Update: William H. Hocker & the Aetna Explosives Co.

I was finally able to review Harrisburg city directories to see when my great grandfather was living in the city. I hoped that they would narrow the window for his possible employment at the Aetna Explosives Company in Mt. Union, Pennsylvania. It didn’t narrow the timeframe nearly as much as I was hoping it would.

William H. and Isobel A. Hocker were living at 35 N. 18th Street in 1915.¹ The directory does not give a date of publishing beyond the year, but Jun 8, 1915 is stamped on the table of contents, indicating that it was published before this date. By the time the 1916 city directory was compiled, William and family were no longer living in Harrisburg.² Nor were they listed in the 1917 city directory.³

So, sometime between the birth of his first child in May and the compiling/publishing of the 1916 Harrisburg city directory, Will was likely hired to work at the Aetna explosives plant. Unless, of course, he worked somewhere else outside Harrisburg first.

This timeline means that he very likely could have been working at the Aetna Explosives Plant in Mt. Union at the time of the 21 Sep 1916 explosion. He doesn’t reappear in the Harrisburg city directory until 1918—which has Jul 19, 1918 stamped on the table of contents.⁴ He was most likely back in Harrisburg before that date.

Unfortunately, we still don’t know which explosion the family story refers to.

• Category: Research
• Tag: City Directory, Hacker-Hocker Genealogy, Paternal Line