Edna Edith "Ada" Parker
1910-1967
A Working Mother in Twentieth-Century Massachusetts
Edna Edith Parker was born on January 17, 1910, in Connecticut, the fourth child in a large and growing household headed by her parents, Charles H. Parker and Nellie F. Parker, both Connecticut natives. The 1920 census places the family in Wolcott, where nine-year-old Edna was living among eight siblings—Raymond, Isabelle, George, Helen, Howard, Earl, and baby Ethel. At just thirty years old, her mother Nellie was caring for an infant while raising a household of children ranging in age from one to twelve, a demanding domestic environment that shaped Edna’s early years.
The Parker household reflected the realities of working-class New England life in the early twentieth century: crowded, industrious, and rooted in shared responsibility. Growing up in such a large family likely instilled in Edna both resilience and an early familiarity with caregiving, cooperation, and routine—traits that would echo throughout her adult life.
By the late 1920s, Edna had moved from her childhood home and entered adulthood quickly. Census records indicate she married at about eighteen years of age, and by 1930 she was living in Ludlow on Goddu Street. The household she shared was a multi-family arrangement, typical of the Depression era: Edna and her husband John Riley lived with Melvin and Lucy Grimshaw and their infant son. At age twenty, Edna was already the mother of a one-year-old daughter, Ruth.
Despite these responsibilities, Edna was employed as a time clerk in a carpet mill, working for wages outside the home. The position required literacy, numeracy, and reliability—qualities reflected in the census notation that she was able to read and write, though she was no longer attending school. Her work placed her squarely within the industrial economy of western Massachusetts, where textile and carpet mills were major employers of both men and women.
By 1940, Edna and her family had settled in Springfield, living at 61 Quebec Street in the Indian Orchard section of the city. Now thirty years old, Edna was married and the mother of two children: eleven-year-old Ruth and a one-year-old son, John William Riley Jr. She continued to work in the carpet industry, listed once again as a clerk, and reported having completed one year of high school—a modest but meaningful level of education for a woman of her generation. That year, she worked eight weeks and earned $128, supplementing the household income during a time when many families still felt the lingering effects of the Great Depression.
The 1950 census shows Edna still living at the same Quebec Street address, now forty years old and raising her children in a more settled postwar period. Her household included her husband, eleven-year-old John Jr., and three-year-old Linda, her youngest child. By this time, Edna’s work had shifted from clerical duties to hands-on factory labor. She was employed as a power knitter in a knitting factory, working 40 hours per week. The transition reflects both the changing labor needs of Springfield’s textile industry and Edna’s continued willingness to adapt her skills to support her family.
Sometime in the early 1950s, Edna’s marriage to John Riley ended. In 1954, she remarried, wedding Stanley Frank Misiaszek in Hinsdale. She continued to reside in Springfield in the years that followed, remaining closely tied to the city where she had spent most of her adult life.
Edna Edith Parker—often remembered as “Ada”—died on April 23, 1967, at the age of fifty-seven. Her obituary appeared the following day in The Union of Springfield. Her life tells the story of a woman shaped by a crowded childhood home, early marriage and motherhood, and decades of steady work in New England’s textile mills—balancing responsibility, resilience, and quiet determination across changing times.