I found this family history site, which includes individual pages on great-grandparents. One of those is on Richard W. Robertson, who lived at 302 Laurel Street.
Here is an excerpt:
A death certificate shows that Richard W. Robertson died at age 87, on October 16, 1918, while at Grace Hospital in Richmond. The certificate shows that he was born in July 1831, in Virginia. His father was listed as Alex Robertson and his mother as Sallie Williams, both born in Virginia.
At death, he lived at 302 Laurel St., Richmond. Apparently, from the certificate, the cause of death was an injury from a street accident involving a car. Whether he was a pedestrian, hit by a car, or a car’s occupant during the accident is unclear. The certificate informant was C. H.
Robertson, one of Richard’s sons, who lived at 2218 Hanover Dr. Richard W. was buried at Hollywood Cemetery. The death certificate information is very consistent with other information provided here, in my family history.The 302 Laurel Street address, which is very near the Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, was almost certainly the address of Mary A. Owen, Richard and Mary Robertson’s daughter. From the 1860s until Richard and Mary’s death, one pattern that emerges is the frequent changes in their addresses. This, along with the fact that they were living with their daughter at the time of death and that they are buried at Hollywood Cemetery without head stone markers, is consistent with the conclusion that Richard and Mary were likely very poor much of the time. Frequent
moving suggests they always rented their residences, and did not have a lot of stability in their living arrangements. And, having no head stone at their burial site, which was known at Hollywood Cemetery in the late 1800s, very early 1900s, to mean a lack of funds for purchasing one, also suggests the Robertsons were poor.Richard and Mary Robertson is just one example of finding throughout my family ancestral history, from the 1860s into the 1900s, many poor economic situations. And, I believe, because these families were all southern families that their poor economic status was in large measure a
consequence of the Civil War.
