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| 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.
