Portrait of a Young Woman

Charlotte A. Raymo

1931

The 1930 Census

Eighty years ago, and for much of its history, the United States Census was not the self-reported mail-in form that it is today. In 1930, an enumerator would go door-to-door and make a personal accounting by hand of every resident in their assigned district. Here is the 1930 Census form of the section of Chattanooga that we are interested in, as preserved by the National Archives (click to enlarge).

This form was filled out by enumerator Leora Perry on 15 April 1930. In the first column, vertically, she has recorded the street she is visiting -- East Ninth Street. In the second column, the house numbers of East Ninth Street are recorded.

At 1025 East Ninth Street, lived the Raymo family -- Margaret A Raymo and her four children, Arthur J Raymo, Charlotte A Raymo, Chester T Raymo and Roger D Raymo. Margaret, as she was a widow, was listed as head of household in column 6.

Columns 7 and 8 record whether the residence was owned or rented, and what the home value or monthly rent was. The Raymo home was rented for $50 a month.

In 1930, the U.S. Government was interested in how widespread the radio had become in America. As indicated in column 9, the Raymos had a radio.

Column 10 asks if the residence is a farm. Not here in Chattanooga City!

Columns 11 through 15 contain a personal description of each individual, including gender, age and marital status -- very valuable to genealogists. In April of 1930, Margaret was 47 years old. Her children were aged 23, 22, 21 and 19 respectively.

Columns 16 and 17 record each individual's education. Arthur, Chester and Roger each had attended school in the past year. (All three were students at the University of Tennessee.) The whole family could read and write as indicated in column 17.

Where the individual was born is recorded in column 18, along with their parents in columns 19 and 20. As we know, they were all born in Michigan.

Columns 21 through 24 dealt with immigration and citizenship. The Raymos were all US citizens.

Columns 25 and 26 record the occupation and industry of each individual. In the Raymo home, the three boys were students and unemployed. The only one working was Charlotte, who was a library secretary -- a job she held for most of her life.

In addition to providing valuable genealogical data for each individual, the census forms are also useful for getting a sense of the area our ancestors lived in. By looking at the other individuals enumerated on the same street, you can see what kind of neighborhood they lived in. East Ninth Street looks like a typical middle-class street. The occupations of the Raymos neighbor include bus drivers, firemen, railroad workers, letter carriers and nurses. Most folks are native Tennesseans, but there is also a family of Russian Jews.

Also of interest is the household at the bottom of the page -- 1014 East Ninth Street, the home of bookkeeper Leonard Dietzen, his wife Mary and their seven (!) daughters. Their eldest daughter, 16 year old Margaret Dietzen, would five years later, become the wife of Chester T Raymo, and forty years later, my grandmother.

The Giants of Ninth Street

Chattanooga, 1930

Mother and Daughter

Margaret (Merrow) Raymo and her daughter Charlotte A. Raymo

1930

Happy Thanksgiving

Apologies for the lack of posts lately. I've been taking a break from the scanning. Back at it soon.

Happy Thanksgiving to the families of Arthur, Roger and Chester!

Arthur J. Raymo, Roger D. Raymo and Chester T. Raymo

1930

In Uniform

Chester T. Raymo, Arthur J. Raymo and Roger D. Raymo in their Army ROTC uniforms. Presumably, they were all in the Rocky Top Battalion at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

Chattanooga, 1930

The Old Seat

When this 1929 photograph of Arthur J. Raymo came across the scanner, I recognized the footbridge in the background having seen it before. In his mother's photographs from 1905 there is an image of the same bridge.

This 1905 photograph was taken on Arthur E. Raymo and Margaret A. Merrow's honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls. After a google search turned up a vintage postcard of the same view, I could confirm it was a footbridge over the Niagara River to the Three Sisters Islands. I can find no contemporary photographs of the bridge so my assumption is it no longer stands.

What I find interesting here is that in a 1923 letter Arthur E. Raymo sent his wife Margaret while on a business trip to the Niagara area, he wrote:

My Dearest Wife and all - I have sure had some go today. Early this AM for walk to place above fall where we sat, the morning after we were married, think I was at the same old seat.

It seems plausible that in 1929, while on their road trip north, the widow Margaret brought her four children back to "the same old seat" that her and Arthur both had fond romantic memories of.

Great-grandmother

The 76 year old Emma (Handeyside) Raymo and two of her great-grandchildren, Janice Bills and Ann Bills

Wayne, 1929

Next up: The old seat

Marion and Arthur

My next task after identifying the Bills' children is to see if I could find their parents, Marion Raymo (1898-1953) and Arthur H. Bills (1898-1966) in Charlotte's photographs. In the same batch of 1929 negatives was this photograph:

The woman with the three Bills' children must be Marion. Despite the blurriness of the image, I remembered seeing that distinctive face before. Going back through my earlier scans, I found what I was looking for, from 1925.

Marion Raymo and Arthur H. Bills

with daughters Ann Bills (aged 3) and Janice Bills (aged 2)

1925

Next up: Great-grandmother

Detective Work

As I've explored my family history I've found that genealogical research involves quite a lot of detective work. Not just combing through years of census records, searching through microfilm and delving into the stacks at the genealogical library, but also piecing together lives from the old photographs in Charlotte's collection.

I have been scanning hundreds and hundreds of photographs from the original medium format film negatives. Charlotte had them organized in envelopes, labeled by year, but apart from that I have no other information on most of them. I have to infer a lot from the date and the context of similarly aged negatives.

An example of one of these puzzles, recently on the scanner...

Who are the three young children seated with Charlotte in this 1929 photograph? It is clear for the other photographs in the 1929 envelope that sometime that year, Margaret and her four children went on a road trip in their new car. It appears they visited Wayne, Toronto and Niagara Falls, so it seems very likely that these children are some of Charlotte's relatives back in Wayne, Michigan.

By looking through the 1930 census records for Wayne, Michigan for all the Raymo descendants, I find a likely candidate family.

Marion (Raymo) Bills was the daughter of Ralph Raymo and Fannie Norris. Marion was Charlotte's first cousin. Her three children, Ann, Janice and Robert would be aged about 7, 5 and 2 respectively in 1929. This seems to be a excellent match for the children in the photograph.

Can I find more evidence to support this hypothesis? I then remembered, thanks to Susan, I had a Charlotte photograph album from 1960 that had (labeled) photographs of the grown up Bills children.

Robert Bills and his wife Marjorie, Janice McIntyre and Ann Koch

Wayne, 1960

Yep! It's them, thirty one years later, with almost the same facial expressions!

Next up...finding Marion Raymo and Arthur Bills.