J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI and the Bureau of Investigation before it for 48 years, was born on 1 January 1895 in a house at 413 Seward Square SE on Capitol Hill, then numbered 413 C Street, on the block where Capitol Hill United Methodist Church now stands. The house is gone, and the church on the site was built in 1967. No birth certificate was filed when he was born; one was registered only in 1938, when he was 43.
Hoover lived in the house for more than four decades: with his parents, then with his mother after his father, a printing chief at the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, died in 1921, until her death in 1938. He went to Central High School, where he sang in the choir, drilled in the cadet corps, debated and graduated valedictorian. His first job, at 18, was as a messenger at the Library of Congress, about half a mile from home, and he later wrote that it had trained him in the value of collating material.
He took law degrees at George Washington University in 1916 and 1917, joined the Justice Department and became director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924. In 1939 he moved to a house in Forest Hills in northwest Washington, where he died on 2 May 1972. He is buried a little over a mile from the birthplace, in Congressional Cemetery.
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