Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Oldest Ancestral Item

Time to go on a treasure hunt with Randy Seaver for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun!

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) Lorine Mcginnis Schulze on her Olive Tree Genealogy blog asked this question several weeks ago in http://olivetreegenealogy.blogspot.com/2020/10/what-is-your-oldest-ancestral-item.html.

(2) So have at it — what is the oldest ancestral item in your collection of artifacts and stuff?  

(3) Tell us all about it in a blog post of your own, in comments on this blog post, or in a post on Facebook.  Be sure to link to them in a comment on this blog post.

Thank you to Lorine for the idea and to Linda S. for suggesting it.

I don't have many ancestral items to begin with and very few old ones, but I did take my time thinking about this to make sure I had determined the oldest item.  I'm pretty sure it's a photo of my Gorodetsky great-great-grandparents taken in Kamenets Podolsky, Russian Empire, from about 1890.  It's the only family item I have from before 1900.

The second-oldest ancestral item I have is a photo of a different set of great-great-grandparents, the Brainins, from about 1906, taken in Manhattan.

And that's almost everything I have that can count as an "ancestral item."  I do have my great-grandmother's set of silverplate tableware, but I don't have a date for them.  She married in 1914, so that's the oldest they are likely to be, but there's a good chance they're more recent.

Lillyan E. Meckler, March 6, 1919–October 17, 2006

Today is the 100th anniversary of my maternal grandmother's birth.  Esther Lillian Gordon was born at 1575 Madison Avenue, Manhattan, New York.  She knew the address becaue that was the home of her maternal grandparents, Morris (Mendel Herz) and Rose Dorothy (Ruchel Dwojre) Brainin.  The reason she said that she and her two older brothers were born at her grandparents' home was because for her parents' first child, a boy, her mother had gone to the hospital, and the child was stillborn.  Blaming it on the hospital, my great-grandmother then had all of her children after that in her mother's home.

Brainin family (as "Brennan"), 1575 Madison Avenue, 1920 census

Bubbie (Yiddish for grandmother) told me she spoke Yiddish as her first language and that she didn't learn English until she began school.  I have her Hebrew primer.  I don't think she had a bat mitzvah, and she didn't really remember or use Hebrew later in life.

She did continue to speak Yiddish.  The only time I heard her speak Yiddish, however, other than some random words, was when she turned 80.  She had flown out to California for her birthday and was staying at my uncle's home.  Her best friend (my godmother) had come up from Southern California to help celebrate.  I was listening to them talking, and then their voices got louder, and it sounded like an argument — and suddenly I couldn't understand anything they were saying.  I was mesmerized — they were arguing in Yiddish!  It's still the only time in my life I've heard the language used in a conversation, albeit a loud one.  I wish I had been able to record it.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: How Did Your Parents Meet?

For this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver is recycling a question he has asked before, but he has reworded the challenge:

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music!), is:

(1) One of our family stories for our descendants should be how we met our spouses.  Another one should be, if we know it, how did our parents meet each other?

(2) This week, let's tell our "parents meeting" story if we know it.  If you don't know that story, tell us another one about one of your relatives meeting his/her spouse or significant other.
 
(3) Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a comment on this blog post to lead us to your answers.

As I mentioned, Randy has asked this question at least once before.  I answered it back in 2015.  I have not added any details to my knowledge of how my parents met (I really need to talk to my father about that), so I'll write about my great-grandparents instead this time.

I was told by my mother that her maternal grandparents, Joe Gordon and Sarah Libby Brainin, met when Joe was boarding in Sarah's parents' house in Manhattan.  It was common for immigrant families to take in boarders, particularly from the same ethnic group, both as a way to help make ends meet and to help new immigrants arriving in the United States.  Apparently my great-great-grandparents, Morris and Rose Dorothy (Jaffe) Brainin, had boarders at various times.

My great-grandfather arrived in New York City in 1909 as Jojne Gorodetsky.  In the 1910 census he had already changed his name and was enumerated as Joe Gordon, living with his uncle Sam Schneiderman (his mother's brother) and Sam's family in Manhattan.

My great-grandmother arrived in New York City also but earlier, in 1905, as Sore Leibe Brainin.  Her father, my great-great-grandfather Mendel Hertz Brainin (he went by Morris and Max in the United States), arrived in 1906.  I still haven't found my great-great-grandmother Ruchel Dwojre Brainin on a passenger list with the three young children she brought with her, but by 1910 the entire family was here and was enumerated in Manhattan also (except for Sarah's brother David).

Joe must have become a boarder in the Brainin household sometime between 1910 and 1913.  Joe and Sarah became engaged in 1913 and married on April 4, 1914 in Manhattan.  The marriage lasted until Joe's death on May 2, 1955.

I have Joe and Sarah's engagement photo, but I can't find the scanned version.  My grandmother told me that this photo of them was taken while they were engaged.

The Miracle Baby

Lily Gordon, circa 1935

Family stories are always interesting, but are they accurate?  My grandmother Esther Lillian Gordon, whom I always called Bubbie (Yiddish for grandmother), was born March 6, 1919.  One of the stories I heard many times while I was growing up was how it was a miracle she had been born and survived.

The story goes that Bubbie's mother, Sarah Libby (Brainin) Gordon, was pregnant with her when Sarah's brother, William Brainin, came home from the Army with influenza during the 1918 pandemic.  He infected his sister, who became gravely ill.  She had to go to the hospital and have a lung removed, while still pregnant.  Everything was touch and go, and there were serious questions as to whether either or both of Sarah and the baby would survive.

Somehow, Sarah recovered and gave birth to my grandmother.  Both of them were healthy, and Sarah's father, Rabbi Mendel Herz Brainin, was so overjoyed he went dancing in the streets. As an epilog to the story, Bubbie also said that her Uncle Willie had died before she was born.

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So far, the only part of this story that I've attempted to research is Uncle Willie's death.  My first clue that he didn't actually die before my grandmother was born was that I found him, or someone who certainly appeared to be him, in the 1920 U.S. census with his parents in Manhattan.  After that discovery, I searched for him in the New York City death index and found a likely listing with a death date of January 26, 1920.  I ordered the death certificate and confirmed it was indeed for the brother of my great-grandmother.  Obviously, I was very lucky in that he lived long enough to be enumerated in the census!

Learning that Uncle Willie had died in 1920, not before Bubbie's birth in March 1919, does seem to poke a fairly large hole in my grandmother's story.  Unfortunately, the other avenues of research aren't particularly viable.  The odds on any hospital records from 1918–1919 surviving are very small, and even if they existed, I probably wouldn't be permitted to view them, because medical records of any type are considered sacrosanct in this country, and New York is especially well known for being unfriendly about allowing researchers access to records (yes, even 100-year-old records that are supposed to be available).

A slightly — only slightly — better angle would be to research Uncle Willie's time in the Army.  He apparently did serve, because there was a photograph of him in his uniform that my grandmother identified.  It disappeared several years ago, but he was an enlisted man.  About 80% of Army enlisted personnel records for soldiers discharged between 1912 and 1960 were destroyed in a fire in 1973 at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis, Missouri.  So the chances of his records having survived are low.  I do need to try requesting them, though, because that's still a 20% of being successful.  If his records did survive, I might be able to find out if and when he was sent home with the flu.  (It's on my [long] list of things to do for my own family research.)  If he did have the flu, and if he went home between about June 1918 and February 1919, maybe the story is true after all!

Black Family History on "History Detectives"

I've written about History Detectives before.  People who think they have interesting items with historical relevance contact the program, hoping to have research confirm the items' importance.  For Black History Month, I decided to collect links to all the stories having to do with black family history.  I was surprised and delighted to see how many there were!  I've listed them chronologically in order of the events or documents they focus on.  Most of the segments no longer have the videos online, but all of them have PDF files of the transcripts (which really could use some editing!), so you can at least read the text of what was said.

A 1667 land grant to a black woman named Christina, the wife of a former slave, was signed by General Richard Nicolls, the first governor of New York.  The property, which is now in downtown Manhattan, was referred to in the document as being in "the land of the blacks."

A viewer has a photocopy of the record of the manumission of his ancestor Agnes Mathieu, which was granted through a court case in New Orleans in 1779.  The manumission is unusual because it was signed by Bernardo de Galvez, the governor of Spanish colonial Louisiana, whereas most such papers were signed only by the former slaveholder and notarized by a local clerk.

A Continental Army muster roll from 1780 includes the name "Paul Cuffee."  This turns out to be the same Paul Cuffe well known as a Quaker whaling captain and shipbuilder.

Someone bought an 1821 document at a flea market and believes it was a "freedom paper" for the man named on it, John Jubilee Jackson.  Jackson was actually freed in 1818 and the document is a seaman's protection certificate.

Among her grandfather's possessions, a woman found an 1829 bill of sale for a female slave named Willoby.  The woman wants to learn whether Willoby lived long enough to see emancipation.  (I've posted about this segment in some detail.)

The owners of a beautiful home in Natchez, Mississippi, learned that it was built in 1851 by Robert Smith, a free black man.  The owners have also discovered that Smith arrived in New Orleans on a slave ship and now want to know how he came to own the house.

A banjo bought at an auction had a note inside stating that the instrument dates to the mid-1800's and was bought from a former slave by an abolitionist family.  The segment traces both of the families to find the truth of the story.

A face jug discovered in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1950 is traced via the Underground Railroad to its origins in South Carolina.  (This museum catalog shows other examples of face jugs.)

A ca. 1861 tintype of what appears to be two Civil War soldiers, one white and one black, is analyzed in depth, including the relationship between the two men, to answer the question of whether a black man actually served in the Confederate army and carried a weapon.  The tintype was appraised on an Antiques Roadshow episode, and later the owner asked History Detectives to find more information about it.
 
A woman in South Carolina has some old family letters, including one written in 1877 by her grandmother's brother, suggesting that he was going to Liberia as part of the "Back to Africa" movement.  But the woman doesn't know if he actually made it there.

A Grand Army of the Republic photograph from about 1900 shows two black men in a group of about twenty men.  Along with discussing racial integration (or the lack thereof) in the time period, the investigation tries to identify the two black members of the GAR post.

A poster titled Our Colored Heroes tells the story of two black soldiers during World War I who defended a post against more than twenty Germans.  The poster has a quotation from General John Pershing praising the two men.

Tracking Family from the 1620's to the Present

Martin Van Buren

The New York Times of July 22, 2011 published an interesting article on the Van Dusen family in the United States, which began with a Dutch immigrant to Manhattan in the 1620's and now has more than 200,000 far-flung members all over the country.  Variations of the name include Van Deusen, Van Deursen, and Van Duzer.  Descendants include the famous (Presidents Martin Van Buren and Franklin Delano Roosevelt) and the not-so-famous, and even the president of the New England Historic Genealogical Society.  There was even a town named Van Deusenville.  Family artifacts mentioned include photos, family Bibles, and a hymnbook from the Civil War.  For me, one of the best aspects of this story is that many of these people are in communication with each other in context of being descendants of the same person.