Aspen Street Family: Who Was There?

Who Would You Like to Meet? — Episode 3: The Family Connection

🏠 One Block, Three Families

Three addresses immediately caught my attention.

My father was living with his parents, the Drivers, at 4812 Aspen Street.

My maternal grandfather, William Jackson, was at 4840 Aspen Street.

And at 4838 Aspen, next door to my grandfather, lived the Sample family. Their son, Theophilus "Tony" Sample, would eventually marry my mother's younger sister, Marie Jackson.

Think about that for a moment.

Driver. Sample. Jackson.

Three families living within a few doors of one another who would eventually become connected to my family story.

But there's an important twist.

My mother wasn't living on Aspen Street in 1950. She attended college away from home and appeared on her mother's household record on 72nd Street. My maternal grandparents were no longer living together.

Meanwhile, my father was 21 and lived with his parents on Aspen Street.

My mother's younger sister, Marie Jackson, was 15 and living with her mother. Tony Sample was about 16 and living with his parents on Aspen Street.

How and when did Marie and Tony meet?

Did they meet because her father lived next door to his family? Did she visit Aspen Street? Did the younger people already know one another through school, church, friends, or relatives?

I don't know yet.

That's exactly why I want to go back.

🔗 The Connections Keep Growing

The more I researched, the more intriguing the block became.

My father's family lived at 4812 Aspen in a house owned by my paternal great-aunt Margie Driver Anderson.

My maternal grandparents, William and Josephine Mapp Jackson, had previously lived together in this same part of West Philadelphia.

Then another possible connection emerged: Eastern Shore, Virginia.

The Sample and Mapp families had roots on Virginia's Eastern Shore. Other people appearing around my grandfather and his neighbors may also have Eastern Shore connections that need further investigation.

Was that significant?

Perhaps.

Migration often followed family and community networks. People didn't always arrive in northern cities without connections. Relatives, friends, church members, and people from the same hometown or county could help newcomers find housing, employment, and community.

So one question I'm asking now is whether Aspen Street was part of an Eastern Shore network in West Philadelphia.

That's a much bigger question than the one I started with.

🕰️ What Was Aspen Street Like?

The 4800 block of Aspen Street, between 48th and 49th Streets, was part of Philadelphia's Mill Creek neighborhood.

By 1950, Mill Creek had a large and growing Black population. Census-based neighborhood research indicates that roughly 60 to 80 percent of Mill Creek's residents were Black by mid-century.

Ten years earlier, however, the neighborhood was considerably more racially and ethnically mixed.

In 1940, just under half of Mill Creek's population was white, and about 21 percent of its adults were foreign-born, most of them Irish. Among Black adults, about 70 percent were born in Southern states, making Mill Creek part of the larger story of the Great Migration.

Brown Street formed something of a racial dividing line in the neighborhood, with predominantly white blocks to the north and predominantly Black blocks to the south.

Aspen Street sat just south of that divide.

So the neighborhood my family knew wasn't simply a collection of Philadelphia row houses. Migration, race, housing policy, and changing opportunities reshaped it.

🏘️ Life in Mill Creek Wasn't Easy

The neighborhood's story had another side.

The discriminatory housing and lending systems, known as redlining, assigned Mill Creek the lowest-risk rating. These practices made mortgages, home-improvement financing, and other investments much harder to obtain and contributed to decades of disinvestment.

The neighborhood also faced a danger residents couldn't see beneath their feet.

Mill Creek itself had been buried underground and converted into a sewer.

As development increased, the underground system struggled to handle stormwater and sewage. Heavy rains sometimes caused ruptures, unstable ground, and devastating cave-ins.

A major collapse in 1945 destroyed the homes of 135 residents.

By 1948, Philadelphia had designated Mill Creek as a redevelopment area. Architect Louis Kahn became involved in planning for the neighborhood in the early 1950s, and construction of the Mill Creek Homes public-housing project began in 1953.

Three 17-story towers eventually rose around 46th Street and Fairmount Avenue, east of the Aspen Street block where my family lived.

So when I imagine visiting Aspen Street in 1950, I'm visiting a neighborhood at a turning point.

The old neighborhood was still there.

But major changes were coming.

🏫 The School Around the Corner

One landmark would have been impossible to miss.

Mayer Sulzberger Junior High School stood at 48th Street and Fairmount Avenue, essentially at the eastern end of the 4800 block area. Built in the 1920s, it served grades seven through nine during that era.

That raises another set of questions.

Did Tony Sample attend Sulzberger?

Did other Jackson, Driver, or neighborhood children attend there?

Were some of the friendships and relationships that eventually connected these families formed at school?

I haven't established the answers yet, so they remain research questions rather than conclusions.

Several blocks east, Martha Washington School stood at 44th and Aspen, another important neighborhood institution.

And there is another school question I am investigating: Which senior high school officially served the 4800 block in 1950?

West Philadelphia High School is one possibility, but I want to locate the period school-boundary records before making that connection.

A yearbook could potentially tell a story the census cannot.

📜 Following the Families Backward

One of the most interesting discoveries came when I stopped looking only at 1950.

1940

The 1940 census shows my maternal grandparents, William and Josephine Jackson, living on Aspen Street with three of their children. They owned their home, which the census valued at $3,500.

Another family with possible Eastern Shore connections lived next door—another lead for future research.

My paternal great-aunt, Margie Driver Anderson, also owned the house at 4812 Aspen Street, although the census includes an address question about Brown Street that warrants further investigation.

I have not yet located my paternal grandparents' household in the 1940 census.

The Sample family was nearby at 711 N. 49th Street.

So the Sample connection to this immediate neighborhood didn't begin in 1950.

It was already there.

1930

Go back another decade, and the geography becomes even more interesting.

Walter and Margie Driver Anderson owned and lived at 4812 Aspen Street.

My maternal grandparents, William and Josephine Mapp Jackson, rented a home at 724 N. 48th Street — around the corner.

The Driver children were living on 45th Street, a mystery that deserves its own research.

The Samples were then living at 1804 Masters Street.

The farther back I go, the more I realize what looked like a remarkable coincidence in the 1950 census may represent something much larger.

These families had been moving through some of the same West Philadelphia neighborhoods for years.

🚶🏾‍♂️ If I Could Walk the 4800 Block

Now comes the fun part.

Suppose I could actually travel back to Aspen Street.

I wouldn't knock on one door.

I'd walk the entire block.

I'd watch the Jackson house.

I'd walk past the Sample house next door.

I'd continue toward the Driver house.

I'd watch people sitting on their steps, children coming home from school, neighbors stopping to talk, and families heading to church or work.

And I'd be looking for answers to five questions:

1. How did the Driver, Jackson, and Sample families interact, if at all?

2. What was everyday life like for the children and teenagers on the block?

3. Who were the memorable characters everyone in the neighborhood knew?

4. When did relationships begin forming among the younger generation?

5. Did their Eastern Shore roots help bring any of these families into the same West Philadelphia community?

A census cannot answer all of those questions.

But city directories, school records, yearbooks, newspapers, property records, church records and the people living in the surrounding houses may provide clues.

And that has changed the direction of my research.

🔎 From Family History to Neighborhood History

I began this journey looking for my ancestors.

Aspen Street is teaching me to look for their community.

Occupations may tell me whether neighbors worked together.

School records may reveal whether their children knew one another.

Church records may uncover another network.

Property records can tell me who owned the houses and how long they remained there.

And the birthplaces of the surrounding residents may help answer my Eastern Shore question.

Perhaps the biggest lesson is that our ancestors didn't live their lives inside the boxes we create for them on family trees.

They had neighbors.

They went to school.

They worked.

They worshipped.

Their children played together.

They borrowed things, argued, celebrated, dated, married, and moved away.

They belonged to communities.

Growing up, I knew my family had deep roots in West Philadelphia. I hadn't understood how closely some of those roots clustered around just a few streets.

❤️ Before They Were Family

When I first saw those names in the census, I saw three households.

Now I see something different.

4812 Aspen — Driver.

4838 Aspen — Sample.

4840 Aspen — Jackson.

My father was there.

My maternal grandfather was there.

The family of the young man who would someday marry my aunt was there.

My mother and aunt were living elsewhere, but their father was on Aspen Street.

None of the records can tell me what these people were thinking as they went about their lives in 1950. They certainly couldn't have known how their families would eventually become connected—or that decades later one of their descendants would sit at a computer trying to reconstruct the neighborhood they once called home.

That's why, if my time machine could make one stop in 1950, I wouldn't ask it to take me to a famous event.

Take me to the 4800 block of Aspen Street.

I'd find a place where I could quietly watch.

Because somewhere on that block, among ordinary neighbors living ordinary lives, my family story was already beginning to come together.

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