the one-armed bandit

This is George Victor Johnson, born in Alameda, Contra Costa Co., Calif. on Dec. 11, 1911, to Agnes Judith Hanson and Gotlin Alfred Johnson. His father was an immigrant from Norway, and his mother was from Sweden. (I don’t think ‘Gotlin’ is the original version of his father’s first name, tho.)

George was known as a one-armed robber, and the ringleader for a 1930s band of East Bay boy bandits. In 1933 he was given a sentence of 5 years to life, and sent to San Quentin. The photo is in the prison paperwork, and available online.

If I’ve done the math correctly George and my father were 3rd cousins.

Alice Maria Bååv Kemp (1888-1970)

Alice Maria Bååv Kemp died in July of 1970, in Chicago. She had lived in the United States since the spring of 1913, almost 57 years.

Alice’s name appears alongside her husband’s on documents between their 1915 wedding and her husband’s death in 1939. After 1939 her son, Walden, is listed as the head of household. Alice is listed as a widow. I don’t know if she ever worked outside the home after she married. The notes for her on the censuses say housework, or “at home”. She left no other marks.

William N. Kemp

William Nelson Kemp, carpenter, died on Jan. 6. 1939. He was 52.

His death certificate states that he had been born on Jan. 14, 1886, in Delaware, Penn., that his father’s name was Edward, and that Edward had been born in Manchester, England.

At the time of William’s death the family lived in Palatine, Ill. Alice Bååv Kemp was 50 years old. Her son, Walden, was 23.

By 1930 the Kemp family was living in Chicago. They had moved from North Collins to Buffalo, New York, in time for the 1920 state census. At that time William Kemp worked as a landscaper and a gardener. In the 1925 New York State census he is listed as a machinist.

In Chicago in 1930 William is working as a carpenter. The family lived at 5964 Paulina Street in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago. Today a one bedroom apartment at the same address will cost around $1500/month to rent.

William Walden Kemp

Alice Maria Bååv gave birth to a boy on June 17, 1916 in North Collins, New York. North Collins is south of Buffalo, NY., and close to Lake Eire and the Canadian border. The little boy’s given names were William Walden.

Alice’s husband, William Nelson Kemp, had been born in Pennsylvania in 1887. His father was an immigrant from England, and his mother was from New York state.

 

The mystery

Johanna worked at an inn in Torbjörntorp north of Falköping at the end of the 1860s. I am pretty sure that’s where she met Karl Adolf’s father, whoever he was.

The owner of the Inn was Adolf Ruckman. The son of a minister who’d been forced to resign for drunkenness, Adolf started out as a bookbinder, became a singer and an actor, and then an inn keeper. His sister and her husband owned Viken, the property outside of Falköping where Johanna and her family lived when she was young.

I have no idea what kind of relationship Johanna had with the Ruckman family. But she did name two of her children after two of the ten Ruckman kids: My grandfather, Karl Adolf, and his younger sister Elma Georgina.