Friday, September 26, 2014

Ethel Louise Grant

Ethel Louise Grant was born June 25, 1925 in Maine, which meant that she was not quite 17 when she graduated from high school. According to the 1930 census, she was the daughter of Alymer and Ethel Grant, who lived in Sangerville on French's Mills Rd. Her father was a farmer. She had two brothers, Clarence S. and Doran E. Grant. Clarence was older, born in 1922; Doran was younger, born in 1927. In the 1940 census, Ethel was going by Louise, but everything else seems the same.

In 1944, Ethel was studying to be a nurse at Paterson General Hospital in Paterson, NJ. She was what was called a Nurse Cadet, part of the U.S. Public Health Service. She was living there in Paterson, still single.

The Cadet Nurse Corps was formed to supply nurses to U.S. hospitals depleted by World War II.  It partnered with nursing schools around the country to train people to be nurses. I had never heard of this group but learned a lot from their website: Cadet Nurse Corps.  It's very interesting!

A family tree posted to ancestry.com shows Ethel as having married in 1946 to William Latham. I can find no record of that, but I can ask the owner of the tree if I need to.

That tree also shows Ethel as having died in 1990 in Connecticut. I looked up the death record and she did die on 1 November 1990 at age 65. She was widowed by that time, working as a bookkeeper for University of CT. I wonder if she didn't finish her nurse training or decided she didn't want to do that anymore. Did they have children?

Well, I ran across Ethel's obituary in the Bangor Daily News from November 1990:

So, she still has kinfolk left in Maine, a brother and a sister who apparently never left the area. Of course, that was 20 years ago so they may both be dead now. Perhaps her children can be contacted for information about their mother and her activities during the war.

I've found that her brother Doran died in 2002 and that he apparently graduated from University of Connecticut in 1950. I didn't know about the sister, Rebecca, who was on the 1920 census.  She died in 2008.

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