Finding Eloise

She was a fourth cousin of mine, so I never really would have known her, myself. I would not even have encountered her name, if it hadn't been for this strange hobby of pursuing ancestors and their kin. Eloise Marie Lyon was a second great-granddaughter of the brother of my own second great-grandmother—a distant trail of relationships only a genealogist could follow. It was because I was having challenges researching William F. Riley that led me to her story.

I've already recounted what I learned about Eloise and her family—their early years in rural Indiana and subsequent move, before the start of the Great Depression, to Detroit, Michigan. Although I could trace what became of her three siblings and her parents, the trail went cold for Eloise after she obtained her Social Security card in 1951—until, that is, I stumbled upon a possible indication of her death.

It was a stark entry in Find A Grave which filled in the sparse details. None of the customary photographs or other volunteer-provided records accompanied Eloise's memorial. In fact, the entry did not even provide a date of birth—just the word, "unknown." Date of death was simply "Jul 1982."

The only thing that kept me from bypassing this doubtful match was the detail filled in below that date of death. According to the memorial, this Eloise—whether she was mine or not—was buried at a place listed as "Potters Field." Below that entry, someone had provided the location as "Hart Island, Bronx County, New York."

Having grown up in the New York metropolitan area, one thing I knew was that if New York was anything, it was a place made up of islands. Manhattan is an island. So is Staten Island. Some of the famous places all Americans recall are islands in and around New York City—think everything from Ellis Island to Liberty Island, the ground upon which the Statue of Liberty is perched. So where was Hart Island? I had never heard of it.

As it turns out, the island could possibly be seen by anyone driving northward over the Throgs Neck Bridge—at least on a clear day, if the bridge's barriers did not block a driver's view. And yet, I had never noticed this island with such a strange history. Over time, Hart Island had served as a military training ground, a prisoner-of-war camp, a quarantine station during the 1870 yellow fever epidemic, a psychiatric hospital, and a tubercularium. It later also housed a workhouse for the indigent and, eventually, a prison.

Hart Island became New York City's catch-all for all sorts of unpleasant duties of government, and, not surprisingly in the face of various epidemics, it became the site chosen for mass burials. It could, indeed, be considered a "potters field." Over its long history, not all records were carefully kept—indeed, in some cases, that would be impossible for the remains of those not even identified at the point of their death—but adding to that lack was the incidence of arson, occurring in 1977, which destroyed many burial records there.

Somehow, someone found a record detailing the 1982 burial of a woman in New York City named Eloise Lyon. Whether that was thanks to the nearly single-handed campaign by artist Melinda Hunt and the Hart Island Project, I can't say. But the effort to bring the Hart Island tragedy to light has been shared by a number of others publicizing its plight. A 2016 photojournalism piece in Medium gave the world a glimpse of Hart Island's current abandoned situation and the history that led to this point. A more recent account, appearing last month in National Geographic, gained additional attention upon the news that, in the course of composing the piece, the journalist's drone was seized by New York City police, just as New Yorkers were waking up to the fact that the city was again using Hart Island for burials—this time, to dispose of victims of the current coronavirus epidemic.

Far from any limelight—even if of a notorious cast—was the burial of Eloise Lyon. Could she have been my family's Eloise? It is hard to say. The Social Security account gives this woman a birth date of March 11, 1920—matching the record issued in Indiana at the time of Eloise Marie Lyon's birth. It further mentions that this woman obtained her Social Security account in Michigan, which would have been correct for our Eloise, as well. But it is not outside the realm of possibility that there would have been two women by the same name and similar story.

Given the sad history of Hart Island, it is entirely likely that this Eloise found herself an unfortunate indigent who, at the end of life, would have been buried in such a desolate location. Trying to find any record of her life's story in New York through newspapers would be a challenge, if she were one of the near-anonymous homeless of the area. I've tried, of course, to find any mention of her—and will keep trying. It's hard not to know—but near impossible to know.

So often, we pass people living on the streets who are down on their "luck"—but never imagine one of them could be our own kin. And yet, there we find an example of how, yes, this could indeed happen. I suppose only a genealogist would know anything about someone as distantly related as a fourth cousin. But for this fourth cousin—wherever she was abandoned under the rocky turf at Hart Island—I can't help but mourn her forgotten end.

Isle of the Dead

Both mythology and the arts are rife with fascination over the idea of an isle or island of the dead. The concept may have originated with Celtic mythology, but has been a motif echoed in stories passed down in many European ethnicities.

Thus, it is no surprise to learn of the many times the concept has been borrowed in the arts, even in modern times. Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin created a series of paintings which eventually became known by that very title, "Isle of the Dead," beginning with a somber first version in 1880, now held at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland. From that first painting, the idea evolved with the input of a patron, who requested a copy with some significant additions, resulting in the second version. A third version, though much brighter in aspect, was eventually obtained, infamously, by one Adolf Hitler. A fourth version, created by commission, ended up hanging at a subsidiary of the Berliner Bank. All that remains of that version—destroyed by a World War II bombing attack—is a previously-snapped black and white photograph.

It was that photograph which, while on display in Paris in 1907, became the inspiration for Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff's symphonic poem by the same name, Isle of the Dead. The black and white of the photographic treatment evoked an even more somber mood for the composer, who later noted, upon discovery of the original oil painting, that "If I had seen first the original, I, probably, would have not written my Isle of the Dead."

There were, as it turns out, various islands which some have assumed served as the inspiration for Böcklin's creation. Some speculate that the model was a Greek island near Corfu, or the Island of Saint George in Montenegro.

There have been other islands which have actually been given that name, Isle of the Dead. Most of them have a history to go along with the dreary moniker. The Isle of the Dead, off the coast of Tasmania, was the destination for those who died in the prison camps during Great Britain's Australian convict era. Though some early eyewitnesses have romanticized the location, describing it as "picturesquely sorrowful...soothing in its melancholy," there is no escaping the brutality of its reality. Of the estimated thousand graves there, only those of prison staff or military personnel had been marked; the rest of those interred were granted insignificance by those who withheld their identity.

Likewise, in France, a set of twin island served through history, before their use for military purposes, as a quarantine island for lepers and a cemetery for the island's burials. The cemetery island was appropriately dubbed Île des Morts—Isle of the Dead.

That same combination of uses—to confine prisoners, to isolate the morbidly ill and, eventually, bury them—was a pattern in yet another island of the dead. This one, however, was not worlds away from me, but one which, within my own lifetime, I had driven past many times, yet not even knowing of its existence or purpose. You see, New York City—not far from my childhood home—has its own "Isle of the Dead." I wouldn't have known that, though, if it hadn't been for my search for a missing cousin. The path to finding Eloise Marie Lyon led me to this place of the forgotten dead, nearly at my own back door.

Above: "Isle of the Dead," 1880 oil on canvas by Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

 

Before Eloise Disappeared

Given all indications provided us by the pedestrian records genealogists typically rely upon, Eloise Lyon had a fairly routine childhood, growing up in rural Indiana. Sure, hers was a lifetime spanning the Great Depression and a world war, but other than that, indications—at least on paper—were that she had a stable household, growing up in an average American community.

Eloise's dad, Waldo Emerson Lyon, had been born a few years before the turn of the century, and until the time of his marriage to Bessie Mullennix—William F. Riley's great-granddaughter—he had lived in the same place where he had been born, Blackford County, Indiana. After their 1913 wedding in Muncie, the newlyweds settled in New Castle, then a small town of fourteen thousand residents, where Waldo obtained work as a machinist, and Bessie gave birth to their firstborn in 1918, a son they called Harry.

By the time Eloise arrived, two months after the 1920 census was taken, the Lyon family was still in New Castle. Likewise during the arrival of Eloise's younger brother Robert and, apparently, a child who did not survive, who had been born in between those two births. It was only upon the 1926 arrival of the Lyon family's youngest—a daughter they named Nina Lucille—that we have any reference point upon which to pin the family's move from Indiana to Detroit, Michigan.

Perhaps it was for the sake of a job for Waldo that the family moved from their native Indiana to the rapidly growing Detroit. How the family fared, once the effects of the depression became severe, is hard to tell, though the 1940 census showed that they had moved by then to a suburb of Detroit. Waldo was employed as a tool and die maker, and his oldest son joined him as an apprentice in the same line of work.

There, the regular snapshot of life in the Lyon family ended, except for the occasional digitized record of marriages and moves. Soon after that 1940 census, apprentice Harry felt confident enough in his success at work to marry Doris Renshaw, who had moved to the Detroit area with her mother and stepfather from Ohio. Eloise's younger brother Robert was of an age to serve in the military during World War II, and set aside his opportunity to marry and have a family until long after the end of the war—long after even their baby sister Nina had married.

By that point—perhaps because the family had followed Robert west during his military service?—almost everyone in the Lyon family had moved to California. Robert had settled there, and his two sons were born there. Though older brother Harry had married in Michigan, he and his wife eventually settled in California, as well. Baby sister Nina was married there. And nine years after her husband had died, Bessie, the mother of them all, passed away in 1969 in southern California.

For each of these events, documentation was available to substantiate each location. I have found records for Waldo, for Bessie, and for their children Harry, Robert, and Nina. But what about Eloise? The Lyon child who was born two years before the ill-fated infant whose untimely death hit the family seemed to have disappeared from the record after her mention in the 1940 census, back in Michigan.

If it weren't for the fact that Eloise had applied for Social Security benefits, I wouldn't have guessed that she had moved from Michigan. I certainly wouldn't have guessed that she moved in the opposite direction from the rest of her California-bound family.

But if I have the right Eloise Lyon, her Social Security record showed her last benefit was mailed to a location in the zip code 10025. If zip codes are basically the same now as they were in the 1980s at the point of her passing, hers would lead us to the west side of the northern reaches of Central Park, almost up to West 111th Street and Morningside Park on the island of Manhattan.

How did Eloise end up in New York City?

Why You May Never Find that Missing Ancestor

There are some people on your family's tree whom you're never going to fully trace. Just take that for granted. It's not because you haven't learned all the latest techniques for flushing out those mystery relatives, or that you haven't searched diligently enough. It's simply that, well, some people just...disappear.

That is the conclusion I've reached lately, when searching for the descendants of my second great-grandmother's brother, William F. Riley. You know my drill: because I'm working on identifying just where my thousands of DNA matches actually belong on my family tree, I've started this enormous project to identify all the descendants of all my ancestors. But in William's case, the going has been unexpectedly rough. And yes, one of those descendants did actually disappear—almost.

If it weren't for the phenomenal virtual assists researchers can access nowadays, I'm sure I would never have found this person's whereabouts. I still don't know the backstory on how this distant cousin of mine got from her birthplace in Indiana to the location where she died sixty-two years later. Though the distance between those two points amounted to only eight hundred miles, the site of the end of her life was worlds away from the rural setting where her days began.

There are some specific hints researchers look for when following an ancestor's life trajectory, step by step. Even moves of many miles can usually be explained by life circumstances, such as military enlistment resulting in cross-country relocation. Yet there are some life episodes which, even happening within the same city, can cause the trail to grow cold for a researcher piecing the story together, decades later. There is only so much research magic that can be conjured up, using the ten-year spacing of census records, or the happenstance of birth, marriage, or death records. Without a story line to fill in the blanks between these vital records, our ancestors sometimes take us by surprise.

Thus it was that I was able to trace the family line of Eloise Marie Lyon from her mother, Bessie Mullennix, granddaughter of the Mary Riley whose name was flagged by the Greencastle Press as complainant in a paternity suit back in 1871, and thus from Mary's father, William. But I sure wouldn't, not in a million years, have thought to look for Eloise's ill-fated future in New York City. Not, at least, when I had already established that her parents, two brothers and sister had moved in the opposite direction, to southern California.

Even if I had figured that Eloise had moved east, it is doubtful that I could have discovered her story in secretive New York, resistant as that domain has historically been to open sharing of public records. And despite Reclaim the Records' victories (which are much appreciated by this researcher), Eloise had evidently fallen into a black hole of municipal record-keeping which exists even to this day.

When I think of instances such as this, I realize that, yes, there are some ancestors whom even the most diligent researchers are going to fail to locate. Not because their efforts were misapplied, but because of the disastrous condition of the records they are seeking to find. As you'll see this week, Eloise's story is just one of thousands of examples—a story I'd never even have suspected, had I not stumbled upon a clue, thanks to a genealogy volunteer's efforts to shine some light.