Sepia Saturday 617. Second in a series about family history discoveries in the recently released 1950 U.S. census.
In 1992, I went with my mom, Peg (Laurence) Charboneau, on a summer genealogy road trip to her Gloversville, N.Y., hometown. The plan was for Mom to show me around, then we would interview relatives, photograph ancestral homes and do some local research.
I had a list of family census addresses — so we drove from house to house around Gloversville snapping photos. At some point we drove past a large home on Grand St. ,and Mom surprised me with the casual remark, “That’s where you spent your first Christmas.”
A 45 Grand St. surprise
Wait, what? This was news to me. So we parked the car and walked around to get a better view of the 45 Grand Street building.
“We lived with your grandparents then,” she said, referring to her parents Tony and Elizabeth (Stoutner) Laurence. “It was before we all moved to the farm. The Christmas tree was up there in that circular window.”
We stood on the sidewalk staring up at the turret windows, then I took a few photos — and that’s the home where I was enumerated in the 1950 US census!
Road trip immortalizes 45 Grand St.
Regular readers of Molly’s Canopy know that I am enthusiastic about genealogy road trips. Repositories and records confirm our family lines, but there is nothing like visiting the towns and homes that are part of our family history.
I could not have imagined that when I took photos in 1992 of 45 Grand St., I would discover that I lived there during my first census. Nor did I expect that a recent Internet search for 45 Grand St. would turn up an empty lot where the building once stood.
Thank goodness Mom and I made that genealogy road trip so I have these photos of where I lived during the 1950 census!
Sanborn map fills the gap
One thing puzzled me, though. This seemed like an awfully big house for my grandparents to be living in. So I turned to a 1912 Sanborn map of Gloversville (shown below) to see if I could learn more.
According to this map, the large building contained a number of flats. My grandparents’ household — in Apt. 137 in the 1950 census — may have actually been on the 45 1/2 Grand St. side of the building if our Christmas tree was in the round turret.
Extended family in transition
Why were my grandparents living in a flat instead of a house? Because the 1950 U.S. census caught my extended family in transition.
My parents had been living out of state, but wanted to be closer to family when I was born. My mom’s younger sister, Aunt Rita, was studying blood bank technology with an eye toward leaving the northeast for parts unknown. And my grandparents, no doubt detecting a manufacturing downturn in once prosperous Gloversville, were also considering a move.
So a rental flat at 45 Grand St. was the perfect temporary solution —while my parents and maternal grandparents looked for a large extended-family home closer to the Albany-Schenectady area and my aunt finished her studies.
As for me, I am just happy that I made it into the 1950 census, and that I have photos of where I lived during my first year — including the one above with my first Christmas balloon.
Up next, the Laurence-Charboneau household in 1950. Meanwhile, please visit the blogs of this week’s other Sepia Saturday participants.
© 2022 Molly Charboneau. All rights reserved.
It’s a wonderful feeling to walk around where your ancestors once lived and even better if there’s someone who can tell you first hand what it might have been like at the time when they were alive.
What a fabulous adventure. Surprise memories like that are the best!
A super story about family stories and those pesky “permanent records” where everything important was supposed to go. My mom retained an amazing sense of direction even as her other faculties declined. On one of our last road trips together driving past her old family homesteads, she remembered exactly where I should turn to find places she had not seen in 20+ years. She was almost like a homing pigeon who navigated by invisible magnetic waypoints. Sadly my childhood as an army brat had so many different homes that I remember very little except what was recorded by my dad’s camera.
What a wonderful story, Mike. My last “road trip” with my mom was by phone when the 1940 US census went public. Her memory was failing, but as I read the entries from her Gloversville street, she readily called out the occupations of each person. She was so delighted to hear the names of her childhood neighbors, that when we got to the end of the block, she said, “What about the other side of the street?”
Wow, this is an absolutely awesome story to go with your finding yourself in the census for the first time! How amazing that you were able to find out about being there and snapping pictures of it on your road trip! Who would have known that it would be that road trip that would tie everything together in the future, when the census you were first in came out! I would love to go on ancestral discovery road trips, but don’t have the means to do so. I must rely on oral histories of the area, genealogical society and local histories, online records and images, offline records and images, and more. 😉
Thanks, Diane. I was fortunate that the road trips with my parents were a short drive from their home — and they were made when fewer records were digitized. I drove to Binghamton, N.Y. , with my dad in 1993 because it was then the only way to see the 1865 NYS census for Broome County. Now, I can easily see it online, as you are doing. However, when possible, road trips do add a special dimension to one’s family history research and sometimes unearth non-digitized records.
What a neat surprise to discover where you spent your first Christmas. 🙂 I could just imagine how pretty a Christmas tree would have looked in that upstairs bay window!
I thought the same thing when Mom and I were looking up at the turret windows!
How fabulous that you got the photo and your mum could tell you about the Christmas tree. Those Sanborn maps are a wonderful asset…as far as I know we have nothing similar. It’s great to have the image and confirmation about the 1950 census…again, which we don’t have. We must be almost the xact same age as I was also 11 months that Christmas.
Tanks, Pauline. It felt great to put together the pieces collected over decades of family history research. A shame you don’t have similar record sets.
Having visited (or re-visited) a place in person can indeed fill in some gaps compared to just old photos. My brother and I went on a couple of outings/trips like that, one (not very far) to locate the houses (and surrounding landscape) where our paternal grandparents were born, and one to our old home town/village where we grew up ourselves, but hadn’t revisited in a long time.
Great that you took your brother along. I have made similar trips with my mom (the trip featured here), my dad (to his home area in upstate New York), and my siblings and friends (to several ancestral spots). The experience is all the richer when it is shared.
My father and I made a trip to Springfield in 1968, but he wasn’t interested in showing me places of interest. And I wasn’t that curious. I do remember we were given a tour through our old parsonage where we lived in 1950. Everything looked so much smaller! No phone cameras then and we weren’t traveling with a camera. Now I wish we’d gone to see the house we lived in before that one and got photos. And taken photos in the same places where we had them in 1950 – me standing on the front porch and my father sitting on the church stairs.
You had a lot of hair!
My early road trips, like the one featured here, were also made before smartphones — when photography was a challenge. Some photographed maps came out blurry and on one trip I had to dash to a store for more film in the midst of a visit to the farm where I spent early childhood. Luckily, some homes have survived and appear in online maps and real estate databases. Hopefully that is true of some of your ancestral homes as well.
Great that you took photos of the house when you visited. In 1974 I tried to show my sons where I’d first lived in St. Louis. It had had a fire and was now an empty lot. Many photos of my sister and myself in front of the house are now all that remain of it.
Thanks, Barb. As you point out, genealogy road trips are often a race with time. My brother Mark and I traveled to take “last photos” of our childhood home, which was initially scheduled to be torn down after a severe flood. I can still hear the sound of demolition crews carting off the remains of surrounding homes during our visit! Luckily, our home was spared and is still a residence today. But it could easily have gone the other way. So there is no time like the present to get those front porch photos!