This week, I was looking at the timeline gaps in my research into the early life of Uncle Joseph A. Markell (1895?-1975). For some reason, he didn't show up in Ancestry when searching the 1905 New York State Census, so I tried Family Search. Immediately, a Joseph Markell popped up. In a very unlikely setting, I might add. The name and the age are what I expected, not the place. Is this the right person?
As shown in the NY Census excerpt at top, a Joseph Markell was age 12 and living at boarding school in 1905, at the Weingart Institute.
What was this school all about? I located several references. Here's a reference from an 1893 handbook to NYC, explaining that this school was K-12, including college prep.
Another mention of this school was in a NY Times ad from 1908. In both of the references, the Weingart Institute's gymnasium was a selling point. One more online search turned up a piece about this school's summer camp in Highmount, NY--a camp attended by young Oscar Hammerstein, among other luminaries.
Where exactly the money came from to send Joseph to a posh private school is quite a mystery, which is why I have to dig deeper to be sure this is MY family's Joseph. So far, I haven't located the whereabouts of Joseph's parents in 1905. Very possibly they weren't living together; she could have been in PA while he was in NYC. I say this because I know Joseph's mother, Rosa Lebowitz Markell, died young in 1909 in Allegheny county, PA. I have her death cert and this is definitely the right Rosa.
That left his father, "Barney" Benjamin Isaac Enoch Markell (1874-1944), who was working as a "driver" in 1902 in NYC, according to his citizenship papers, responsible for Joseph. Both Barney and son Joseph were living in Rosa's mother's NYC apartment, according to the 1910 Census (found on all three sites).
Once Barney remarried in 1914, however, Joe didn't get along with his new step-mom and left as soon as he could. By the time of the US Census in 1920, Joe was in the Navy, a yeoman serving on the U.S.S. Niagara off Tampico, Mexico. In 1921, he was out of the service and married to Mary Mahler (1896-1979). The newlyweds first settled in New York City, later moving to New Rochelle, just north of the city.
Their neighbors around the corner in New Rochelle were Rose Farkas Freedman (1901-1993) and her husband, George M. Freedman (1900-1989). Rose, my mother's aunt, and her neighbor Mary Markell (my father's aunt) were BFFs . . . and they introduced my parents to each other. The rest is #familyhistory! Now to round out the stories, I'll be looking more closely at Uncle Joe and the possibility that he went to private school in 1905. And where his parents were at the time....?
