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:
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