My Name is jalen This is a picture of me and my sisters in 1908. I was 5 years old when the photo was taken.

This is a picture of my mother and father. My father was in the stock market business and was pretty high up. He made pretty good money. My mother didn't work.

This was the house we lived in before the great depression. It was the house that i was born in and I loved it. I always played with my friends in our front yard because we had the biggest. I lived in it with my mother, father, and my 2 sisters.

In 1928 the stock market crashed. And my life was never the same. My father lost his job and that was the end of life as we knew it. Everything changed.

My family wasn't the only family affected by this, millions of people were affected.

My father was always going into town and looking for jobs. Along with many other men. Sometimes he would find a small job that would pay very little but nothing was enough. We lost our house we lost everything because of the Great Depression.

The only place we would be able to get food was at these little stands and at the bad times when we had absolutely no money, i would have to steal things otherwise my family was going to starve to death. My parents tried so hard to feed us sometimes they wouldn't even eat and they'd give anything they could get to us.

When Roosevelt wins the election in 1933 things start to look up for us. We finally got to buy a new house and my father found a decent paying job. My mother also got a job to help with the money. The whole country was seeing the change that he has made.

The New Deal programs created jobs and provided financial support for the unemployed, the young, and the elderly. The New Deal is the reason my father got a job.

The New Deal program that my father got a job at was called The Civil Works Administration, created in 1933 to create jobs for the unemployed. That ended in 1934. So he had to get a job at The Federal Housing Association which paid pretty well.

Throughout the 1930's over 9,000 banks failed. Bank deposits were uninsured and thus as banks failed people simply lost their savings. This was one of the major reasons we lost everything. They were just giving out too much money and people couldn't pay it back.

Another reason for the Great Depression was the drought that occurred in the Mississippi Valley in 1930. It was so bad that many could not even pay their taxes or other debts and they had to sell their farms for no profit.