Week 36: Labor (how did those people make a living anyway?)

I'm still well behind on this challenge, maybe even losing ground, but I'm going to keep trying!

One of the most interesting things about the census data is the occupation question.  They fill it out for everyone in the household which means that you get a lot of best guesses for the one year old as well as the head of household.  I've noticed that a lot of my ancestors continued to live with their parents long after they had reached adulthood, and sometimes after they had married.  However, everyone had a job, even the unmarried daughters.  Great aunt Minnie worked as a tailor with her aunt Lillian (who apparently supported her ne'er do well husband and her stepchildren).  My grandmother worked for a year as a teacher before she was married.  Others labored on farms or their occupation was listed as "home."  But here I am going to leave some breadcrumbs for my children about their grandparents.

My own parents, Cecil and Ruth Prewitt, were very typical of the post World War II generation.  My mother had started nursing school in 1939 or 1940 at St. Peter Hospital in Olympia Washington.  Mom was born in that hospital (at least in one of its iterations) and many of her final days were also spent there:  one of the hospital chaplains, Sister Cabrini, had been one of her instructors.  Anyway, the war interrupted her studies.  She married my father at age 19 on July 6, 1941 which at that time disqualified students from nursing school.  My sister was born the following April and by then my father was somewhere in the Pacific with the U.S. Navy.  After the war, Mom was a housewife and my father worked on large machinery in various settings:  logging, dam construction, road construction, various constructions projects on the west coast and twice overseas in Italy and Israel. 

My husband's parents followed a similar course, on the East Coast.  My future mother-in-law, Edith Kober Doerflinger, also started nursing school, though a few years later than my mother.  Edith too decided to marry in 1946 after her SeaBee fiance Eugene had returned from the war.  She also became a housewife while her husband eventually worked as a linotype machinist for the Security Columbian Banknote Company in Greenwich Village.  However, my father-in-law passed away at 48, leaving his widow with three sons, 24, 18, and 16 and not much money.  Their oldest son had been totally disabled by a car accident and was living at home with aides, my husband the 18 year old was supposed to be on his way to college (fortunately on a full-ride scholarship) and the 16 year old was still in high school.  So, Edith went back to school and became a Licensed Practical Nurse and worked as a nurse in a hospital on the north shore of Long Island until she was 62.  She worked as a nanny for a family of young boys for another ten years after that, until she finally retired completely.

As for me, well, I was a gig worker before that became fashionable, and my husband held a steady position for 36 years.  But those are stories for a different day.