This is my great-great uncle Sam and his wife Annie, in what I think could be a picture commemorating their marriage, which occurred in June 1890, in New York City.  Or it could be commemorating Sam’s naturalization, which was finalized in December 1890.  Either way, it seems quite clear that this photograph was probably taken to commemorate something important, judging by their quite smart and neat attire.  Sam was the youngest son of my great-great grandfather Moses, and the older brother of my great-grandmother Anna, and he worked his entire adult life as a printer.  He and Annie had 5 children - 2 boys and 3 girls - who were raised, for the most part, in Brooklyn.  Annie died relatively young - probably in her late 30’s sometime between 1910 and 1920, when their two youngest children, William and Laura, were still teenagers or younger.  Laura never married and lived downstairs from her father in Brooklyn; Willie played the mandolin and was “a little retarded,” according to my sources.  Sam himself was an old man with “big blubbery lips” and a homburg, looking a little bit like a bulldog.

See, though I know very little about Sam and his children, they are people (like Uncle Sam Blaustein) who lived in the corners and borders of the memories of very young children - in this case, my cousin David and his brother Matthew.  When David and Matthew were little, they recall very clearly going to visit an Uncle Sam Kahn with their parents and seeing Laura and Willie while they were there.  As adults, they couldn’t trace exactly how they were related to Uncle Sam Kahn, but they knew quite resolutely that they were indeed related.  An 1880 census I found several years ago confirmed the connection that they guessed was there, concealed by Sam’s name change from “Cohen” to “Kahn” at some point.  This wasn’t, apparently, an official name change, as census records up to 1930 record the Sam and his family as Cohens, but it definitely wasn’t a mis-hearing on David and Matthew’s part, as my grandmother Ethel, keeper of quite immaculate and complete address books, always recorded Sam, Laura and Willie’s last names as Kahn.

This picture is one that magically materialized from a box in my aunt’s closet a few years ago, long after I had assumed I had seen all the photographs my grandparents’ had saved.  These kinds of boxes of pictures are the best kinds of treasure troves I can imagine - and they give me faith that despite the difficulty of putting names to faces and stories to names, it can always happen when you least expect it.

Samuel Cohen (Kahn) (ca 1867-after 1945) and Annie Richmond Cohen (ca 1872-ca 1915)