Treasure Chest Thursday: An Insurance Policy for Rosita La Forêt

Two weeks ago I posted the last document I have that is directly associated with Jean La Forêt, a letter from his daughter Adrienne.  After going through the files I created for the other individuals in my "treasure chest", I decided the next logical person to work on is Jean's younger daughter, Rosita.  She has been discussed in some posts previously, but always as a secondary person in a document or photograph.  These documents are really about her, although I don't have many.

This is a "Travel and Pedestrian Accident Policy" for Rosita E. La Foret.  The full sheet of paper is 22" x 17", designed to be folded into quarters and then thirds, of a size to fit into a standard business letter envelope.  It's currently off-white in color with some stains that look like grease.  It's about the weight of 20# bond and has no watermarks.

Almost everything on this policy is preprinted, with the exceptions of Rosita's name, age, and address on the first full, "title", page and the date, signatures, location, and beneficiary information on the third full page.  All nonprinted information except the signatures has been typed.  The signatures appear to be stamped; they have no texture and do not appear to have been signed by hand.  Geo. A. Fisher's name has been stamped twice, with one instance offset from the other.

There's no indication of any specific event for which this insurance was bought.  Rosita was 17; maybe she was going on a trip?  It is a travel policy, after all.  The address for her and her parents is the one we have seen before, 615 Indiana Street in Vallejo.

The policy is dated July 31, 1926, less than two months before Jean passed away.

The policy itself goes into a lot of detail about how much it pays and under what circumstances.  On the first full page, I find it surprising that the amount for loss of life of the insured is the same as loss of two body parts.  You'd think it would be more if the entire body was out of commission.

And the circumstances which are covered are specifically described:  "wrecking of a railroad passenger car or street, elevated or underground railway car", "being struck by lightning or a cyclone or tornado", "collapse of the outer walls of a building Insured is therein" (but apparently not the inner walls?), "result of accidental drowning at a Public Bathing Beach during the time that a Life-Saver is on duty, and not otherwise", for a few examples.  The policy cost only $1, plus $0.25 to register it, and also depended on the insured being a "regular reader" of the San Francisco Chronicle.  I had no idea that newsapers sold insurance policies.  Since it did not specify the insured needed to be a subscriber, I wonder if I could go to the library and read the Chronicle and still qualify.

The Chronicle was pretty proud of its building.  It included an image of the building on the back of the policy.

The insurance was through Eureka Casualty Company of Los Angeles, which had a local office in San Francisco on Sansome Street.  I didn't find much information about the company online, but several of the hits from my Google search were for lawsuits against Eureka.  I guess it's a good thing that it doesn't look as though Rosita had to try to collect on the policy.

This letter is on a sheet of 8 1/2" x 11" paper.  It's a grayish white; it might have been white originally.  It is about 20# and has no watermark.  It is glued into the policy over the signature page.  It was printed, not typed.  I'm not sure if Geo. A. Fisher's signature was printed or stamped.  This version of his signature looks different from the one on the policy.  I wonder if either version was actually signed by him.

This is a pretty standard cover letter.  (Apparently not much has changed in 90 years.)  I am amused by the second paragraph:  "We are confident you will experience an increasing measure of satisfaction in possession of this policy."  That's funny, I would have thought policy-holders should experience greater security or maybe safety.  I never thought about being satisfied that I had an insurance policy.

This envelope is 6 1/2" x 3 5/8".  It scanned much yellower than it is; the true color is a medium grayish-white.  It has "Medical Matters" written on it twice, once in pencil and once in what looks like blue crayon.  This was tipped into the folded insurance policy.  It's too small for the policy to have been in it at any point, because there would be more fold marks on the policy.  I don't know what its relevance is to the policy.  Maybe it just ended up there over the years.

Search for a Photo of a Bride Wearing Her Wedding Veil

A friend of mine, Sheri Fenley, is looking for a photograph of a bride wearing her wedding veil.

While I'm sure the bride was beautiful, what's actually more important here is her veil.

The bride was Jeanette Augusta Meier.  She was the daughter of Abe Meier and Minnie Eisig, and the granddaughter of Aaron Meier and Augusta Hirsch.  Aaron Meier started the Meier & Frank stores in Portland, Oregon in 1857.  The family was Jewish and from Bavaria.  They were early pioneers of Portland and prominent socially.

Jeanette married Walter David Heller on November 14, 1922 in Portland.  He was the son of Moses Heller and Adele Walter, and the grandson of Martin Heller and Babette Kuper.  Martin Heller was a Bavarian Jew who came to San Francisco in the 1850's.  He was president of Congregation Emanuel in San Francisco from 1876 until his death in 1894.  The Heller family was also socially prominent.

The veil that Jeanette wore on her wedding day has been worn by 48 members of the family and extended family at their own weddings.  Jeanette's granddaughter is helping her mother put together a scrapbook that will stay with the wedding veil as it continues to be passed down through the generations.  They have a photograph of every single bride who wore the veil — except for Jeanette Augusta Meier Heller.

So I am helping spread the word about the search for a photo.

Since the bride was from Oregon and the groom from California, Sheri has been trying to cover both areas.  She has searched these newspaper collections online:
• Chronicling America, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/
• Historic Oregon Newspapers, http://oregonnews.uoregon.edu/
• California Digital Newspaper Collection, http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cgi-bin/cdnc/
• ProQuest Historic San Francisco Chronicle online

She found several articles about the wedding, but no photos.  She has also contacted the Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon, the Oregon Jewish Museum, and the Oregon Historical Society, and no luck there either.

The best remaining possibility would seem to be the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at the Bancroft Library on the University of California at Berkeley campus.  Among the items in the collection are a card index for the Emanu–El newspaper and the complete historical run of the paper.  I'm sure the wedding was reported in the newspaper; maybe there's a photo?  That index would be really convenient to check, but the staff at Bancroft said that, "Unfortunately the materials are as yet unprocessed and there's no way of telling whether this collection contains the photo you are looking for."  Well, the index has been catalogued and some parts of the collection have been processed; many of us have been waiting patiently for several years for the rest of the Magnes Collection to be accessioned at Bancroft, i.e., made accessible for researchers.  The Bancroft staff apparently have been busy with lots of other things and somehow just haven't gotten around to finishing this task.

There are a couple of other possibilities for the Emanu-El newspaper.  According to the Chronicling America database, both the Jewish Theological Seminary of America and the New York Public Library have the newspaper for 1922, JTS in hard copy and NYPL on microfilm.  Neither has an index, of course, but they could be searched manually.  But access is difficult for us, as Sheri and I are both in California.

And there's always a small chance that someone out there who was connected with the Heller and/or Meier families has a photo in a collection at home.  The more people who share this story, the better the odds that anyone who might have a photo hears about the search.

So here goes my shot in the dark.  Let's see where it lands.

Wordless Wednesday

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Genealogy Research in San Francisco -- via BART!

Tank photo from the
"Mexican Expedition"

This is a slightly different take on research in San Francisco.  I'm going to approach it from the perspective of getting there.  I live in Oakland, which is on the other side of San Francisco Bay, so any research trip has to take into account getting across the water and into and out of San Francisco.  I love to drive, but I don't like driving in San Francisco.  The streets are narrow, parking is expensive and hard to find (especially near the research locations), and you have to pay a toll to cross the bridge just to get into the city.  So my preferred way to go to San Francisco is by BART!  And conveniently, BART can take you to some of the most important research locations in San Francisco.

The first stop on our BART research tour is Civic Center station.  If you exit the station by following the signs to 8th Street and then to Civic Center, you come out right across the street from the San Francisco Public Library and a mere two to three blocks from the Department of Public Health, City Hall, and Superior Court.

The San Francisco Public Library has two excellent research resources:  the San Francisco History Center and the Magazines and Newspapers Center.  The History Center, on the sixth floor of the library, is the official archive for San Francisco and has a wealth of information available.  There are Sanborn insurance maps for several years, a magnificant photograph collection, annual municipal reports dating back to the 1850's, vertical files with clippings on people and events, and a staff that really knows the holdings.  While you need to visit in person to see much of the material, more and more of it is being placed online, which not only makes it easier for researchers but also helps preserve the originals.  Online resources include a growing collection of the photographs, San Francisco city directories, the Sanborn maps, and a request service for obituaries.  At absolutely no charge, library staff will search San Francisco newspapers for obituaries for you, to a maximum of five requests per month.  If you want to search for yourself, or if you have more than five to look for, the Magazines and Newspapers Center on the fifth floor has microform for many San Francisco newspapers, indices for several newspapers, San Francisco and Oakland city directories and telephone books, and criss-cross directories with listings by street addresses.  Another benefit to going in person to the library is that any California resident can get a library card, which then allows you to use HeritageQuest, the historical San Francisco Chronicle, and the historical New York Times from the comfort of your home.

The Department of Public Health holds birth and death records for San Francisco County for the past three years.  In California anyone can purchase an informational copy of a birth or death certificate; these are marked clearly "not valid for identification" across the faces of the certificates.  And the information is all we need for research, right?

San Francisco City Hall has several offices that can be useful in your research.  The most commonly used are the County Clerk, which holds San Francisco County birth and death records older than three years, and the Assessor-Recorder, which has San Francisco County marriage licenses/certificates and property records.  For the County Clerk you need to know the name and date when you request your record; they don't have an index available.  The Assessor-Recorder has indices for both marriages and property records, so you can do your search on site if necessary.  I have also gone to the Tax Collector and the Small Business Center in search of records.

The Civil Division of San Francisco Superior Court handles probate, divorces, and lawsuits.  The records viewing room is where you head for research.  If you're looking for older records, you'll need to plan on two visits -- one to find a reference for your file, and the second to come back after it has been retrieved from storage (for which you pay a fee, by the way).  If you want to avoid a third visit, remember to bring a self-addressed stamped envelope with you the second time, because you can't get copies on the spot; you have to return the file and request your copies, and they'll be done within the next ten business days.  If you forget the envelope, you're coming back a third time to pick up the copies.

If by chance your research leads you to the seedier side of San Francisco history, the Civic Center station is also the closest one to the Criminal Division of the Superior Court.  This is a little bit more of a walk from BART, maybe fifteen minutes, and from the opposite end of the station.  Room 101 is where you go to look up records and request copies.  Listings for more recent cases are in the main room.  If you want to research older cases, you need to have permission to go into the office area, and you can plow through the old, musty, dusty ledgers.  As with the Civil Division, older files must be retrieved from storage, which can take up to a month, but there's no fee.  So plan on two visits.  I haven't done any research on recent cases, so I don't know if copies of those records can be obtained on your first visit.  I also haven't found any files that I needed copies of, so I don't know if they'll make the copies while you're there.

Our next BART stop for research is the Montgomery Street station.  Here you should follow the signs toward New Montgomery Street.  You'll exit just off New Montgomery.  Head down New Montgomery, turn right on Mission Street, and soon you will arrive at the California Historical Society.  Its library, which is focused solely on California, is open to researchers at no charge.  The collection includes directories, books, photographs, manuscripts, and ephemera such as letters, diaries, and business letterhead.  Of particularly interest are photographs of many San Francisco locations after the 1906 earthquake and fire.  If you are researching people who lived in San Francisco, I highly recommend looking here to see what they might have.

You can't quite get to Sutro Library using only BART.  You can either go to Embarcadero station and take Muni light rail (M line) to San Francisco State University at 19th Avenue and Holloway Avenue, or to Daly City station and take a #28 Muni bus to the same corner.  From the Muni stop it's a short walk onto the campus and to the library.

Sutro Library is the genealogical branch of the California State Library system and has the largest genealogy collection west of Salt Lake City.  It holds city directories, local and American history books, and many genealogy and family history books, along with a special collection of Adolph Sutro's rare books and manuscripts.  Among the items in the special collection are two psalters that belonged to King James I of England, a book of drawings from one of James Cook's voyages on the Endeavour, maps galore, Torah scrolls, photo books (including one from a "Mexican expedition" in 1916, which included the tank at the top of this post), Japanese paintings, and Mexican government publications detailings events in the 18th and 19th centuries.  Unlike the California Historical Society, it is not just about California!  And now that Sutro has a permanent location, the staff would love for people to come and use the facility.

One of the best research facilities we have available in this area is the local branch of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).  While it isn't actually in San Francisco (it's in San Bruno), its official name is the National Archives at San Francisco, so I'm including it here.  And it is reachable by BART!  Go to the San Bruno station and exit toward Tanforan mall.  Walk around the mall and cross El Camino Real at Commodore Drive, then continue down Commodore until you reach the Archives.  It's about a 20-minute walk.

This branch of the National Archives holds records from northern and central California; Nevada (except Clark County [Las Vegas]); Hawaii; American Samoa; Guam; the Marshall, Caroline, and Northern Mariana Islands; and U.S. Navy bases on foreign territory in the Pacific and Far East.  Along with censuses, ship manifests, ship log books, and naturalizations, there are records from the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (Freedmen's Bureau), Bureau of Indian Affairs, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Federal Aviation Administration, among many others.  There are also genealogy workshops offered.  The Archives has a so much information, and a staff that wants to help you discover information.  This is your tax dollars at work -- use it!