Black Home Owners of Truxton Circle: Sarah Holmes- 1615 New Jersey Ave NW- Dead End

So the goal of this exercise is to look up Truxton Circle African American home owners in the 1920 census and find out as much as I can, and share it with you. In this post I hit a dead end, but I was sent on a chase and I’m going to share that with you too.

The Black American I was going to look up was Sarah Holmes of 1615 New Jersey Ave NW. She was a 49 year old widowed charwoman living with her 3 daughters, son-in-law and son. It was unclear if she owned or not in the census.

509E-LC-1909

I looked up her surname for Sq. E0509. I came up with a couple of Holmes. Of the female names that popped up were Nancy G. and Gertrude E. I eliminated Nancy because those records were from 1959-1960. This left me with Gertrude E. Holmes who had early 1920s records.

At times I have discovered women will change up their first names. Like myself, they may drop their first name for their middle name. They may go from Katerine to Catherine and so forth. I was hoping this was the cases, nope.

Gertrude E. Holmes was a white woman from Michigan married to Patrick Holmes and they lived at 1016 Douglas St. in DC. She and her husband owned several lots, on R St NW. So that’s a dead end.