Wagner & Kraus Families: NYC, 1890s-1910s

When Barbara Wagner arrived in New York on Aug 12, 1899 aboard the ship Southwark she was traveling with six children (George, 14; Barbara, 11; Henry, 9; Peter, 5; Anna, 4; and Elizabeth, 2). The passenger list shows that they were meeting Barbara’s husband, Peter Wagner, whose residence was 137 E 36^th St (corner of Lexington Av), New York City. Today, that address is coop apartments called the Carlton Regency, built in 1966. It is located in the Murray Hill part of the city, a very nice area to live from all appearances. That address is a two-block walk from my Great Aunt Edna's old apartment at 7 Park Av (built in 1931). What was the neighborhood like in 1899?

Mulberry St (Lower East Side), New York City, ca. 1900

 In 1899, the area from 27th St. on the south to 59th St. on the north, and from 3^rd Av east to the East River, was called the Kip's Bay-Turtle Bay neighborhood, sometimes known as the mid-town East Side. Huge industrial enterprises—breweries, laundries, slaughter houses, power plants—along the water front faced squalid tenements not far away from new apartment houses built in the area for its river view and its central position. The numerous plants showered this district with the heaviest fallout of soot in the city—150 tons to the square mile annually.

Early in the 19^th century this region was the site of the country estates of many prominent New Yorkers, among them Horace Greeley, the editor, and Francis Bayard Winthrop, bank director and poet. By the 1880's, however, the estates had been broken up into lots and rows of brownstones had been built. By 1899, much of the district was a slum. Elevated trains of the 2^nd and 3^rd  Av lines thundered by constantly, and 1^st Av, an important commercial traffic artery, brought an endless, noisy procession of trucks. Kip's and Turtle bays have long been filled in, and their names have vanished from maps.

On the site of the old Kip’s Bay was the Kip's Bay Station of the New York Steam Corporation, 1^st Av and 35^th St, which supplied steam to midtown skyscrapers, such as the New York Central, Chrysler, Lincoln, Chanin, and Empire State buildings. This service made possible the elimination of heating equipment in large buildings and the utilization of additional rent-able floor area. The steam was forced through underground conduits at a speed of 200 mph. The huge Waterside Station of the Consolidated Edison Company at 38^th Street and the East River, near the load center of the city, could generate 367,000 kilowatts of electricity.

The Kip’s Bay neighborhood adjoins, or even overlaps, what was known for over a century as the Gashouse District. Con Ed’s Waterside Station stood among coal-gas storage tanks that lined the East River along First Avenue through the blocks of the East 20s and 30s. Few remnants of the old neighborhood remain. The Con Ed generating station was torn down for Sheldon Solow's $4 billion dollar, 6 million square foot, East River development of seven glass towers, a public pavilion designed by Richard Meier, and 4.8 acres of gardens, lawns and Parisian-style esplanades. That development, currently under construction, is about a block from where Martin and Annie Kraus, and Grossmutter Wagner, lived in 1900.

Tenements covered many of the small lots in the East 30s from 1890 onwards. Their residents could find employment nearby; the Hupfels brewery and the Hoffman Cigar factory were two of the largest businesses near 334 E 38^th St, the first residence of the Kraus family and Grossmutter Wagner. As late as 1899, many lots in the immediate vicinity were either vacant or the site of ramshackle wood-frame structures dedicated to low-skill industrial or agricultural uses. Slaughter houses and packing houses filled the streets north of 42nd Street from the early 1850s until the United Nations was constructed in 1952.
 Many blocks of this area were razed in the 1930s for construction of the Midtown Tunnel.

Of the few buildings that remain from this time, 325 E 38^th St has an interesting history. There are identical doorways to # 325 that used to be separate men’s and women’s entrances to a public bath house. The photo below is of children standing on the sidewalk in front of # 325 in 1904. In the distance, you can see the iron superstructure of the 2nd Av elevated train (demolished in 1942), along with a gas-lit street-lamp. All the structures in the photo are long gone except for #325.

Photo from the Byron Collection – Museum of the City of New York

The 1899 map of New York shows sewer and water lines down each street. However, water closets in hallways and simple taps in the kitchens were the most that could be expected in many late 19th century tenements in New York. Bathing was only possible by filling tin bathtubs from the kitchen tap, a cumbersome procedure in crowded and busy flats. A once a week full body bath was custom and practice, but many went without for longer periods of time.

Photo from the Byron Collection – Museum of the City of New York

 The city government did not begin to take responsibility for the construction of desperately needed public bathhouses in tenement neighborhoods until the turn of the 20th century. Until then, private philanthropy for the most part supported the construction of public baths for those whose homes lacked them.

In June 1902, Elizabeth Milbank Anderson announced that she would donate a public bath, to be built on a 50 by 98-foot lot on East 38th Street (# 325) on behalf of the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor (the “AICP”). Anderson was heiress to a founder of the Borden Condensed Milk Co.; she was a leading New York philanthropist. During her lifetime she donated approximately $5 million to various institutions, principally Barnard College. The bathhouse that she donated, known as the Milbank Memorial Bath, opened in January 1904. It cost $140,000 to build and could accommodate 3,000 bathers daily. In 1914, the AICP established a wet-wash laundry at the Milbank bath.

The Wagners did not reside for all that long at 137 E 36^th St. I can only imagine Barbara’s reaction to the home her husband Peter had found them. In fact, on the 1899 map of New York, that address is shown as a brick stable. Perhaps the address was transcribed inaccurately on the ship's passenger list. By June 14, 1900 (date of the 1900 US census), the Wagner family had moved to Vandling, PA, where Peter had a job as a coal miner.

Martin and Annie Kraus, however, lived at 334 E 38^th St, even closer to the river and the coal gas storage tanks, in 1900. As they immigrated in 1892, they probably had been living there for the better part of eight years by 1900. By 1892, they had five daughters, Mary, Rose, Lena, Annie, and Ella. The 1910 census shows that Annie Kraus had had eight children but only five were living. All five daughters AND Grossmutter Wagner were living at 334 E 38^th St in 1900.

The Kraus residence would have been almost right across the street from the Milbank bath once it opened in 1904. Before that time, there undoubtedly wasn’t much bathing. Martin Kraus was a butcher in 1900, and likely worked at one of the local slaughter houses. Can you imagine working in a slaughterhouse and not having a place to shower at the end of the day? The census shows that 17 families, at least 78 people, lived in their tenement. An 1899 map of New York shows that the building faced north and was 5 stories tall. Given the number of families living in 334 E 38^th St, there must have been 4 tenements per floor. The street level was typically occupied by shops. Tenements were commonly three rooms, a front room (the only one with windows), a kitchen, and a bedroom, totaling about 325 square feet. Four doors down was the Hoffman Cigar Factory. One block away was the Kip's Bay Brewing Co. Two blocks away were the coal gas tanks.

Other families in the Kraus’s building were from Germany, Sweden, Spain, Ireland, Russia, and Hungary. Occupations of their neighbors were porter, steamfitter, butcher, waiter, tailor, several ironworkers, laundryman, laundress, cook, servant, lady’s maid, plumber, telephone operator, and bartender.

By 1910, the Kraus family had moved to 406 W 46^th St, in a neighborhood that in recent years has been gentrified but then, and for many years after, was known as Hell’s Kitchen. Their building faced north, had 5 stories, and was two lots over from a coal yard. Martin Kraus by then was working as a carpenter in a shop and his 18-yr-old daughter Ella was working as a clerk in a hotel. The census shows at least 21 people living in their building. Each family probably had their own floor. Families were from Ireland, Germany, and England. Occupations were carpenter, cashier, dressmaker, printer, saleslady, stenographer, book keeper, driver, and several hotel clerks. The only ones not working were several wives keeping house and a few children too young to work. By 1920, Martin and Annie Kraus has moved to Smithtown, Long Island. What a relief that must have been!



Internet sources: Gotham History Blotter, Gotham Center for New York City History;  New York Files; New York Public Library Digital Gallery; US Census data, ship's passenger lists, and other resources on ancestry.com.

Thias Johnson Sr (b. 1763, d. 1830)

I have a long way to go on Thias Johnson Sr, which is going to involve actual archival research and not just computer games with census data and e-books. Thias lived at a time that is tough for genealogy. The first US Federal Census was taken in 1790, but not until 1850 did they enumerate and list by name every individual in a household. From 1790 to 1830, they listed by name only the head of the household and tallied the other members according to age, gender, and race. As you might imagine, this affords much less information to later generations. Wives’ names and children’s names help identify a family and offer clues to family trees. For this time range, you really need to work with church records, gravestones, deeds, and local archives. Then again, every day, more and more information is uploaded to the web, so sometimes you get lucky just by waiting.

What is it that I want to know about Thias Johnson? Some of this I have written about before. I’ll just encapsulate here. In trying to find William Melancthon Johnson’s ancestors, all I had found was that his father was Thias Johnson and his mother Sarah McDougall. To bet back farther, I searched for 'Thias Johnson’ in ancestry records and found a promising family tree that started in Charlestown, MA in the early 1600s. From there, the family was among the founders of Marlborough, MA, near Framingham. I found a Thias Johnson born in 1733 and another, his nephew, born in 1762. So on the one hand, I had a Thias Johnson in Cambridge, NY born in 1783 and on the other a Thias Johnson born in 1762 in Marlborough, MA. Did they connect? There's only a difference of one generation! The Thias in Cambridge could be the son of the Thias in Marlborough!

I found some curious notes on US military pensions paid in 1818-1832 to 'Thias Johnson.' I figured these must be for the Cambridge, NY Thias Johnson, father of Wm Melancthon Johnson, who died in 1843. I found a couple other similar records and filed them under 'Thias 1783.' Then, as I was nosing around somewhere, I saw some mention of a decision by the US Congress to pay Revolutionary War pensions; the legislation was dated 1818! So, 40 years after the Revolutionary War, they decided to pay pensions to soldiers still living. The light bulb was when I realized that the pension payments were to Thias 1762, of Marlborough. One record even said that he was a resident of Cambridge, NY and had served in the Massachusetts Line (a regiment of the Continental Army).

Thias Johnson (b. 1762) first enlisted at Bernardston, MA. He enlisted a second time at Guilford, VT.

Not long after Thias finished his Revolutionary War service, he was living in Guilford, VT. On 13 May 1786, he was appointed “hog constable” of the town. A lofty position indeed. At least it places him in Guilford in 1786. The next I find him is in Stillwater, NY, in 1818, when he first applied for a Revolutionary War pension. Apparently, he lost his discharge papers when his pocket book fell in the Deerfield River as he was crossing. He had to go through a long involved bureaucratic process to prove he fought in the Revolutionary War and merited a pension. Eventually, he got the pension and was paid $8 per quarter from April 1818 until his death in November 1833. 

A page from Thias Johnson Sr's Revolutionary War pension application

Thias’s pension application also shows him living in Easton, Washington County, New York, seven miles from Cambridge, in 1820. In that year, he had to do some more wrangling about his pension. A notarized letter from him states that his wife at the time was Hannah, aged 47 years, and his son Stephen Van Rensselaer was 7 yrs old. Apparently, the boy was Hannah’s by a previous marriage. In his pension application, Thias enumerates all his worldly belongings: 1 axe, 1 hoe, 2 scythes, 1 cooper's axe, 1 cooper's adze, 2 draw shaves, 2 planes, 2 jigs, and 1 stove, for a total value of $40.

A letter from Thias pointing out his penurious circumstances.

When it comes right down to it, there is nothing to show that Thias Sr lived in Cambridge. So far, no one has found his grave or any other documents on his whereabouts when alive. By all appearances, we have a link between Thias Johnson (b. 1762) and Thias Johnson (b. 1783). So far, however, there is no hard evidence that the two are father and son. 

This has really bedeviled me. Therefore, I was amused and excited when I got a message from a librarian in Georgia asking me to please contact Doris Davies by e-mail as she also was researching Thias Johnson and had information on his children. That contact revealed that there is a branch of Johnsons of the same tree in the Macon, Georgia area, of particular interest, because of the name, Melancthon Brown Johnson Sr & Jr.  After Doris put me in touch with a cousin, Stephen Johnson, we had a sort of three way conversation. Stephen, and his father, over the decades have been in touch with Johnsons in Washington County, New York. Stephen’s father had a long and rambling, fairly incoherent letter from Henry Warner Johnson (son of Wm Melancthon Johnson, the pastor), which must have been before 1949, when he died. HWJ mentioned that his father and grandfather both were named Thias Johnson, which gives us at least some circumstantial evidence of the relationship. Stephen also told me some of the links to Georgia and also about links to Johnsons in Ohio. That of course got me going on even more computer games and turned up lots of Johnsons in the Columbus Ohio area and in Fort Worth, TX, of all places.  Hopefully, I’ll get  more details after the Holidays from both Doris and Stephen. It seems they both do this the old way, interviewing people and visiting archives and cemetaries. It takes both kinds. Perhaps we can finally figure out Thias Johnson Sr by putting our heads together.

After the holidays, Stephen will send me copies of all his family tree stuff. He even has a photo of William Melancthon Johnson. 

Robert Groat Johnson (b. 1899, d. 1970)

As my middle name is Johnson, I wanted to figure out the Johnson branch in my family tree. I had long heard of William Melancthon Johnson, the pastor of the Silliman Memorial Church in Cohoes. Gramp’s name comes from him: William Melancthon Johnson Lewis. It was easy enough making the links back to WMJ. Gramp’s mother was Sarah Mariah Johnson (the “Ri” of family lore, after whom Mariah Maloy was named), whose father was WMJ. Back before that, things got tough. I eventually found an obituary for WMJ published in the Princeton Theological Magazine that listed his parents as Thias Johnson and Sarah McDougall. Thias, at any rate, is buried in the Old White Church Cemetery in Cambridge, NY. He was a deacon and elder of that church. Going farther back from Thias has proved to be the crux genealogical puzzle of this branch of my family tree.

Sometimes it helps to work forwards, because you uncover names that give clues to the past. Or you can find living cousins who know other bits of family lore. Working forwards, then, WMJ had three children, Sarah Mariah Johnson, Hellen J Johnson, and Henry Warner Johnson. Henry Warner Johnson was an MD who practiced in Hudson NY. He also had a farm that he kept in Cambridge, NY, as a sort of rich man’s hobby. Dr Johnson (as Gray always refers to him) had two sons. The eldest was William Johnson, who was also an MD and practiced in Plattsburgh NY. SVL II consulted with him in the 1950s after he broke his leg. The younger son of Henry Warner Johnson was Robert Groat Johnson. Johnsons are ridiculously hard to research because the name is so common. It turns out that a middle name like Groat makes things easier. 

I found a surprising amount of information online about Bob Johnson, as Gray refers to him. He went to Princeton. Not only that, but he was a student at Yale when he was drafted to serve in WWI. He graduated from Philips Academy in 1919, when he was 20 years old (makes you wonder about his enrollment at Yale). Then in 1925, he graduated from Princeton. Why did it take him six years to graduate from college? Well, he went on multiple trips to France and Bermuda in that time and spent a good portion of it living at the Princeton Club in New York City. I don’t think he was given to working hard in college.

In 1930, I found him living in Miami Beach in a glitterati neighborhood (6009 N Bay Rd near La Gorce Country Club) with his wife Jane and son John W Johnson. The census data shows he was a securities broker. Curiously, his wife Jane was about 14 years his senior. He must have had some good reason for marrying someone so much older, I thought (he was 31, she was 45). Money? So I kept hunting.

It turns out that Jane Johnson had been married previously to Carl Fisher, who invented Miami Beach. Fisher was a talented entrepreneur from Indianapolis who started the Prest-o-lite Company, and made a fortune manufacturing headlamps for automobiles in the 1900s. He also started Indianapolis Motor Speedway. And then he bought some property in the boondocks of what would become Miami Beach and decided to develop it. Of course, first he had to dredge millions of tons of sand from Biscayne Bay to create the land he was going to develop. Once over the technical hurdles, though, development took off and Fisher made more millions. Jane Watts Fisher, also from Indiana, divorced Carl Fisher in 1926 and married Bob Johnson. Jane writes about the whole story, Bob and all, in her 1947 book “Fabulous Hoosier.” 

Jane Watts Fisher, Bob Johnson's wife #1

Jane Watts Johnson, abt 1945

 Bob and Jane were divorced in 1932. Bob married Beulah Sladden Meagher Snowden in 1934. Beulah’s father was a wealthy NY banker. She had already been married twice to Carl Meagher, a real estate developer, and James Snowden, an oil man, both of whom were extremely wealthy. Beulah brought to the marriage her two daughters, Mildred and Jean.

Let’s go back a bit to look at what Bob Johnson actually devoted himself to, when it wasn’t wealthy women and trips abroad. He was a stock broker for the firm Rhoades & Co. in NY from 1924-33. John Harsen Rhoades Jr. (~1870-1943) founded Rhoades & Co., which merged with Carl M. Loeb & Co. Rhoades was also a trustee of the United States Trust Company of New York and a director of the Home Insurance Company of New York. Our man Bob Johnson left Rhoades and Co. in 1933, when his wife apparently bought him a seat on the NY Stock Exchange. He went into partnership with a guy named Durant, who I suspect was Will Durant, an early president of General Motors who was forced out and then partnered with Louis Chevrolet to found Chevrolet. He soon bought out Louis Chevrolet, in 1914 and proceeded to build the company until he lost his shorts in the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression. In the 1920s, Durant had became a major player on Wall Street and on Black Tuesday joined with members of the Rockefeller family and other financial giants to buy large quantities of stocks, against the advice of friends, in order to demonstrate to the public their confidence in the stock market. Bob Johnson’s firm was called “Johnson & Durant.”  I couldn’t find anything more on this firm. I suspect it was a sort of shell company that allowed the two of them to piddle around in stocks a bit, as a kind of sideline to their social activities. The price of a seat on the NYSE in 1933 was about the equivalent of $5 million dollars today.

Just before WWII, Bob Johnson founded Roosevelt Raceway in Westbury, NY, a harness racing track. I have a 1940 photo of him there in the stands with his second wife Beulah. 

Bob Johnson & Beulah Sladden Johnson, wife #2

Beulah didn’t last long, however. They were divorced in Florida in 1946 and Bob married for a third time. I haven’t nailed down the identity of the third wife, but I have a 1946 photo of the two of them—she is dripping with jewels—at the Starlight Roof in the Waldorf Hotel. 

Bob Johnson & wife #3

 

Bob became the first president of the Maywood Park Race Track, a new harness track in Illinois, in 1946. I find a few mentions of him after that, mostly quotes in Sports Illustrated about comments he made at this party and that in places like Palm Springs. Of course, Southern California had plenty of historic race tracks. Bob Johnson apparently died in 1970 in Phoenix. Phoenix Trotting Park, a harness track, opened in 1964 and ran for about two seasons before closing. I don’t know whether Bob Johnson had any involvement with the development of the park.

Gramp used to tell of his visit with his cousin Bob Johnson at the Princeton Club. He was so accustomed to staff doing everything for him, “He doesn’t even know how ice cubes are made!”

Margaretha ‘Grossmutter’ Wagner (b. 1831, d. 1924)

In researching my Wagner relatives (Grays’ mother was Anna Wagner), I came across some curious census data that I just couldn’t understand. I found Gray’s great grandmother Margaret Grossmutter Wagner in 1910 and 1920 living in the home of Rose Friede and her son Frank Friede in Smithtown, Long Island. I asked Gray, “Who were the Friedes?” She told me, “Oh, Mother Friede had an inn at Middle Country Road in Smithtown. Then her son Frank took over the business and called it the Riverside Inn. That inn was on Jericho Turnpike in Smithtown. It was well known as a stop on the carriage trade between New York and the Hamptons. Everybody went there. It was a speakeasy.”

 OK, a speakeasy. I’ve heard of those… What IS is a speakeasy? I can look that up. A speakeasy is an establishment that illegally sells alcoholic beverages. Such establishments came into prominence in the United States during the period known as Prohibition (1920–1933). During this time, the sale, manufacture, and transportation (bootlegging) of alcoholic beverages was illegal throughout the United States. So…Grossmutter was living in a speakeasy?

I had to wonder WHY she was living at a speakeasy.  First, I thought she was living at Mother Friede’s because her daughter Annie Wagner Kraus and son-in-law Martin Kraus happened to live next door to Mother Friede’s (the 1910 census shows them as next door neighbors). Maybe the Kraus family didn’t have enough room for Grossmutter. Or she was too ornery. So she lived next door at the inn. I also noticed that in the 1930 census Aunt Margaret Wagner (Gray’s aunt) and Uncle Frank Schmitt were listed as living at Mother Friede’s on Middle Country Rd. I passed that by Gray. She said, “Oh, well you know, Aunt Margaret and Uncle Frank ran the inn for Mother Friede. I remember going over there when I was a child. There was a large kitchen with a huge table. And on the end of the table there was a bird cage where they kept cockatoos. They let the birds out during the day and they roosted up in the trees. It WAS hygienic… I don’t mean to suggest it wasn’t clean.” The birds didn’t show up in the census. But here we have Grossmutter living with Mother Friede, and Aunt Margaret and Uncle Frank also living there AND running the place.

So I started looking into the Friedes. Somebody from Smithtown had taken an interest in the Friedes and put together a web page of old postcards, census data, and anecdotes of people who worked and partied at the inn over the years. It became clear to me that there were two inns, first Mother Friede’s on Middle Country Rd, then Frank Friede’s Riverside Inn on Jericho Turnpike in the 1930s and later. Mother Friede was still around in 1930 but Grossmutter Wagner had died by then. In 1930, the inn was still on Middle Country Rd. Frank Friede died in 1954. It seems the Riverside Inn was a popular restaurant, and place for weddings. Lots of notable people frequented it. Apparently, people would eat dinner and then go out to the barn for a snort and some gambling (the former is according to Gray, the latter according to another Smithtown local who grew up going to the Riverside Inn). 

 The Friedes, like Grosmutter, were from Hungary (though Grossmutter was ethnic German and hated being thought of as a “Hun”).  Grossmutter immigrated from Schalke, Germany in 1899 with Annie and Martin Kraus. They lived at first in New York City. Rose Friede immigrated with her second husband Heinrich Welzel and her two sons, Frank and Tanny Friede, also in 1899, also from Schalke, Germany. They went to Allegheny, PA, where Heinrich was a coal miner. By 1910, they were in Smithtown, running the inn on Middle Country Rd and Grossmutter was living with them; by this time, Heinrich Welzel had died. I looked back at all the census data to see if I was missing something. That often happens. I saw that in 1920 Grossmutter was shown as “grandmother” of the head of household, Frank Friede. Grandmother? What? Did everybody think of her as grandmother? Then I had a crazy hunch. Grossmutter was born in 1831. Rose Friede Welzel was born in 1863. Frank Friede was born in 1881. The ages all worked out for Frank to be the grandson, Rose to be the daughter of Grossmutter, and Grossmutter to be the grandmother of Frank.

I called up Gray. “Was Rose Friede a Wagner?”

Gray said, “OF COURSE! That’s why everybody ended up living there and working there! My Uncle Henry worked for Frank Friede, too.  For years, he was the clerk  at the Riverside Inn.”

I said, “Did you know this the whole time and just not tell me?”

“Well, I don’t know why I said ‘Of course.’ It does make sense. I didn’t really know all of them. They were much older than I was. I don’t necessarily remember all these details until you jog my memory and things fit into place. I don’t think I really knew that Rose Friede was a Wagner.”

So I had truly dredged up something that was pretty much lost to history. Rose Wagner, Grossmutter Wagner’s daughter and Gray’s great aunt, married Henry Friede in Germany and had two boys. Her husband Henry died and she remarried, then emigrated to the US in 1899 with her second husband and two boys. The rest of the Wagners emigrated too. Peter and Barbara Wagner (Gray’s grandparents), with five children, emigrated in 1899 and went to Vandling, PA, and then to Carbondale, PA, where Mom was born many years later. Annie Wagner (Gray’s great aunt) and Martin Kraus emigrated in 1887. They lived in Manhattan until after 1910. All of Peter and Barbara Wagner’s girls (Barbara, Anna, Rose, and Margaret--Gray’s aunts) were very close, and when one moved to Smithtown, they all moved. I suspect that Margaret moved first, to run the inn on Middle Country Rd with her husband Frank Schmitt. Then Poppop and Nana moved to Smithtown in about 1930. Aunt Rose and Uncle Walter Loughney didn’t move to Smithtown until after 1930. Henry Wagner had also moved there by 1930.

Ship that brought Anna Wagner & family to the USA in 1899.

One other interesting fact of little utility: the Friedes dropped a final “k” from their name. When the boys immigrated, they were listed as “Friedek.” And they were listed as Friedek in the 1900 census. They probably dropped the k in order to seem less foreign in their new country. I haven’t found much on Tanny Friedek. “Tanny” must have been a nickname as his real name was Peter. His WWI draft card shows he married a woman named Ava and in 1918 they lived in Buckner Ohio where he worked for the Old Ben Mine, mining coal. After 1918, I can’t trace him. He may have died in the war.

There you have it. How the Wagner family got to Smithtown, Long Island.

Christmas 2010

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Tangent 2

The other tangent I went on recently came up, again, because my mother has said on many occasions when I refer to our Pruyn ancestors, "You know, the North Country [Warren and Washington Counties, generally speaking] is full of Pruyns. And of course, they were quite a force in Glens Falls as they owned Finch Pruyn Paper Co." I can't tell you how many times I have heard that. No time like now to figure out how we are related. After all, I have the tools!

The Pruyn family, as everybody knows, were principals in Finch, Pruyn and Co., founded in 1865 and still a privately-owned mill though now called Finch Paper LLC. At their mill, located on the banks of the Hudson River, they convert raw logs into pulp and pulp into paper, all on their own premises. Finch Paper employs about 850 people, making it the largest for-profit employer in the Adirondack region, and is the second largest private landowner in New York. In 2007, The Nature Conservancy purchased all 161,000 acres of the company’s forest land in the Adirondacks for $110 million, or $683 an acre. Finch Paper has a twenty-year agreement with The Nature Conservancy to continue logging on the timber lands. Samuel Pruyn (1820-1908) was one of the co-founders of the firm.

In this case, the family ties are a lot closer. Samuel Pruyn's father, Hendrick VanNess Pruyn (1783-1859), was the brother of my relative, Hannah Francis Pruyn (1791-1874), who married Ludowecus Viele. The Pruyns were an old Dutch family who settled in Albany, NY in the mid-17th century. Francis Pruyn, the scion of the family, arrived in Albany in 1661 from Reusel-de Mierden, Noord-Brabant, Holland. Pruyns figure in all the early history of Albany, NY.

My branch of the Pruyn family became big landholders in upstate New York when Francis Samuel Pruyn (1757-1812) married Maria Hendrick VanNess (1760-1847). Francis and Maria were the parents of both my Hannah Pruyn and Hendrick VanNess Pruyn. Maria owned a substantial amount of land along the Hoosick River in what became Washington and Rensselaer Counties through her father, Hendrick Gerritse VanNess (1718-xxxx).

The Van Ness family were proprietors of the Hoosick Patent, which was granted in 1638 to Maria Van Rensselaer of Albany, Hendrick Van Ness of Albany, Gerrit Teunis Van Vechten of Kaatskill, and Jacobus Van Cortlandt of New York. The patent comprised 70,000 acres on both sides of the Hoosick River.

Tangents

It's been three months since my last post, but I've not been ignoring genealogy. I went off on a tangent recently. Here's what happened. My parents were invited for dinner with their friends the M****s. My mother dutifully sent a thank-you note on her Crane's stationery engraved with Mrs. Stephen Viele Lewis II on the front side. Her friend Liz later remarked that she and my father must be related somehow because she is a Viele and he is a Viele and all the Vieles in upstate New York are related. Well, I took that as a challenge. I had never had any connection to other Vieles outside my own immediate family. I started with the precious little I knew and directly came up short. I thought about starting from what I know of the Vieles and working forward. It was useless, however, to follow the strands of my Viele line out in all directions searching for Liz Viele. I went back and forth with my mother, who would relay my questions to her friend Liz, who, like my mother, is in her 80s. My mother would scribble down some notes in her faltering handwriting, since she can't see very well. Then my father would read me my mother's notes over the phone. And nobody's memory is very good any more so the conversations would have boiled down to a few words on a scrap of paper. ["Stephen, can you read this to me again?"] I'd get snippets of information in each phone call, a last name of a grandfather, a place where a grandmother was supposed to be from, a list of so-and-so married so-and-so but I can't remember whether these were her grandparents or her great-grandparents. Or on her mother's side or her father's side. Hmmm. Not going to be easy. My mother asked, "How do you know if you get on a wrong track?" Well, with so little information to go on, you basically can't hope for much. My mother told me, "Her father's name was Howard." OK, I dutifully plugged Howard into my genealogy software. Nothing. After some searching around, I did find a Harold. I asked my mother, "Is her father's name Harold by any chance?" "Yes," she said, "I knew that. That's what I said." Un-huh. In another conversation, I found out about a grandfather, Frederick Viele, of Glens Falls.

Eventually, after several false starts, I got lucky.  As Tim says, "Bingos don't just happen. You have to be ready for them." I found a link to Google Books for "The Fort Edward Book," in which the search engine had found a mention of a Fred Viele. Fred C Viele apparently owned a drug store in Glens Falls. The book said that Fred was the great grandson of Barney Viele, who was well known to the author as a prominent citizen of Fort Miller, NY. And Barney was descended through a long line of Vieles all the way back to Aernoud Viele, the 17th century interpreter between the Dutch and the Iroquois. Aernoud was the son of Cornelis Volkertsen Viele, the first of the Viele line to arrive on these shores from Holland in 1636. Vieles were some of the earliest settlers of New Amsterday (Manhattan), Schenectady, and Schaghticoke. Cornelis is MY ancestor, through Aernoud's brother, Lowis Viele. Finally, the relationship came clear. Cornelis Volkertsen Viele is the 8th great grandfather of both my father and their friend Liz. Our families ARE related, but the tie goes back to the mid-17th century.

I cleaned up the genealogy file for Liz and exported some snazzy documents listing the descendants of Cornelis Volkertsen Viele all the way down to Liz. And one listing Liz's ancestors all the way back to Cornelis. And finally a "kinship" list, showing how she is related to each person in the genealogy file. This last one shows that Cornelis is her 8th great grandfather. I sent it all off to my parents with the request that they print it all out and give it to Liz. She may not even give a crap but at least her kids can stash it all away someplace and then someday if somebody cares they can dig it out again and get some laughs at what a PhD geologist and cancer patient in New Mexico, with nothing better to do, spent the better part of a week figuring out.