Randy Seaver has asked us to take a prompt from the Fear Females list created by Lisa Alzo for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. I’ve chosen today’s prompt which is to take a family document and write a narrative about it.
My Great Aunt Margaret Jackson married Alfred Fafri sometime in the early 1940s…somewhere. No one seemed to know when it happened. As far as I knew, they were always married. I never met Margaret but remembered Uncle Buster, his life as a Merchant Marine, and that he’d bring us wonderful things like koala stuffed animals from Australia.
It wasn’t until last year when familysearch.org added marriage records for San Francisco to their offerings that I could flesh out Margaret’s story. I knew that Margaret had been married three times, so I looked for Alfred Fafri in the Groom Index.
The entry shows that Alfred Vernon Fafri married Margaret Mary Nelson 19 Jul 1944 in San Francisco. Nelson! This was not a surname I had for Margaret, meaning she had been married four times, not three.
The 1940 US Census fills in the rest of Margaret’s story. (Click image for larger view) She was renting a room for $16 on Post Street in San Francisco. She was going by the name Margaret Nelson and she was divorced. She had nine years of education.
At the time the census she was unemployed. She had been working as a waitress in a sandwich shop. She had no income to report in 1939. Without being employed, I wonder how she was able to afford the $16 monthly rent?
According to the marriage record, she met up with Alfred Fafri not too long after the census and they were married. They were married for 28 years, until Margaret died in 1972.
(It was great for me to find the marriage entry for Margaret. Up until then I had lost track of her from the 1920 Census when she was with her parents until later city directory information with Alfred. I know have the 1940 census and I hope to be able to find 1930 soon.)
