Thursday, December 9, 2021

Back Surgery in 1964

Donald is currently under the knife having a cervical discectomy and I am not capable of doing any real research while I wait for news, but I was thinking of these photos of my grandmother, so I thought I would share.

I don't know the details of the procedure, but my maternal grandmother, Marjorie Elizabeth Dean, had back surgery at Montreal General in 1964. The recovery was long, involving a lot of follow up, and my grandparents lived about a three hour drive from Montreal, so they rented an apartment "in town" for the duration. My mother doesn't remember how long her actual hospital stay was or why my grandfather brought a camera to the hospital one day, but I'll never be mad about documentation of life events like these.


The poor thing is wearing a full body cast, as she would for months.




Just casually enjoying a cigarette in her hospital bed!


Poor grandma. She had to hang like this for hours at a time!




My parents had not even met when my grandmother had this procedure but I did unfortunately visit her at this very hospital over Christmas sometime in the 80s. She was at the airport, on her way to visit us, when her rolling suitcase, which had a strap back then, not a handle, hit some ice, went airborne and knocked her down so hard that she broke her pelvis. Yikes!

Mum and I ended up flying to Montreal and spent that Christmas at our cousins' apartment in the city while they were in the mountains. Thankfully, although she was 80 or thereabouts, she did go on to make a full recovery then as well.

I'm still waiting for a call from Donald's surgeon, so I'm going to count my socks or something, since its quite cold here today, and our dog does not want to go for another walk.  Stay safe out there!

Tuesday, December 7, 2021

WikiTree, Transcriptions, Citations and Discoveries

 

Photo from the Digital Collection of the New York Public Library, cited below,

While my family did have to make adjustments during the Great Depression, most of my ancestors still had jobs. Some took reduced salaries, some delayed marriages, but none faced the hopelessness of an entire family out of work. Donald's family, as I realized this week, while luckier than many, still faced the fear and uncertainty of what appears to be years of joblessness.

I finally joined WikiTree recently and one of the things I picked up on pretty quickly is an emphasis on sourcing. Sourcing is part of the WikiTree Honor Code and every year for about six years now, WikiTree has held a 72-hour Source-a-Thon, where members volunteer to add sources to unsourced profiles for prizes and to improve WikiTree.

When I signed the WikiTree Honor Code last week, I promised myself that I would add citations as I add each new person to my tree, sourcing each fact in each profile before moving on to the next. And this is a good thing. I had been getting a bit ahead of myself and not following good protocols when I was finding new documentation. I had not been transcribing my documents as I found them.

This week I have been adding citations to WikiTree for Donald's maternal grandparents and transcribing all of their records, including census records for 1930 and 1940. My earlier focus was on family groups and ages, transcribing gave me a deeper look.

In 1930, Donald's maternal grandmother, Catherine Barry, was 16 and living at 266 1st Avenue in Manhattan, where she would live her entire life. Living there with Catherine were her parents, Edward and Mary and her maternal uncle, Thomas Fitzsimmons. Thomas was a widower - or possibly divorced -and had been living with the family since about 1917. Luckily, Edward and Thomas were both working; Edward as a stock man in a warehouse and Thomas as an electrotypist at a printers.

Over on East 15th Street in the Bannon household, things were more serious. Catherine's future husband William, then 19, was out of work, as was his father, Frank. Luckily, in addition to William and his parents, his household included his sister, Betty, and her husband of two years, Thomas Caslin who was working as a watch engraver. It's too bad that the unemployment schedules do not survive, so that we could get more detail.

For now, we wait ten years to get our next snapshot of these two families, although we do know that Catherine's father died in 1937. In the 1940 census, it's just Mary, Catherine and Thomas still living at 266 1st Avenue, but none of them are employed. Thomas is then 59 years old, so I don't believe he was retired, but I don't know. Thankfully, things are much brighter in the Bannon household, where William "Buster" and his father are both employed as steamfitters and had been working steadily since at least 1939.

1940 brought joy and sadness to these families. Mary passed away on September 5th, just weeks before Catherine's marriage to Buster on the 28th. He moved into the 1st Avenue apartment and spent the rest of his career working as a steam fitter, except for a stint in the Navy during WWII. I don't yet know what happened to Thomas, although he did register for the draft in 1942. He was unemployed then and originally gave his address as the 1st Avenue apartment, but it was crossed out and changed to an address on East 18th Street.

And just like that, I'm super invested in the 1950 US census! I don't have a whole lot to learn about my own ancestors in 1950, but so many questions about Donald's.

All because I took some time to transcribe these documents. No wonder I still feel excited when I find someone in the census!

The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Photography Collection, The New York Public Library. "Pike and Henry Streets, Manhattan." New York Public Library Digital Collections. Accessed December 6, 2021. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-4ef4-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

1930 U.S. census, New York County, New York, population schedule, Assembly District 6, Enumeration District 0200, p. 22A, dwelling 219, family 205, Edward Barry family; digital image, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com: accessed 30 June 2021), National Archives, roll 1553, FHL microfilm 2341288.

1930 U.S. census, New York County, New York, population schedule, Assembly District 6, p. 13A, dwelling 46, family 187, Frank Bannon family; digital image, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com: accessed 30 June 2021), National Archives microfilm roll roll 1553, FHL microfilm 2341288.

1940 U.C. census, New York County, New York, population schedule, Assembly District 6, Enumeration District 31-467, p. 4A, dwelling 265, family 22, Edward Barry family; digital image, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com: accessed 19 Nov 2021), National Archives mircofilm roll T626.

1940 U.S. census, New York County, New York, population schedule, Assembly District 6, Enumeration District 31-464, p. 8A, dwelling 201, Frank Bannon family; digital image, Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com: accessed 30 June 2021), National Archives microfilm roll m-t0627-02634.

Wednesday, December 1, 2021

Honor Roll Project - Bellmore, NY

As part of Heather Wilkinson Rojo's Honor Roll Project, I have transcribed this Roll of Honor in Bellmore, NY to make the names visible to search engines so that family researchers can find them.

This memorial park is located on Bedford Avenue just north of the Long Island Rail Road tracks.






Erected by the residents of Bellmore in honor of our boys who answered their country's call. In The War For Liberty 1917-1918.

George R. Adams
William Armstrong
Harold Baldwin
Walter Brockman
Clair S. Bartholomew
G. Anderson Bloomer
Frank R. Britton
Amos Baldwin
William Betz
Michael Betz
John Busch
Rudolph Busch
E. H. Bohnemann
Le Roy Dunn
Walter T. Dunn
Harry Green
Arthur Horn
George Howley
Dr. H.V. Holcomb
Frederick Hodgson
Walter Hardy
Harold Hardy
George Johnson
Peter Johnson
Paul Jaeger
Jacob Karp
Mande Karp
Alex Karp
Jacob Koch
Elmer Kress
Frederick Lutz
George Merrett
James M. O'Hearn
Kenneth Tillotson
Thomas Palermo
Arthur Southard
Frederick Schebs
Thure Sindburg
Percy Smith
William Smith
Herbert L. Von Mechow
Harold A. Von Mechow
Emil Wiedeman


No plaque here lists the names of those who served or died during World War II.





In Memory of the men from Bellmore who died during the Vietnam War.

James Kendrick
Joseph Piambino
Joseph Mancuso
Joseph Mandarino
Charles Meerholz
Richard Weidner
William Klenert
Michael Mannina
Greg Ellison
Charles Emery
William Wicks



Spring Cleaning - Bookmarks

I made it! My desktop PC was getting slower and slower last week, but my new laptop shipped earlier than expected and arrived on Friday and ...