Whats Even on the Record?

My Mother’s Mother’s Mother

I dont know when, but sometime during the year my mother and her mother both died I took an interest in my matrilineal line, an area of my family I had never much considered before. In the months leading up to her death, I remember twice sitting down with my mom to interview her about her life, just so I had a record. The first time she and her friend who had come to visit her told me the stories of their days in a yoga and meditation cult in the 80s in the Bay Area. The second time, when it was just the two of us, I had her tell me all about her grandmother.

Mostly they were stories I already knew: For one, my great grandparents were first cousins, paired up by the family for the sake of convenience as they had both made it to their thirties without marrying. My great grandmother, Anne (or Ann and as a child Annie), had spent her young adulthood caring for her ailing mother, who eventually passed away, and so had not had much of a social life. My great grandfather, Leo, spent most of his time working, so much so that he was excomunicated by his immediate family for choosing to work on the sabbath. I always assumed this was what had kept him occupied. They grew up on seperate continents and only met as adults, when Leo had emigrated alone to New York from a schtetl somewhere in Galicia, a historical region which at times was under Polish or Austrian contol, that their family was from. My grandmother was their only child, and grew up in a one room apartment on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, near avenue I.

My mother’s memories of her grandmother always sounded a bit sinister to me when I was a kid, but my mother loved her dearly. I think she and I just had very different ideas of fun as children. By the time I was six, my mom thought I might want to watch classic horror movies like Rosemary’s Baby and the Exorcist. When told what these movies were about, I refused. My mother didnt understand, she loved those movies when she was my age. Those were movies that her grandmother would take her to go see. Her grandmother also taught her to play card games like gin rummy, and the two of them would play with Anne’s sister Hannah. They would often play in the park, and at a certain point, my mom realized she could cheat by seeing the reflections of the old women’s cards in their sunglasses. They also were the first people to let my mom try coffee.

Checking Out the Records

Recently I came upon a records search page, embeded in a larger database for New York City Historical documents, which held birth certificates dated between the years 1895 and 1910. I knew my great grandmother was born sometime in those years but Ive never been quite sure when, so I thought Id give it a go to try and figure out. I always assumed she had grown up in Brooklyn as she had raised my grandmother here, but recently my uncle had mentioned he thought she grew up on the lower east side. So I put Brooklyn and Manhattan both into the search just to see what would come up. Of course there was more than one Anne Goldner born in those years. Birth years shown were 1900, 1905 and 1907. There were also several Max Goldners (her bother) and two Hannah Goldners as well. However there was no mention of a Ruth, my great grandmother’s younger sister, from whom my mother got her middle name. This search didnt seem terribly comprehensive, and now I was so curious, so I turned to familysearch.com: The Mormon church funded free genealogy wibsite, which, while being limited still gives you a lot.

I put a cursory amount of family information that I knew into a family tree, and the site was able to find some pretty interesting documents. I found a bunch from both sides of my mother’s family, but there were several documents that were interesting to me concerning my great grandmothers family. The first was a census from 1910 which showed the Goldner family living in Manhattan. As it turns out, my uncle was right! The parents were named Aaron and Beile, names I had heard before but wouldn’t have remembered. And there were four children: Max, Anna, Annie, and Beckie. Funny. I knew my great grandmother had been Annie at times, and Anna becoming Hannah made enough sense to me. But who was Beckie?? I suppose Rebecca could become Ruth, but from what I know of the Torah, those are two very different names. Also listed below the children was their grandmother, Fegie Goldner. My great great great grandmother, who I had never heard of before.

The census also carried other interesting information. Both parents and the grandmother had immigrated from Austria, and none of them spoke English, only Yiddish. Additionally it gave the occupations of several family members. Aaron was an operator at a cloak factory, Anna at a shirtwaist factory. Max is listed as a self employed “pedaler” of gas mantles, which I learned was a type of mesh cloth used as a light source in old lanterns. A bit outdated already by that time, I’d imagine kind of like selling flip phones today. Most curious to me though, is that Annie’s age is listed as 12, placing her birthday sometime 1897 or 1898. Different than any of the previous records I had found. In the following cencus I found from 1920, now named as Anne, her age was 19. Meaning she had only aged 7 years while 10 years had gone by. Now her birthday was 1900 or 1901. In the only other census I could find, from 1950, her age was 45. Placing her birthday in 1904 or 1905. How weird that her age kept changing. When I brought it up to my aunt, she thought maybe it was because she was embarrassed by how old she was when she did get married and have a child. That would have explained the last age change, but from 12 to 19, that wouldnt make sense. Growing up my mother would always tell me about how her other grandmother, her father’s mother, had lived to 100 or 101, but that she was very secretive about her age so they could never quite be sure. But in perussing old documents, this information was fairly traceable. And her birthday was consistent across all of them. They did in fact confirm that she lived to 101. However, my other great grandmother has now become a mystery to me.

Looking Back, Being Here

I come from a line of mothers who do not have easy relationships with their own mothers. Ive always known this. As a child I watched my mother and her mother bicker constantly, over issues both supurfluos and important. And as I grew up I inheritted that kind tension with my mother. We didnt fight in the same way, rather we often came to emotional stalemates with bitter quietness. But it was unresolved frustrations all the same. And like her with her mother, we never really got to the bottom of it. Once I was older and learned more stories about our family, I came to understand that this was a struggle that my grandmother had with her mother as well. And judging by this pattern, I can only wonder what Anne’s relationship with her mother couldve been like. Especially as she took care of her through the end of her life. In many ways, end of life was when my relationship with my own mother became so frustrating.

The thing about Anne, is she may always remain a mystery to me. The stories I heard of her growing up told me very little of a woman, only about the world she lived in. And in the archive she in anything but exact, her name and age always changing across time. But despite all that I have felt so connected to her spirit since the passing of mother and grandmother. In the wake of my mothers death, I moved back to Brooklyn, after having not lived here since I was child. I thought a lot in those days about her, and how she lived out her daily life in the same place that I now was. I remember trying to write a song, a eulogy to my mother, but the refrain that kept coming to me was “I am my mother’s mother’s mother, strangely.” I know her in the ways I have come to know her life. Growing up and living our lives in the same city, although it is very different now than it was then, makes me feel like I know her. It is a similar feeling I get to when I drive around the Berkshire foothills and feel my father’s uncles (who Ive only ever known in stories) in the mountains. Unfortunately I also know her in the ways she passed down a fraught sort of mothering to her daughter and grandaughter. But with the good comes the bad, so I dont hold ill feelings.

The thing I find so exciting about all of this, is that this is history as much as any paper record. And the records, as we can see, are hardly exact. I know these are both fairly obvious statement, but it doesnt make them any less true or exciting, especially when we realize that we get to experience them! Ive been thinking a ton recently about why I care so much about the things that Im interested in: urban development, social theory, history and geography (to name a few). And more and more Im realizing how much it hinges on my connection to place. New York is not only the city I grew up in, but that generations of my family have grown up in and around. So much of my existance is defined by this place, and its given so much meaning to my life. So much of the context in which I knew my mother and grandmother growing up is tied to the ways they showed me the city and all that it could be. I continue to look to the city as a testament to them, and the life they brought me into. And I will never forget them, or the lives that they came from.

Post-Script: Check This Out

Along a similar line of thought, I also stumbled upon this in the records:

It’s my great grandfather Leo’s petition for US Naturalization in 1924. His profession was “trunkmaker” and he was 24, the same age that I am now. He also lived at 141 Penn Street, which is in South Williamsburg, only a few miles from me in Crown Heights! I think Im gonna take a walk over there someday soon, see what it looks like now. Will update when I do!