Like a Breath of Fresh Air

 

Shortsville Train Station 1920's

     

     One summer afternoon in 1926, readers of The Shortsville Enterprise picked up their newspaper and saw this on the front page-- "Shortsville and Manchester have completely surrendered to the Fresh Air children from New York City, sent out through the New York Tribune's Fresh Air Fund".  The article's early date surprised me, I had believed the Fresh Air program to be a more recent invention but after some online reading, I found it actually began in 1877.  That year the Rev. Willard Parson, a former resident of New York City himself, asked members of his small congregation in Sherman, Pennsylvania to provide a country vacation for some of New York City's neediest children.  As a former New Yorker, Rev. Parsons personally knew social workers and missionaries in the city who could help him in selecting the children.  His efforts were so successful, the New York Tribune offered their support as sponsors and would go on to underwrite the construction of summer camps.  By the year 1895, over 100,000 of these disadvantaged children had visited, "Friendly Towns".

Ellen O'Hora

     Another surprise, was to read that among the crowd waiting for a child at the train station that July day, was my great-grandmother Ellen O'Hora.  Ellen, a widow by that time, lived on the family farm with her three children and her brother-in-law Michael O'Hora.  Her daughter Mary, my grandmother, would have been thirteen years old that summer, her older daughter Alice fifteen and her son Edward ten.  Their guest was Julia Whalen who would spend two weeks in her new environment, surrounded by trees, chickens, horses and pigs.

     An unnamed host offered his opinion regarding the visitors, "The farm is a happier place because of them and it does us old folks as much good as it does the children to have them here".  Julia must have agreed with that sentiment because the following July she was once again sojourning at the O'Hora farm as she would in 1928 and 1929.  Every July the Enterprise published a list of local families hosting children, so after finding Great-Grandmother's name missing in 1930, I wondered why Julia had not returned?  The Great Depression had begun when the stock market crashed in the fall of 1929, but the Fresh Air program was still up and running; other local families were hosting children in 1930.  It's a little known fact that the stock market rallied in early 1930 only to crash again in April beginning a decline that would drag on for years, but the worst was still ahead in 1930.  Unless Julia had found a job in New York, I doubted the economy had ended her visits.

     Perhaps the reason Julia did not return after 1929 was that she had simply grown out of the program. There were age limits, but unfortunately none of the newspaper articles I found mentioned Julia's age.  If that was the case, it must have been a sad parting in 1929.  I would love to know if Julia and Great-Grandmother or any of the O'Hora children kept in touch, which gave me the bright idea to see if I could trace her. I wasn't overly optimistic I would find Julia in teeming New York City, there were well over five million people residing there in 1920, but I decided to give it a go.

   I started at Ancestry with a search of the 1920 census using the birth year 1914 plus or minus five years, figuring it was likely Great-Grandmother would have requested a child around the same age as her own children.  Surprisingly, only three possibilities came up, even when I increased the age range to ten years.  One little girl caught my eye right away, Julia Whalen born in New York on 7 July 1911; that put her right in between my grandmother born in 1912 and her sister Alice born in 1910.  

     In 1920 Julia was living in Brooklyn with her mother and stepfather, Annie and Bernard Laughlin, both of whom were natives of Ireland.  Julia's two sisters, Nora and Catherine, were also part of the household.  In 1925 I couldn't locate Bernard or Annie, but Nora and Catherine resided with their older sister Mary and Mary's husband John Reilly; fourteen year old Julia was not with them.  I found her living with David Douglas and his wife Kate in the Bronx.  Kate Douglas, fifty-six, was from Ireland, perhaps she was a relative?  Indeed, after consulting NYC marriage records, I later found she was the sister of Julia's father.  By 1930, eighteen-year-old Julia had been reunited with her sisters in the Reilly household.  At that age Julia would definitely have been ineligible to participate in the Fresh Air program any longer.

      In an attempt to find Julia's father, I checked Family Search which has a database of births in New York City for the years1846-1909, Julia wouldn't be included, but her older sister Nora Whalen should be.  After a search for Nora, daughter of Annie, there she was-- born 19 October 1907, which fit nicely with her birth date in census records.  The parents were Patrick Whalen and Annie Molloy.   Having Patrick's name, I could more easily go back further in census records.  In New York's 1915 census, Annie was already a widow with five children, including Julia.  Going back to 1910 I saw Patrick (gardener) and Annie living in Brooklyn with their children.  Earlier still, the 1900 census listed Patrick (day laborer) and Annie still in Brooklyn with their first child Mary, the one who later gave her younger sisters a home. The NYC death index at the Italian Genealogical Group site shows two Patrick Whalen's died in Brooklyn between 1910 and 1915, one in 1912 and one in early 1915. The Patrick who passed away in 1915 must be my man, the youngest child in this family, Catherine Whalen, was born in 1915. Poor Annie was pregnant when she lost her husband!

     There were of course two other possibilities for the Fresh Air child; Julia Whalen born in 1919 and another one born in 1916.  Both of these girls however, were living in families with two parents present and their fathers were working steady jobs, making the first Julia seem the neediest of the three by far.  I lost track of Julia after 1930.  New York didn't take a census in 1935 and by 1940 she was probably married.  Perhaps someday I'll learn the rest of her story...