Biography of Edwin Stephenson

The life of Edwin Stephenson could be considered pretty typical to a person who lived from the late 1800’s to the mid 1900’s. During the 57 years that Stephenson lived, from 1887 to 1945, he would have lived through some of the most important events in United States history. A few of these events include World War 1, World War2, and the Great Depression. So a typical life of someone who lived during this time period would be very eventful and different from someone who lived during another time period in history.

Edwin Stephenson was born on October 8, 1887, and according to death records I found on familysearch.org, he was born in Stromsburg, Nebraska, to two Swedish immigrants Caroline and Charles Stephenson (church). This immediately brought up the question, how old was Stephenson when he moved to Galva, Illinois? The town in which his family ended up settling and eventually, where Stephenson would be buried.

I continued to search through familysearch.org for more information on the childhood of my subject. The next source on the website that I was able to come up with was a census record from 1900. At the time of this census, Stephenson would have been 13 years old. According to the census, the Stephenson family was residing in Galva, Illinois at this time, and the members of his household included his mother Caroline, 3 boys, Edwin, along with his two older brothers Frank and Joseph, and 2 girls, Edwin’s sisters Mamie and Elsie. There was also one more person named Frank Sandell listed as a “boarder.” I would later discover, in the 1930 census, that this was the uncle of Edwin. Apparently Edwin’s father Charles had died at some point from his birth in 1887 to this census in 1900, because the census states that...

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...registration card that he was unemployed. At the time that he registered for the World War II draft he was 54 years old (church). This is a few years too young to be retired, and he did have a decent, stable job as a tax collector before he was sent to fight in the war. Maybe he had some sort of traumatic experience in the war and that is why he never quite got on his feet again.

Throughout the life of Edwin Stephenson, it seemed to me that he never really had stability. As I looked through census records, draft registration cards, and his death certificate, I noticed that Edwin moved around a lot, never really had a consistent job for a long period of time, and he never was in a relationship or had kids. To his defense, Edwin did live through many hard times, such as his time fighting in the war and also the Great Depression. Both create many logical explanat