Friday, June 12, 2015

Early 20th Century Hunter Sisters - Update

I have written about my grandmother and her sisters a few times:
Wordless Wednesday ~ Hunter Sisters Circa 1911
Wordless Wednesday ~ Hunter Sisters Circa 1909 (This date is in error, and now I've determined that some of the facts need changing yet again!)
Early 20th Century Hunter Sisters Stories

My maternal grandmother, Helen, was the youngest of five girls of Percy Earle Hunter and Marguerite (Lysle) Hunter. I know that the oldest sister, Marion, died on November 30, 1913, of pneumonia, at the age of 14. She died in Pittsburgh and I shared her death certificate here.

My mother's sister recently gave me some photographs from the 1900s and 1910s that had been developed sometime in the 1940s. This is one of them:
Mary, Helen, Margaret, Caroline

Compare this photograph with the one that my second cousin shared with me in 2013:
Caroline, Margaret, Helen, Mary

These photographs are not the same, but must have been taken on the same roll of film and one of them was printed from a reversed negative.

Although my second cousin only knew that these were four of the Hunter sisters, my aunt wrote on the back that she believed this was taken at Elgin Avenue, East End, Pittsburgh. When I asked her for any more information she might remember, she told me that the family lived in California BEFORE Marion died, with the hope that the weather there would be better than Pittsburgh's weather for her health. (She suffered from pneumonia several times before she died of it.)

I then more conscientiously explored city directories for Pittsburgh and San Francisco (found at Fold3.com through 1923).

1909-1910 Pittsburgh City Directories:

1911-1912 San Francisco City Directories:

1913-1914 Pittsburgh City Directories:

1915-1921 Pittsburgh City Directories:

1922-1923 Pittsburgh City Directories

So it looks like the family was living at Perrysville Avenue (see photos here and here) until after the 1910 U.S. Census, at least. They then moved to Berkeley, California for a couple of years, where Percy served as President of the Fremont Foundry Company.

I also found Percy and Marguerite in a list of registered voters at an ancestry.com database: California, Voter Registrations, 1900-1968. In 1912, Marguerite and Percy were registered Republican voters, living at 2510 Buena Vista:

Ancestry.com; California Voter Registrations, 1900-1968; Original data: State of California, United States.
Great Register of Voters. Sacramento, California: California State Library. Year: 1912; Roll: 7; Berkeley Precinct 35.

Perhaps Marion was feeling better or the family missed their friends and family back in Pittsburgh and decided to return. The family is living at 5629 Elgin Avenue, Pittsburgh, by the time of the printing of the 1913 Pittsburgh City Directory. Marion died at home in the fall of that year.

My grandmother was two months shy of seven years old when her oldest sister died, so it does appear likely that these photos were taken at Elgin Avenue soon after Marion died.

In less than two years, the family had moved again to a nearby street, 5459 Stanton Avenue, Pittsburgh, where they lived for six years.

Highland Avenue is where the Hunters lived until they built their home in Allison Park, in the early 1930s, where Marguerite is living in 1940.

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