Knowing Now What Was Needed Then

 

Sometimes, I wish I had thought of things sooner—like when I had first sent away for my paternal grandfather's death certificate. If I knew at that time what I know now, I could have had Aunt Rose's death record on hand to help answer the questions I'm struggling with this month.

But that was then; this is now, when I finally discovered the actual date of Rose Hassinger's death. For that detail, my thanks go to that bulldog nonprofit, Reclaim the Records, for their wrestling match with the New York State Department of Health. As they put it, "It took us seventeen months of fighting with the government just to get a list of the names of dead people."

It was that death index, recently obtained for all by Reclaim the Records, which provided me with the exact date of death of Rose Hassinger. More than that, it also identified the location of her death: "N. Hempstead"—or, more specifically, the Town of North Hempstead, where Julius Hassinger still lived at the time of the 1940 census, three years after his wife's death.

If I had known about that date of Rose's death decades ago, when I first sent for my grandfather's own death certificate, I might have actually obtained a copy of it. As it stands now, my chances of actually obtaining a copy of Rose's death record—and thus, the names of her parents if that was provided at the time of her death—are virtually nil. And there's a spiraling descent of a story to explain why my chances are so limited.

Here's my tale of woe, set to the tune of apparent legal changes in New York State. According to their website, I now can only order a copy of a death certificate if I am the spouse, parent, child, or sibling of the deceased. Problem #1: Rose Hassinger was none of these; she was my grandaunt. Worse, she had no children, and her only brother has long since died, so I have no one to ask to order the record on my behalf.

Just when my hopes were dashed by this restriction, a ray of hope appeared on the horizon: the New York State Department of Health will provide an uncertified copy of a death record, as long as the date of death was "on file" for at least fifty years. The good news is Rose's date of death in 1937 certainly qualifies me on that count. The bad news? "Processing a genealogy request may take eight (8) months or longer."

Instead, the New York State website recommendation for the impatient: submit requests to the municipal clerk where the death actually occurred. Next step: look for the county, right? Wrong. In New York, death records were generally kept by the township. In Rose's case, that would be the Town of North Hempstead.

Clicking through their menu to, first, the Town Clerk's office, then being redirected to their webpage on Vital Records—nothing is ever easy—I discovered a listing again of the same limitations provided by the state's website. In addition, the site rattled off a list of places of death, mostly hospitals, for which they would not provide death certificates. Problem #2: from that caveat, I now enter my own personal Catch 22. How am I to know where Rose might have died? Without an obituary, the only way I could know her precise location of death within the township would be to view it on her death certificate.

The faint glimmer at the end of this tunnel of genealogical doom was the township's provision of a "fee for genealogical searches." Of course, I don't need a search; thanks to Reclaim the Records, I finally have the precise date of death. Nothing on the webpage indicates that the fee would result in receiving a copy of the actual document desired. But the entry offered a phone number to call "for further information."

After all that wandering in circles, I decided to double check what I had found. I looked up the FamilySearch.org wiki for researching genealogy in Nassau County, New York, location of Rose's final home in North Hempstead. There, the section on Vital Records mentioned that records in New York, contrary to the sense I had gathered from all that reading, could actually be ordered online.

Genealogy could come with instant gratification, after all? I clicked on the link in the FamilySearch wiki article, which brought me to an order form for Archives.com. I hesitated. This seemed a bit too easy, after all the warnings I had consumed from the New York State website. Another clickable link in that same paragraph on the wiki offered an alternate: a New York State Records Research Guide at the website Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness. There, too, the option of ordering online led to the Archives.com order form.

Receiving my answer within "two to five days" seems tempting, until I realize it comes at a price—a price I would likely not have had to pay, if only I had known all those years ago to order Aunt Rose's document along with the death record for my own grandfather. Were things easier back then? Perhaps I am just conveniently forgetting.

Found my Voice Again

 

I can finally talk again! It took lots of googling for answers, reviewing and testing information—which in this case hadn't seemed to work—but now it appears I can finally talk back to everyone again in comments you've left on A Family Tapestry. Seems it was a function of some default settings on Safari, the browser I've been using since switching from my old clunker PC to a new Apple laptop. While my first—and second, and third—foray into problem solving didn't seem to do the trick, that option to try, try again worked in my favor, and by last night, I was able to pipe up and leave a reply to the comment by "kdduncan."

What Kathy had suggested was to go to FamilySearch.org to look up the marriage record for my Aunt Rose and her third husband, Julius Hassinger. I did just that, and quickly located an entry for the 1933 New York City marriage.

The record provided, however, was only a transcription, not a digitized copy of the actual document. Still, as Kathy had mentioned, it divulged information on the parents of the couple.

Well, let me amend that: Julius Hassinger's father and mother were explicitly named. From that transcription—assuming it was correctly copied—we can now say that Julius' father was named John, and his mother was identified as Agathe Geisen.

For Rose, however, reading an entry for her father which included only a first name did not follow a pattern as helpful as that for her husband-to-be. The bride's name was listed as Rose Kober, a name which we already have learned was her married name from her by-then-deceased second husband, George W. Kober. Having her father identified only by his given name told us very little, as we simply can't assume the missing surname was Kober; to eliminate that possibility, though, would have required us to trace Rose's history back past the first two marriages. In other words, the blank for the bride's father's surname leaves us in the same position in which we had started: with no usable information at all.

On the other hand, the name provided for the bride's mother did help somewhat. According to the transcription, Rose's mother was named Anna Segar. That entry at least resonates with one I had found on the death certificate for my own paternal grandfather, Rose's brother. On that record, which I had sent away for years ago, his mother's name had been listed as Anna Zegar—close enough to have been, perhaps, a matter of writing down, slightly incorrectly, what had been heard.

But reading "Julius" for the bride's father's name on the transcription of a document detailing her marriage to a man also going by the same name? There is room for doubt here, in my opinion.

Still, the suggestion was well taken, and one good turn—around a records resource, that is—deserves another. So I looked up Rose's previous marriage to George Kober to see what the reported parents' names might have been. There was no surprise regarding George's parents. He was a junior, and sure enough, the transcription for his 1915 marriage to Aunt Rose indicated his father's name was also George, although his mother Pauline's maiden name was mangled as "Heutton" (it was Hutton). But the main point of this search showed a confirming detail: again, Rose's father's first name was given as Julius.

Once again, no surname was given for Rose's father, the presumption being that her own surname must have been her maiden name. This, of course, was incorrect, for her marriage to George Kober listed her under her first married name, Miller. Looking for Rose's connection to a father named Julius Miller would have produced as many helpful leads as our previous assumption of a surname of Kober for Julius in the Hassinger marriage license. Yet looking for a record of Rose's first marriage would have produced quite a challenge, seeking an unnamed Miller coupled with a bride of unknown surname.

There is, of course, another approach to untangling this research dilemma. Now that I've discovered Rose's date of death in New York, I can try to obtain a copy of her own death certificate, which should also contain the names of her parents. That would be a prudent step in a sound research plan, but in the case of researching New York ancestors, it is a plan which brings up some roadblocks of its own.

Fast-Forward to the Past

 

When we can't find the more recent records for our ancestors, genealogists can still turn around and look deeper into the past. While I am stuck in pursuit of Aunt Rose, my paternal grandfather's sister, it is indeed in locating a death certificate and burial information on the woman who, as far as I can determine, finished life known as Rose Hassinger, where my research hits a roadblock. But that doesn't mean we can't do an about-face and look for further details on her younger years.

Granted, I've only been able to pursue Aunt Rose over her years in New York City back to the time of the 1910 census. Then, she was listed as married, but was not living with a husband. Instead, Rose "Muller" was living with her mother Anna. Both of them were listed as aliens arriving in the United States in 1884. While their native tongue was listed as Polish, their nationality had been given as German—a factor of the politically correct designation of that time period.

If the two women had arrived in New York back in 1884, of course the question becomes, "Where were they for the 1900 census?" That, I still can't locate—although seeing Rose's mother's name spelled "K-u-s-f-k-r" in the 1910 census makes me wonder how much worse the rendition might have looked, ten years earlier in their learning curve to acquire a new language in a foreign land.

Still, thanks to several DNA matches for the descendants of Rose's mother's siblings, I've been able to combine that strange error in the 1920 census, revealing Anna's origin in "Schwartzwald," with baptismal and marriage records from the region around a tiny village called Czarnylas near the Polish region known as Pomerania. Coupling that with a copy of a death certificate revealing Anna's maiden name—whether correct or incorrect—as Zegarska, I have been able to find some useful transcriptions of old Polish records.

The online resource where I found those records, and what information I'd still like to locate, will be this week's topic, as we review what needs to be done next to move further into Rose's past—and that of her ancestors, as well. 

Finding a Final Resting Place

 

While I've finally discovered that Aunt Rose died toward the end of 1937, that certainly doesn't mean that is the end of her story—not, at least, for family history research purposes. There are far too many gaps left in her story. Among them is that tiny detail of finding her final resting place.

There is nothing I've found online that confirms where that resting place might have been. Now that I've finally located the date of her death—not to mention, that key detail of what surname her burial records might have listed—I can begin that next research process.

Not finding any obituary for Aunt Rose, though she was survived not only by her third husband, Julius Hassinger, but by her younger brother, I had some searching still to do. While a copy of a New York State death index revealed the date of her death, I'm curious to see what was recorded for the names of Rose's parents—not to mention, discovering who the reporting party might have been. I doubt her third husband, to whom she was married for only three years, would have been able to correctly answer such questions—though her brother, my secretive paternal grandfather, might have been, if he'd be willing to break silence on his origins just this once.

Discovering what was surely the mangled married name of Rose's mother led me to one cemetery where Rose might have been buried, if she didn't have plans to be buried with Julius Hassinger, her current husband. That cemetery was the beautiful and historic Woodlawn Cemetery located in the northern portion of the Bronx, part of New York City. That was the cemetery, according to death records, where Rose laid her mother to rest after Anna's tragic demise in 1921, although searches through Find a Grave with several spelling variations yielded no results from the memorials posted there.

The Find a Grave memorials do include an entry—however, without any headstone photograph—for Rose's second husband, George Kober, and note an inscription stating "Husband of Rose." I can click a handy button at Find a Grave and request that a photo be taken, but I will first need to provide a burial location before sending that request. Since the only map of the cemetery I can find online dates back to 1912, that hardly helps. I will need to call the cemetery on a nice, quiet day midweek, when the office isn't quite so busy.

Still, though I can't find any mention of Rose herself in the Woodlawn entries at Find a Grave, I did notice that George's father, the senior George W. Kober, was also buried at Woodlawn. I'm hoping this detail indicates a family burial plot, in which case, I will ask for the names of everyone buried at that location, including Rose's mother Anna. Who knows what additional ways Anna's Polish surname might have been mangled in American records.

Finding this final resting place for both Rose and her mother Anna will help me gather those last few details I've been lacking. Perhaps that will provide a key to open the door for future searches. After all, this may be the last stop in the story of the end of their lives, but in genealogy, we are always working backwards in time. The answers from the end of the story may well be the information I need to unlock doors on the details of their life prior to their arrival in New York City.

Doubling Up

 

Running into possible double identities when researching an ancestor can be frustrating, as I mentioned just this past weekend. Today, I'm doubly at it with the same problem, only this time, I'm focusing on another branch of the family: my paternal grandfather's sister Rose.

Aunt Rose had supposedly been married three times. I've located records identifying her first married name—the unhelpful surname Miller—and her second marriage in 1915 to George W. Kober. George's 1932 death left Rose a widow, but not for long. According to newspaper reports, the widowed Rose Kober married a man by the name of Julius Hassinger.

My only problem: every time I tried searching for a New York City resident by that man's name, I kept finding a married man whose wife was named Helen. That's a problem. Whatever became of the new Rose Hassinger?

Not being able to locate a death record or even a burial for anyone by Rose's most recent married name, I thought I'd try a different tack: research this other Julius Hassinger to see where the information led. After all, many subsequent marriages turned out not quite the way the parties had hoped, and divorce could have been the result. If that was followed by yet another marriage for Rose, she could be lost to any researcher not aware of any new married name.

Since the original newspaper announcement of the wedding of Julius and Rose mentioned two scant details about the groom—that he had been a confirmed bachelor up to the point of their 1933 nuptials, and that he worked for the Post Office—there wasn't much upon which to base a search. Worse, since the couple lived in the greater New York City region, the chances of there being more than one man by the name of Julius Hassinger were high. After all, New York City in 1930 had a population pushing toward seven million people, providing numbers almost certain to produce name doubles.

When I looked for Julius in the 1930 census, I found information on one man with that name. The details provided in that census seemed to support what little had been mentioned about him in the announcement of his 1933 wedding. Renting a room in the household of Andrew and Sophie Siebert at 141 Whitehall Boulevard in Garden City—just outside the New York City limits—Julius, like his landlord Andrew, was reported to be a clerk in the Post Office. His reported age of forty seven at the time would have made him somewhat younger than his future bride, but I'm not yet sure of Rose's own age, only going by what the newspaper report had divulged.

Julius had reported his place of birth as New York, and his parents' origin to be Germany. The most important detail—at least, for our purposes here—was that he claimed to be a single man.

Looking further for confirmation of this Julius Hassinger—whether he was our man or not—I searched for records predating that census. A World War I draft registration card produced a birth date for one New York City man named Julius: March 3, 1883. At the time he signed the form, Julius was living in downtown Manhattan, working as a postal clerk at "Penn Terminal Station"—or Penn Station, as it is called today.

At the time, Julius gave a contact person named Ernest Hassinger, whom he identified as his brother, and who was living at the same address as Julius. However, looking for a Hassinger household in the earlier 1910 census did not produce those two names paired together. Instead, I found Julius living alone with his widowed father John. Again, Julius was listed as a clerk in the Post Office. But this time, the entry showed that Julius' father had arrived in the United States in 1872, shortly before the then-twenty seven year old Julius would have been born.

If we turned the search in the opposite direction, time wise, there would be no sign of Julius' supposed wife, Rose. Despite their marriage in 1933, by the time of the 1940 census, Julius—with an estimated birth year of 1883, agreeing with the data from the earlier enumerations—was sporting a considerably younger wife by the name of Helen. 

Yet, looking more closely at that actual document, there are a few loose threads which invite us to tug at them and see if we can unravel this illusion of double identities. The first detail was the fact that the 1940 census asked where residents lived five years prior to that date. Unfortunately, the entry for Julius was overwritten, making it hard to decipher the true answer. Transcribers at Ancestry.com took his answer to read, "New Haven." I think the answer might have been something different: Woodhaven.

You might recall that, when Rose had been married to her second husband, George Kober, her address had been a home in part of Queens borough called Woodhaven. When Rose remarried, could the Hassinger couple simply have retained the old Kober residence as their own? More telling was the five-year-prior answer for Julius' 1940s wife Helen: she stated her home, five years before that, was not in Woodhaven, but in Manhattan.

Bingo: Julius and Helen weren't married to each other, five years before 1940. In fact, that led me to locate information on when Julius and Helen might have wed: 1939.

So, this detail makes me feel more positive that we have the right Julius and not, as I had previously thought, his name twin. Something must have happened to Rose between their 1933 wedding and Julius' subsequent marriage to Helen. Whether it was a divorce or a death, there should be a record. But where was it?

Just to make sure, and to follow Julius' trail to the end, I located his Find a Grave memorial in Florida—a customary destination for many retired New York City residents. Julius died on February 3, 1964, according to his obituary, and was buried in Fort Lauderdale. His only survivor mentioned in the obituary was his wife Helen. No children—and no mention of any previous marriage to someone named Rose.

Since the 1940 census led me to believe that Rose and Julius had established their residence at the former Kober home in Woodhaven—part of Queens within New York City limits—it was puzzling that there was no documentation to help find what became of Rose. Clearly she was out of the picture between 1935 and 1939.

However, I remembered that Julius had previously lived and worked in Garden City, which lies outside the border for New York City. Thinking any records of Rose's demise might instead be listed in Nassau County records, I checked the broader digitized collections for New York State. There, in a 1937 New York State death index, was a mention of one Rose Hassinger, who died on November 14 in North Hempstead, the same town where we had found Julius living in the 1940 census.

I still haven't found an obituary for Rose—if there was any—nor have I located any indication of her burial, other than a volunteer's note on George Kober's Find a Grave memorial that he was "husband of Rose." This will require a call to the cemetery where George was buried to see whether I can find any details on Rose's final resting place. But it at least brings some closure to the pursuit of the mysterious Aunt Rose of the few family photographs passed along to me by older relatives.

True, that only answers the question of what became of Rose. Where she came from is an entirely different question. While I'll review what I already know about this issue tomorrow, there is far more I still need to learn about the part of the family which connects Rose and her brother—my tight-lipped grandfather—to their forebears.

When Rose Met Julius

 

It was on a vacation in 1933 that Rose met Julius. She, the recently widowed Mrs. George W. Kober, had made arrangements that summer to visit friends in nearby Garden City—twenty miles from her home in Woodhaven, less than an hour's journey by train. Perhaps her friends, sensing she needed to get out of the house where she and her husband had lived in New York City since their 1915 wedding, had suggested she come to visit them. After all, it had been well over a year since George's 1932 death. Perhaps a change of scenery and some fun activities with friends would do her good.

That, at least, was the story told in two New York newspapers which announced her wedding. "Vacation Romance Leads to Wedding," announced the Society page of the Long Island Daily Press on December 13, 1933, noting that the Saturday, December 9, wedding was held in Long Island City. The article, while providing Rose's age—fifty eight at the time—and address in Woodhaven, said little about the groom. That he was "with the post office" in Garden City, and that this was his first marriage, was all the paper gave of the man's identity, while details of Rose's previous marriage filled a paragraph.

To have captured a pertinent detail such as Julius' age might have helped me find what became of the couple after their marriage celebration. At least the names of the witnesses had been provided in the article, though Mrs. Emily Kollshdorf and Charles Peters are not names which I had seen before in family circles—details to add to Aunt Rose's "F.A.N." Club.

A second article in The Richmond Hill Record seemed merely to repeat the details I gleaned from the first newspaper. I found no other search results for Julius Hassinger, though that is not to say there aren't others out there. However, seeing mention of the wedding taking place further east on the island, plus the groom's residence in Garden City, seem to indicate the couple may have set up residence outside New York City limits. Perhaps I should widen the scope of my searches. And test out some "what if" scenarios. Nothing else has divulged whatever became of Aunt Rose.