Allison Update - Good News

The Allison family of Galveston and New Orleans, profiled earlier, was not completely wiped out in the 1900 storm. The eldest son, Walter, survived!

Walter was born in December of 1881, according to the 1900 census of Galveston, recorded just a few weeks before the storm. At 18, he was employed as an apprentice machinist at a foundry. We can speculate that he was at his job when the storm began, and was prevented from returning to his home near the Gulf. Several iron works were listed in the city directories, the largest being Lee Iron Works, near the railroad station on the north side of the island. He may have been the informant that enumerated eight children of his parents among the storm dead, including his two uncles, Edward and Archie Reagan.

In 1910, Walter can be found still living in Galveston, in the household of Lewis Cook on Avenue F near 12th Street. He married Katie Beagor(?) soon after and had a daughter Ethel in 1911, and a son, Walter, jr. in 1914. Walter Allison died in San Antonio on 19 October 1918 of influenza at the peak of the epidemic there. The disease had spread very quickly through the city. and its Army installations. See more details here.

Walter was buried in the Lakeview Cemetery in Galveston, near the Gulf. His wife, Kate, returned to Galveston and remarried to Gustov Hoff, a German tailor. They moved to Washington, D.C. by 1930 where they had a shop. Ethel married and had a son whom she named Walter. Her brother, Walter, had married and was working for the Treasury Department, but had no children at the time of the 1940 census. Several more generations of Allison descendants could be alive today, far removed from the horrific storm of 1900.