A few months ago, I posted this collection of Beat draft cards. Today, I would like to share a few more old documents that may be of interest to those researching the Beat Generation. I’m not sure if these are readily available elsewhere but I hadn’t seen most of them until going through some archives. Maybe they will help someone with a project, so I’m sharing them here.
First up, a 1930 census record including a three-year-old Allen Ginsberg:
Here’s the 1940 census for the Ginsberg family:
And finally the 1950 census:
This one is interesting because of course by this point Ginsberg was an adult and had moved out of the family home. However, he had been locked up in a mental hospital in 1949 and was released on February 27, 1950, returning to his father’s home, which is where the census takers found him living. Note also that there is no Naomi listed here. Louis and Naomi had split and Louis was now living with Edith, who is listed as a “Census Enumerator.” Ginsberg is noted as working as a copyboy for a “Newspaper gathering agency.” Also worth pointing out is the fact that their name is misspelt. It is written “Ginsburg” instead of “Ginsberg.”
Here is the Kerouac family’s record in the 1930 census:
Their name is spelled Kerouack and Jack is called Jean here. Jack Kerouac went by many names, most of which are discussed in this article.
By 1950, the Kerouacks were the Kerouacs and Jean had become John:
Here’s a strange one… William S. Burroughs’ baptism record from May 1914, a few months after his birth:
I wonder if the “W” in “James W. Lee” stood for “William”….
In 1933, Burroughs returned from a trip in Europe, sailing from Le Harve to New York on the SS Carinthia. This is his immigration record:
Thomas Antonic writes about this trip briefly in Amongst Nazis:
[He] spent the summer of 1933 in Paris and London with his friend David Kammerer. The following year, he travelled with
his friend Rex Weisenberger to Paris as well as – in the footsteps of André Gides L’Immoraliste – Algeria (Algiers, Biskra, and Touggourt) and Malta, precisely at the time of the Röhm Purge at the end of June/ beginning of July 1934, when the Nazis took out the SA and murdered its leader Ernst Röhm, which Burroughs gathered from the Nazi newspaper Völkischer Beobachter, apparently also available in Malta, and which he remembered vividly decades later (cf. ibid).
I should note that Barry Miles says in Call Me Burroughs, “Bill and Rex [Weisenberger] did a trip to Europe and North Africa in 1933 and were close friends.” He gives no further details and I think Antonic is correct here. It seems Burroughs’ trip was most likely made alongside David Kammerer, whose death is discussed at length here. I dug up these documents months ago and did not save the other pages.
Antonic’s excellent book (reviewed here) covers Burroughs’ trip to Europe in 1936 and 1937, when he was in Austria and saw the Nazis come to power. (Sound familiar?) He famously helped a Jewish woman escape by marrying her. Here’s the marriage certificate:
It was purely a marriage of convenience and they did not live together as man and wife.
Years later, Burroughs lived with Joan Vollmer as common-law spouses. They did not officially marry but had a child, also named William Seward. That was July 21, 1947, when Burroughs and Vollmer were living in Texas:
From birth to death, we now skip ahead just four short years and the tragic end of Joan Vollmer. Here’s her death certificate:
And finally, the death certificate of Neal Cassady, who also died in Mexico but many years later (on what would have been Joan’s 45th birthday):
