Friday, April 20, 2007

Ancestors in the 1930 U.S. Federal Census - Part 5

April 1st was Census Day for the 1930 U.S. Federal Census. In honor of that census day, throughout the month of April I am posting lists of my known direct ancestors and where they were residing during that census. I'll also list who's missing; for us family historians, missing individuals on census records can be the most frustrating and intriguing challenges of genealogy!

My maternal grandmother, Ruth Lillian HOEKSTRA, was eleven years old when she was enumerated with her parents, John Martin HOEKSTRA and Lillian Fern STRONG, and her younger sisters Hope and Mary Lou at 1815 Newark Avenue in the Third Ward of Grand Rapids, Kent Co., Michigan.

(The census image has been removed)

Lillian writes about this house in her Family Record book:
Louis & Grandpa built us another new house at 1835 [sic] Newark. It was big & fine, only John had to sleep daytimes and it was so hard for me to keep the children quiet when he slept. The bathroom was upstairs--no hot water for baths--had to carry it up with pails to take a bath.

John was working for the post office during this time, obviously doing the night shift. "Louis" and "Grandpa" were John's brother and father, Peter Louis Ton HOEKSTRA and Martin HOEKSTRA, who were carpenters. This was the second home they had built for the family; the first was at 1023 Gibson, SE, also in Grand Rapids. You can see that this home was worth $6,000 ($68,000 in today's money) and had electricity ("R" stands for radio, and one of the purposes of asking whether or not a family owned one was to determine how much of the population had electricity in their homes). This family moved many, many times, and it would be profitable to look at Grand Rapids city directories and especially deeds in John and Martin's names.

(Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12)

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