Interviewing Myself–52 Ancestors #1

I am combining the first prompt for the 2018 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge with the Thomas MacEntee prompt in his Genealogy Do-Over challenge to interview yourself as a way to start at the beginning.

As the old joke goes I was born in Jackson, Michigan in June 1947 because I wanted to be near my mother.  I was born to Elizabeth Denman and Clifford Salt. My parents and older sister had moved to Michigan before I was born, from Atlanta, Georgia.   My first brother was born in Jackson as well, making us the only two siblings to be born in the same place. We moved a lot in the early years!

We lived in Jackson until about July 1950 when my father moved us to Lebanon, Indiana.  My father was an accountant for a manufacturing company.  I am not sure whether my father changed companies or was transferred within the same company.  We were only in Lebanon long enough for my second brother to be born there and by about April 1951 were moved to Decatur, Illinois.  We were in Decatur until December 1953, so I started school there, and I remember the house we lived in at 345 Melrose Court.  It was a new house, and the yard was bare when we moved in and set up a swing set in the back yard.

In December 1953 we moved back to Lebanon, Indiana and stayed here from then until August 1962.  We lived at 704 N. Grant Street and I finished elementary school and junior high in Lebanon.  I have lots of memories of people and places and activities from this time period, and have blogged about a few.

The summer after my ninth grade year we moved to Lynnfield, Massachusetts due to my father’s being transferred and we hadn’t been there very long when they decided to transfer him back to Lebanon.  At the last minute my father left that job (I’m not sure what the circumstances were), and we ended up staying in Lynnfield.  My parents lived in the same house at 11 Newhall Road until my father died in 1983.  I graduated from high school there and went off to college in 1965.

I primarily lived in Yellow Springs, Ohio from 1965 to 1972, marrying my husband Dan, and staying until he started law school in Boston in 1972.  There was a short period of time, between 1966 and mid-1967 that I lived in New York City. I had dropped out of college due to lack of funds and stayed on at a co-op job to save money and re-group. Believe it or not, it was actually possible to live in New York and save money in those days.

I graduated with a B.A. in psychology and in Boston went to work as a research assistant for a new project at Mass General Hospital.  I worked there until 1975 when I started graduate school at Boston University.  I was a student, teaching and doing research assistance from the fall of 1975 to the spring of 1981 when I got my Ph.D.  I then worked in research until 1987 when I started re-training in clinical psychology.  I spent 2.5 years re-training and getting the required experience to be licensed.  I started working as a therapist in New Hampshire in 1990 while continuing to work on a research project half-time in Boston. My mother died after a long struggle with emphysema in 1991.

The schedule of commuting into Boston or north to New Hampshire became more wearing than I liked and eventually I decided to open a solo therapy practice full time in southern New Hampshire. I did that from 1999 to late 2004 when I cut back my therapy practice and went to work as a mental health consultant for the Disability Determination Services of Social Security in New Hampshire 2 days a week.

By 2008 I was ready to stop seeing clients in therapy and I shut down my practice in July 2008.  I continued to consult for the Disability Determination Service until July 2017, and now am fully retired.  My husband is almost fully retired as well and we are in the first year of figuring out how to do old age and not working for a living. As we were told, and said repeatedly, at Antioch: “It’s an educational experience.”