Daily Diary of J. E. Barry and family
Barry’s journal begins with his marriage to Isabelle Hurst of
Wilmington, North Carolina:
John Edmund Barry, and Isabelle Hurst were married on
March 23, 1915 in Charleston, South Carolina by Pastor Muller
of the Lutheran Church.
It resumes with a census of his household’s members and their
vital statistics that he was born in Charleston on February 24, 1888,
and was 27 years old when he wed the 23-year-old Isabelle Hurst,
who was born March 22, 1892. When their first-born child, John
Edmund Barry Jr., was born at four minutes before midnight on
February 1, 1916, the family lived in Summerville, South Carolina.
A year later on February 18, 1917, the Barrys welcomed baby
Budd, William Hurst Barry, to the household.
John Edmund Barry Jr. weighed at birth 10 and ¼ lbs.
William Hurst Barry weighed at birth 12 lbs.
Salary at time employed $84.20, Investigating claims.
Eight months later, in October 1917, the Barrys moved to
Wilmington where John was employed by W.R. Taylor as a chief
clerk to A.H. Sheppard F.C.A. of Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. This
entry documents a railroad workers’ strike and suggests that the
United States is about to enter World War I:
November 1st 1917
Strike declared by A.C.L. Atlantic Coast Line Clerks over entire
system for recognition of B. of R.C. Bank of Royal Canada, on strike
one month and one day, went hard, with me being that I was in
Wilmington only one month.
Public opinion strictly against striking clerks account of interna-tional
trouble, war with Germany.
Following an influenza epidemic, part of the Great Pandemic that
caused 13,600 deaths in North Carolina alone, Barry moved his
family to Wrightsville Beach on May 1, 1918, to care for his wife
Belle, now pregnant with a third child, and the health of his sons:
Epidemic of Influenza raging in Wilmington, N.C. ... 1918, my
family and self down at one time, with the grace of God we pulled
through OK. Budd and John very sick boys.
During this time, he would have had to commute from the beach
back to town by way of the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad. They lived
in a fishing shack.
John Edmund Barry Jr. and Lucille, winter 1919-1920.
John Edmund Barry Jr., age six, on Banks Channel, July 1922.
Belle at the family’s home at Wrightsville Beach.
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WBM december 2013