Edwin Stephenson's life could be considered fairly typical for someone who lived from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s. During the 57 years that Stephenson lived lived, from 1887 to 1945, he experienced some of the most important events in United States history. A few of these events include World War I, World War II, and the Great Depression. Thus, the typical life of a person who lived in this period would be very eventful and different from that of a person who lived in another period of history. Edwin Stephenson was born on October 8, 1887, and according to death records I found on familysearch.org, he was born in Stromsburg, Nebraska, to two Swedish immigrants Caroline and Charles Stephenson (church). This immediately raised the question: How old was Stephenson when he moved to Galva, Illinois? The town his family eventually settled in and, eventually, where Stephenson would be buried. I continued to search familysearch.org for more information about my subject's childhood. The next website source I could find was a census from 1900. At the time of that census, Stephenson would have been 13 years old. According to the census, the Stephenson family at this time resided in Galva, Illinois, and the members of their household included their mother Caroline, 3 boys, Edwin, as well as their two older brothers Frank and Joseph, and 2 girls, the sisters of Edwin. Grandma and Elsie. There was also another person named Frank Sandell listed as a “boarder.” I would later discover, during the 1930 census, that he was Edwin's uncle. Apparently Edwin's father, Charles, had died at some point between his birth in 1887 and this 1900 census, because the census indicates that... middle of a paper... registration card indicating that he was unemployed. At the time he registered for conscription during World War II, he was 54 years old (church). He's a few years too young to retire, and he had a decent, stable job as a tax collector before he was sent into combat. Maybe he had some sort of traumatic experience during the war and that's why he never really got back on his feet. Throughout Edwin Stephenson's life, it seemed to me that he never really had stability. Looking through census records, draft registration cards, and his death certificate, I noticed that Edwin moved around a lot, never really had a steady job for a long period of time, and had no never been in a relationship or had children. In his defense, Edwin lived through many difficult times, such as war and the Great Depression. Both create many logical explanations