The Father Who Tried
The Father Who Tried
Thomas Eugene Hamall
He lost his career fifteen weeks after his wedding and spent twenty-three years getting back on his feet. What the record shows is a man who kept turning up.
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Caldwell, New Jersey, 23 November 1957. Thomas Eugene Hamall stands at the right, having come up from Miami for his son’s wedding. It was his fifty-third birthday.
His granddaughters never met him. He died in Miami in July 1967, when the eldest was nine and the youngest was three, and the family memory that came down was of a father who had not been there. This page sets that memory beside the paper record. Both are in it.
Fifteen Weeks
Thomas Eugene Hamall was born in Chicago on 23 November 1904, at 201 Washburne Avenue, to Thomas Henry Hamall, an iron worker, and Emma Guilbault, a French-Canadian immigrant. His own parents separated before he was three and his mother raised him alone, an only child. By nineteen he was a teller at the Lake View State Bank on North Clark Street.
He married Margaret Katherine Kenny at Our Lady of Lourdes on 4 June 1930. On 22 September 1930 the Lake View State Bank closed its doors. Fifteen weeks.
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Notice of a final dividend to Lake View State Bank depositors, 1947. The claims were still being settled seventeen years after the failure — longer than the marriage that began fifteen weeks before it lasted.
What the Failure Cost Him
He had worked at that bank since he was nineteen. It was the whole of his working life. Banking jobs did not come back; the industry that employed him contracted for a decade. He took what there was — the Bowman Dairy Company, driving for a hand laundry — and stayed in Chicago through the Depression.
Their son, Thomas Kenny Hamall, was born at Evanston on 21 July 1932 and baptised that August, at the bottom of the Depression.
The Lost Years
Between 1930 and 1953 the record thins to fragments. What survives:
Father and son, Chicago, in the 1930s. One of very few photographs of the two of them.
On a Miami beach, 26 July 1948. By this date he was in Florida — whether visiting or settled, the photograph alone cannot say.
A caution about this stretch. It is tempting to read the later nurseryman back into these years — to look at a Chicago yard in a snapshot and call it evidence of a gift waiting for its chance. It is not evidence. What can be said is narrower and still worth saying: nothing in the record between 1930 and 1953 shows him doing the work he would later be known for, and then, at forty-nine, he was doing it.
Miami
By 1950 both households were in Miami. The census places Thomas Eugene at 289 NE 90th Street with Emma; Margaret and their son were with her parents at 8101 NE 1st Avenue. The two addresses are a short drive apart.
Why he came south, the record does not say. His former wife's parents had retired to Florida and she had followed them in 1942; he arrived at some point before 1950 with his mother. It would be tidy to write that he moved to be near his son, and it may be true, but no document says so, and this page will not put a motive in his mouth.
What the record does support is narrower and firmer: for several years in the early 1950s, father and son were grown men living in the same city. Thomas Kenny came out of the Navy, worked for North American Loan and Thrift and then the American Cancer Society, and was based in Miami until his transfer north in 1957. Whatever was or was not built in those years, the chance to build it was there, and it was there for both of them.
Forty-Nine
In 1953, at forty-nine, Thomas Eugene Hamall appears in the Miami city directory as a landscaper at 3291 NW 103rd Street. It is the first record of him in the work that would define the rest of his life.
1956 — quoted in the Miami Herald on the care of bougainvillea.
1958 — Bow-Arrow Gardens, his own nursery.
1963 — president of the Horticultural Spraymen’s Association.
Twenty-Three, Then Fourteen
In formal wear, probably at an association dinner. By this point he was an officer of his trade body.
By his car in Miami, November 1964. He is sixty, and has two and a half years to live.
What He Kept Doing
Three contacts are documented, and they span twenty years.
1947. His son, then fifteen and at St. Charles Seminary in Maryland, was taken by his father on a trip to Washington. Thomas Kenny described it in later life as pivotal. It is the only visit from these years anyone recorded.
12 November 1957. Two weeks before the wedding, he wrote to his son's fiancée in New Jersey — a letter and a card, to a woman he had not met, welcoming her. Nobody asked him to.
23 November 1957. He travelled from Miami to Caldwell, New Jersey. He was in the formal photographs, wore a boutonniere, and stayed for the reception. It was his fifty-third birthday.
When the Distance Grew
The American Cancer Society moved Thomas Kenny to New York in 1957, and his work kept moving him after that — New Jersey, then Omaha, then back to New Jersey. Five daughters were born between 1958 and 1964 along the way. A sixth child, a son, was born in 1972, five years after his grandfather's death.
Thomas Eugene stayed in Miami, running the nursery and caring for Emma, who went into a nursing home some time after 1962. The gap had been a short drive across one city. It became something over a thousand miles, with five children under nine at the far end of it.
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Miami, in his last years. Florida had become home; his son and grandchildren were a thousand miles north of it.
He died in Miami on 6 July 1967, aged sixty-two. Emma outlived him by three years. His five granddaughters, then aged three to nine, never met him.
Two True Things
Thomas Kenny Hamall said in later life that he felt estranged from his father. That is not a claim this page is going to argue with. He was there and we were not, and a man's account of his own father is not overturned by a directory entry.
What the documents add is not a correction. It is a second fact, standing next to the first.
What his son carried
A divorce at nine, and a move to Florida into his grandparents' house. A father in the same city for a few years and then a thousand miles away for ten. Children who would never meet their grandfather.
He called it estrangement. It was his life, and that is the word he chose for it.
What the paper shows
A trip to Washington in 1947. A letter to a young woman he had never met, two weeks before she married his son. A journey of a thousand miles to be in the photographs, on his own birthday.
Three documented contacts across twenty years is not much. It is also not nothing, and it is what there is.
These do not cancel. A man can try and still not manage it. A son can be loved at a distance and still grow up feeling the distance more than the love. Both of those were happening at once, in the same family, to two people who could not have described it to each other.
The Watch
Thomas Eugene Hamall owned a pocket watch engraved TEH. After he died in 1967 his son kept it.
At each of his five daughters' weddings, Thomas Kenny Hamall put that watch in his pocket on a gold chain and wore it.
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The watch, hung beside his photograph. Every one of his five daughters’ weddings — his father’s watch, with his father’s initials, present for each ceremony.
He felt estranged from his father, and he wore his father's watch to every one of his daughters' weddings. He did not have to reconcile those. He just did both.
That is where this page ends, because that is where the evidence ends and nothing further needs saying. The watch is not a verdict on the father. It is not a rebuttal of the son. It is one more thing that happened, and of everything in the record it is the thing that was chosen — deliberately, five times, at the moments that mattered most.
A Note on Method
A family memory that an ancestor was absent is worth testing before it is repeated, and worth keeping even after it has been tested. Two things were decisive here: an address, which showed that for several years the distance was a short drive rather than a continent; and an object, which showed what a son did about his father when no one was asking him to do anything.
Addresses are in censuses and directories. Objects are in drawers, and nobody catalogues them. Ask what was kept.
The Three Thomas Hamalls
Six posts documenting three generations of Thomas Hamalls, one cottage in Riverside, Illinois, and 130 years of family history proven through forensic analysis, legal documents and oral-history verification.
1. The Property War
How Thomas Henry Hamall fought a four-year legal battle to the Illinois Supreme Court to protect the cottage his mother helped him buy.
2. They Were Never Photographed Together
How forensic photographic analysis proved three generations of connections when the subjects were captured in separate frames.
3. The Mystery Man
Using forensic ear analysis to identify Emmett John Holland in a 1947 photograph — twenty years after he died and his memories were lost.
4. Mothers and Sons
Three generations of mothers living with their sons — not dependence, but an economic survival strategy in working-class America.
5. The Father Who Tried · you are here
Thomas Eugene Hamall's twenty-three years of rebuilding, and what the record shows about the son he was said to have left.
6. Three Generations of Shrinking and Expanding
From Kate's six children to near-extinction to explosive survival — how child mortality, small families and one generation's choice saved the line.
The full case study draws on twenty-two primary sources, forensic photographic analysis and legal documents across eighty-seven years, to BCG-compliant standards. And if you want to see where the whole thing began, the Hamalls start with Owen Hamall — a seven-year mystery across three countries that began with a single census entry.
View the Full Case Study →Does Your Family Have an “Absent Parent” Story?
Most families have one — a parent or grandparent remembered as having gone away, or not tried, or not cared. Sometimes that memory is exactly right. Sometimes the record holds an address, a letter, a journey or an object that nobody in the family knew was there, and the story turns out to be more complicated than either version.
Finding that out does not overturn what anyone felt. It just puts a second fact beside the first.
Storyline Genealogy works on cases where:
- A family narrative and the documentary record do not agree
- Relationships were fractured by divorce, distance or economic hardship
- A story was lost between generations
- More than one person's account has to be honoured at once
- An object that was kept suggests something the oral history denies
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