Stepping ten years back in history, let's look at the 1930 census for Elizabeth Fast. She was 37 years old and living with her husband David D. and three children in Nabisco Township, Texas County, Oklahoma. When we met them in the 1940 census they were living in a ramshackle stone house near Hardesty. About a year after the 1930 census, they lost their farm in Nabisco township due to being unable to pay the mortgage and were forced to find a house, any house, to live in. So at the time of this 1930 census, debt collectors were already breathing down their necks.
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| U.S. Census of 1930, Texas County, Oklahoma, Nabisco Township, e.d. 70-17, sheet 1A, family #6, household of David D. Fast, lines 19-23, accessed online at ancestry.com, 20 October 2012. |
Nabsico Township? We don't think about townships much today, but America was a rural country before World War II and most people located themselves by the township in which they lived. Nabisco was (and still is) a township located southeast of Hooker and north of Adams. But for decades townships have meant little or nothing.
Let's take a look at the other families on this census page. Just below them is another Fast family, Abraham G. and Sarah Fast. Abraham was her husband David's cousin. In fact, David's father and uncle (and Abraham G.'s father) Gerhard and several of their children had owned farms next to David's. By 1930, they had all moved away except for David Fast and his cousin Abraham G. Fast.
Three children named Viola (age 4), Rosa (3) and Ernest (0/12). Rosa should be "Rose" and Ernest is "David Ernest." His age is 0/12 because he was less than a month old when the census was taken. And Rose was born in Liberal, Kans., not in Oklahoma. As he did here, a census enumerator makes mistakes - sometimes big and sometimes small.
David and Elizabeth owned their own home, shown by the "O" after David's name. Unfortunately, the column for value of their home is blank for everyone on the page. Please, please, for the sake of future genealogists fill out every blank on every form!
Another interesting bit of personal data are the ages at marriage, 40 for David and 31 for Elizabeth. They both married at a late age. They were married on 10 June 1924 in Reedley, Calif., when David went to California to wed his bride and bring her back to his farm in the Oklahoma Panhandle. If we didn't know about their marriage, the census would give us a clue about when to search. Here is their wedding picture:
And here is a picture of their farm home. Elizabeth came from a middle-upper class family in California and joined her husband on a pioneering farmstead in the Oklahoma Panhandle. The Panhandle had only been thickly settled starting in about 1905, so she left behind a comfortable life and became a pioneer woman. It was a huge change in her life, and she often talked about her memories of beautiful California. And I think the difficulties of pioneer life and the losses of the Great Depression led to depression in her life.
The 1930 census was the last one to record the birthplace of each person's parents. Elizabeth's parents, Jacob and Eva (Pauls) Suderman, were born in Russia, which means that she was the first generation born in the United States. She grew up in an immigrant household, speaking Low German as her first language, and living in a Mennonite culture that had been transplanted from Russia. This was a very different experience than most of us who know nothing but life in the United States.
