Every now and then, Ancestry.com gives free access to parts of their vast online genealogy resource collection. Right now, in celebration of the completion of the indexing of the 1940 United States Census, Ancestry.com is offering free access to those records. I decided to take a look and see who I could find from my family.
It did not take long before I found my paternal grandmother, who was seventeen years old at the time of the 1940 Census. It was fun to see her record, because I learned that she was one of six children. She went on to have six children of her own, as was common for Irish Catholic families to do at that point in time. I have no idea how parents were able to raise such large families, as I feel like I have my hands full with my two little boys. Unfortunately, I lost my grandmother when I was in high school so I did not think to ask her things like that when she could have shared her wisdom on the topic.
Another neat thing that I found out was that my paternal grandmother’s parents were named John and Mary. When my grandmother had children of her own, one of her daughters was named Mary and her youngest son was named John. She also had a brother named John, so my uncle John had both a grandfather named John and an uncle named John. My father, whose name is James, had an uncle named James. He also had both an aunt and a sister named Betty. It is apparent that at least on my father’s side of the family, family names were very, very popular. Learning this made me feel very pleased that I chose the middle name James for my son Dylan. In my generation, there were mainly female children, and we all ended up with first names that were not shared by any of our aunts. My one male cousin does not share his name with any of our uncles, either.
Photo by jdurham on morguefile.com.