Today I’m highlighting another genealogy document that showed me something new when I was ready to see it.
When I first found it, I was excited to see my great-grandparents’ names and home address in 1941. At first I was just pleased to see it, but I wasn’t sure what it would mean.
I love how number seven is stated: “Name and address of person who will always know your address.” Emergency contact is boring in comparison.
Somewhere between finding this document, talking to my grandma and taking notes, and life, I visited both Austin and San Antonio. Each visit was a first and they were new to me, a map without meaning, locations with no memory, buildings and streets with history that belonged to other people.
When I looked at this document two weeks ago, my great-grandpa’s employer caught my eye. W.P.A. San Antonio, Texas – New Camp, Texas. My familiarity with the W.P.A. was surface level, I knew it put people to work during the Great Depression.
I searched to get more information and located Living New Deal. Browsing the projects, I learned that the San Antonio River Walk was a WPA project. When we visited San Antonio in December 2019 for my birthday, we walked all along it from our motel with its highway murals past the museums to downtown. Those steps had created my personal experience of San Antonio.
So when his employer caught my eye, I wondered did great-grandpa work on the River Walk? A lot of projects were undertaken in San Antonio. I may never know.
This week I caught up on my podcasts and found Marketplace recently covered the Living New Deal database. We’re inching toward the centennial of the great undertaking.
The last centennial moment impressed upon me was the Great War, 1919, a chapter in history that I did not feel in my bones, but that was partially revealed to me at the Milwaukee Museum of Art with a Wassily Kandinsky exhibit in 2014. I was not particularly familiar with Kandinsky and left enchanted with his story as a law student turned painter who created, among many objects, the massive paintings for the Juryfreie Kunstschau.
I’m even more enchanted to picture my great-grandpa, born in Texas, as a struggling father, contributing his labor to something lasting and useful for the future residents of Texas through the WPA, whether it was a road, a river walk, or something else. It’s important to remember all of the good that was created as the nation clawed its way out of the Great Depression and to marvel at what comes when we spend our money on improvements and labor rather than destruction and war. I look forward to all the reflective coverage of the WPA in the coming years.