The Bold: Ella Holzmann Brown (1882-1971) with daughter Rona and granddaughter Dione

  My great-great grandmother Ella was a very fashionable lady and a very strong-willed one.  It’s likely she didn’t need glasses until she was middle-aged (her side of the family is not generally a near-sighted one), which is when these very classy rimless frames start showing up in photographs.

The Desperate: Ethel Kalisch Hoffer (seated, 2nd from right) with the rest of the Temple Beth Israel (York, Pennsylvania) confirmation class of 1932

Unlike Ella, my grandmother Ethel needed to wear glasses nearly all her life (her side of the family is, unfortunately, a sometimes very near-sighted one) and made the move to contact lenses as soon as she could get them. Clearly, her confirmation in 1932 was before that date and she just really needed to be able to see.  In all of her high school yearbook photos that I’ve seen, she managed to sneak her glasses off before the shutter fired, but obviously not this time.

I wouldn’t have noticed about either of these foremothers wearing or not wearing glasses if it hadn’t been for another excellent lady who wears glasses: the footnoteMaven.  fM, as she is known to her friends, is the founder of Shades of the Departed, one of the most well-written, researched and loved genealogy blogs out there, and she is also the publisher of Shades of the Departed Magazine, where I was fortunate to be a regular columnist.  fM’s skill with words, research chops and passion for photographs are obvious to anyone who has ever read her work, and her generosity, supportiveness and general awesomeness are readily apparent to all who’ve been lucky enough to meet her.

Happy birthday, footnoteMaven!  I hope the coming year brings happiness, health and lots of ladies wearing glasses!

CreativeGene, by Jasia

The Educated Genealogist, by Sheri Fenley

For Your Family Story, by Caroline Pointer

Geneablogie, by Craig Manson

Healing Brush, by Janine Smith

Shades: Birthday Edition — A Teacup Throne at Moultrie Creek, by Denise Olson

What’s Past is Prologue, by Donna Pointkouski

The Family Curator, by Denise Levenick

Ella & Max

As I have mentioned before, my great-great-great grandfather Jacob was relatively prolific with regards to wives and children: he had at least 2 – maybe 3 – wives with whom he raised at least 7 children over a span of 30 years. This meant that my great-great-grandmother Ella, who was born to Jacob’s last wife, had a bunch of half-siblings, some of whom were almost old enough to be her parents. One of those siblings nearly old enough to be her parent was her oldest (as far as I know) brother, Max.

For a long time, the picture above has hung on the wall at my grandparents’ house even though we didn’t know who that man was in the carriage with Ella — because it is a quite amazing artifact of bygone years and clothes and transport, it was there anyway. When we decided, through a mixture of research and conversation and examination that maybe it was Max, the photograph became much more than a neat picture of Nana Ella all dressed up in a buggy.

I only found out about Max because I stumbled across the documentation of his death in some roundabout way that I don’t quite remember. I probably stumbled across his name by fluke somewhere – in a death index for Chicago, or maybe in the online index to Cook County coroner’s inquests. Whatever the case, I found him.

Max’s story is this:

He was a tinsmith who came the United States with his sister Bertha Wiener and her family in 1902. He lived with another sister, Rose, who first came to America in 1893 and ran a boarding-house/saloon in Chicago. Then, on July 13, 1904, he hung himself from a rafter in the coal shed behind Rose’s house. There was an inquest, during which Rose, her bartender and a third man acted as witnesses. The jury issued a verdict stating that: “The said Max Holcman now lying dead at 8914 Green Bay Ave in said City of Chgo, County of Cook, State of Illinois, came to her [sic] death on the 13 day of February AD 1904 from strangulation by hanging himself with a rope around his neck tied to a rafter with suicidal intent, while temporarily insane in the coal shed in the rear of 8914 Green Bay Ave on Febr 13 AD 1904.”

The family gave out the story that Max had fallen off of a roof in the course of his work as a tinsmith, which involved a lot of roofing and working on roofs, in order to minimize the stigma of the suicide and his story was forgotten, at least among my branch of the family. At the time of his death, Max’s sisters were all living in Chicago; his father, his brother and his youngest sister were still in Europe. I am curious sometimes to wonder if the story of Max’s death was accurately transmitted to Europe, or if the family there was left in the dark. I wonder this because the story of the roofing accident comes from the grandson of the brother who lived in Europe, who heard this story as the simple truth about Max. I don’t know enough about how the Holzmann family worked to know if they would have lied to their father and their brother, to keep them from the sad truth as other branches of my family might have (would have). I also wonder if it was something about America itself that drove Max to suicide, though it would seem that there was also something in the genetic hardwiring he inherited that contributed to it (a first cousin killed himself by drinking Lysol at the age of 33, leaving a wife and three young children). I also wonder about his feelings towards Chicago, about the sense of dislocation he might have felt at being a very small fish in a very large pond – just another immigrant in a city full of them – when he came from a small small place where he would have most likely been quite assured of his place in society and where people probably knew him.

Whatever the case, I am glad I have at least one photograph that I tell myself is of Max and his little sister, hopefully on a day when they had a nice time.

Max Holzmann (ca. 1862-1904) and Ella Holzmann Brown (1882-1971)

Ella was born in what is now Slovakia in 1882.  She came on a ship to the United States by herself at the age of 15. She married, had 2 children, got divorced, moved to California and lived until the age of 89. Somewhere in between all this, she went to Glacier National Park and posed for a photograph with some Native American men in front of their teepees.  Now, I didn’t know Nana Ella, my great-great-grandmother, but this – Glacier National Park, teepees, Indians – is not something I would have guessed she did.  And, in fact, the entire idea of this picture continually amazes me.

On second thought, though, I don’t know why this is really particularly surprising.  Nana was not a boring person, though apparently she was obsessive-compulsive about things like mopping floors.  My great-aunt Francine tells stories about Nana taking her to multiple double features in one day and persuading her, as a newlywed, to paint a wall in her first apartment purple.  These are stories that don’t get told about uninteresting people, people who you would never suspect of taking a trip anywhere.

There is not even anything really that surprising about a 49-year old lady visiting Glacier National Park and having her picture taken there in 1931.  The Many Glaciers Hotel, which the caption on the back of this photograph mentions, still exists.  A hotel in the best tradition of grand old national park hotels, it was (is) part of a string of hotels and chalets built across the park in the 1910s, something that wouldn’t be out of the question for a 49-year old lady from Chicago to visit, even during the Depression.  In fact, it was probably something pretty fashionable to do, and if Nana cared about anything, she cared about fashion and class.  Then there are the Native Americans.  It isn’t hard to imagine an encampment of teepees and Indians standing by near the hotels for photo opportunties with idle visitors from the east (and I’m hoping, a sizable tip from ladies like Nana).  Today, even just teepees (and a chuckwagon breakfast) at Dornans in Grand Teton National Park draw a crowd fascinated with the notion of the west.

But still.  Somehow, even though I know these things, Nana and the Indians never fail to, for lack of better words, completely blow my mind.

Ella Holzmann Brown (1882-1971)