Calling all Genea-Musings Fans:

It’s Saturday Night again –

time for some more Genealogy Fun!!

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along – cue the Mission Impossible music!):

1) Check out Lisa Alzo’s “Fearless Females 2023” blog post prompts and write about one of them.

2)  Put it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link in a comment to this post.

Working girl: Did your mother or grandmother work outside the home? What did she do? Describe her occupation.

How many working women do you have in your family tree? While some might disagree, I consider all of my female ancestors to be ‘working women’. Today, many argue that being a ‘housewife’ should be classified as a job. Any many, including myself, would agree that there is a lot of work involved in keeping a house and raising a family. Thus, when one steps back in time to periods without many of our modern conveniences, my female ancestors worked even though they often did not receive payment for that work. Since many of my female ancestors were also farm wives, they acquired an added workload to help with the farm.

While most of my female ancestors did not receive payment for their work, I have a few that not only maintained a home but helped support the family financially.

• Roberta Crawford — For most of my childhood, my mother worked. City directories from Dodge City indicate that she worked as a stenographer for the Medical Center in 1958. When we moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, my mother’s full time job in a medical center was the primary source of income for the family since my dad had returned to college to work toward his doctorate degree. From Lincoln, we moved to Emporia where my mother took a short break from work. However, she returned to work joining the medical records staff at St. Mary’s Hospital. In 1973, she completed the requirements for certification as an Accredited Record Technician. In 1974, she was named as the director of the Medical Records department at St. Mary’s Hospital.

• Winnie Currey Crawford — My grandmother ‘left’ a children’s home to go to work in North Kansas City around the age of 13. She and her sister, Mary, lived with a cousin near where they worked. By the age of 16, Winnie was living in Dodge City, where she met and married my grandfather, Leon Crawford. During World War II, my grandmother became the operator of a ‘boarding house’. She rented out rooms to the wives of the pilots who were stationed at the Army air field to the West of Dodge City. Between 1953 and 1958, Winnie was employed by the Eckles Department Store in downtown Dodge City. Since Winnie and Leon lived close to the junior college in Dodge City, Winnie again turned her home into a boarding house during the school year, renting out rooms to male college students.
• Pauline Mentzer Briles — After the death of her husband in 1958, Pauline took on babysitting jobs to support herself.
• Mary Foster Crawford — Like my grandmother, Pauline, my great great grandmother Mary Foster Crawford found that she needed to support herself and her youngest son after the death of her husband in 1889. Thanks to the support of her brother-in-law, James H. Crawford, Mary Crawford was the owner of a boarding house at 911 Second in Dodge City. This house is the same one that her grandson’s wife, Winnie, would later live in when renting out rooms to college students.