Winifred I. Flynn

Mother of Jerry Dwyer. Born at St. Joseph, Missouri, on 1 November 1901, the fourth of the eleven children of William Clifford Flynn, a mail carrier, and Anna Mary Paulson; she is among them in the newspaper’s “Family of 13” photograph of about 1915 (in the Gallery). A stenographer in San Francisco in 1930, for paper jobbers (the census, as the online tree reads it), she married Edwin Dwyer at Portland, where her parents then lived, in 1935.

At Seattle she ran the books and the office of the family’s printing-machinery business while Edwin did the hands-on work: so family memory has it, and the 1950 census lists her as its stenographer. After Edwin died in 1969 their son Jerome, who had worked in it under his father, took it over (family knowledge); her obituary calls her “the retired owner of Edwin C. Dwyer Co. of Seattle,” so she may have kept a share in it (record). She died at Seattle on 30 May 2003, aged 101. Two of her sisters were nuns of the Sisters of the Holy Names.

In the records the tree attaches (not checked here):

• 1910. St Joseph Ward 2, Buchanan, Missouri; marital status: Single; relation: Daughter (record)
• 1920. St Joseph Ward 2, Buchanan, Missouri; marital status: Single; relation: Daughter (record)
• 1930. San Francisco (Districts 251-409), San Francisco, California; marital status: Single; relation: Lodger; Occupation: Stenographer (record)
• 1935. San Francisco, California (record)
• 1936. Los Angeles, California; Occupation: Typist (record)
• 1940. Seattle, King, Washington; marital status: Married; relation: Wife (record)
• 1941. Seattle, Washington (record)
• 1950. Seattle, King, Washington; Occupation: Stenographer; relation: Wife; marital status: Married (record)
• 1951. bef. 1951; Washington (record)
• 644 SE 20th Ave (record)
• King, Washington (record)
• Seattle, Washington (record)

Other records the tree attaches: Oregon, U.S., Marriage Indexes, 1906-2009; her father’s obituary in the Sunday Oregonian, 27 Jan 1952, which names her as “Mrs. Winifred I. Dwyer, Seattle” (record).

Family memories

As her great-grandson remembers her (October 2026).

An independent woman, stubborn and active. She told her great-grandson of travelling across the United States on her own when she was young; her records fit a single woman on the move, in San Francisco by 1930 and registered to vote at Los Angeles in 1936. In her last years she lived alone in her own house in Ballard, Seattle, until her death, and on many days took the bus into town.

Open questions

• Where she worked in San Francisco (1928-1935), and what share of the company she held after 1969.
• Her travels, and her life before her marriage: the full text of her 2003 obituary, any newspaper notice of her 100th birthday (November 2001), and St. Joseph newspapers of the 1920s (see research/gedcom/ancestry-lookups.md).
• When she moved to Ballard (her address at death).
• A “Winnifred A. Flynn” at Long Beach, California, in 1994-1999 public records is very probably another woman.