I know that this website promises photographs of ancestral faces and the stories that go with them, so it is with some trepidation that I present you with an image which does not include a face.  The faces associated with this image and with its attendant story are still unknown to me, but I have been so engrossed in trying to piece together the story this past week that I would be hard pressed to write anything substantial about something diffent.  So in lieu of an actual visage, here is a part of the April 24, 1896 public face of the Boston Store of Dover, New Jersey, as published in Dover’s Iron Era newspaper.  With the help of the Rockaway Township Free Public Library, which has recently digitized the run of the Iron Era from 1872 to 1905 and the Rockaway Record from 1890 to 1956, I have been trying to track the history of the Boston Store and the man who owned it -- my great-great-great uncle Hyman Rassler.

I wasn’t sure until this week that Hyman Rassler actually was my great-great-great uncle, but I have long suspected it, since he is buried not far from my great-great grandmother Tama Leah, whose maiden name was Rassler, and since one of his sons worked for the A. Hollander fur concern in Middletown, New York, which, as I have written before, employed a bevy of my relatives.  This seems like relatively scant evidence, I know, but I had a hunch -- strengthened when I learned some years ago that Hyman, along with a William Rassler, who I suspected was possibly another sibling, was buried in B’nai Abraham-Union Fields Cemetery in Newark, New Jersey, but spent most if not all of their lives outside of Newark, dying in Dover, NJ and Westchester County, New York, respectively.  I thought maybe it would make sense that a family tie would have brought them to Newark in death, and years after I made this assumption, I finally figured out for certain that my hunch was right.  Several years ago, I did some basic research, tracked Hyman and William in the censuses, requested their death certificates, and knew a decent amount about their descendants, but was never able to establish for sure that they were related to Tama Leah.  So I kept their data in my database program, unlinked to anyone else, and sort of forgot about them a little bit, figuring their possible relation to me was a brick wall that would take too much effort to knock down.  Until this week.

Hyman was born in about 1862 in a part of Austria-Hungary that is now Ukraine.  He came to the US sometime in the early 1880s, and somehow found his way to Pinckneyville, Perry County, Illinois by 1887, in which year he filed his initial citizenship papers and also paid $5.17 in personal property taxes there.  Sometime around then, he married Miss Sophia Norton of Newark, New Jersey because their first child, Estella, was born (apparently in New Jersey) in 1888.  By 1890, they were living in Hillsboro, Marion County, Kansas, a town originally settled by German-speaking Russian Mennonites, where their son Charles was born in July, and where William Rassler had filed his initial citizenship papers in 1888.  In 1895, they were all still living in Hillsboro -- at least long enough to be documented in the state census as storekeepers.  Alongside Hyman and William and their respective wives and children, a 24-year-old Charley Rassler (born in Austria) was enumerated, and I assumed maybe that was another brother, which was another correct hunch.  The brothers apparently had time left in 1895 to make a stop in Carthage, Missouri, where Hyman’s name is embroidered on a fundraising quilt and which William listed as the place he incurred debt as a partner in the firm Rassler Brothers, according to a 1901 bankruptcy filing in the New York Times.  Then, they all ended up back in Dover for 1896, before William made his own way to Peekskill, then Ossining, New York in 1897.  Hyman quite successfully ran the Boston Store with his wife Sophie until her death in 1920, and than ran another apparently smaller store in Dover until his own death in 1929.  William, it seems, had some financial trouble as there is at least one other bankruptcy filing listed in the New York Times under his name, but he continued operating as a shopkeeper in Westchester County until his death in 1924.  As for Charley Rassler, I had never been able to find another trace of him until this past week, when he provided the link I was looking for to tie these interesting and enterprising men back to me and Tama Leah.

I don’t really know how or why I did this, but somehow in the course of plugging some names into Google when I was bored, I arrived at an issue of the Iron Era from the Rockaway Township Library’s project which mentioned Hyman.  So I kept searching their project for the Rassler family, hoping I’d find an obituary or something helpful that would maybe establish a link.  I found it in an obituary for Charles Rassler, who died June 3, 1898 in Dover of blood poisoning caused by appendicitis.  He was a few days short of 26, but had a lengthy obituary, which mentioned he had been born in Austria in 1872, the youngest of 5 children, and had come to the US in 1886, spending some years in Kansas before settling in Dover.  A senior member of the firm of Rassler Brothers, he was survived by his father, by his two sisters, Lena Fenig and Rose Bierman of Newark, and his two brothers, Hyman Rassler of Dover, and William Rassler of Peekskill, New York.  Lena Fenig is a pre-1900 incarnation of the name that would later be recorded as Tama Leah (or sometimes Lena) Fenning, and that meant that there, right there, was the evidence I had been looking for to link these people together -- along with a sister named Rose I had never heard of before and the tidbit that their father (probably called Henry in the US) was still alive and possibly in Newark, New Jersey in 1898.

I have put out my feelers (as I like to think of them) in the form of emails and letters to historical societies, county clerks and archivists and am waiting for the first to come back to me with more particulars on the migrations of the Rasslers and their businesses.  This story of migration westward from the usual Jewish urban life all my other America-dwelling family of the period is an strangely compelling one to me because, of course, it is interesting.  But also because it makes me feel like now I have some kind of personal relation to the saga of manifest destiny and rural America that I have never had before.  Until the Rasslers, this was not a story that included my family, living in small tenement apartments and Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods in big cities, running saloons and tailor shops and candy shops.  Our story might have included gigantic moves across the Atlantic, but never before the same mobility across the vastness of the American midwest, never the participation in the settling of a place, or in the life of a small town that would not have included many of what the Iron Era of the 1890s terms “co-religionists.”  The Rasslers present a family story that is a new one for my particular family, and I am excited at the chance I get to unravel it.

Hyman (ca. 1862-1929), William (ca. 1867-1924) and Charles (1872-1898) Rassler