Margaret Katherine Kenny
Margaret Katherine Kenny
The youngest child, and the last one born in Chicago
"She was not yet five when the family moved into Our Lady of Lourdes parish, and she lived in it for almost thirty years."
Margaret Katherine Kenny was born in Chicago two days after Christmas 1907, the last of her father's seven children and the last of the line to be born in the city that Margaret Connors Kenny had walked into thirty years before. This episode follows her to the age of thirty-four, through a parish, a wedding, a bank failure and a census — and ends where the records end, on a Florida racetrack in April 1942.
Two Days After Christmas
She was born on 29 December 1907 and carried to St. Sylvester's on Humboldt Boulevard a fortnight later. The family was living near Logan Square in those years, at 1028 Montana Street, and three Kenny baptisms are in that register — the infant Margaret of 1901, Mary Frances in 1905, and this one.
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Registrum Baptizatorum, Annus 1908, page 107. Her entry is the one that fixes the birth date — Nativitatis Dec 29, 1907, Baptismi Jan 12, 1908. The columns are read out below.
Baptismal Register, St. Sylvester's Roman Catholic Church, Chicago
| Register | Registrum Baptizatorum, Annus 1908, page 107 |
|---|---|
| Name | KENNY, Margaret |
| Nativitatis | Dec 29, 1907 |
| Baptismi | Jan 12, 1908 |
| Parents | Thomas P. Kenny and Ellen O'Connor |
| Sponsors | Thomas J. Creig and Sarah Wade |
| Minister | J. E. Foley |
"Kenny, Margaret," baptism, 12 January 1908, Registrum Baptizatorum, p. 107, St. Sylvester's Roman Catholic Church, Chicago, Illinois.
1907, Not 1908
The family papers give her birth year as 1908 twice — in the typescript narrative and again on the family group sheet. Both were written by the same compiler, and both carry the same slip: she recorded the baptism year as the birth year. Two documents agreeing is not two sources agreeing when one hand wrote both.
Four independent records give 29 December 1907: this register, the certificate drawn from it in 1968, Margaret's own letter of that year, and the Social Security Death Index. The register is the earliest and the others descend from or corroborate it.
Our Lady of Lourdes
Before she was five the family moved north to 4875 North Ashland Avenue, and later along the same block to the two-flat at 4869. She grew up in Our Lady of Lourdes parish and stayed in it for close to thirty years — made her First Communion there, was confirmed there, and was married there.
With her doll carriage on the walk at 4875 North Ashland Avenue, about 1912–1915. The address is written on the back of the print — the earliest evidence we have of where the family lived.
Eleanor, Margaret and Mary, about 1917 — three girls before a canvas tent, one of them holding a box camera. Eleanor was her half-sister, eleven years older; Mary was her own sister.
What the Parish Could Still Prove
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The confirmation certificate — issued from the parish register in March 1968, forty-nine years after the event, when she wrote asking what Lourdes could still prove. It fixes at 20 May 1919 a sacrament she herself could only place as "around 1920."
The lost First Communion registers are worth recording for anyone else working this parish: the pastor confirmed in writing that the books covering 1913 to 1922 could not be found. That window covers both Kenny girls. It is not a gap in the searching — the records are gone.
The Youngest of Seven
She was the last of seven, but the seven were not all her mother's.
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The Thomas P. Kenny family, about 1915: Margaret, Mary, Eleanor, Ellen, Thomas P. and Jim. Thomas Jr. is not in the picture. Margaret, at the front, is about seven.
Two Marriages, Two Sisters
Thomas P. Kenny married Mary "Maime" O'Connor in 1894 and had five children by her; she died in 1901. In 1902 he married her elder sister Ellen Xavier "Nell" O'Connor, who had witnessed that first wedding, and raised her sister's surviving children alongside her own two. Episode 9 tells the marriages; Episode 10 tells what Nell made of the household.
So Margaret was the youngest of her father's seven and the second of her mother's two. Her only full sibling was Mary Frances, born 1905 — the mother of Mary Ellen Molony Brady, whose research is the reason this series exists at all.
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Jim, Eleanor, Anna Moran Stone, Mary and Margaret, about 1920–1925. Four of the Kenny children and one unplaced woman: Anna Moran Stone appears in no typescript, no group sheet and no notice, and is named only here.
June 1930
She married Thomas Eugene Hamall at Our Lady of Lourdes on 4 June 1930, with Arthelma Dick as bridesmaid and Edward Biebel standing as best man, and a reception afterwards at the Hotel Sovereign. She was twenty-two. He was twenty-five, and had been a teller at the Lake View State Bank on North Clark Street since he was nineteen.
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The bridal portrait, June 1930. The print in use here is a cropped and enhanced copy; the uncropped scan is held as the master.
The wedding party at the Hotel Sovereign. Arthelma Dick and Edward Biebel are named nowhere else in the collection.
Thomas Eugene Hamall. Born 23 November 1904 at 201 Washburne Avenue, Chicago, to Thomas Henry Hamall, an iron worker, and Emma Guilbault, a French-Canadian immigrant. His own parents separated when he was three and his mother raised him alone.
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"Mrs. Thomas Hamall is the former Miss Margaret K. Kenny, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas O. Kenny of 4869 North Ashland boulevard." The middle initial is the paper's error — it should read P. The same Chicago papers printed him as "Thomas T. Kenny" in his mother's death notice five years earlier.
Three Months
On 22 September 1930 the Lake View State Bank closed its doors. The marriage was fifteen weeks old.
The Date That Set the Rest of It
Thomas Eugene had worked at that bank since he was nineteen — it was the whole of his working life to that point. He found other work, at the Bowman Dairy Company and driving for a hand laundry, and stayed in Chicago through the Depression, but he never got back to where he had started.
The claims against the bank were still being processed seventeen years later: a dividend notice reached him in 1947, long after the marriage that began three months before the failure had ended.
Their son, Thomas Kenny Hamall, was born at Evanston on 21 July 1932 and baptised that August. Across the 1930s Margaret and the boy kept house by turns with her parents and with her sister Mary, whose husband John Molony took an interest in him. They were not often in a place of their own.
The Only Census
In 1940 the enumerator found the three of them together at 33 North Menard Avenue on the west side. It is the only record of any kind that puts Margaret, Thomas Eugene and their son under one roof.
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Sixteenth Census of the United States, 1940 — Chicago, Cook County, Ward 37. The only enumeration that finds Thomas Eugene, Margaret and their seven-year-old son in one household. Within two years the household was gone.
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In the yard at McVickers, about 1930–1935 — the only surviving photograph of the two of them together after the wedding. Roughly half the original print has been torn or cut away, and no attempt has been made to reconstruct what is missing. The image here is a restored access copy.
Two photographs and one census line are the entire record of this marriage as a household. The 1930 wedding pictures show a beginning; the torn print at McVickers shows a yard and two people in it; the 1940 return shows an address. There is nothing between them and nothing after.
The marriage ended in divorce about 1941.
April 1942
Her father had retired from the Chicago Fire Department in 1936 after forty-four years, twenty-five of them as a battalion chief, and he and Ellen had gone to Florida. On 12 April 1942 Margaret and her son were photographed with him at Hialeah Park racetrack — the single most precisely dated document of the whole move.
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Hialeah Park, 12 April 1942. Named on the back: Mrs. Tomasius — a friend — Margaret Kenny Hamall, Tom, and Thomas P. Kenny. Margaret is thirty-four; her son is nine, and will turn ten in Miami that July; her father is seventy, six years retired. It is the last photograph in this episode and the firmest date in the entire move.
By the boy's tenth birthday that July they were living in Miami. He would not come back to Chicago to live, and neither would she.
Where This Episode Stops
The documentary record of Margaret Katherine Kenny's Chicago life ends here, and so does this episode. She was thirty-four. She would work as a bookkeeper into her sixties, raise her son in Florida, and die in Georgia in August 1985 — but those decades belong to living memory and to the people still in it, and they are kept with the family rather than published here.
What can be said publicly is this: forty years later she still knew the name of the parish she had grown up in, and when she needed proof of the day she was born, she wrote to it. The book was still there. It is the reason this page can give her birth date to the day.
Image Gallery
Chicago, 1907 to 1942. Photographs and clippings from the Brady family papers.
Margaret Katherine Kenny, about 1928. Restored access copy.
Baptismal register, St. Sylvester's, 12 January 1908 — birth 29 December 1907.
Confirmation certificate, Our Lady of Lourdes, 20 May 1919; issued 1968.
With her doll carriage, 4875 North Ashland Avenue, c.1912–1915.
The Kenny family, c.1915. Thomas Jr. absent.
Eleanor, Margaret and Mary, c.1917.
Jim, Eleanor, Anna Moran Stone, Mary and Margaret, c.1920–1925.
Bridal portrait, June 1930.
The wedding party, Hotel Sovereign, 4 June 1930.
Wedding announcement, Chicago newspaper, 1930.
Thomas Eugene Hamall, c.1928–1932. Restored access copy.
In the yard at McVickers, c.1930–1935. Half the print is lost.
1940 census, Chicago Ward 37 — the only household enumeration.
Hialeah Park, 12 April 1942. Mrs. Tomasius, Margaret, Tom and Thomas P. Kenny.
