1940's Census

             For at least the last six months, ancestry.com has been touting the fact that the 1940’s census is going to be released as public information and little by little the release of each state’s information has been completed.  This is a time period that is of real interest to me in our family history because Mom’s family had left South Dakota during the depression and then turn up again in the 1950 at the Van Ness St. house in Santa Ana where we eventually came to live. Yesterday I got an email saying that the full census was available and each state’s information complete.  I immediately did a search in the 1940’s census for my grandfather (i.e. Victor Wilkins, my dad’s father was dead by then) and actually found it a listening for him.  Moreover, a bigger surprise to me was that my mother was on that census, too.  Despite the relatively few clues censuses give about flesh and blood people, they are like a mystery to me from which I enjoy reconstructing the narrative of their lives.  Here are some of the things that I found.

            They lived at 1415 West Fourth St. in Santa Ana.  Other than her parents, my mom was the oldest person in the family listed at that address.  She was 18.  Since she was the third oldest in the family what that means is that her oldest sister, my aunt Lucille was out of the house and probably married and that her next oldest sister, Elaine, had already died of diabetes.  My mother is listed as having finished 3 years of high school, and as working as a housekeeper for a private family.  The census reveals that from March 26-30 she had worked 48 hours, which confirms the story Mom always told about having to live at her Uncle Ray’s during the week and bring the money back home for the family.

            Another interesting fact is that right next door at 1405 a Catherine A. Wilkins is listed.  This has to be my grandfather’s mother (Katie Sitzmann)  since she is listed as 73 years old and having been born in Wisconsin.  I never realized that she had actually lived so close to them, though I vaguely knew she had been in California at some point. At that point, my grandfather and Mom must have been supporting her.  Unfortunately, for some reason it does not list my grandfather’s occupation.  Catherine Wilkins is the only one listed at her address and is listed as the head of the family.  Where the marital status is designated, she has an M but the M is crossed through and something that looks like a lower case l is there instead.  Others on the page have a W or D next to their name to indicate widowed or divorced, but she does not and since Ed Wilkins (her husband and my great grandfather) was still alive at that point, I’m curious about what the situation was.

             The 1940’s census also helps to narrow down the time that the Wilkins family moved out to California.  The three youngest children in the family Alice (aka Sister Karen), Shirley and Armond were all listed as born in California and the next youngest in the family Ardell was born (and is on the 1930’s census) in South Dakota.  Sr. Karen was 8 years old in the 1940’s census which means that the family must have come out some time around 1931.   We have all read about the Great Depression and how it changed the lives of people in this country and in the landscape of the country itself, but to see how it affected individuals in your own family specifically, really makes history come alive. Obviously, I get quite carried away with these things.