Census Sunday: Grandma Cleo Had Two Homes

It's been a while since I've done a Census Sunday post, but this one has been on my mind for a while. I started drafting it a year-and-a-half ago, when I realized that I was going through my first holiday season without a living grandmother - my Grandma Cleo, or Cleola (Johnson) Whaley-Ballour, passed away back in the summer of 2023. (As I'm typing this, I'm realizing that maybe I'm posting this now because the anniversary of her death is June 3rd). For whatever reason, I didn't post it back then, but it's such an interesting snapshot of a moment in her life, and also an example of why we need to look closely at Federal Census records, that I'm finally putting it up!

You see, she shows up in the 1950 Census not once, but twice.

Here’s Grandma Cleo in 1950 in Yorkville, Ohio at the age of 9 years old:

1950 Census. Yorkville, Jefferson County, OH. National Archives and Records Administration.

She’s in the household of her stepfather Ray West and mother Beatrice (Harris) Johnson West. The family crosses over from the bottom of one page to the top of the next. (Yes, the Johnson kids' last name is incorrectly written as Johnston.)

And here’s Grandma Cleo in 1950 with a different family, in a different state:

1950 Census. Kewanee, Henry County, IL. National Archives and Records Administration.

She's listed as the daughter of the head of household, Praytor Brown, and it says she's from Alabama. Neither, of course, are correct.

So, what’s the story?

Whenever Grandma Cleo and I talked about her family history, she reminded me that even though she was born in Powhatan Point, Ohio, she was raised for a good portion of her childhood in Kewanee, Illinois. Times were tough for her mother, Beatrice, whose money didn’t stretch as far as the number of mouths she needed to feed around the table. So, Grandma Cleo was sent to live with Beatrice’s sister, Lillian, in Illinois, when she was very little – as she recalled it, less than a year old. She stayed there for much of her young life, until she was maybe 6 or 7 years old, or perhaps in the 3^rd or 4^th grade – it was a fuzzy memory, but she knew it was sometime in her elementary school life. She also remembered returning in her teens, after her grandmother Ardenia passed away. (That would have been 1957 or later.)

Sisters Beatrice and Lillian Harris, one in a casual pose and the other in a more formal studio portrait.

Grandma Cleo was in Kewanee for long enough, and from such an early age that - as she told me several times - she “thought her Aunt & Uncle were [her] Mother and Father.” She called coming back home “quite an adjustment,” but also said that once she did adjust, she could “remember some really fun times” with her siblings.

In the Yorkville, Ohio census, we can see some of those siblings – most of whom are now with the ancestors. There’s younger siblings Mamie and Delores and Ray Jr, and a baby boy who’s been crossed out because according to census rules he technically didn’t exist yet. That’s Clarence Edward West, born 5 days after the official “Census Day” of April 1, 1950. Then there’s older sisters Queenie and Theola. The eldest three – Bob, Laura, and Willa – are already out in the world, and so don’t appear in this household. Grandma Cleo’s stepfather, Ray West, works as a pipe fitter’s helper in a tin plate mill (probably for Wheeling Steel), and her mom, Beatrice, is listed as keeping house.

And who’s in the Kewanee, Illinois household? There’s Beatrice’s sister, Grandma’s Aunt Lillian. Like her sister, she’s keeping house, and, like her sister, she was born in Alabama.  And there’s her husband, Praytor Brown, from Georgia. He works as a grinder in a valves and fittings factory, so he’s a part of the same massive steel industry as his brother-in-law. And finally, there’s Grandma’s cousin, Bernice, born in Alabama like her mother, and about 8 years Grandma’s senior. One wonders what it was like for her to have Grandma show up in her household! But this is what family did; Great-Grandma Beatrice needed help and her sister gave it.

So, was 1950 the year Grandma Cleo moved from her Aunt Lillian’s home back to her mother’s? Could be. Given the Yorkville census enumerator’s attention to detail when it came to her brother Clarence, she was probably living with her mom by April 1^st. If the Kewanee enumerator was a little less detail-oriented, she was probably living in Kewanee at some point within the previous year, or maybe even in 1950 sometime before April. Maybe her Aunt and Uncle still considered her a part of the household? Maybe they even planned on her coming back.  But, who knows?

Whatever the exact detail here, it’s still pretty neat to see the connection between recollection and records here, though the story underneath it is heartbreaking. I wish my grandmother – and her family - hadn’t had to go through this. (Grandma said that some or maybe all, of her siblings at the time – 1940 or 41 – were also separated from their mother, and temporarily put in a group home.) But I’m glad that in that sad story, there’s still something positive: family supporting family in hard times.