Scrappy Genealogist Goes to New York – Part 4 Great Grandma Catherine’s Birthplace

The second day of our frenetic visit to New York City found us here:

  
With my family in tow (in a hired car), I was looking for the home of this precious beauty, my great grandmother, Catherine:



It’s hard to say who was cuter, Catherine, or this kid:



You have to love those freckles. This adorable guy was Catherine's son and you already know him as Bubba, the Sailor Man. While we were in New York City, we visited 401 East 10th Street in Manhattan. This was the home address of Catherine’s parents, Edward and Sarah, at the time of her birth in 1899 as indicated on her birth certificate. 




Here is the building (above) which is at the location Google Maps gives for 401 East 10th Street. The photo below shows the same building from the front, which faces Avenue C. The address above the door shows that it is number 170. A website of virtual walking tours in Manhattan called New York Songlines indicates it was built in 1967. 



Obviously this was not the home of my great grandmother, although the 1900 U.S. census did show them living at 170 Avenue C and not 401 East 10th Street. I had expected them to be living in a building similar to the Lower East Side Tenement Museum and similar to the buildings (shown below) across both Avenue C and East 10th Street from this more modern building. 

          

I took a look at some old maps to see what the area looked like in the past. This snippet of an 1852 map from the David Rumsey Map Collection shows Stage Stables at the future location of  401 East 10th Street. Click on the map to be taken to the original image. 



Here is a later image of the same address in 1891. The stables have become a Horse Car Stable and seem to take up a smaller area. The street number range provides for the house numbers in Catherine’s records.




The buildings along the stretch of Avenue C between from 162 through 172 appear to have been similar in size to other brick multifamily buildings still in existence today and which I photographed in the area. Most likely Catherine did live in a building similar to the Tenement Museum. Although I did not get to see the original home of my great grandmother, it still felt more concrete (no pun intended) to stand on the street where she lived. As much fun as I have with David Rumsey’s maps and Google Maps, nothing beats visiting a place in person.
This is my last installment of our two day whirlwind trip to New York City. You can read Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 here.

Thanks for reading!

Scrappy Gen

Scrappy Genealogist Goes to New York - Part 3 - The Lower East Side Tenement Museum

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street has been on my bucket list for a long time. For years as a Third Grade Hebrew school teacher, I facilitated an immigration project with my students. The students would first spend time learning about Jewish immigration through fiction and nonfiction books, maps, videos, websites and a visit with Mrs. Shapiro at the Shapiro House at the Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, N.H. The second part of their project involved interviewing a family member, who was an immigrant or who knew an immigrant ancestor. It was an ambitious project and so we only spent a brief period of time learning about the Tenement Museum in New York City, but every year my interest in visiting this place was renewed. 

97 Orchard Street is just a couple of blocks from Sammy's Roumanian Style Restaurant. We were due there at 6:00 PM for dinner with our 'long lost' cousin and so we made a reservation for the 4:45 PM Piecing it Together tour. One thing you should know about this museum is that the only way to see it is by guided tour. I would have loved to have spent the whole day going on all of the tours and seeing the entire tenement, but I knew that my husband, M.J., and the kids would stage a revolt. The best I could hope for them to do (if a little grudgingly) was a one hour tour. Conveniently I was able to make the reservation online and luckily as well because all tours were sold out by the time we arrived.

I chose the Piecing it Together tour for two reasons; the first because it would show how two Jewish families lived in the tenement and the second because one of the families was involved in the garment industry. M.J.'s Jewish immigrant ancestors were not involved in the garment industry, but my Irish Catholic immigrant ancestors were and lived not far from the museum at 401 East 10th Street.

All tours for the museum begin not at 97 Orchard Street, but at 108 Orchard Street, where their gift shop is located. This is at the corner of Orchard and the infamous Delancey Street. Just down the street you can see the tenement building. 

Our tour guide was Dave, a veteran guide of seven years at the museum and a descendant of Lithuanian and Italian immigrants. Dave knew his stuff and brought the Rogarshevsky and Levine families to life. More importantly he piqued and held the interest of my highly disinterested 11 and 14 year old kids. 

Before we entered the museum we found out we would not be able to take any photos, but that www.tenement.org had an entire section of photos available for free download. This made sense once we were inside and found that most of the interior is original. Very little restoration has been done. It feels very much like a tenement. It is dark, and the original layers of flooring and wall papers are there. Dave told us that there will be a museum project or exhibit that will show the process they are going to use to do some restoration, almost like an archeological dig, but on a building. It sounds fascinating.

Our hour on the third floor of the museum in the Rogarshevsky and Levine apartments passed very quickly. One last thing of interest to those who do genealogical research is that the museum has traced forward the ancestry of those known to have lived in the building. They have been able to gather pictures and oral interviews of former residents adding immeasurably to the experience for tour guests. It's a visit I will long remember. 

Confessions of an American Mutt

It's time for a confession. My children are American mutts. Their mother is an American mutt. My ancestry includes (but is not yet limited to) Prussian German, English and Irish (both northern and southern for variety). Their father's ancestry is (but is not yet limited to) Latvian, Lithuanian and Russian Jewish as well as possibly Spanish Sephardic. Actually I am not sure which word in that sentence should have come first. Is it Spanish Sephardic or Sephardic Spanish? Perhaps someone will enlighten me.

The fact of the matter is...there are no purebreds living in our house ...except possibly our canine household members.

It makes me happy that the melting pot that is America is well represented in my children. It sure makes researching their ancestry interesting! 

Thank you for reading! 

Scrappy Gen