Destination Brooklyn–1900

I carried a list of about fifty addresses of my ancestors, addresses culled from censuses and vital records. (My forebears apparently house-jumped almost every year.)

There are caveats to finding ancestral addresses: streets are sometimes renumbered, so the current address may be houses or even blocks away from the address location in 1880 or 1910. And if the address is unchanged, the building on the site may not be. In one-hundred-twenty or –thirty years, how many generations of construction might there be at a site? If in 1876 a building was already old, what I see today might be two buildings away from the one associated with my blood.

Despite these problems, I felt compelled to the pilgrimage: at least I might glean some sense of the area as it existed in the past. My first priority was to find my Dad’s ancestral home; it is one of the few stable addresses, owned by the family for at least twenty-five years, until the mid 1920s. While I was sure of the address: 329 17th Street, whether the same lot had this number was unknown.

In the end, correctly relating the address to a building turned out to be a non-starter. The block on which this lot would be was demolished for the Prospect Expressway, which cuts a wide trough through south Park Slope and Windsor Terrace. We stood across the highway and I took a shot of what the location looks like now. The expressway was built in the 1950s, and so when my Dad drove us around his Brooklyn for a look-see, the house must have already been gone. Not far away, on 18th Street, is the 1890 Lain Directory address for a Daniel McM, a very strong candidate for my great-grandfather. That address would be located just about where I stood to take the picture of 17th Street, but it is now part of the wall of the expressway trough. Likewise, the Eighteenth Street Church where my grandmother worshipped is under the road.

The common life of common people is completely expendable. The neighborhood where my father ran as a tyke, where motorcars mixed in with horse carts, and trolleys with cars, where streets were cobbled, or were dirt, is not even a memory anymore, but only a mental reconstruction. There are images: of the sites, the wonders: Grand Army Plaza, the Prospect Park Zoo, the Shore Drive and Ridge Avenue, Borough Hall. But images of neighborhoods are more obscure. The candid and the snapshot are decades in the future.

The house would have been in this row, where the Expressway wall is now.

So I gazed over the flood of cars sliding by in the canyon of expressway, its smooth white walls and steel barriers an artery of modernity through this antique place. Transformations of transformations, the landscape of olden times inscribed and erased, albeit imperfectly, but still, treated as dispensable, as bury-able as any bones, and as buried.

More details and photos of the Brooklyn trip can be found on the “Brklyn101″ page.

Note: See great photos and wry commentary on Brooklyn’s expressway “brutalist masterpiece” at Big Sky Brooklyn (16 May 2007).

Time Signatures

Josiah A Burger: his actual signature.

I have E. J.’s and William’s, too:

All similar: the names of brothers, written with hands built of the same bones, yet each individual in its way. I remember how an aging family member signed her name—instead of the dashed-off, bumps-and-lumps scrawl of those who charge a dozen times a week, she etched it carefully, slowly, an inscription, clear and even, as if for the ages.

And it was. Almost 125 years have passed. The Burger signatures remain, extant, yet hidden on an obscure document in the Brooklyn Surrogate’s Court Records Room: They authorize the “administration” of the estate of Jennet Burger, dead and “intestate” in 1884.

In death as in life, Jennet remains voiceless: her wishes never conveyed, her selfhood dissolved by time.

I don’t have the actual document, only a poor photocopy. The Records Room is in transition: original documents are undergoing digitization, and I only got a hold of the photocopy because of the kindness of the supervisor. He sent a clerk to the scanning room to find and copy Jennet’s letters of administration for me.

Many original records are accessible, though, either as hand-transcribed wills in the hundreds of moldering ledgers lying in open shelves or as original legal papers folded into packets and stored in the stacks.

I requested a few documents relating to some familiarly named Burgers, none of whom turned out to be my family. Nevertheless, I was astonished to unfold in my hands, for example, the actual guardianship papers of children who lived a century ago. Those children are orphaned again, the documents that determined their fate forgotten and abandoned in a government storage room.

Each quest I go on discovers tidbits of information, and also relics like these: signatures, once ink, then toner, now pixels on a screen. Signatures, wavy lines, once signifying men: they are abstractions now, several names for non-existence.

Note: The crosses after E. J.’s and William’s signatures are not “marks.” The members of this family were literate, according to census records. All the signatures are distinct, and different as well from the hand that filled in the forms. I believe the crosses were placed there by the clerk to indicate where the men should sign, since there were no printed “dotted lines.”

Surviving Jennet

The “Letters of Administration” for Jennet’s estate indicate she died “intestate.”

The proceedings, in a sense, substitute for a will. All of her survivors are named:

“no husband but six children towit Josiah A. Burger your petitioner, E. J. Burger, William R. Burger, Rachel A. Davis and Josephine Davis, all of the City of Brooklyn, and Richard F Burger residing in the State of Penn.”

Cornelius—though he lives—is not among them. The wording is curious: she has “no husband” rather than is “widowed” or “divorced.” But who knows—perhaps this was standard locution rather than a clue that they are trying not to say “abandoned.”

Missing: First-born Benjamin—whose tombstone, next to his mother’s, indicates he died in 1876, “drowned.”

Missing: George, third-born in 1839, seen in the family in the state census of 1855, gone by the federal of 1860, and missing thereafter. No gravestone located.

Missing: Eliza, born about 1843, last seen at home in 1860, age 17, in “service.”

Missing: Jane, 1846, also seen last at home, and in “service,” in 1860. Possibly found a second time in 1860 in household of “engineer” David Jackson and family in Kingston, NY.

Found: Richard, born 1847, seen at home in 1860, a young boy “at school,” resident in Pennsylvania by 1884. No other records of him; searches of NY and PA censuses for 1870 and 1880 do not find him or any similar persons.

The five Brooklyn Burgers I know of are the family entire—except for the renegade Richard, except for any descendents of the deceased siblings who become hidden within stepfamilies or relocations.

This ad hoc census of the family in 1884 gives clues, or half-clues. Between leaving the family and 1884, George, Eliza and Jane are dead, or living. It leaves me searching back from Jennet’s death for graves, certainly, but also for the crumbs left by their brief lives.

Estate Defined

Reading these “Letters of Administration” is a small lesson in NYS estate law. In the absence of a will, someone must be appointed by the Surrogate’s Court to take charge of Jennet’s estate. That someone was Josiah, the oldest living child. He petitions; the two other brothers resident in NY “renounce” their claims; the two daughters, female, and Richard, non-resident, seem not required to do same. (Hence, I don’t find the signature of my direct ancestor Josephine.) Finally, Judge Edward Bergen signs off on the decree.

Leading up to my trip to Brooklyn to acquire this document, I eagerly anticipated learning more about the house in Port Ewen. After all, it was passed down through the E. James side of the family until it was taken for the construction of the “turnpike” across the Rondout Creek from Kingston—I learned this from a descendent in that line. But these documents make no mention of real estate at all.

Rather, Jennet’s holdings seem ridiculously meager to a twenty-first–century descendent:

In 1875, the mean annual earnings of a mason was about $524, according to a chart in Poverty and Progress, a 1964 book attempting to define and interpret the “occupational mobility” of workers in Newburyport MA on the basis, in part, of census data. An unskilled laborer there earned as little as $358 per annum at that time.

This “less than $150” was then way short of a half-year’s worth of income, even of the poorest worker’s income.

If I researched the estate law of the time, would I discover that estates larger than $150 required more involved legal proceedings? Perhaps there was some fudge factor in noting down this amount.

You can see I find it hard to accept that this paltry sum was the final residue of Jennet’s life. Did they split it six ways? Or was it, simply, the money they used to ship her body back to Port Ewen and bury her with a sturdy granite block in the center of Riverview Cemetery?

[Source note:Thernstrom, Stephan. Poverty and Progress: Social Mobility in a Nineteenth-Century City. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1964. Rprt NY: Atheneum, 1969.]

Some Profiles

I’ve been reading around in Uncle Win’s genealogical book, published in 1989, Some Profiles of our S— Family. I was curious, in particular, about how he conducted his research, because it was all done before the explosion of online records. The book appears to be typewritten (professionally and competently), not word processed, and the diagrams and charts likewise completed on a typewriter.

Uncle Win’s sources include journals and memoirs, both published and unpublished, as well as letters, family Bibles, family-held genealogical records, entries in the Dictionary of American Biography, addresses, obituaries, and other records created by family members about their own lives or those of relations. Titles include the charming “Our Alpine Honeymoon” (1913), “The Revolutionary History of Fort Number Eight” (1897), and “An Appreciation by the Rector of the Church of the Holy Communion “ (1914). As Win points out in his forward, the family has had the “good fortune to had have several family members interested in genealogy” so that “books and records have passed down” (1).

So complete are these records in establishing the history of the family, it appears that Win did not use the census, deeds, church books, or even vital records in compiling his history.

Of course, this book is not about my family—Uncle Win is my husband’s uncle, not my own. Some Profiles dramatically illustrates the chasm between the classes regarding the past. Descended from John Winthrop, Conrad Weiser, Muhlenbergs, and Baldwins, among others, my husband’s family has (seemingly forever) been educated, professional, upper-class. They have been leaders: lawyers, ministers, company owners. They had the literacy, the leisure, the funding, to write, record, store, and publish a growing archive of material about the family and the times in which they lived. Descended even from notables about whom commercial or scholarly books have been penned, their lives intertwine with events in the larger world. Win writes about property and businesses acquired and divested, estates passed on, memberships in clubs and societies, all as if these things were most natural and normal.

I had mentioned to Win, not long ago, that I was conducting my own family research, and he seemed not to understand when I mentioned census records and the Family History Library—my first clue that not all family research is created equal.

If I had one letter—what would that mean to me?

One letter: written in the hand unique to my ancestor, in ink now sepia, perhaps, written in the spelling and sentences of their time—the very scrawl on the page an emanation of soul into the physical world. But I can’t describe the impact on me of writings that don’t exist—only the longing for them. I can be sure only that a description of self and circumstances would move me, that such a letter would swell the enigma of personality, and leave me wanting—more.

All emanations have gone up in smoke. Surely they did write: Josephine back to William and their mother Jeannette in Port Ewen; Jeannette to all of them down in Brooklyn. The younger Josephine to her grandmother, perhaps, and to her friends and her cousins scattered across the city. By the twentieth century, surely, someone might think to save something. Where are, for example, my Dad’s letters back from the war?—for surely he wrote some. I wonder, even, what happened to the letters that I wrote, on that thin blue paper once used for “air mail” letters, back to my dad when I traveled to Europe on the proceeds of my summers waiting tables?

None have survived. Not from or to my parents, or anyone else contemporary, or between any two names in my genealogy. But they did write. Those who could, did, certainly. I have this memory: my mother getting post cards from her sisters a few towns away. And this: she would sit at the kitchen table to write to one or the other, in ballpoint pen on the white 5 x 7 pads we kept by the phone for messages.

And I mean “gone up in smoke” literally. Once read, postcards, greeting cards, notes of whatever kind, were disposed of. A rip in half, a toe to the pedal of the kitchen trash, a hand pushing the paper down into the can.

The prosperous classes have something else, beyond resources and time, that prompts their copious self-expression and family documentation, even memorialization—something missing in the people who work and struggle and get by: a self-image.

I don’t mean my forebears were lacking a self—or depth or even introspection—but rather, they were absent the sense that who they were amounted to more than a hill of beans to a stranger or even to a descendent. I surmise this from knowing my parents, and their parents. Reticence was gospel; self-effacement the rule, quietness the treasure of a person. And when a life was done, it was done, and people went on with the rest of theirs; a home was dissolved, the things scattered, the papers chucked, all but the cemetery deeds. A person became a name and dates incised on polished stone, and, they prayed, a soul in heaven.

Intersection of Parallel Universes

Among the homes and apartments mentioned by my “uncle-in-law,” Win, in his family history is a vacation house: “In the summers, they rented at Greenwich, Connecticut, or at M—, Long Island, before the completion of their large summer home in M— in 1915” (9).

As Win grew up and the depression curtailed the family’s resources, this home became their main one. In fact, Win largely grew up there and went to elementary school in the town.

Strangely, M— is also the town where I was raised, many decades after Win’s youth there. We went to the same elementary school. At his time, it was the only school in the town, situated on the main street, quite far from his family’s house near the bay in the southern end of town. [Sometime I must ask him how he was transported to school.] I attended the school because it was walking distance from my house—a small Cape Cod built by my dad on a 50’ x 100’ lot. My little joke with Win has been that we went to the same school, he when it was new, and I when it was old!

Win summarizes his transition in and out of the New York suburbs:

By 1926, my parents must have realized the impossibility of maintaining two homes and the need to recoup some funds, so they sold the 39th Street [Manhattan] brownstone and settled into the M— house. Sister and I were sent to private schools in Garden City, while brother Henry was enrolled at St. Mark’s School at Southboro, Massachusetts.

After the fourth grade at St. Mary’s at Garden City, I went to M—‘s public school for three or four years and was then enrolled at St. Mark’s for the first form (7th grade). . .

During these lean years, father never let his financial concerns show in front of his children. He was ever one to enjoy outings at Jones Beach with his family and to socialize with his many M—friends.

Years later, while waiting to be called to fight in World War II, Win returned for a visit to his hometown, and in his book he quotes from the journal he kept at that time:

Good old M—! Our house [built by my parents in 1915 and rented to others since father’s death seven years ago] stands across the road from a small privately owned lake, noted mainly for its seaweed and bullrushes and one huge weeping willow. The lake empties through a small dam into one of the millions of creeks of the Great South Bay. We used to catch lots of eels, crabs, and snappers in the creeks in the old days. Mussels lined the banks of the small tributary creeks, but we never thought of them as edible. Meadows and swamps extended along the shores in great patches and probably still do where they haven’t been laid out in blocks and promoted by indefatigable real estate operators (or simply optimists).

I had friends in that south part of town when I was in high school, and their homes were new, built on landfill by those “indefatigable real estate operators.” But they were hardly “laid out in blocks”; rather, these developments were prototypes, I suppose, of today’s McMansions, with swirling streets confusingly lapping around, and houses with features I’d never imagined: atriums, loft bedrooms, walk-in closets, two-story family rooms, gourmet kitchens with islands, pendulum lights, wall ovens and stone-floored patios, and possessions I simply didn’t know were available: grand pianos, original oil paintings by New York artists, sectional sofas, pedigreed dogs. Simply: my public high school was as excellent as it was because of the taxes paid by the engineer-, physician-, and stockbroker-parents of the kids in my classes.

The particular niche in the layout of M— where Win grew up was unknown to me: an older neighborhood surrounded by the homes of the nouveau riche erected on acres of landfill. We drove out, my husband and I, some years ago, to see our respective ancestral homes, and while the S— house still stands, and is still elite, clearly some of its grounds have been sold off for new construction. Win’s expectation that the “meadows and swamps” he knew probably still existed in 1989 was surely over-optimistic.

Further journal entries reveal both the oncoming suburbanization of the town and the lingering lifestyle of the old social set.

In June of 1942, Win writes, he and his sister

. . .came out to M— to join mother. Her apartment is right across the street from the little tennis club to which our old “social community” belonged. The apartment is part of the house that the Swansen family rented in the old days. Mr. Swansen[‘s] . . . son Ed went to Kindergarten with me here in M— and later was my St. Andrews School and Yale roommate.

Mother and I went out to dinner with the Kanes, old friends of the family. We dined at the Shore Terrace, a new and swanky night club in M— complete with orchestra, floor show, and tables for a hundred or more! And then to think back to when I used to go to the public school here, and to when I heard Mr. Kane tell of how his father came to M— in 1892 and how for a couple years they had no gas or electricity and had to pump their own water! When Mr. Kane built his present house about 1900, M— was a village of not even 200 people. Those were the days when everyone in the village knew everyone else and the whole village would have parties down by the bay. Now he hardly knows a soul as he stands with the crowd taking the morning train for New York.

Though much of Win’s descriptions refer to a town and neighborhood alien to my experience there, I did have a bolt of recognition when he described the library as it existed in 1942:

M—‘s new population uses the same library which was functioning when I was born – a tiny one-room affair which used to be supported privately at an annual cost of $300. It is now under the Board of Education and has a budget of $5,000. I don’t know how this shanty can gobble up so much money in a year.

In my day, this library was still a shanty, although it had several narrow extensions also crammed with books. I remember my mother taking me there and my studious perusal of shelf after shelf of plastic-sheathed books. It was on wooded grounds next to the Catholic Church, itself on a large plot harboring a tan brick steepled ediface, a grade school, an old-house turned rectory, a nun’s quarters, and an extensive parking lot. By the time I left town, a new, modern library had been constructed on land at the other side of the church. When we visited M— in the ‘90s, the shanty was still standing and in use in some official capacity. A lot of people loved that old shack, I think, notwithstanding Win’s scorn.

Margaret, August 19, 1912-December 7, 1961

Years after the death of her beloved husband, journalist Lynn Sheer interviewed psychiatrist and grief-expert Jimmie Holland for the television show 20/20. Holland disputed the existence of the now-classic “five stages of grief”—the concept that people “progress” through a series of ever-healthier emotions and finally heal from a loved-one’s death. To this expert, boxing people into a rigid concept of how they are supposed to feel after a loved one dies—and when they are supposed to feel it—is punishing, not curative. Sheer quotes her: “Your pattern of grief is as unique as your pattern of love.”

For Sheer, this one sentence was liberation: she had not progressed to “acceptance” of her husband’s death, and she realized she didn’t have to, she could stay sad if she was sad. To her, embracing sorrow was a means of reconnecting with her loved one; grief was a manner of relationship.

But my deaths came well before the stages of grief were invented.

There were no expectations about mourning then. There were no constructions around experiencing a death, other than the formalities of funeral.

This doesn’t mean I grew up in some halcyon time of natural grieving. Not at all. Around death there was silence. There was the scaffold of ritual and a busy-ness of preparations that occupied adults. And there was euphemism.

“She’s in a better place.”

“The good die young, that’s the way it is.”

“God took her so early because he loved her so.”

This was meant to comfort me? God didn’t much love a thirteen-year-old girl if he took her mother. Away. Forever.

* * * * *

The culture of platitudes was, of course, a culture of suppression, a way of rushing past the pain, of boarding an express to next week, when it would be all over. Probably it was meant to cushion the bereaved in public and permit private mourning. But shallow funeral-talk—Your mother is with the angels—was just another abandonment.

The “five stages” put a slower train on the tracks through the territory of grief, with, of course, the same destination: complete recovery for the living, oblivion for the dead.

Grief became work, a job to be done and done well.

I was twenty-something when I heard of the stages of grief. It was deeply weird: at my first job after college I was assigned to write a press release about a book on thanatology, the “science” of grief. Sitting at a desk, looking out at St. John’s Cathedral where pigeons swarmed in the eye-blue sky, I read without revelation. This step-by-step pilgrimage couldn’t be retrofitted to what I’d been through. It didn’t fit my case, for, after all, nothing did. Two parents dead, dropping like dimes out of God’s pocket of a sudden, falling forever through a hole in His pants, tumbling through infinity, a bit of silver lost, written off His accounts.

Five stages of grief would be a luxury when you’re a kid on your own. You move on. You move from the dorm to an apartment so you can have your stuff all twelve months. You give up the portion of your scholarship that pays the residence hall, but start to collect the veteran and Social Security survivor benefits for minor children attending college. You wait tables and you pay the mortgage on the family house until the sale goes through. You pay the undertaker, you pay the doctor who closed your dad’s eyes, you share out the few thou that’s left with your sibs, and you put what’s left of your dad’s life in a savings account for some rainy day.

I shed platitudes then.

I swore never to say, “passed on.” I was at war with pillowed sorrow. I would say “dead.” This speaking formed a tribute to them, though I didn’t realize it then. I honored them by showing that I knew what had really happened. They had died from life. Their children were tossed to the center. I would bite grief and chew it.

* * * * * *

So my mother is my first ancestor.

And, my father is my second.

In genealogy I complete myself. I get them back—and the others too, that went before. I have them, not the way I did, but a different way. Not such a great way—I know—but it is the only way.

Seeing their names on a page of the census, opening an envelope with a vital record inside, is like glimpsing a familiar face in the window of a passing train. The moment goes by too fast to wave, too fast to attempt any signal at all. But the trace lingers, an image in the mind, ink on a page, bits of data in storage, indexed now for retrieval through all time.

Decades have passed, but I still have grief. I look out over my scraggly fall garden and think of my Mom’s zinnias, carnival colors outside our front door, then drying stiff in the turn of the season. More, I think of her similar moments, hand on a mug of coffee, quiet in the house, children at school, the meaning of it all drifting in the air outside a window, leaves circling in a fall wind.

My sorrow transmutes to empathy as I learn details of their struggle. Instead of stunned, mugged, plundered, by loss, I can feel about them. I feel for them the way you feel for a person you know and love, whose life entangles with yours.

Genealogy is my relationship with my family. It is my grief still alive.

The Big-Big Parents

What’s so grand about grandparents? I wondered about this as a child, you know. Typical of me: snagged by words that didn’t quite fit, words that sprouted questions.

Now I realize, of course, it must be from the French. Les grand parents: crunch that r in the back of your throat, drop the plosive d, squeeze your nose tight. And this, translated, means, big parents, big as in Grand Canyon.

Now the word makes me picture an extended family, with a tiny, tiny baby held between the regular-size Momma and Poppa, and all of them loomed over by the swollen giant shadows of les Grand Parents.

Today people rue the loss of the extended family, but les grandparents looming is not what every momma and poppa want.

My first home was a cottage next to my Irish grandmother’s house. It was wood frame with minimal amenities (as one would say today)—a water closet (one toilet in, yes, a closet), a kitchen sink, a gas stove, an ice box. (I saw the ice man cometh throughout my youth). The house was heated by a coal furnace in the parlor (not a cute wood stove, mind you, a furnace, possibly installed by my plumber-dad). I was bathed in a washtub; my parents must have borrowed a shower somewhere from time to time. Before us, my mother’s sisters and their husbands and babies bunked there until they got their feet under them and moved on.

Until I was five, I saw Grandma Jennie regularly. She was too old to come across the yard and visit us. Heck, she’d been born, to my best estimates, in 1874.

Mostly I remember being in her house—a dark room, people crowded in, chatter of voices, milky tea in big cups for the children, wooden chairs and a table of some kind. I’m not even sure if the room I remember was the parlor or the kitchen, but it was a room for laughing in.

One time she did visit us, at some small family gathering in the cottage. She and I went for a walk hand-in-hand on the road across from the house. I strained to pull a flower, a blue cornflower, my favorite, and I pulled her right over. She couldn’t get back up, but she held on tight to me, afraid I’d get hurt in the road. I yelled, and she yelled, and everyone poured out of the house to rescue her. When they learned it was all because of a flower, they yelled at me for knocking her down. She wasn’t, of course, exactly steady on her feet, being not only old but partial to whiskey. Nevertheless: I’m sorry, Grandma.

You don’t want to be the cause of somebody falling in the road, especially your ancestor. I think we’re reaching for flowers here. We’re hoping to make that chart of les big-big and les big-big-big parents. The chart where they’re up above us, looming. The part about where they fall down, well, it’s part of the narrative, small print on the next page.

* * * * * *

Les Big-Big, Cont.

We got our own house and became our own solo nuclear family. Eventually my dad built an apartment on the second floor for my other grandma, his mother. Here is where some actual looming came in.

Grandma Josie was rather opinionated about how children should be raised. In particular, she thought they should be raised Methodist. She raised my older half-brother so, even though I believe he’d been baptized in a Catholic Church—his deceased mother was a Kildare. And here my Dad had gone and married another Catholic.

When I went upstairs to pay my grandmother a visit, she tried to evangelize me. She reminisced about a blind preacher she had heard speak in her youth at a “revival” (whatever that was). She showed me her Bible and read to me from it and seemed faintly shocked that I was completely unfamiliar with the book. Never mind its contents—its tissue pages and red titles were nothing I’d ever seen before. I was seven or so at the time, and I was getting an A in catechism, but her lesson introduced an alien world. She spoke gently against statues and Virgin Marys and told me to watch a particular preacher on the TV who didn’t need fancy robes and ringing bells to spread the word of Jesus.

I didn’t exactly rat on my Grannie—but with bursting mixed emotions at hearing so much new in the realm of God—I told my mom. I wanted to hear her view.

It was not positive: Grandma is a different religion and she doesn’t believe the same as us. Ignore it.

But it didn’t end there for the grown-ups. There was some sort of late-night discussion, heated enough I could hear it from my bed, about this bad behavior on my grandma’s part. I never visited her by myself again. There were from then on quite separate worlds in our divided house.

The Ladies Aid from the Methodist Church that Grandma had attended in her previous town picked her up for church. She didn’t much visit us downstairs, and we didn’t visit her up there. She watched us children come and go through her windows. She grew African violets in a planter.

Once I expressed to my mother some sorrow about not knowing my grandmas very well. In late elementary school I had become aware of children whose grandmothers were close family. My mother told me her philosophy that it wasn’t good for children to be too close to their grandparents, because they would be too hurt when the old folks passed away. I’m sorry, Grandma.

Day of the Dead

On the car radio, Chef Jim’s show came on; his guest was discussing memorializing of the dead in Chinese culture. In particular, the Dragon Boat festival celebrates the attempted rescue of an ancient nobleman who threw himself into the river in despair over a dynastic shift. Sticky rice is wrapped in bamboo packages and thrown in the water to feed his spirit, while the boats race futilely to abort his suicide.

I was driving to the craft shop to scare up some preservation aids: acid-free paper, polypropylene photo sleeves, archival quality this and that. The world is yellow and saffron and tangerine as clouds of leaves diffuse from high above us into the middle air where we live and on down to the ground. My part of the county seemingly has millions of trees—-my yard alone has fifty—and therefore some billions of leaves are dancing through our peripheral vision.

I slid into the right lane to leave the bypass for a smaller road, but had to pull in as a cortege of cars, purple stickers on the rear windows, lights blinking, processed in the local lane. Slowed to a majesty, seeming hooded and private, the cars moved as one unit: a ritual as old as the Ford, as old as the horse and wagon, as old as feet, really, I suppose, as old as grief.

Another radio guest, a restauranteur, discussed her months of preparations for the Mexican feast of the Day of the Dead—or days, first one for the angelita, the little angels who have passed on, and the next for adults. Originally an Aztec celebration going back to antiquity, it became linked to All Souls Day by missionaries in the fifteenth century and now is celebrated in the fall. In Mexico, people decorate the cemeteries; candles and marigolds are spread to help light the way so the dead can find their families; picnics of special foods are spread, including “Day of the Dead” bread and sugared treats, even skulls made of candy, and a hot corn-chocolate drink similar to cocoa. Home altars are also stocked with food and flowers as people beckon the spirits and honor their significance. It is a circle of life celebration, not one of mourning.

I turned on to another secondary road and drove past the Catholic cemetery—it’s so big you can hardly see any graves beyond the expanses of lawn at its margins—and the cortege had U-turned and was coming back down to turn into the cemetery gate. Someone’s bones were going in the ground. Chef Jim’s last guest gave instructions on how to make a chocolate spider out of melted chocolate, chow main noodles and rice crispy cakes.

And at Michael’s, I lucked out: there was a 40%-off sale on archival memory books.

Rachels

I have Josephines, but I also have Rachels. The first Rachel that I know of for sure is Jannette’s daughter, born about two years before my great-great grandmother Josephine. I have a suspicion, however, that Jannette may have had a sister named Rachel, on the basis of some bits and pieces I have seen on the web. Since Rachel is carried on in Josephine’s family going down at least two more generations, I believe my great-grandmother Josie and her sister Rae were close. But I haven’t been able to find out much about Rachel.

She appears in the 1860 census with her parents, age 11, “attends school,” and in the 1865 NY census (“Rachel A 15”). But in 1870, she is not living at home with Jannette: only Josephine 18 (“app. dressmaker”) and William 14 (“cook on boat”) are still at home. Josephine’s apprenticeship is significant: the next reference I can find to Rachel is an entry in the Brooklyn Lain’s Directory for 1878: Burger, R. A. dressmkr h 301 Degraw.

By this time, many of the Burger siblings are in Brooklyn. Josephine is married and living with Walter. Rachel herself marries William, Walter’s brother, in 1878, and in 1880 the couple is living on Court Street. Rachel is still a dressmaker. But she fades from view after this.

Josephine names her first daughter for her sister Rachel in 1884. Her second daughter is my grandmother Josephine, who grows up and has two daughters, also Rachel (“baby Rae”) and Josephine. Baby Rae dies in childhood, but her aunt Rachel marries and has a son and a daughter, whom she names Josephine. Rachel is listed as “Rae” in the 1920 census, so that seems to be the usual nickname for the Rachels. But then, as my information moves toward the middle of the twentieth century and the databases close up, I can’t tell if there were any more Josephines or Rachels.