Tag Archives: Jersey City

Maternal Kin, Photographs, Religion

Church home, no. 9: Christ the King Catholic Church, Jersey City, New Jersey.

After my recent 52 Challenges post, I started wondering about the church my great-grandmother and cousins are standing in front of. My grandmother and her sisters were reared Episcopalian (and AME Zion), so I assumed that it was an Episcopal church. To my surprise, my cousin G.W., son of the oldest daughter of my great-aunt Launie Mae Jones Colvert, identified it as Christ the King Catholic Church.

Catholic??? Aunt Launie Mae was Catholic?

Another cousin, K.J., chimed in. She’d talked to her mother, who said that in Aunt Launie Mae “had told her she converted to Catholicism after my grandfather was sick (with TB), and the Catholic church was there for her.” (Aunt Launie Mae’s husband was Isaiah James Jones (1912-1984), a native of Georgia.) This would have been in the early 1940s. The things you learn when you least expect.

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(I wonder what happened to those beautiful wooden doors?)

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Maternal Kin, North Carolina, Oral History, Photographs

Remembering Launie Mae Colvert Jones.

My maternal grandmother’s youngest sister, Launie Mae, would have turned 104 today.

Here she is, not long, I think, after she moved to Bayonne, New Jersey, around 1930. She met Georgia-born Isaiah James Jones, married, and reared seven children in Jersey City.

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And here, a photo taken at the first Colvert-McNeely family reunion in 1978. Sweet and funny, this is how I best remember her.

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Launie Colvert Jones (20 December 1910-2 August 1997)

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