Catharine Veronica (Dawkins) Lane was my great-grandmother. My father and his siblings called her Nanny; my sisters and I called her Great Nanny. She was born on 10 December 1895 in Manhattan's Fourth Ward (down by the Brooklyn Bridge). As a child she moved to Brooklyn with her family, and she spent most of her married life in Bay Ridge and later in Dumont, New Jersey. In 1978 my grandmother, Kathryn (Lane) McGrath, recorded a series of short interviews with her mother about her history. The original recording is on a 60-minute cassette tape labeled (in my grandmother's hand) "Mom - her life story / started 10/16/78." Great Nanny died on 20 March 1984, when I was only six years old. I remember her voice, though, and listening to this recording really brought her back to me.
Below you can listen to the two sides of the tape. Note that the batteries on the tape recorder were sometimes a little low during some of the recording sessions, and so the tape was running a little slow. Played back at normal speed, the voices sound a little higher than they should. It's probably only an issue if you know the people involved; the voices sound just a little off.
I created transcriptions of this interview using a service called Trint. The "Transcript" links below will take you to a page with an audio player at the top and an embedded transcript beneath it; click on the Play button on the audio player and the transcript will scroll along with the audio.