Friday, February 5, 2016

Long Beach Album Photo, The Second Side



Perhaps it's actually the first side.

This one's captioned, "Gwendolyn Ljunggren. Day she left for Waukegan-Ills."

When I get a name that's pretty common, I don't bother  doing any research.  If I ran "Mary Jones" I'd probably get a thousand hits on Goggle.  But Gwendolyn Ljunggren begs for a quick trip to Goggle land.

The first problem with searching for a woman is that they have a tendency to get married and take their husband's name, so it was no surprise that the only direct reference to a Gwen Ljunggren, in Los Angeles, that I found was a marriage record.  It didn't have a date, but Gwen's husband, Theodore Pretz was listed as head of household in the 1930 census.  His birth year was listed as 1906, and Gwen was listed as being 18 years old, giving her a birth year of 1912.  The photo on the other side of this picture was dated 1914.  I'm not very good at estimating the age of children, but I'd say four or five, so it's the right era.  And, since I wasn't willing to provide a credit card number to Ancestry.com, that was it as far as Gwendolyn went.

As for Theodore, his profession was listed as furniture salesman.  I also found out that he was a Marine in World War 2.  Let's say he joined up in 1942, which means he was running the obstacle  course at 36.  That's pretty old for that sort of duty.   He died in 1957.   Pretty young.

Of course, just because Gwendolyn Ljuggren is a rare name, it doesn't follow that this Gwen became Mrs. Theodore Pretz.  Perhaps she changed her name to Mary Jones and disappeared into the vast digital wasteland.

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