08 I Can Identify

A home can be a part of our identity, and finding the home of an ancestor can bring us a bit closer to that person. This week it took me most of a morning to identify the house where my father lived with his two siblings in Milwaukee, 1929-1932, even though I had the address from a photograph: that address, 354 43rd Street, does not exist today.

Dad's family moved to Milwaukee in early 1929, and they lived there until summer 1932, the early Depression years. Dad was not quite 3, his older brother Harry Jr. was 7, and their younger sister Patricia would be born that fall. Six years later in 1935, Uncle Harry wrote a 28-page autobiography in school, and he talks about that Milwaukee home:

Grandma Marie had taken some photos with different views of the home, including the one annotated with the address (above). And, since the years they lived there included a census year, I was able to confirm their address, and learn a bit about them at that time.

This Milwaukee 1930 US Census page shows them renting the home at 354 43rd Street for $70/month. Harry Sr. is a credit manager at a shoe company, and their home includes a radio. Harry Sr. was two years older than his wife Marie, and they had been married 12 years. They had 3 children, including a new baby girl one half year old:

 

But when I used Google Maps to search for that address, I could not find it; 43rd Street has been split into North and South segments, and the house numbering changed. There is a 4 mile gap (which includes the Brewers baseball stadium) between the North and South segments of 43rd Street; 43rd North starts its house numbers at about 1000, just a couple blocks south of Washington Park.

 

I searched for information about address changes in Milwaukee and found an informative online webpage pointing to 6 large PDF files  published by the Milwaukee Historical Society covering street name conversions in the early 1930s. I spent a while trying to figure out the data which listed all the streets in Milwaukee. It was a bit confusing, and so I decided to try another approach.   

I knew from Harry's autobiography that the house was by Washington Park, and that park still existed, and so I tried using Google Street View to go down 43rd Street by Washington Park virtually and look for houses that were similar to the photos my Grandmother Marie left behind. Sure enough, in a few minutes I found the house still standing, with the address 1158 N 43rd St. Compare the Google View of today's home (top) with the old photo (bottom): 

I also discovered that a photo of Larry, Pat, and Harry sitting on a lawn turns out to have been taken from their home, looking across the street. Again, compare the Google View of today's home across the street (top) with the old photo (bottom):

I wondered if Zillow, the online real estate site, might tell me more about the home. Interestingly, Zillow shows it as 4426 W. Martin Drive: the house stands on two different streets, and the Martin Drive side is now used as the front door. According to Zillow, it and the houses nearby were all built in 1927 (further confirming that I had the right house), and were therefore only 2 years old when the Kenyon’s moved there in the winter of 1929. 

 

The stock market crashed that fall, and though they did not know it at the time, the economy was about to start a decade-long downturn. In 1932  Harry Sr. apparently lost his job, and that summer the family returned to Fond du Lac, moving in with Harry Sr.'s parents and other extended family for the duration of the Great Depression.

 

Later I went back to the Milwaukee Historical Society's website and, after a bit more effort, finally found the data I had been looking for, which provided a nice confirmation of my house identification:

07 Outcast

Uncle Harry, born in February 1922, spent his first five years at the Fond du Lac County Insane Asylum, a mental health facility on the outskirts of the city of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. His grandparents managed the asylum, and his parents, aunt and uncle, two cousins, and a great aunt and uncle also lived there, as part of the non-patient population. Today I'd like to write about the asylum, and its origins as a poorhouse – a place for the "outcasts" in Wisconsin in the 1800s to mid-1900s... 

Two years prior to Harry's birth, the 1920 census gives us a basic idea of the population at the asylum. There were 212 "insane patients," 99 men and 113 women, and 20 administrative staff and family members. Of the 212 patients, 69 were foreign-born, from 15 different countries; 117 were from Wisconsin and 26 from 12 other states. Ages of patients ranged from two fifteen-year-olds to a couple of 91- and 93-year-old widows. Administration was a bit of a family affair: of the 20 non-patients, about half were my relatives.

In most of the 19th century, people with various mental or physical afflictions who did not have close family support really were outcasts in society, and often ended up in jails or starving somewhere. Poorhouses were an early institutional solution, but were in many cases not much better than jails. Fond du Lac's poorhouse was built in 1856, just 8 years after Wisconsin became a state.

 

In 1871 the state commissioned a board to address better ways of dealing with the unfortunate, to "administer public charity and corrections based on sound principles of economy, justice, and humanity, and so that relations between the state and its dependent classes may become better understood." An 1885 report from the board gives a blunt assessment of Fond du Lac county's situation at that point:

"Fond du Lac County (46,855).  The surplus insane returned from the Northern Hospital, are kept in a brick building, the only decent building on the poor farm, constructed on the plan of single cells, on each side of a central corridor. There are no sitting rooms or dining rooms. The building is a fire trap, and is liable to burn up with half the insane any day. After much effort we have been able to secure from the authorities sufficient warmth to keep the insane from freezing in winter, and somewhat better clothing and bedding. There is a proper separation of the sexes and an attendant for each sex. The insane still eat from tin plates without any tables.
 
The poorhouse consists of a series of ruinous old buildings, with scanty furniture, which are not fit for human habitations. It is to be hoped now that the court house is built, that the county board will construct a poorhouse worthy of this wealthy county. The superintendent is elected by the county board...

Since the above was written, and while waiting for the printing of this part of the report, some steps have been taken looking toward a complete reform in the method of taking care of the insane at once, and the erection of a county asylum. We sincerely hope this may be done. Considering the population and wealth of Fond du Lac county, she is the most backward county in the state in the care of her paupers and of her insane."

Fond du Lac did erect a new county asylum a year after this report, on 172 acres of county property in 1886, adjacent to the poorhouse. Twenty years later Louis Kenyon was appointed superintendent, and served 1906-1927. This was a political post, so Louis must have been active in politics; other than being a farmer, useful for running the agricultural aspect of the operation, he had no training in running mental health facilities that I know of, so I am assuming this was a "learn-as-you-go" experience. His wife Ida became the "matron" of the institution, as was customary in these county asylums. 

Yearly conferences were held for the "Trustees, Superintendents and Matrons" of these county asylums in Wisconsin, hosted by one of the counties; conference proceedings provide fascinating insight into the concerns and operations of these asylums, which ranged from care of patients with various diagnoses, to issues with the agricultural operations of the farms. Some of the papers given at the 19th annual convention held June 9-11, 1920 include: "Experiences of a New Matron," "Some of the Causes of Insanity," and "How to Make a Poor Farm Pay." 

 

The late Dr. Darold A. Treffert, who worked with the asylum in the 1960s, wrote this nice summary of the asylum in a Fond du Lac Reporter column in 2015:  

"The county mental hospital is unique to Wisconsin. After state hospitals in Madison and Winnebago were filled to capacity by 1873, the legislature decided, instead of building more or larger state facilities... they would build small facilities 'rural, close to home, near blooming and growing things, a place to restore the spirit for persons broken on the wheels of living.' Ground was broken on 172 acres of county property and a hospital, designed by George Burke, opened in 1886. The ample land was farmed and provided vegetables and fruit in large quantities. A prize herd of dairy cows, at one time numbering 400, provided milk, butter and ice cream. Some of the men who were able and interested did the farm chores, just as they did on their own farms before succumbing to mental illness. Ladies exchanged stories and tales in the 'paring room' and kitchen. The superintendent and wife-matron lived in the facility, as did some attendants."

I don't know how often the asylum lived up to this picture of life there, but this news clipping does seem to show that at least some of the patients were not always kept separate from the rest of the town's population:

I was able to view an asylum register from the 1920s and 30s when I visited the Wisconsin State Historical Society Museum in Madison, Wisconsin – they had the large ledger book from Fond du Lac in a box in their archives. One big thing struck me: the number of people released in the 1930s after Social Security was implemented, now able to live on their own.

 

Today a Holiday Inn motel stands on the site of the old asylum, alongside the highway that loops around Fond du Lac. We now have better drugs, and diagnoses, but we do not always address the needs of our mentally ill and homeless as well as we did a century ago.

References:

First Biennial Report of the State Board of Charities and Reform of the State of Wisconsin, For the Years 1883 and 1884. Democrat Printing Co., State Printers, Madison, WI, 1885.

 

Keith, G. M., Odegard, B. O. (1939). A History of the State Board of Control of Wisconsin and the State Institutions, 1849-1939. United States: State board of control.

 

Rugg Anne V and Wisconsin Council on Developmental Disabilities. Children of Misfortune : One Hundred Years of Public Care for People with Mental Retardation in Wisconsin 1871-1971. Wisconsin Council on Developmental Disabilities 1984.

 

Treffert, Dr. Darold A. "Broken on the wheels of living; the history of mental health in FDL." FDL Reporter, 24 Feb 2015, accessed online 15 Feb 2023.

Ancestry.com. 1920 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Images reproduced by FamilySearch.

06 Social

When I think of "social," I think of my grandmother, born Marie Gerhard in 1898, in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Her "media" consisted of letters, newspapers, the movies, a diary...  What if she had had Facebook?

Marie grew up before the era of radio and television, so it was really only newspapers and the movies that were a social medium everyone shared. Marie's older Aunts would appear every week or so in the society column as they hosted a German Women's organization, but it was a medium Marie would only rarely use. 

So, it was really personal social media that Marie used. She was a prodigious letter writer; she wrote her son Harry weekly when he was at West Point with the family news, and he wrote back weekly as well. I can imagine everyone in the family coming home from work or school, and reading the latest letter from Harry.

Marie was the family photographer, always bringing her camera on a visit, and she was typically the one behind the camera in most of her family photos. I suppose in today's world she would have taken selfies, though modesty may have prevented that; she would certainly have posted photos on Facebook

There were also diaries; Marie wrote in hers daily, from 1914 to 1929. If Facebook had existed, I imagine she would have turned to that instead – most of her daily entries were not that personal, and easily fit the format of a check-in post: "In the afternoon I went autoing with Irene. In the eve. Aunt Ceil & I went to the Bijou to see 'After the Ball'"!

I can imagine a Facebook selfie of Marie and her Aunt Ceil in front of the Bijou!

Today we are faced with a bewildering number of social media possibilities and little common understanding of how to use them. Would Marie have kept her resume in LinkedIn, posted photos on Instagram, Tooted or Tweeted on Mastodon or Twitter, interacted with her bridge group on Facebook? 

For genealogy, social media has helped create a boom, but I wonder what our genealogist descendants are going to do with all those social media traces we will leave behind. I feel lucky to only have to catalog letters, diaries, and news articles!