Today I thought I'd take a little time to use the Power of the Internet and research a bit of my family tree. Here's what I found...
I was able to go as far back as 1940, the year my father was born. Shown below is a census form from the neighborhood that my father lived when he was a newborn. I've highlighted his immediate family living in their apartment at 402 Rathbun Street, Woonsocket, RI. The house still exists. It looks in great shape too. Am I 100% positive this was the house? No, but it doesn't look new, certainly not newer that 1940. It's actually a colonial style that could very easily date from said times...that is, colonial times...years before 1776. Not unusual in Rhode Island. Not sure if this house was so well maintained in 1940 though as this house is in the heart of the section of town, I would assume still known by today called Social Coin (coin, corner in French, is pronounced "quan" with the "n" sound severely de-emphasized as to be almost inaudible like the French word for bread "pain")
According to this census form, filled out by an at-home visiting enumerator, their apartment was one of 6 in the house, and it does look large enough to have that many apartments. I would guess that visiting census takers were much more common and necessary back then, especially as you look at the column asking what each residents' last year of school was, and out of the whole page of about 50 people, I saw only one with double digits and it was 10th. So the overwhelming majority of these people never even made it to high school.
My father's household, at this time, was as such:
Joseph Chausse (61) and his wife Rosana (58)
Their children, Armand (37) and Yvonne (17)
Armand's wife Elizabeth (27) and their son Paul (age 0/12)*
Joseph and Rosana had 2 other children, Rose and Marie but they have either already left the family to be in households with their husbands or have yet to be born...I haven't figured out their ages yet so I don't know at this time. I do know Yvonne never married and she likely kept living here years after this time of 1940. Young women didn't live on their own back in these days...not sure when or under what circumstances Yvonne eventually moved. I really have the feeling though that she was the youngest child since I remember Rose being pretty old in the early 70s when we occasionally visited her family in Cranston, RI and I don't remember Marie at all.
The form doesn't indicate what floor the Chausse family lived on but it does have a column indicating in what order the enumerator visited the household and they are 2nd at this house so maybe they were one of the two? first floor apartments? The other being the younger members of the Voisinet family with the elderly member of that family, Phineione, the owner, living in, perhaps, a smaller apartment since she was a widow.
*My father was born on March 31, 1940 and though the form was completed by the enumerator, Rose Bardell on April 15, the form has instructions, just as today's census forms do, to only include births prior to April 1st. So if my father had been born even one day later, he would not have been on this form.
This census taker, Rose, did a fantastic job and her handwriting is awesome, wish we could all write like that today, cursive, and super-legible cursive at that is truly a lost art. She did make one mistake though which apparently her supervisor never caught or even considered: When indicating where each person lived on April 1, 1935 (five years earlier) for almost everyone it was either the same house or same town but for my father's mother Elizabeth, who would have been yet to marry and move in with my father's father Armand, it says: Manville, Lincoln, Rhode Island. That's the village, town and state, yet the instructions indicate it should have been village (or town or city), then county, then state, so it should have been: Manville (or Lincoln if she wanted), Providence county and Rhode Island as the state. It's understandable though because in my day, and likely then too, counties in RI are pretty much name places. They hold virtually no political power unlike say, here in Florida where they often supersede cities or towns in them.
Other really interesting things found on this form:
My great-grandfather Joseph, paid $26 a month in rent. The whole 6 unit house was worth $1,500. While my great-grandmother (who was still alive when I was a young child and I do think I met her before she died...we called her Memere Chausse) was born in Connecticut, my great-grandfather was born in Quebec (Canada-French on this form), had never gone to school and had not become a US citizen. As he was 61 when this form was completed, he likely never naturalized and died as a Canadian. Like most of their neighbors, Joseph and his son, daughter and daughter-in-law all worked as laborers in textile mills, the then-still-bustling industry that drove New England towns like Woonsocket.
A lot of the questions on this form dealt with government assistance or social security and my guess is that the form would have been gauging the efficacy of these programs during the Great Depression. Perhaps this version of the census was specifically created to be used in locations like this where the populace was under-educated, immigrant and working-class poor.