I have been tracing the origins of some of my childhood neighbors. I use ancestry.com, U.S. census records for 1940 and earlier, naturalization records, and other publicly available documents.

Following are examples of my findings:

A good friend of mine in high school had a grandmother living with the family. The grandmother did not speak English. She only spoke and understood Greek.

The parents of another classmate immigrated to the U.S. in the 1920’s. They recorded on their immigration form that they spoke Yiddish.

My near neighbors spoke German.

Another neighbor listed in the 1940 Census that she had been born in Sweden.

Another neighbor identified the German speaking part of Switzerland as her homeland.

Italy was identified as the home country by a number of people.

And Ireland was also identified by quite a number of people.

England was also favored by some.

This image of some of my school friends was taken from the 1953 Yearbook.

My friends look so young!

The girls are still living. The boys have passed.

My research re my childhood neighbors is going to be rather sad, given my age now. I am now in my 80’s so most of the people I knew in my childhood are of similar age or no longer living. I have written previously of the Fahey family who lived a few doors away. The Faheys were a large Irish Catholic family. They were very outgoing and a joy to know. There were 7 children, the youngest 3 years older than me. The youngest, Liz, passed away 3 years ago in October 2017, presumably from Parkinson’s disease. She was age 84.

From a very early age I was interested in weaving, and particularly in rug weaving. So my childhood efforts in this direction consisted of making pompons which I sewed to a piece of canvas with a printed pattern. A pompom rug. Then there were the latchet hooked rugs, again with a preprinted pattern. And finally I moved on to braided rugs. All this was in the 1940’s and early 1950’s.

Then came a gap – many other activities took precedence. College, graduate school, first jobs, etc. Knitting was about the only textile/wool craft which appeared sporadically.

Late in the 1960’s I married and before long I was the mother of 3 young sons. Our young family went to St. Lucia in the Caribbean for 2 years. A magical island. It was customary to have a maid and this left me free to do ……..what? I turned my thoughts to craft work – I could obtain canvas and a hook but not the appropriate yarn. I turned to sewing, with a new sewing machine. And embroidery on a printed canvas. But I wanted to finally learn to weave.

So our next overseas adventure was to Fiji. I had time in Dublin (our home in between overseas assignments) to get prepared. I saw a box containing a child’s weaving loom made by Spears. It was high up on a shelf in Nimble Fingers, a toy shop near us in Stillorgan. If I recall correctly it cost about 5 pounds?? Really very inexpensive and just the thing to ship to Fiji along with our other belongings.

(A side note here – Nimble Fingers also stocked the precut packs of wool for making a latched hooked rug. These supplies were not prominently displayed. One had to sort of root around, which I was happy to do!)

So when we arrived in Suva, Fiji, survived our struggles with the epidemic of dengue fever (not nice), unpacked our belongings – I began to weave. Tiny beginnings but I soon progressed to a 4 shaft table loom and then a floor loom. And with a floor loom I could actually weave rugs. At last!

Today in reading an item in Newspers.com I stumbled across a newspaper article from the Hartford Courant, October 1950. It was an account of my sister Nan’s wedding to Robert Whitney Richardson of New Britain Connecticut. Oh the memories! The Reverend Richard Bennet officiated. The bride was given in marriage by her brother Robert Dana Miller. The bride wore…………… Her sister Ruth was the Maid of Honor. The ushers were ________ and Mr. Elie Rubinsky of Beirut Lebanon.

Elie Rubinsky was a boy friend of my sister Ruth. She and Nan had met him on the ship (the DeGrasse) when they were returning from their 2 month long trip to Europe April to June 1950. Elie was strikingly handsome. Sometime in the winter following the wedding he and Ruth took me with them on a weekend skiing trip to Mt. Belknap near Laconia New Hampshire. We stayed with Aunt Rena and Uncle Clarence who had sold their farm and were living in Laconia. The skiing was wonderful but poor Ruth fell, and fortunately she didn’t break anything but had a very painful bruise.

I have been doing a bit of research on my childhood neighbors. A large family, the Fahey’s, lived just around the corner on Essex Road. There were 7 children ranging in age from that of my older brother and sisters down to a girl just 3 years older than me. They were a friendly outgoing family and I played with the younger members occasionally. They had a basketball net in their driveway and games of basketball occurred fairly regularly. Thanks to Ancestry.com I have been able to gather some new, and old, information about the family.

The family have all passed away now. My particular friend and the youngest of the 7 children passed in 2017 at the age of 84. She married in 19?? and had 7 children. The family lived in Acton, another suburb of Boston.

The father died of a sudden heart attack in 1955 (just 6 years after my father had suffered a similar fate).

The mother was a graduate of Radcliffe College and taught for a while before she married.

I am trying to include a newspaper clipping of the marriage of the mother and father in 1922, almost 100 years ago. Watch this space.