The End of the Family Legacy in Brooklyn

By year-end 1930, our grandparents Gordon and Ruth Hynes were living in Freeport, Long Island, New York. Gordon was an ordained Baptist minister and the full time pastor of the Freeport Baptist Church. Their first child, daughter Magurerite, our mother, was born in Freeport in April 1932.

The era of great grandfather James Louis Hynes’ reign over Brooklyn’s Bushwick Avenue Baptist Church ended in the summer of 1933, falling victim to the economics of the great depression. James and Bessie moved to Middleboro Massachusetts to lead the Central Baptist Church there. Recall that we earlier discussed James’ introduction to Middleboro which included important biographical background.

Gordon was 25 in 1932. His older sister Elizabeth (Betty) was 26, younger sister Eleanor 23, and brother Gilbert 22. That year, both Betty and Eleanor were married (by their father, in his church, sustaining the family mysteries surrounding their relationship with their abusive father) and left home.

Eleanor was married to Maurice Jacques, a preacher from Bridgewater Massachusetts, from a Rhode Island family. Bridgewater is only 5 miles from Middleboro (south of Boston), so it is interesting to speculate who followed who there (between Eleanor and James). The Hynes family had strong ties to Massachusetts religious community going back to Betty’s 1906 birth in Watertown, Massachusetts (not New York as previously inferred from an odd misleading record in the New York birth register) at about the same time that James started his career in the ministry. Some component of James’ religious education must have taken place in the Boston area. Also, both Betty and Gordon attended Gordon College to the north of Boston. Some of the resulting family ties mush have led to Eleanor’s introduction to Maurice as well as James finding his new position in Middleboro. Eleanor and Maurice would go on to start their own large branch of the family tree.

Gilbert followed his parents to Middleboro. He would marry Margaret Rehnberg in 1939 and pursue a successful career as a classical singer in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Betty fared poorly. Not long after marrying John William Travis in Brooklyn in 1932 she would fall fatally ill, succumbing to Diphtheria or Rheumatic Fever (according to the 2019 memories of Mom and her brothers) in 1935. One of mom’s earliest memories is of Betty lying ill in the family home in Freeport.

Except for parts of the Wright and Elliot families who remained there until the mid 1940s, this was the end of our family’s legacy in Brooklyn. The younger Hynes Family would remain in Freeport until 1944.

Newspaper accounts through the 1930s in Freeport show a successful ministry under the pastorship of Gordon Hynes.

We close this chapter with an account of a family encounter with celebrity, the former first lady, Edith Roosevelt, from nearby Oyster Bay, Long Island.