Revision Alert

I’ve just added a new page (Brklyn101) to provide more details and pictures of my Brooklyn trip. And I’ve written some more on the Strickly page, having made some discoveries recently about my paternal grandfather’s family.

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.

Tug Sinking: What it was like

This photo is undated and unsourced, but it appears to be taken along a river. The area seems to be a river-town, built up along the water’s edge. If you look in the left hand side behind the boat, you can see, very faintly, that buildings edge the opposite bank for quite some distance. Across the water, the area seems flooded, and the water is pretty high in the foreground as well.

The boat itself looks pretty basic. It seems to be of wood and there appear to be no railings. It’s so shallow it looks almost raft-like. My guess would put it early in tug history, perhaps the 1870s, although the event pictured here might be quite a bit later.

Review: Henry R. Stiles on Brooklyn’s Atlantic Basin

I’ve been reading around in a history of Brooklyn by Henry R. Stiles.* Volume III of his 1870 book describes the contemporary city. My current interest is the waterfront, covered in Part III of Chapter XII, “Docks and Commerce.” This is a book I happened on somewhere, and I notice it is not in the bibliography at the back of George Matteson’s book on New York tugboats. It may, thus, provide somewhat of a supplement to that book’s coverage of the Manhattan tug scene.

Early on, Stiles makes two points that seem contradictory. On the one hand, he reports that “no city in the union, possessing the natural facilities and extent of waterfront, is so poorly provided with public docks as Brooklyn” (573). On the other, just a page later, Stiles emphasizes that “a comparison between the docks and warehouses of New York and those of Brooklyn is highly favorable to the latter” (574). (New York and Brooklyn were still separate cities in 1870, so by “New York” he means Manhattan.) New York’s waterfront was owned by the city, and had become dilapidated and antiquated; there was no protection from the weather nor a way to recapture the inevitable leakages of cargo. It was, furthermore, he notes, “exposed to the depredations of dock-thieves” (573). Finallly, the routes leading away from the docks were in sorry shape, and goods, once landed, took many more days to arrive at their destinations.

In Brooklyn, to the contrary, the waterfront had been in private hands since the early days, when the city failed to act on an offer from the owners of the shore land to sell it because of one negative vote by one Joseph Moser. “Since that time, private parties have been allowed to take possession of every foot of available waterfront” (374). It was, then, in public wharves that Brooklyn was lacking. Astonishingly, “along its thirteen miles of waterfront,” Stiles reported, “there are scarcely a dozen pubic docks” (574), all small and inconvenient. The story of the Brooklyn docks is a story of private enterprise making the best of a fortuitous situation.

The Brooklyn docks were elevated above the waterline and not swamped, as happened in NY. They were in excellent repair and clean, “so that every pound of sweepings and leakages can be saved” (574). In Brooklyn, the warehouses were right on the docks, saving the cost and time of transportation that was so arduous in NY, and out-shipment was much easier because the ships could load right from the warehouses. Stiles notes, that at the “overcrowded docks of New York, . . . work, not infrequently, has to cease at noon, because the pier is covered and the men have fairly blocked themselves in” (575).

I am interested in the Atlantic basin because Capt. James’s tug laid up there according to several maritime reports, and, of course, it was there the tug was docked when it sank. The Atlantic basin was in the twelfth ward. Stiles notes, “through the whole lower portion of the 12th ward, streets are rapidly being extended and graded, sunken lots and disease-breeding pools of stagnant water are being filled in . . . The sheds and shanties of squatter pioneers are rapidly disappearing before the advance of new buildings of brick and stones, and imposing churches, school-houses, factories, warehouses and dwellings have already been erected. . . . The hum of machinery and the evidence of industry and activity are unceasing, and this section of city already possesses sufficient material in population, property, manufactures, schools, churches and other requisites to constitute a tolerable municipality by itself” (582).

Stiles elaborates the history of the Atlantic dock in a footnote extending across several pages—a format which often puts the juice of a matter in a subsidiary position to his main-text cataloguing of the components of his contemporary Brooklyn.

The Atlantic wharves, he says, were planned to resemble the Liverpool docks. The basin itself was shallow at low-tide and the area surrounding it, in 1841, so rural that cows would stand in the water to cool themselves. Viewed from downtown Brooklyn, it appeared that the cows had waded across Buttermilk Channel to Governor’s Island, which is close offshore from the basin, and that they did so was an urban myth of the time. To make the basin useful, it had to be excavated “by steam dredging machinery, a tedious and expensive process, which has been going on from the commencement of the work until this time” (576), progressively increasing the size of the ships that could use the docks. In Stiles’s day, “over a hundred large vessels drawing twenty feet of water at low tide can lie with ease and comfort within the secure walls of this dock” (576).

In fact, the basin was an astonishing construction: “The access to the basin is midway through a line of warehouses half a mile in extent, by an entrance two hundred feet wide, passable at all stages of the tide by any class of vessels; differing in this respect from the Liverpool docks which are accessible at high tide only, and then closed by gates to retain the water to keep the vessels afloust during the ebb tide, the fall of water in the river Mersey leaving the docks inland when the tide is out” (576).

We think of ourselves as modern, but we have as a people, a civilization, been “modern” and technological for a very long time now. Stiles describes the warehouses ringing the basin as built on secure foundations, of granite and brick to four stories, with nine “first-class” steam-powered grain elevators, “some of which exceed anything of kind in this or any other country”{ (576). He explains, “These elevators will, under ordinary operation, discharge a canal boat loaded with eight thousand bushels of grain in three hours, elevating, cleaning, weighing, and distributing, to a point four hundred feet from whence it took it, by one process of machinery” (576).

He notes that as many as 130 sea-going vessels have fit in the basin at one time, and at another, over 600 canal boats loaded with grain alongside 50 sea-going ships (576-7). The basin was, he says, “the commercial point of the city of Brooklyn” (577).

These wharves were at the outer reaches of swampy low-lands, Stiles reports, and quickly speculators bought up the land and filled it in, flattened the hills, and built several thousand houses. This is the area now called Red Hook, I think. I notice on the map that the streets where my family mariners lived, Sackett, President, and Degraw, are only a few blocks away from the basin.

Stiles details the specifics of how the Atlantic docks were built, from the incorporation of the Atlantic Dock company, through a petition to the state legislature, in 1840, through the application to the legislature for a bill to permit altering the official waterline set down in 1836, the contracting for the work, the completion of the first docks in 1844, to the decision and contracting to erect the first steam elevator in the NY metro area in 1846-47. Some have a halcyon view of the nineteenth century, as a time when actions were more direct and free enterprise was truly “free,” but Stiles’ narrative shows that the web of business regulation, government oversight, and the law of contracts was very much part of the economic scene then as now.

The Atlantic Basin was, it seems, only the beginning of massive development of the Brooklyn waterfront. In the 1850s, planning began for the Erie and Brooklyn basins, erected ‘round the bend of Red Hook, and at the time of Stiles’s publication, still in progress.

The Atlantic basin, then, by the 1880s and later, was the old docks, smaller (at 40 acres of water, compared to 60 for the Erie), less commodious, and less modern. Just the place for a one-tug company to lay up its ageing boat.

* Stiles, Henry R. History of the City of Brooklyn N.Y., Volume III. “Published by Subscription,” 1870. Facsimile Reprint. Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 1993. Paper.

The picture here is of the John H. Cordts in New York Harbor; it’s dated 1909, and its provenance is unknown. It’s not from Stiles’s book; it’s an old photo in my collection. The writing on the cabin says Shortland . . . Harbour Transportion Co.

Washboard: My Captains

The bits I found in the Brooklyn Eagle Online about my great-great-uncles, Captains Josiah and James, piqued my interest in them, and reading George Matteson’s Tugboats of New York helped me feel closer to the lives they lived. Shipping is a manifestly physical occupation, and Matteson unpretentiously and without melodrama conveys the arduousness and extremity of the work involved. I am so struck by the concert of humanity that brought about the operation of the harbor, by the cooperativeness and dedication to the perfection of the routine, by the spare poetry of a crew working silently for an hour or more under the direction of bells and hand signals.

I think of my father, the grand-nephew of James and Josiah, who also was an entrepreneur and a master, not of marine trades, but in building. He had every skill necessary for building, from drafting to roofing and everything in between. He had the physical strength of a laborer, the hands of a craftsman, and the nuanced know-how of the long practitioner.

I remember him once telling me, in showing me how to make something (I no longer remember what), that there were three sides to a line: the right side, the left side, and the middle, and you had to decide where you were going to cut, and stick to it. That bit of instruction has stayed with me, as an example of the esoteric-practical often obscured by the humbleness of the tasks involved.

I savor these terms that would have been daily vocabulary of James and Josiah: hawser, shifting, bitts, capstan, catenary, manila rope.

Reading Tugboats of New York drove me back on the web to find out more, if possible, about the Brooklyn waterfront. I thought I had milked out all there was online about my captains, but when I started searching web-wide I came across some additional information.

Selections from the Nautical Gazette, a source frequently cited by Matteson, are online through the Tugboat Enthusiasts of the Americas, and Capt. James comes up several times.

On Nov. 26, 1891, his boat is listed as “Up for inspection:” EDWARD ANNAN, E. J. Burger, of Brooklyn.

On November 1, 1906, the boat is listed again: “Atlantic Docks have a large number of tugs hauled up overnight awaiting good weather. They are . . . Also the tugs ANNIE R. WOOD, CASTOR, EDWARD ANNAN, HENRY D. McCORD . . .”

In April 25, 1907, the Gazette again reports, “Laid up at the Atlantic Basin: Capt. Burger’s EDWARD ANNAN, Carroll Bros. SEVEN BROTHERS, and Peter Cahill’s O. L. HALENBECK.”

Finally, on May 23 of that same year, when Elisha James would have been age 66, the Gazette reports: “Capt. James Burger has retired, selling his tug EDWARD ANNAN to his former agent, Wayne Knight, Jr.” By the 1910 census, James and Elsie are living in Esopus, on his “own income.”

So, James did indeed raise the tug after its sinking at its pier in 1898 and returned it to duty, Matteson’s reports of scant profitable work for tugs notwithstanding. (There is, in these transcriptions at least, no mention of the sinking.) Capt. James worked the tug for almost ten more years.

One more note about the EDWARD ANNAN: The Lake Champlain Maritime Museum has on its site a list of all the boats that ever worked the lake and the canal linking it to the Hudson, and a boat called the Edward Annan is on it. A researcher upstate has informed me, however, that this Edward Annan was a canal boat with a distinct history of ownership from my tugboat. He provided me with some instructions on how to trace my boat at the National Archives. I am going to ask him, though, about the name. Is there a particular reason why these boats are named after this man?