Military Monday: "650 WACs Defy the Subs"

My aunt Dorothy Schwartz was one of 650 WACs in WWII who sailed aboard the RMS Aquitania from New York City on July 8, 1943, arriving at dusk a week later in Gourock, Scotland. It was a risky voyage because the ship sailed alone, without a convoy, under absolute secrecy. They never knew when a German submarine might follow or attack.

RMS Aquitania in Southampton, England

Before the trip, the WACs were held incommunicado at Camp Shanks in New Jersey (guarded by MPs) until they were taken by train to the ship. As historian of the WAC Detachment of the 9th Air Force, Auntie wrote that the WACs "enacted an Ellery Queen radio mystery drama concerning the importance of being security-minded."

Doris Fleeson's article is the cover story

Famed war correspondent Doris Fleeson sailed along with Auntie and her fellow WACs, as well as hundreds of British military personnel. Later that year, Fleeson's long article about the voyage was published in Women's Home Companion as "650 WACs Defy the Subs."

In reading Fleeson's article, I was struck by her mention of "gangplankitis," which she says is "the fear of boarding a ship that might be attacked. Men soldiers have succumbed to it. Sometimes they are hospitalized. Sometimes they are carried aboard. The Wacs entirely escaped gangplankitis."

Once the Aquitania docked and the WACs disembarked, they were met by dignitaries including US Army Captain Sherman, who told them: "You are here safely. The safety of the troops to come depends upon your discretion." Quite a solemn welcome to WACs who would help the Air Force coordinate bombing of enemy targets.

The oral history of Mary Williams Elder was another good source of info about what it was like to be aboard the Aquitania as one of the 650 WACs.

NOTE: This is my "Uniqueness" post for the April 2018 "Genealogy Blog Party" by Elizabeth O'Neal.

Genealogy by the States: New York state of mind

There are so many wonderful New York City sources to help with my genealogy research that I scarcely know where to begin. My Schwartz, Farkas, Birk, and Mahler ancestors all sailed past the Statue of Liberty from Eastern Europe, so my genealogy naturally has a New York state of mind.

Here are four of my favorite sites for NYC genealogy:

• NYC brides, grooms, births, deaths, and naturalizations: My top go-to site is the Italian Genealogical Group. It's free and the volunteers who transcribed the records and developed the databases have done an incredible job. 
• 1940 NYC directories, old photos, and much, much more: online and in person at the NY Public Library Milstein Division. Browsing the Digital Gallery brings me back to the New York City of my grandparents' time.
• Ellis Island and Castle Green sites are helpful in finding immigrants who landed in NYC, although I prefer Family Search's Ellis Island passenger lists and Ancestry, not to mention Fold3's naturalization documents.
• Linkpendium's city and borough-by-borough links that that of the Bronx are quite useful. Actually, Linkpendium is great for any state!

Now for my most recent New York genealogy adventures in following the Markell family. Barnhart (Barney, Bernard) H. Markell (1874-1944) was the father-in-law of my grand-aunt Mary Mahler Markell. As I wrote earlier this year, Barney came to New York from Boston with his son Joseph after the early death of his first wife, Rose Lebowitz. I've followed the paper trail of Barney and his progeny via US and NY census data, but have yet to discover exactly how Julius and Barney Markell are related.

On Friday, hubby and I took a field trip to Riverside Cemetery in NJ, where Barney is buried (above). In the same plot were: Barney's second wife, Esther M. Markell; Esther's daughter Ella Markell and her two husbands, Albert Brown (originally Brownstein) and Jeremiah Match; and Albert's brother-in-law David Zenkel. RIP.

This weekly prompt about New York is part of the "Genealogy by the States" series by Jim Sanders.

Surname Saturday, St. Patty's Day edition: Smith from Limerick?

Last year on St. Patty's Day, I wrote that I married hubby for his Irish ancestors. This week I found out, via fam trees on Ancestry with documententation, that hubby's 5th great-granddaddy, William Smith, has a link with Ireland.

William's will, dated April 14, 1786, refers to some property he owns in his homeland:

I give and bequeath to my son William Smith the sum of ten pounds with my right and title to my father's estate in Ireland and ye ten pound note to be paid untill [sic] it can be collected from the book debts.

Brice Smith is buried in Fairfield Cty, Ohio

The elder William Smith had another son, Brice, hubby's 4th-great-granddaddy, who inherited land, bedding, a horse, heifer, money, sheep, and other possessions.
 
Now it's going to be quite a trick to trace Smith family connections to and within Limerick, the place where they are probably from. So many ancestors, so little time!

Workday Wednesday: What the Men Were Doing

Home built by James Edgar Wood

 

 

 

My husband's male ancestors (Wood, McClure, Steiner) were often carpenters or did other skilled work with their hands.

• Thomas Haskell Wood and seven of his sons (William H., Alfred O., Francis E., Charles A., Marion E., James E., and Robert O.) were carpenters, machinists, or painters in the early 20th century. Hubby's father (Edgar J. Wood, an insurance adjuster) tells of his father James building a home and moving the family into it while finishing the interior and starting to build a new house...then moving the family into the next new house after selling the previous house...and on and on.
• Thomas H. Wood's father Elihu Wood (late 1800s) was the captain of a merchant ship, and his father William was a glazier. Further back in the Wood line were more captains.
• Edward George Steiner was a carpenter. I'm still tracing his brothers.
• Brice Larimer McClure (early 20th century) and his father, William Madison McClure, were both machinists. Further back in the McClure line were several generations of farmers.

Other male ancestors had other occupations: Brice S. Larimer was a railroad station agent but his parents/grandparents were farmers. Joseph W. Rinehart was a farmer. In the Slatter family were cooks, laborers, and wallpaper cleaners (and, later, bandmasters in Canada). Shehen ancestors (1800s-1900s) were laborers and bricklayers in Ireland and England.

The male ancestors in my family (Burk, Mahler, Farkas, Schwartz) came from Eastern Europe and chose occupations with "low barriers to entry" in the United States--meaning you needed a skill and maybe a few tools.

• Isaac Burk was a cabinetmaker, highly skilled it seems because he worked continuously in Canada and the United States from the early 1900s onward.
• Meyer E. Mahler was a tailor in the late 1800s/early 1900s. My cousin Lois has his cutting shears!
• Moritz Farkas was a farmer in his native Hungary but in New York City he became a sometime peddler and a sometime presser, ironing clothing in the Lower East Side's factories at the turn of the century and later.
• Teddy Schwartz was an interpreter at Ellis Island after he arrived from Hungary, and then worked as a runner for the steamship lines. He briefly sold insurance before opening a grocery store in the Bronx.

Genealogy by the States: Virginia (after arriving from Donegal?)

Hubby's 3d great-grandparents (John McClure and Ann McFall) married in Rockbridge county, Virginia, in 1801. One of their sons was Benjamin McClure (1812-1896), the subject of my Facebook genealogy experiment (which has attracted one McClure researcher so far).

There is strong evidence that the McClure family (specifically, John's father Alexander and grandpa Halbert) was from Donegal.

Actually, it seems to be a Scots-Irish connection. I still have more work to do proving the connection, of course...

How appropriate that I can showcase one of hubby's three Irish ancestral links during the week leading up to St. Patrick's Day!

This weekly prompt about Virginia is part of the "Genealogy by the States" series by Jim Sanders.

Surname Saturday: Searching for Slatter, Shehen, and Steiner

Steiner sisters of Wyandot County, Ohio

 On hubby's side of the family tree, I'm searching for these surnames:

• Steiner. Jacob S. Steiner (1802? - ?) married Elizabeth UNK (1802-1864) and brought up a big family in Crawford, OH area. Jacob's granddaughter Floyda Mabel Steiner McClure (1878-1948), shown with her sisters Carrie, Minnie, Maggie, and Blanche in the studio photo above, is hubby's grandmom. I wrote about Floyda and Maggie here and more about the Steiner family is here.
• Slatter. John Slatter Sr. was born in Oxfordshire in 1811, married his wife Sarah in 1832, and the last time I can find him in the UK census (with any certainty) is 1841. His children are Fanny, Thomas, John, Sarah, William, and Daniel, all born between 1833 and 1850. John Sr. is hubby's 2nd great-granddad. I summarized what I know about some of this family on the "John & Mary Slatter" tab at top of the blog. Someday I hope to get at least one generation back from John Sr.
• Shehen. With St. Patty's Day just a week away, I'm thinking about John & Mary Shehen, hubby's 2d great-grandparents, both born in Ireland just after 1801. Their daughter Mary Shehen married John Slatter in 1859. Passing down given names from generation to generation makes it a challenge to keep 'em all straight and locate the right ancestors, I can tell you! Where in Ireland were the older John & Mary Shehen from? Who are their parents/siblings? How and why did they move from Ireland to England?

Those Places Thursday: The Bronx

The Bronx was where my grandparents brought up their children and where my parents (Harold Burk and Daisy Schwartz) settled with my sisters and me.

Teddy's Dairy (owned by Grandpa Theodore Schwartz and Grandma Hermina Farkas) was in several locations around Fox Street and Beck Street in Bronx, NY.




Above, Teddy behind the counter. At right, Teddy and his assistant John in front of Teddy's Dairy, 1934. John eventually bought the business from Teddy.

The Bronx has a legendary mystique worldwide, it seems . . . in Japan, as well.

When hubby, Sis, friend Laurie, and I were in Kyoto in 2007, we passed a bar entrance named for our hometown.

Left, a photo of us waiting for The Bronx to open :)

We also went to a baseball game where Marc Jason Kroon, a star relief pitcher from the Bronx who made it big in Japan, saved the game for the Yokohama Bay Stars.

Right, I'm helping Marc get his pitch ready. He was driven to the mound in a brand-new tricked-out Toyota and treated to cheers from the Yokohama fans before striking out the Yakult Swallows to earn yet another win.

Wordless Wednesday: Dotty Wears Dots

About 30 years ago, my auntie Dorothy Schwartz had this photo taken for the annual yearbook of Christopher Columbus High School, the Bronx school where she taught typing, steno, and other business subjects. Her nickname was Dot or Dotty and here she is wearing dots for her official teacher portrait.

This photo was "forever" glued to one of those awful magnetic page albums until, thanks to the magic of dental floss, I carefully worked around its edges and got the photo out. The smudge at left is my attempt to remove the word "proof" from the photo.

Travel Tuesday: Harold the Travel Agent

Dad (Harold Burk) was a travel agent who did the most traveling of his life during WWII.

Here you can see brochures and timetables for trains and other transportation methods, next to his desk at the luxe Savoy Plaza Hotel, located at the corner of 57th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City, a ritzy address just across from the Plaza Hotel.

Dad started his WWII travels at Camp Upton on Long Island, where he was inducted in 1942 for what became 3 1/2 years in the US Army. He served from late 1944 to mid-1945 in "Central Europe" and in "Rhineland," according to his honorable discharge documents. His younger brother Sidney also served in Europe then.

We know Dad was stationed outside Paris for a time because he sent photos home to his mom, Henrietta Mahler Burk. For instance, the photo at left below shows him in uniform at a cafe outside Paris (and below right, Dad in Paris itself).

Harold Burk (right) and friend

After WWII ended, Dad came home, met Mom (possibly through a date arranged by two aunts, one on each side) and were married, followed by a Bermuda honeymoon.
  
Once Dad became a father, his travels usually consisted of getting onto the IRT subway to ride from the Bronx into Manhattan every day for work. His biggest post-war trip was in 1959, when he went to Hawaii for what turned out to be a very short stay, as I wrote last year here.

Funeral Friday: Following the Wolf family

My 2d cousin Lois found me through this blog when she spotted (among other entries) a short post I'd written about her grandfather, Louis Volk, who married my great-aunt Ida Mahler.

Today I used Ancestry's Historical Newspapers, Birth, Death & Marriage Announcements to search for funeral info about Louis's sister Beckie Volk (1886?-1955), who married Simon Wolf (1886-1969) in 1908, in New York City.

Very quickly I found them both in New York Times obituaries. Above, Beckie's funeral notice from May, 1955. This showed me that one of Beckie's three daughters was no longer alive (I found her obit in a 1943 Times notice). It also gave me the married names of Beckie and Simon's two daughters and mentions that Beckie was a grandma by this time.

Simon's funeral notice from 1969, directly above, confirms those daughters' married names and that Simon was a grandfather. Both Simon and Beckie, and their daughter Cecilia (below), are buried at Riverside Cemetery in New Jersey, where some of my Mahler ancestors are buried, as well.

So now I'm searching for Pauline Wolf Kagan (whose hubby's first name is UNK at this time) and Shirley Wolf Gold (again, hubby's given name is UNK). At least one of these ladies has at least one child . . . more cousins for my 2d cousin Lois!

Two Lebowitz Sisters Married Two Markell Men

"Barna Markell" is a witness to Julius Markell's naturalization

I'm hot on the trail of the link between two Lebowitz sisters and two men named Markell. The Markell men are directly connected by a single document--a 1920 naturalization cert on which one is the witness and the other is the new citizen. Are they blood relatives? Well, that's the mystery . . .

Joseph A. Markell (1894-1975) was the husband of my great-aunt Mary Mahler Markell (1896-1979). He's the reason I'm trying to unravel this tangle of Lebowitz and Markell folks.

Here goes: Great-uncle Joseph Markell, born in Boston, was the son of Rose Lebowitz and her hubby, Bernard (aka Barnhart, Banna, or Barna) Markell. Bernard was an immigrant from Russia or thereabouts, having arrived in Boston in 1891. He was naturalized in NYC on 5 February 1902 (occupation: Driver).

Alas, Rose died young (before 1910), after which young Joseph and his father Bernard came to live with Rose's mother Fannie Lebowitz in New York City for a short time. (The Lebowitz matriarch was supposedly born in Czechoslovakia, but I haven't confirmed that.)

Meanwhile, Rose's younger sister Ella Lebowitz (b. 1890) also married a Markell. His name was Julius, and he was a plasterer born in Vilna. He arrived in New York in 1904, and somehow made he made his way to Washington state, where he married Ella Lebowitz in 1908. (How she managed to get across the country from New York to Washington is another question mark.) Their only daughter (Ruth Markell) was born there in 1909.

Clearly, Julius Markell must have had a yen to travel or a need to find work, because the next year they turn up in Boston, in the 1910 Census (remember that Joseph Markell, son of Bernard and Rose, was born in Boston but much earlier). Then, according to his nat papers, Julius resided in New York City from 1911 on. In fact, his WWI draft card puts his residence in Brooklyn, NY, and he stayed put through the 1920, 1930, and 1940 Census in Brooklyn.

However, Julius Markell and his wife Ella Lebowitz Markell must have fallen out with each other, because by the time of the 1920 naturalization, he tells the court that she and their daughter Ruth are living in Pittsburgh. I found them there, with strong clues to a link between Bernard and Julius Markell:

• In the 1930 Census, Ella and her daughter Ruth Markell are living with Ella's mother Fannie Lebowitz (remember her? She took Bernard and Joseph into her NYC apartment in 1910) in the household of Ella's brother Samuel Lebowitz. Ella tells the Census that she's a widow. Not true!
• In the 1940 Census, Ella is living in the household of her bro-in-law Joseph Sobel and his wife (Ella's sister?) Sarah and their four children. This time, Ella Markell tells the Census that she's divorced. Almost certainly true.

Sometime in the 1920s, Julius Markell remarried and had a child (William Markell) with his second wife, Tillie, in 1923.

Bernard Markell also remarried. Conflict with Bernard's new wife (Esther) prompted Joseph to run away to sea, a family story I wrote about earlier this month. Bernard (Barney) and Esther had a daughter together, named Rose Markell. It's not much of a leap to see that their daughter was named after his late wife Rose Lebowitz. They lived in New York at least through 1940, according to the Census.

Now I'm trying to find more about Bernard Markell's life and family background so I can connect him even more directly with Julius Markell. I'll be checking the 1950 US Census when it's indexed during 2022.

Matrilineal Monday: 1920s School Days in the Bronx

Late in 1984, my aunt Dorothy Schwartz wrote my sis a letter enclosing a newspaper article about her alma mater P.S. 62 at 660 Fox Street, which at the time was "an island of stability in a crumbling neighborhood" of the Bronx, according to the New York Times. P.S. 62 served students in K-4 in 1984 and K-5 today (left), but then it had one of the highest student turnover rates in the city.

My aunt's comments:

P.S. 62 was the elementary school we attended, only then it ran to the 6th grade. I never knew the area was in the South Bronx; I did know it had been renamed Fort Apache. To me, the South Bronx was below 149th St.!

Auntie Dorothy, her twin Daisy (my mom), and their older brother Fred were born in the apartment building across the street from P.S. 62, at 651 Fox Street. Their parents, Minnie Farkas Schwartz and Teddy Schwartz, moved every few years during the 1920s, but always stayed in the neighborhood.

My aunt remembers that after 651 Fox, they lived on Leggett Ave., a few steps away from Teddy's Dairy (my Grandpa's grocery store), which today is a hop, skip, and jump from Bruckner Blvd. Later, the family moved to 712 Fox Street. Finally, they settled at 672 Beck Street, around the corner from Teddy's Dairy store, where they stayed for many years until everyone was grown and my grandparents retired.

Now for some class photos of Daisy and Dorothy at P.S. 62 during the 1920s. Sorry, no notes about which twin is which. Note that the kindergarten class, in a photo taken around Halloween, has more than 30 students. Looking at the other photos, the classes are even larger!

Kindergarten: Daisy and Dorothy are in identical outfits and haircuts with bangs, center of 2d row, with a jack o'lantern between them

Second grade: Daisy and Dorothy at left of center, in matching outfits and haircuts again. Poster at far right is for American Junior Red Cross.

The twins were apparently separated during fourth grade. This is class 413--the twin is in closeup, below.

Dorothy or Daisy in class 413

Class 407, with the other Schwartz twin (along left wall, see closeup below).

Daisy or Dorothy in class 407

Genealogy by the States: Massachusetts, Where "Pappy" Markell Was Born

Joseph A. Markell (1894-1975), who married my great-aunt Mary Mahler (1896-1979), was born in the Boston area, the son of Bernard (Barnhart H.) Markell and Rose Lebowitz. Who knew he'd wind up on a ship that almost touched off an international diplomatic incident?

Markell's mother, Rose, died young. In the 1910 Census, Joseph (then 16) is shown as living in his grandmother Fanny Leibowitz's apartment with her widowed son-in-law (Joseph's father), plus uncles Morris Leibowitz (23 yrs old) and Samuel Leibowitz (18). According to one of my cousins, Joseph (called "Pappy" by his grandchildren) later ran away from home after his father remarried because of conflict with the new stepmother.

The family story is that teenaged Pappy wound up at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, making money by shining the shoes of sailors who were going on shore leave. This seems to be confirmed by the 1920 Census, which shows Pappy as a yeoman serving on the USS Niagara, anchored in Tampico, Mexico, when the enumeration was completed in February, 1920.

Why would the USS Niagara be off the Mexico coast? Well, the Mexican Revolution was underway and the US and Mexico had been skirmishing along the border.

In 1914, there was an incident in Tampico (an oil-rich area of Mexico) involving the Mexican authorities arresting US sailors. This "Tampico Affair" escalated into a US occupation of Veracruz. During WWI, Germany secretly tried to forge an alliance with Mexico, which only heightened tensions along the border.

By the fall of 1919, when the USS Niagara steamed to the coast off Tampico, WWI was over but the Mexican Revolution wasn't quite finished. When the Niagara arrived, it immediately suffered a major outbreak of malaria (according to the documentation declassified in 1980 and posted on Fold3, where I read much of it--see a snippet above). 

In December of 1919, the USS Niagara was dispatched to intercept another vessel, the San Jacinto, before it could land at Tampico. The goal was to prevent the Mexican government from arresting someone thought to be on board the steamship San Jacinto, a person believed by the Mexican government to be a spy. However, the Niagara was unsuccessful in convincing the San Jacinto to stop, and it took no further action to avoid provoking an unnecessary international incident between Mexico and the US. And that's probably a good thing for Pappy, too.

This prompt is part of the "Genealogy by the States" series by Jim Sanders.

Future Genealogy: When Snowstorm Nemo Met Blizzard Charlotte

Overnight we came through one of New England's snows of the century. At 11 pm on Friday night, there was about 8-9 inches of snow on the ground. By 7 am on Saturday morning, we had 25 inches of snow on the driveway and roof. The official total for my town is about 15 inches, by the way.

Left, the snow swallowed up my three front steps. Below, the view from inside my garage. It's a solid wall of snow. Until the plow service shows up (again), I'm not going anywhere . . . except back in time to continue my genealogy research today.

Genealogy by the States: My Connecticut Connection

Connecticut is the topic of week #5 of Genealogy by the States, by Jim Sanders of Hidden Genealogy Nuggets. And here's where I get to talk about teaming up with honorary* cousin Art to track down Gelbman ancestors in Bridgeport. Before I connected with Art via Ancestry message boards, I hadn't even suspected that my family had any Connecticut connection.

Main Street in Bridgeport, circa 1909

Art is descended from a relative of Anna Gelbman (1886-1940), who married my great-uncle Samuel Schwartz (1883-1954). Thanks to Art's information about the Gelbmans living in Bridgeport, Connecticut, I got a copy of Anna and Sam's marriage license 100 years to the month after they were wed at Bridgeport's "Cherry Street Synagogue" (actually Ahavath Achim) in October, 1909, a week after Sam became a citizen. Later, I learned that Sam was named Simon when he came to America in January 1904--why he changed it upon arrival, I don't know.

With Sam and Anna's license in my hands, I visited the Bridgeport Public Library to check city directories that weren't available online. Now I was able to track Sam through the years he lived in Bridgeport:

• In 1906, Sam Schwartz was a vegetable peddler living at 279 Lewis.
• In 1907-8, Sam was a vegetable peddler living at 179 Lewis (typos might account for different addresses in '06 and '07?).
• In 1908-9, Sam Schwartz was a printer rooming at 316 South Avenue.
• In 1910, the Census showed him as naturalized, born in Hungary-Magyar, occupation of printer. The city directory showed the couple living at 95 Clinton Ave.

Anna's Gelbman family lived at 71 Wordin Avenue for many years, not far from the newly-wed Schwartz couple and a short walk from the field in central Bridgeport where P.T. Barnum wintered his circus, animals and all (see photo above). Today, the area around the former Gelbman house is a highway.

Sometime between 1910 and 1915, Sam and Anna moved to New York City. Ultimately he became the self-employed proprietor of a grocery store--the same work that Sam's younger brother Teddy (my grandpa) went into. Coincidence? I think not! Given Sam's early background as a vegetable peddler, he may have influenced his older brother's business decision, not the other way around.

One reason to blog on these state topics is to bring fresh eyes to my research. In this case, I realized I don't have Sam's movements in 1905, when he could have been in the New York State census. Nor do I have Sam's brother Theodore's 1905/1910 census records. So far, no luck on these, but I'll be searching!


*Honorary because we're not directly related but have helped each other climb our family trees over the years!