Roy Gerald Fitzgerald (August 25, 1875 – November 16, 1962) was an attorney, soldier, preservationist, and a member of the United States House of Representatives from Ohio. Birth and early life He was born in Watertown, New York and moved to Dayton, Ohio with his parents, Michael Gerald and Cornelia Maria ( Avery) Fitzgerald, in 1890 when his father's employer, the Davis Sewing Machine Company, was purchased by George P. Huffman and relocated from Watertown to Dayton. He attended the public schools, read law in the office of John M. Sprigg and was admitted to the bar in 1896. He commenced practice in Dayton as a partner in the law firm of Sprigg & Fitzgerald that later became Fitzgerald & Sprigg. Personal life In 1900, Fitzgerald married Caroline L. Wetecamp of Greenville, Ohio with whom he had two daughters and a son. Their son, Roy Jr., was a major in World War II, survived the Battle of the Bulge but died five months after VJ Day. Caroline Fitzgerald was a sickly woman, in the later years of her husband's Congressional service. She died in 1935. Fitzgerald married, secondly, to Alverda J. Sinks of Miami County, Ohio. Military service During World War I, he enlisted in the Army and was later commissioned a captain of infantry and was the commanding officer of Headquarters Company, 329th Infantry Regiment, American Expeditionary Force in France. He was commissioned lieutenant colonel of Infantry, United States Army Reserve Corps, in 1928. Congressional service Fitzgerald was elected as a Republican from Ohio's Third District to the Sixty-seventh Congress and to the four succeeding Congresses. He was chairman of the Committee on Expenditures in the Department of Commerce in the Sixty-eighth Congress. He served on the Committee on Revision of the Laws in the Seventieth and Seventy-first Congresses, during which time he authored a cumulative codification system for statutory law of the United States and the District of Columbia. He was defeated for reelection in 1930 to the Seventy-second Congress. During his decade in Congress, Fitzgerald fought for a number of causes that dismayed his more conservative colleagues, including child labor laws, reorganization of the U. S. Army Air Corps as an independent body and Federal care of the needy aged. The latter anticipated Social Security. In 1922, Fitzgerald introduced a constitutional amendment to allow Congress to control the labor and working hours of children under 18 which