Aisne-Marne Cemetery caretaker and me as a youngster

I was born into an American military family stationed in France, and as the first child of young parents (20 and 24 at the time of my arrival), had the good fortune of being carted along on a number of European adventures during my toddler years. My father, George C. Smolenyak, was an avid photographer, and like some at the time, had a preference for slides over pictures. As a result, assorted moments from my earliest years have been preserved in these miniature transparencies.

My father was a meticulous man with a remarkable memory, so could easily rattle off locations and other specifics decades after the fact — details which inevitably matched the labels he had recorded on the slides’ edges when he first created them. Dad had a few favorites he enjoyed telling stories about, such as my first encounter with snow in the Pyrenees or that time I kept everyone in a small hotel awake with my bawling, but there was one in particular he told repeatedly.

His tidy script notes that it was the “American caretaker, Belleau Woods Cemetery, France” and the slide shows this man bending over to chat with 18-month-old me. I’m clutching a branch he had apparently just handed over.

Dad’s caption on the slide

Time and time again, Dad explained that this gentleman was an American soldier who had served in World War I, stayed in France and married a local woman, and worked at Aisne-Marne Cemetery where 2,289 Americans are buried. When my father asked him while he had remained in France, he responded simply, “To take care of my buddies.”

This moment-in-time has always been special to me — partly due to Dad’s vignette and the snippet of my history it holds, but also because it foreshadows my later experience. I’ve spent years working with the U.S. Army assisting with the on-going effort to identify our soldiers who are still unaccounted for from past conflicts ranging from World War I to Vietnam. As it happens, I recently reached a random but timely milestone of having researched 1776 soldiers as of this year, America’s 250th anniversary. In my mind, this snapshot captures the instant this amiable veteran had just passed the baton so I could one day also help take care of his buddies.

For this reason, it has tormented me that I didn’t know who this man was. I asked Dad several times hoping that his impressive memory would suddenly toss out a name, but no such luck. But I’m a professional genealogist. I should be able to unearth his name, right?

It wasn’t for lack of trying, but as those who are familiar with American records know, our twentieth century military personnel records are sketchy at best since so many went up in flames (or were swamped by water) in a 1973 fire. So how could I find him? All I knew was that he had served in WWI, married a French woman, worked at this cemetery, and was still there in the 1960s. Where to start?

Then it occurred to me. What about those record sets for Americans living abroad? Ancestry doesn’t make them prominent, but if you search their catalog for relevant collections, you’ll pop up several including the following:

U.S., Consular Reports of Marriages, 1910–1949

U.S., Consular Posts, Emergency Passport Applications, 1915–1926

U.S., Consular Registration Certificates, 1907–1918

U.S., Consular Reports of Births, 1910–1949

U.S., Consular Registration Applications, 1916–1925

U.S., Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1835–1974

U.S., Registration Certificates — Widows, Divorced Women, & Minors, 1907–1914

I didn’t have a name, but did I perhaps have enough other information to ferret him out? I took a dive leaving the name fields blank and entering “Aisne” and “Belleau” instead in location and keyword fields. Most came up empty, but I eventually got some hits with the 1910–1949 birth index. Seven children had been born to six couples in the relevant vicinity and time frame. Of course, I didn’t know for sure that my mystery man had any children, but it seemed a reasonable possibility, so now it was a matter of narrowing the field.

I researched each of the six men. Not surprisingly, all had married French women, but a couple had birth dates that suggested they were too old to be the fellow I was seeking. Another struck me as unlikely as he was a naturalized American citizen from Romania, and my father, hailing from a Slavic family himself would have inevitably remarked on the man’s origins and accent. But all this was a bit speculative. Fortunately, I was able to eliminate several because U.S. records showed that they had moved back to the States well before the 1960s. I was soon down to two. What could I use as a tie-breaker? Maybe passport photos? Yes! Both had photos taken in the 1920s. One of them was almost bald even as a young man, so it had to be the other one.

I was now looking at Charles William Anderson along with his wife and daughter. After all this time, I finally knew his name, and it made me smile to have spotted him with his own toddler.

Passport photos as seen on Ancestry

I’ll detour for a moment for those who might be new to research to mention that it’s often worth checking whether a particular resource is available in more than one site as a quick look into FamilySearch’s full-text collection turned up a much cleaner version of this same image.

Same photos as seen in FamilySearch’s full-text collection

I was confident I had the right man, but genealogists can never get enough substantiation, so the final leg of my research was tracing his family forward and reaching out to his descendants. One of them — surprised, but pleased to be contacted out of the blue — responded and confirmed that the man in the slide was indeed Charles W. Anderson, a fellow she recalled as her kindly grandfather.

It had taken much longer than I would have wished, but my own unknown soldier now has a name. If Dad were still with us, today would have been his 90th birthday, and while he’s not here to tell, I’d like to think that somehow he and Charles know. Happy birthday, Dad, and thanks for indulging this one-time toddler, Charles.

Note: While I occasionally use AI for image-generation, all my articles are written by me and AI images will be identified as such.

The post Identifying the Mystery Man in My Baby Photo appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

The Quest for Annie Moore of Ellis Island – As this is the last day of March which is both Women’s History Month and Irish-American Heritage Month, I’m sharing links for my book about Annie Moore, the Irish teenager who was the first to arrive at Ellis Island. If you enjoy sleuthing for pockets of history, I think this might appeal to you!

The Woman Who Refuses to Let History Disappear – Whoa! So grateful for this lovely profile by Christina Stanton! Henceforce, please refer to me as “the woman who refuses to let history disappear”!

Photo by Nahrizul Kadri on Unsplash

The post Genealogy Roundup, April 1 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

This case was tough because the soldier was both an immigrant and foster child, but I did indeed find relatives from his birth family who could provide DNA reference samples, so I think there’s probably more to the story than is shared here.

Regardless, welcome home Sgt. Roger Laurent Raoul Duquesne. Honored to have researched your family. #hero #KoreanWar

Photo by Joe Richmond on Unsplash

The post Genealogy Roundup, March 11 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

‘Meeting my dad was a D:Ream’ – pop star’s 50-year search for his birth father – If you’re one of those who believes non-physical traits are also passed on, you’ll enjoy this one.

The post Genealogy Roundup, March 4 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Which of the following describes the heritage of Peter Gene Hernandez, better known as Bruno Mars?

• Ukrainian
• American
• Filipino
• Hispanic
• Jewish
• Hawaiian
• Puerto Rican
• European
• Hungarian
• Asian
• Spanish

The correct answer is all of the above. And though I haven’t been able to prove it through the paper trail, he may well have some Taíno and African roots through his Puerto Rican ancestry.

As a genealogist who’s been delving into the past for most of my life and playing with DNA for almost two decades, I’ve climbed the branches of several thousand family trees, and the more branches I explore, the more apparent the growing “melangification” of America becomes.

Folks like myself who are 100-percenters or half-and-halves with roots in only one or two places are rapidly becoming quaint, and families like Bruno’s are slightly ahead of the curve. If you were to come back 100 years from now, I suspect most families would look like the cast of Hamilton. But for now, let’s linger on Bruno’s for a bit. Here are a few things you probably didn’t know about his roots:

• He’s typically described as being Hawaiian-born to a father of Puerto Rican heritage and a mother from the Philippines. This is all true. His parents are Boricua and Filipina. But his ancestral pool also happens to be one-quarter Jewish hailing from Hungary and Ukraine.
• In the U.S., Hawaii, New York, California, Nevada, Puerto Rico and Texas all hold a piece of his family’s past.
• Bruno’s Ukrainian immigrant ancestor, a one-time Hebrew teacher, entered America not through Ellis Island, but through the port of Galveston, Texas as part of the Galveston Movement. His future bride, however, was of Ellis Island stock.
• This same ancestor was once banned from ever becoming a citizen, but after modifying his name (please see the Ellis Island chapter of Hey, America, Your Roots Are Showing if you still believe that old myth about names being changed by immigration officials) and waiting about 20 years, he was finally naturalized.

• As seen in this photo, continental blending in Bruno’s family began a long time ago. This shows a pair of his great-great-grandparents — the father born in Spain and the mother in the Philippines — with two of their daughters around the 1890s. About a decade after her husband passed away, Bruno’s great-great-grandmother remarried to a Chinese gentleman 19 years her junior, introducing yet another country into the family mix.

Spanish birth record of a great-great-grandfather of Bruno Mars

• When it comes to Spain, it’s Segovia — I’m talking to you, Nava de la Asunción and Fuentepelayo! — that gets the bragging rights.

Whenever Bruno Mars races around the globe on tour, there are likely unsuspecting cousins in his audiences in Madrid, New York, Manila, Kiev, San Juan, and Budapest. I look forward to the day when we all realize there’s nothing especially remarkable about that.

Follow Megan Smolenyak on Bluesky.

The post The Multicultural Family Tree of Bruno Mars appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

A second chance with a second surname – Improved surname tool at John Grenham’s Irish ancestors site! #genealogy

Photo Credit: Caroline Johnston under Creative Commons license

The post Genealogy Roundup, January 14 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Betty White, now 96 years old, graced us all with her presence at the Emmys. Mischievous and beautiful as ever, she was honored for her remarkable eight-decade career in show business which includes classic series such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Golden Girls.

But it was one of her more recent shows — Hot in Cleveland — that puts me most in mind of her own life. In it,White played a wisecracking, Midwest caretaker of a house a trio of Los Angelistas landed in upon impulsively fleeing their California lives. An Illinois native, White moved to Los Angeles while still a child, so this series was a version of her life in reverse.

Though born in Chicago in 1922, Betty Marion White was already residing in a neighborhood ensconced between Melrose Avenue and Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles by the time of the 1930 census. Her father, Horace L. White, a WWI vet and electrical supplies salesman, seems to have been doing fairly well in spite of the nascent Great Depression, as the family owned their home and — perhaps more importantly for Betty’s future career — a radio.

That only-child Betty was close to her parents, Horace and Tess, can be seen in this 1954 California Voter Registration in which the then 32-year-old Democrat shared the same address as her Republican parents. This same year she had a self-titled show on NBC and was voted honorary mayor of Hollywood.

(Ancestry)

Both Horace and Tess were raised in Chicago with a single sibling and Canadian-born mothers (thank you, Canada, for sharing yet another comedic talent with your Southern neighbor). Both also had immigrant fathers, meaning that all four of White’s grandparents were born outside of America, but the specifics are surprising.

It turns out that the ethnic brew that created Betty White is one-quarter Danish, one-quarter Greek, one-quarter Canadian, one-eighth Welsh and one-eighth English. Her Canadian portion sports branches that meander back not only through Canada, but also New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts to the early days of the United States, and eventually back to England, so in fairness, her English percentage should be rounded up a bit.

Perhaps what’s most striking is the Danish-Greek combination. Her Danish grandfather, Christopher White, came to America as a young man and bounced around Michigan, Wisconsin and Illinois working as a salesman dealing in everything from hats to rubber. It’s possible that his wife Ettie was the quasi-namesake for Betty.

White’s other grandfather, Greek-born Nicholas Cachikis, also came here as a young man and worked as a salesman, but of one item — ice cream. For decades, he sold ice cream off a wagon, but it was apparently a hand-to-mouth existence as he was sadly buried in a potter’s field when he passed away.

So Betty White will always be Hot in Cleveland and a host of other places, but it’s Chicago, Denmark, Greece, Canada, England and Wales that should be hot to claim her.

Originally published on Medium on September 18, 2018

The post The Roots Recipe for Betty White appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Sultana as seen in original photo and after colorization and enhancement (via MyHeritage and Photoshop Elements)

The fact that this image exists is remarkable enough, but the story that spilled out of it is even more so. Included in a scrapbook of immigrant photos taken between 1890 and 1892 by E.W. Austin who worked at the Barge Office while Ellis Island was being constructed (well before the widely known Augustus Sherman and Lewis Hine collections), it’s clear that it meant more to him (or perhaps the recipient) than most as close inspection reveals that it had once been framed. And then there was the caption which was more detailed than usual: “Sultana Numeir, age 18 — Lebanon, Syria — speaks English & Spanish.”

Wondering whether I could pick up Sultana’s trail to learn what had become of this striking young woman, I received a quick assist when I realized a neighboring photo in the album also included Sultana. This one was described as “a family of 4 from Syria, Turkey — Two Hebrews from Oran, Algiers.”

Sultana with her mother, brother, and father along with two fellow travelers

It didn’t take long to find a matching family with a daughter named Sultana arriving around the expected time in New York passenger records. They had sailed from Italy which explains why the entries for Sultana and her brother said “figlia” and “figlio” (son and daughter) and their mother’s “moglie” (wife). Listed above them was their father/husband, Soliman Numeir.

Arrival record of Numeir family (Ancestry)

Ages were given for each and the family was entered as Moroccan. This last seemed a little odd since they were supposedly Syrian, but I’m accustomed to seeing contradictions in records of this vintage, so was still optimistic that this would give me enough to follow them forward in time.

I tried the usual resources for immigrants — census, naturalization, city directories, etc. — but came up empty. Where had they gone? Had they changed their name, moved elsewhere, or maybe returned home? Knowing it was a long shot, I turned to newspapers. Recent immigrants rarely made the papers unless there was trouble of some sort, but you never know and I was running out of options.

Much to my surprise, I found that Sultana had quickly made her mark. Sometimes solo and sometimes with her mother, she traveled to assorted East coast cities (Buffalo and Boston were particular favorites) where she would tell their story — mostly to Christian women’s groups — and sell embroideries.

Article about Sultana “Numier” (Buffalo Courier, 29 April 1892, Newspapers)

The family had left Syria due to “religious troubles” and gone to Morocco where they served as Christian missionaries. This explained why their arrival records had noted the Numeirs as Moroccan. Other details varied across the articles I found (not the least of which was their religion which rotated through Catholic, Protestant, and Unitarian), but Sultana was consistently described as a recent immigrant, fluent in several languages and seeking to further her own education as well as her brother’s, and who appreciated what America had to offer. She left a favorable impression and was considered attractive and a touch exotic — enough so that an artist painted a portrait of her in a “characteristic ‘eastern’ pose” that was put on public display.

Portrait of Sultana by Edward Glover Niles (The Boston Daily Globe, 3 March 1896, Newspapers)

Then her story took another curious turn in early 1895. Without warning, Sultana Francesca Neumeyer (the family had Germanized their surname) eloped and married a man named Edward Luther Perry in New York City. This resulted in a flurry of gossipy articles that barely disguised a fascination with what was regarded as a mixed race marriage.

Edward was a Harvard student described as a grind (“his acquaintances are few, his interest in the affairs of the college limited, his abode cheerless”) and “modest, unassuming and not inclined toward handsomeness.” In some respects, Sultana was treated more kindly (“beautiful, her manner vivacious, her accomplishments many”), but her biographical sketches also included doses of 1895-style racism and at times veered toward fiction. Depending on which version you read, she had been born in Cadiz or Madrid, Spain or Gibraltar. Her purportedly German father and Spanish mother (or parents of those respective heritages, even though both were Syrian) had toiled as missionaries in Morocco and Syria where “the sun imparted a charming duskiness to her skin, and the climate mellowed her temper.”¹ And she had either come to America at the age of three or three years ago.

This undesired attention prompted Sultana’s new in-laws to issue a “doth protest too much” response insisting that they were pleased with the marriage and that the couple had wed in New York to “prevent any unnecessary talk” during their son’s senior year at Harvard — a claim that, if true, clearly backfired.

Sultana’s in-laws’ response to the marriage (The Boston Daily Globe, 9 February 1895, Newspapers)

Some of the articles about Sultana and Edward’s February 1895 marriage said that they intended to go overseas as soon as he finished his studies, and this was corroborated by his application for a passport that May. Shortly after, they left for Sultana’s family’s hometown — now Zahlé, Lebanon.

It must have shocked everyone just months later to read in the same newspapers about Sultana’s death. Announced initially in Boston, her obituary would appear in papers across the country over the ensuing months. 22-year-old Sultana who had captivated so many in the five years since her arrival in America had succumbed to consumption on December 5th.

Announcement of Sultana’s death (The Boston Globe, 1 January 1896, Newspapers)

Her husband, Edward L. Perry, lingered for several months working with the Presbyterian Mission during the Hamidian (Armenian) Massacres, finally returning to the U.S. in August 1896. Less than a year later, he resumed his studies and remarried, starting a new family. He would later report in Harvard updates that he had “done absolutely nothing worthy of note.”

Harvard College Class of 1895, Fifth Report (Google Books)

So that’s the end of Sultana’s story. Or was it?

Sultana’s drama, it turned out, was not the only one playing out in the Numeir family. Sparked by later records pertaining to her mother that didn’t quite seem to make sense, I shifted my attention to Joseph, Sultana’s brother who had arrived with her that day in New York’s harbor.

Joseph was slippery to follow — partly because he casually bounced between his first and middle names of Joseph and John (which is why I’ll refer to him as JJ from this point). These two common names coupled with all the variations of Numeir that had cropped up (e.g., Neumeyer, Neumire, Newmyer, etc.) produced a frustrating number of candidates to sift through while trying to trace him. The reason I bothered, though, was his mother who resurfaced in America in the 1900s.

The whole family had disappeared by the time of the 1900 census, but Sultana and JJ’s mother, Mary, showed up again two years later — and she wasn’t alone. Now she had a “son” named John who had been born in 1895 in — depending on which source you consulted — the U.S., Syria, or England. His specifics shifted over time with him finally settling as John J. Neumeyer, grandson of Mary, born on 21 December 1895 in Hull, England. And to be clear, John wasn’t the one tweaking the details; his grandmother was.

Given her age, it made more sense for John to have been her grandson. It seems she had fibbed to make it easier to enter the country, but whose child was he? John had the Neumeyer name, suggesting he would have been JJ’s son, but was this a fabrication to facilitate her traveling with this youngster? And how and why did Hull, England enter the equation?

So began another research dive that would take me on an astonishing journey. Rather than retrace the quest step by step since it was complicated and anything but linear, I’ll share a condensed rendition of the saga of Sultana’s brother, JJ.

Around 1894, he married Mary E. Wood, an English immigrant. Soon after in January 1895, they had a daughter named Rose in upstate New York. He worked as a photographer (an interest possibly triggered by the photos E.W. Austin had taken of them upon arrival) and was doing well, so you might have thought they’d stay put. But in September of that year, the young family traveled across the Atlantic to England. Maybe his wife was homesick or they thought the prospects for his business were better there?

Not quite.

The family went to Lincolnshire, where JJ and Mary soon split. Mary left Rose with JJ, but he wasn’t able to care for her, so he approached the Glanford Brigg Board of Guardians to have Rose boarded out at his expense.

But on 6 August 1896, JJ — all of 27 years of age — died from nephritis uremia in an infirmary in nearby Hull (presumably where Hull came into the picture). When that happened, the woman who had been caring for Rose gave her to the Glanford Brigg workhouse because she was no longer being paid. Against the odds, a woman who belonged to the Board of Guardians was so taken with Rose that she adopted her.

Meanwhile, JJ’s wife, Mary, professing that their marriage was invalid, wed her childhood sweetheart in July. Since she had taken on another surname about a month before JJ died, those who knew that Rose’s mother was alive couldn’t find her, so the adoption went ahead.

There are many elements of this story that are peculiar, but one that stands out is that Mary, living about 20 miles away, didn’t know about her daughter’s adoption, but somehow Rose’s grandmother in Syria got wind of it and showed up in England to claim her in October. Unfortunately, the board’s minutes and relevant inmate registers and boarding out records have gaps around the time this was happening, so what is known is derived from newspaper accounts.

Custody dispute over Rose (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 30 October 1896, BritishNewspaperArchive)

According to several articles, the woman who had adopted Rose didn’t want to give her up, but the board initially decided in the grandmother’s favor. Efforts to have Rose’s mother, Mary, weigh in were fruitless since they hadn’t found her, so the turmoil continued for two months with attorneys for both sides joining the fray.

In mid-November, the board concluded they had lost authority the moment the child was adopted, leaving the other involved parties to sort it out. This is when the mother materialized saying she had only learned what was happening upon reading about it in the local paper. Mary strongly preferred the board member because she didn’t want her daughter taken to Syria (“they would barter it away to the Turks for £200”), and signed paperwork authorizing the adoption, so the grandmother left England without Rose. At this juncture, the media invited Rose’s mother to share her experience and shifted from dismissing her to celebrating her.

Mary offered a dramatic narrative in which she had been tricked into marriage by a bigamist, a reality she learned about by intercepting a letter written to him.² He had not only a wife, but also a son who was living with his grandparents in Syria. In arguments that ensued, he struck her in the chest, causing cancer that forced her to have surgery to remove her left breast. When she recovered, she took her daughter to England, but “being passionately fond of the child,” he pursued them on the same ship, though they didn’t travel together.

Even after they arrived in England, he continued to follow her until one day he pointed a loaded revolver at her and said that he would kill all three of them unless she let him keep their daughter. With only ten minutes to make her choice, she reluctantly left without Rose in order to save all three of their lives. She and her new husband subsequently tried to find her daughter, but to no avail.³

The challenge with interpreting this from the distance of 125 years is that in spite of the compassion one might feel for Mary, she was a classic unreliable narrator, blending hyper-specific and accurate details with other, more questionable ones. The name and address she gave for the woman who had sent the letter, for instance, were valid. Moreover, the letter-writer was a wealthy socialite who would soon be embroiled in a public scandal for attempting to elope with the “wrong kind” of man (her melodrama merits its own article, but I’ll resist temptation to stay on track here), enhancing the plausibility of Mary’s allegation.

On the other hand, you can’t get cancer from being struck (and even if you could, the odds of a freshly arrived immigrant living in rural New York being able to get this surgery, still in its early days, so swiftly are doubtful), and the paper trail shows that she journeyed back to England in a second class cabin (there were only seven in this class total, including their daughter) with the man she said she was running from. Elements mentioned in other coverage, such as the fact that Mary’s own mother supported the Syrian grandmother, injected further confusion.

Some of what she said was definitely true, but flourishes seem to have been added, perhaps to garner sympathy or explain why she was late becoming involved in her daughter’s predicament. And JJ, her quasi-husband, was no longer alive to present his side.

All of this wouldn’t matter much if it weren’t for Mary’s assertion that JJ had been married before and had a son who was living with his parents in Syria. That claim brings us back to the mystery grandson his mother later brought to America — the one who eventually went by John J. Neumeyer and was said to have been born on 21 December 1895 in Hull, England. And this is where we encounter a battle of unreliable narrators because Sultana and JJ’s mother — also named Mary — had a habit of changing her story over time, so much so that her grandson wound up befuddled about his own origins.

Whose child was John J. Neumeyer, born 1895? (Ancestry)

John lived with her until she died when he was 24, but even three years before then, he expressed his confusion when applying for citizenship, saying, “I was informed I was born in England — I do not know of what parents. I remained in England until I was 11 months old when I was taken to Syria where I remained until I was six years old. I have lived in the United States ever since.”

He also noted that, “I am informed by Mrs. Mary Neumeyer who for some time claimed to be my grandmother,” revealing that he was no longer convinced that she was.

Declaration of Intention for John Neumeyer (Monmouth County Archives, NJ)

I don’t think it’s any accident that when she died in 1920, he made plans the next month for a trip to England. His passport application and the local newspaper said it was to study for the ministry, but he only stayed for three months. I suspect that among his grandmother’s papers, he had found traces of Rose, and believing her to be his closest living relative, went to try to meet her. Or conceivably, the two of them had managed to connect the dots several years earlier when Rose had begun using “Numeyer” as a middle name. In any case, his inheritance from his grandmother (and yes, it appears that she really was his grandmother) allowed him to make the trip.

I’d like to think John and Rose met, but the question in my mind is whether they were siblings or cousins.

John’s grandmother had said that he was her son’s son. And John’s very existence would seem to lend credence to the tale about JJ already having a first wife and child when he married Mary E. Wood, but other “facts” of the two Marys clash.

If the alleged son’s date of birth is correct and he was born in England, how could that timing have worked? He would have been born after Rose, not before, so he couldn’t have already been taken to Syria. The younger Mary would almost had to have been his mother, meaning that she would have been very pregnant when crossing the Atlantic and given birth to three children in two years — two with her disavowed-husband and one with her new one — with barely time to breathe in between. And even if that happened, why is there no birth record in England for such a child, and why is there no mention of him in all the news coverage about Rose’s adoption? Wouldn’t her having a local, infant brother have at least been mentioned in passing?

Two other possibilities come to mind. It could be that the story about JJ having a son from a previous marriage was true, but it was earlier and not in England, so the child was a bit older — say, born in 1893 or 1894. Or maybe — just maybe — John was really Sultana’s son.

It’s hard to avoid noticing that he was born the same month that she died. True, he was born on the 21st and she died on the 5th (and yes, I tried to verify, but failed to obtain relevant Lebanese records), but with all the other truth-stretching floating about in this family, what’s a gentle tweaking of dates?

I think it’s plausible that Sultana died in childbirth, and that her husband either chose to or was persuaded to leave his child with his in-laws and return to America. It was 1896 and he was a widowed, 22-year-old student with a half-Syrian child. He came from a family that was ambivalent about his marriage and he was dealing with a strong-willed mother-in-law who had the home court advantage since this would have taken place in Syria.

Whether John was JJ’s child or Sultana’s, using the Neumeyer surname and borrowing aspects of Rose’s life would have made things easier for his grandmother as she returned to the United States to begin a fresh chapter with a little boy by her side. And if John was JJ’s son from a previous marriage, she would have needed to nudge the date of his birth by a year or two so that it could have happened during the brief period JJ had lived in England.

Barring unanticipated revelations (such as Lebanon providing the requested records or the unearthing of the missing Board of Guardians records in England), the only way to solve this riddle would be through DNA testing. But this situation is complicated and there are four clusters of potential participants to consider — those descended from 1) John, 2) Rose, 3) Mary E. Wood’s second marriage, and 4) Sultana’s husband’s second marriage.

I have researched descendants in each branch, and all indications are that none of them is aware of this story or their connection to it. Normally, I contact relatives before publishing, but this family history is so complex that for the first time ever, I decided to write first and reach out to family members with a link so they can absorb it (or not) at their own pace.

I hope that they will be pleased to learn more about their heritage and see a couple of out-of-the-blue family photos from 1890. If any should choose to allow me to share their reaction, I will post updates here, but I am not going to try to persuade anyone to take a DNA test. My goal was simply to try to find out what had become of the young woman in the photo, so everything else is up to them.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes it takes considerably more than a thousand words to explain one. I hope you’ll agree that this one deserved 3,400.

¹ All quotes in this paragraph are from “A Harvard Romance,” Worcester Daily Spy, 10 February 1895 (Newspapers).

² Efforts were made to uncover any prior marriages JJ might have had to determine whether he was a bigamist, but marriage records of that era were hyper-local and nothing has been found in likely locations to date.

³ Details of Rose’s mother’s account are from “A Scunthorpe and Lincoln Romance,” The Lincolnshire Chronicle, 27 November 1895 (BritishNewspaperArchive).

The post Captured in Time: Syrian Immigrant Sultana Numeir upon Arrival in America in 1890 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Percy Hemingway, age 8

Percy Hemingway was a little boy with a big tag and minimal luggage when he made the journey from England to America by himself at the advanced age of eight. Fellow passengers on the S.S.Teutonic said he showed no fear and required little assistance.

Ellis Island was under construction, so when he arrived in New York on November 6, 1890, he was processed at the Barge Office. The tag attached to his coat explained that he was to be forwarded to his father in Philadelphia, so that may be how he came to meet E.W. Austin, the money changer whose station was near the booth for railroad tickets.

Percy’s departure and arrival (Ancestry)

Austin was intrigued by this pint-sized, solo voyager and asked to take his photo. Luckily for Percy’s future descendants, he agreed. When he did, he became part of Austin’s collection of immigrant photos taken between 1890 and 1892, predating by a generous margin the better known photographs of Augustus Sherman (roughly 1904 to 1924) and Lewis Hine (1905–1909 and 1926).

It’s also thanks to his photo that I was able to identify E.W. Austin as the man behind the camera. Since the picture was included in an album owned by John B. Weber, the Commissioner of Immigration who oversaw the opening of Ellis Island, I had long thought that Weber was the likely photographer. But an 1891 Harper’s Weekly article included a sketch that I instantly recognized as Percy, as well as other drawings from the collection (now housed at the NPS library at Ellis Island), and the helpful explanation that these illustrations by Thure de Thulstrup were based on photos taken by E.W. Austin.

“from England without escort” (Harper’s Weekly, 24 October 1891)

Percy, whose full name was Harold Percy Hemingway, was born on July 6, 1882 in Horbury, England to Levi and Ann (Shaw) Hemingway. He was the middle of three brothers, sandwiched between Wilfred and Herbert, but Herbert died in 1886 and was soon followed by the boys’ mother in 1887. It wasn’t long before Levi, a tailor by profession, decided to take his chances in America with his remaining two sons.

What’s puzzling, though, is how they made the trip. Many families traveled one or two at a time so the first to arrive could earn enough to money to pay for the rest to follow, but in this instance, there were only three in the whole family and two of them were children. Even so, they didn’t journey together because Levi made the curious decision to take his 11-year-old son with him and leave his 8-year-old behind to cross the Atlantic on his own almost two months later. But Levi clearly knew his cool-headed younger son who made his way to Philadelphia with no issues.

Departure of Levi and Wilfred Hemingway (Ancestry)

After a brief stay in Philadelphia, the trio moved about 85 miles northwest to Pottsville, Pennsylvania, where among other things, they were known for their singing talents. It was here that Percy would embark upon his communications career, learning telegraph skills that would land him a job back in Philadelphia and then another in New York.

He worked in the brokerage industry, and as it happens, so did my grandmother before she married. Thanks to her, I know that telegraph operators were highly valued because the best ones could shave critical seconds off trades, giving their companies a competitive edge.

Percy, it seems, worked well under pressure, which makes it somewhat surprising that he dillydallied about getting naturalized, not bothering to start the process until around the time of WWI. But even after all that time, he remembered the ship he came on and his date of arrival, so his paper trail removed any doubt that this was the correct fellow. Several candidates of his name were floating about at the time, so it was helpful to have this confirmation.

Percy’s declaration of intent to become an American citizen (FamilySearch)

His American-born wife — a fellow Pottsviller (Pottsvillian?) — probably wished he had gotten naturalized earlier as she lost her citizenship by marrying him due to U.S. immigration laws at the time. She consequently had to go through the same procedure despite having been born in Pennsylvania, and given that she waited about a decade after her husband, it’s possible she didn’t realize for some time that she had lost her citizenship.

Though Percy lived in Brooklyn for more than half a century, he returned to Pottsville often to visit his family, as well as his wife’s, and he sang in churches — sometimes solo and sometimes as part of a choir — in both locations. It says something of his interests that his obituary summarized him as a “broker and singer.”

The World Telegram and Sun, 16 October 1962 (FultonHistory)

The little boy with a big tag seems to have carried his easy-going attitude throughout a life well lived, so I was excited to reach out to his great-grandchild 131 years after his photo was taken, but was met with silence. As someone who cold calls strangers on almost a daily basis (tracing families who have relatives still missing in action from WWI, WWII, and the Korean War), this is familiar territory for me. Some don’t answer phone calls at all, some screen, some never listen to messages, some assume it’s a scam, and some are skeptical for other reasons.

Photo of Percy colorized and enhanced through a combination of MyHeritage and PhotoShop

It’s all understandable, and given that I only have a virtual item this time — not a physical photograph — I was reluctant to push too hard in my outreach, but the virtual world also provides a safety net by allowing me to share this online. So I’m writing this article in the hope that the Internet will carry this image to his family just as the S.S. Teutonic carried Percy across the ocean all those years ago.

The post Captured in Time: 8-Year-Old Percy Hemingway upon Arrival in America in 1890 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Mrs. Lillicrap and her nine children

Bessie Lillicrap must have been exhausted when she arrived in New York with her children. The family had left Liverpool on October 7, 1890 and finally disembarked on the 18th. That’s a long time to be at sea with nine children, the oldest of whom was only 12.

U.K. departure passenger entries for Bessie Lillicrap and her nine children (UK National Archives via Ancestry)

So she may have been less than enthusiastic when a man named E.W. Austin approached her about photographing them. Still, it wasn’t an every day opportunity for a poor family like hers, so she agreed. She, Bessie, Susie, Annie, Mary, Dick, Sam, Alice, Emily and baby Thomas were captured for posterity on that day just over 130 years ago.

Mrs. Lillicrap and nine children (colorized and enhanced on MyHeritage)

E.W. Austin had been fortunate enough to gain the money exchange concession to service immigrants arriving in New York in 1890, and while Ellis Island was under construction, he worked at the Barge Office which served as the interim immigrant processing center. As described in a previous article, he took this opportunity to take photos of immigrants from a variety of countries, and the result is the earliest known collection of this type.

While he scribbled notes about his subjects, they were usually restricted to nationality and maybe another random detail, but in this instance, he had written, “Mrs Lilycroft age 35 & 9 children Oct 18 to 25 1890.” With all this information, it didn’t take long to find them in passenger arrival records in spite of the misspelling of the Lillicrap name.

Passenger manifest entries for Lillicrap family members (National Archives and Records Administration via FamilySearch)

But what had become of them? It was handy to have such a large family to research as I was able to trace them to Adams County, Mississippi — although it might be more accurate to say that I located the survivors with their father, Richard, in the 1900 census.

Lillicrap family in the 1900 Federal census, Adams County, Mississippi (National Archives and Records Administration via Ancestry)

Four of those in the photograph had died during the intervening decade, and the specifics I would learn would make this harsh reality even more distressing. I discovered that 11-year-old Mary had succumbed to “tonsillitis and croup” in 1892, and Annie to phthisis (pulmonary tuberculosis) the following year. Life was clearly a struggle for the Lillicraps because I turned up another daughter in a nearby orphanage in 1900, but that still left the mother and Thomas unaccounted for.

At this point, my sleuthing went into overdrive because I had to know, but nothing I tried answered my question — until I found a single newspaper article that sadly solved the mystery. The mother, Bessie (Edworthy) Lillicrap, hadn’t lasted a year in America. Nor had Thomas. Both died from malaria in August of 1891 in a small community called Church Hill, Mississippi.

Desperate, Richard had piled his remaining children on a train and headed about 20 miles away to Natchez to seek help. All were ill and the family was described as, “entirely destitute of means, and with scarcely clothing enough to hide the nakedness of the little ones.” The town took pity on them with both the hospital and Baptist Church pitching in, and as seen by the 1900 census, most of the Lillicraps had rebounded.

The Weekly Democrat (Natchez, Mississippi), 26 August 1891 (Newspapers)

Now that I knew what had happened to the family, I turned my attention to finding their descendants. Did they, I wondered, know of this photo that included even baby Thomas during his brief life? I followed the lines of each of the surviving children, identifying living grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but once I figured out that one of the sons had married late, I saw a chance to reach out to someone whose father, aunts and uncles, and grandmother were in the photo. She was my first call.

“I can’t believe this,” Mary declared as I rattled off a few family names to quickly reassure her that I wasn’t looking for anything from her, but hoped instead to share something with her. She confirmed details, and then mentioned that her father had a brother and four sisters. I explained that there had been three other siblings who died young.

We chatted a while, and I offered to snail mail a copy of the photo since she didn’t have a computer or cell phone. To say she was delighted would be an understatement. I would have given anything to be there when she opened her mail, but got the next best thing when she called back, carefully identifying herself as “Mary Louise Lillicrap Milligan” and telling me about her upcoming plans. It seems the photo has lit a spark. She’ll be heading to the local library shortly and has already arranged a jaunt with a friend to Church Hill to see if they can find where her grandmother is buried. “I’m 83,” she exclaimed, “and just now learning about my family!”

The Lillicrap family uprooted themselves and crossed the Atlantic for new lives 131 years ago, and remarkably, their moment of arrival was captured. And now after a very different kind of journey tucked away in a photo album belonging to a stranger, it’s finally gone home.

The post Captured in Time: The Immigrant Lillicrap Family upon Arrival in America in 1890 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.