe Yule together in a Brooklyn production of "A Gaiety Girl", their only son, Ninnian Joseph Yule, Jr. (later Mickey McGuire, then Mickey Rooney), was born. The Yules separated in 1924 during a slump in vaudeville, and in 1925 Nellie moved with her son to Hollywood. Yule was naturalized as a United States citizen at the United States District Court in Los Angeles on May 14, 1943. Yule died from a heart attack on March 30, 1950 in Hollywood, California. Rooney arranged to have his father buried near Rooney's friend and longtime acting colleague, Wallace Beery, who had died the year before.
Yule on what is now Christmas Eve, has been seen as further evidence of a fertility event during the Yule period. The events of Yule are generally held to have centred on Midwinter (although specific dating is a matter of debate), and feasting, drinking, and sacrifice (') were involved. Scholar Rudolf Simek comments that the pagan Yule feast "had a pronounced religious character" and comments that "it is uncertain whether the Germanic Yule feast still had a function in the cult of the dead and in the veneration of the ancestors, a function which the mid-winter sacrifice certainly held for the