Those Places Thursday - the Berg house at 475 Front Street, Hempstead, New York Part One

Theodore Peterson Berg and Delia Dauch Berg were my great-great grandparents. According to a family history that was written up several years ago, Theodore and Delia lived "in  East  Meadow (New York) until  shortly  before 1895, when they moved to Hempstead (a few towns over).  It is told by her daughter (Amelia Berg Raynor, my great grandmother) that her mother and father were out buggy riding one day, when they passed the house at 475 Front Street, which was very large and beautiful, on the corner of Front and Attorney Streets.  She said how much she would love to live in that house.  A few days later, Theodore came in and handed Delia a deed to that property, where they lived for many, many years.  Their youngest son, Royal Howard Berg, was born in that house.  The house had two large living rooms and a large dining room.  On the wall of the dining room was an ornamental wall hanging, with a Bible verse for each week of the year.  The children memorized a new verse each week, which undoubtedly had some influence on their lives."

 

Theodore Peterson Berg and Delia Dauch Berg were my great-great grandparents. According to a family history that was written up several years ago, Theodore and Delia lived I don't know what year this is from but this is a picture of what the house looked like. Delia died in 1932 and Theodore in 1944, so they were in this house for quite a few years, more then 30 years. This was the house in which they raised their family, in which they grew old together.

Theodore and Delia Berg

Wordless Wednesday - St. Mary Star of the Sea Cemetery, Lawrence, NY



Photo taken by Mary Ellen Gorry 20 October 2010. Parish cemetery of St. Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church in Far Rockaway, but within the parish boundaries of Our Lady of Good Counsel Catholic Church in Inwood, New York.



Making a new week's resolution...

It's been awhile, folks, and I apologize for that - my day job has had me completely swamped and consequently completely drained in the free time I've had left over. I feel like all I've done the past few days is work and sleep, work and sleep.

Anyhow, I am still busy today but thought I'd take two minutes to just write a quick post - as I haven't been finding a lot of new information on my family tree lately, and as it's the start of a new week, I've decided to make a "new week's resolution" to be a more accurate and detailed genealogist. Since there's been a derth of new information, now is the perfect time to go back over the information I do have - the records, the notes, the e-mails, the newspaper clippings, everything - and try to catalogue or at least organize what I have - where I got it from, who gave it to me, authors, repositories, anything and everything - a bibliography of my research, if you will. I should've been doing this from the start anyway, and to some extent I have, but on some accounts I've also been lazy and there have been one or two occasions where I know the information I have in my tree comes from a reliable and accurate source, but I didn't write it down, so I couldn't tell you where it came from. And that's what it's about, because even if I *did* know where it came from, I'm not doing this research for me (well, yes, I am, because I do find it so interesting), but I'm not doing it just for me - I'm doing this for my children and their children, so they have a good foundation on which to continue building the family tree. And I'm doing it for my cousins and their cousins right now, who also need a good, solid place to start. You can do genealogy for yourself because it's a hobby you enjoy, but I'm not sure it reaches it's full potential unless you share it with others, so you want those others, whoever they might be, to be able to go back themselves to any original documents or sources or whatnot on their own, which is why the bibliography is key.

So, if you're just starting, start right - try to write everything down and in some kind of ordered fashion that will be usable and helpful to others. And if you're like me, this is what the genealogy research downtime is for - catching up on your organizing is a good way to be productive even when you don't feel like you're being productive!

 For guides on how to properly catalogue your findings, visit the Board for Certification of Genealogists' website at http://www.bcgcertification.org/

Those Places Thursday - Ridgewood Savings Bank

My great-great grandfather Rudolph Stutzmann, who I've written about before, was an undertaker and prominent member of German-American society in the Ridgewood section of Brooklyn and Queens in the late 19th and early 20th century. He was one of the founding members and the first president of what is now known as the Ridgewood Savings Bank, which opened in 1921 - you can find branches all over Long Island, but while the original building is no longer there, the larger, more ornate one that was built in 1929, is, at the corner of Myrtle and Forest Avenues.

This is a recent photo of the original bank headquarters, and below is a copy of a story and photo (courtesy of http://www.fultonhistory.com/) from the June 19, 1929 issue of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle in which the cornerstone for the new building was laid. Rudolph is at the very center and in the front of the large photo at the top of the page, to the right of the cornerstone, holding the trowel. The headline reads, "Laying cornerstone for new $500,000 Ridgewood Savings Bank." He would be president of the bank until his death in 1946.

Wordless Wednesday - Evergreens or Lutheran Cemetery, Queens, New York

I visited both Evergreens and Lutheran Cemeteries in Queens, New York this day and did a terrible job of documenting which cemetery this one was, but I just love cemeteries and remember thinking this one looked even more hauntingly beautiful in the snow. Photo taken 24 March 2005.

Tombstone Tuesday - the Gorrys, Calvary Cemetery, Queens, New York

This entry is going to be a little different. This is a photo of the Gorry headstone in Calvary Cemetery in Queens, New York. There is no photo because there is no headstone. My great great grandfather James Gorry is buried in Calvary, his father James is buried in Calvary, and when I go to visit their graves, I walk amidst the thousands of markers, row upon row of memorials, to an empty square of grass where my family is buried, Irish immigrants and their children who were, like so many other immigrants then, too poor to be able to afford a headstone for their descendants to visit and remember them by. So I go anyway, and I stand on the empty grass and look across the river to Manhattan, the land of hope and dreams that the Gorrys came to from Ireland, and I close my eyes and tell my family hello, and that I know them and know of them, from all the research that I do, and that they don't need a headstone to be remembered.

And the Gorry family tree grows another (possible) branch...

It's only a possible branch at this point, but I don't believe in coincidences and my gut is telling me that there are striking similarities in this new possible branch and my own family tree because they are one and the same.

Early last week I was notified of a hint on my Ancestry.com family tree, that someone else had built a tree that included my 3rd great-grandfather, James Gorry as a "possible" member of their tree. I was immediately excited, probably moreso than I should've been before I read any further, because my own branch of the Gorry tree is so narrow and, well, branchless, that any Gorry connection I find is valuable because of its rarity. For those who have not read about my Gorry branch before, here's the recap - my third great grandfather, James Gorry, son of Cornelius and Mary, emigrated from Ireland to New York. He and his wife Mary Corr had 4 children - Michael, Mary, Hannah, and James - and only James married and had children. He married Mary Horgan and they had four children - Joseph, Mary, Ellen, and Elmer - but only Elmer lived to adulthood, married (to Mary Tormey), and had children (Eugene Gerard and Elmer Anthony, my grandfather). So when my father was born in 1952, he was the only 4th-generation descendant of James the Senior and as far as I knew, the only 5th-generation descendant of Cornelius.

In recent years I was contacted by a woman in England descended from a Charles Gorry, son of Cornelius of Ireland, who was my first possible Gorry branch discovery - Cornelius and Gorry are both such uncommon names that I'm leaning toward the theory that she is a relation, but I have no proof beyond that. But here was this new tree I discovered last week - according to the author of it, James Gorry was a possible brother of a Mary Gorry, from whom her husband was descended. Mary Gorry is a very, *very* common name in my family and she had emigrated from Ireland to New York. So I wrote the author an e-mail saying I thought it was possible we were connected, and asking what kind of information she had on her Mary Gorry. I finally heard back from her last night. She wrote:

Her husband's "great great grandmother was Mary Gorry born about 1826 in Ireland. Her husband was Philip Tuite Philip Tuite and a James Gorry were both naturalized on Oct 25th 1866 in New York. They were witnesses for each other. James Gorry's address was 190 E 11th Street.I wonder if he is your James and if he and Mary were brother and sister.I remember my father-in-law saying there was an Elmer Gorry in the family but I don't remember how he was related... I'm going to try and get Mary Gorry's death certificate and hope it has her parents names on it."

So three things to note from that note - first, that my James Gorry definitely lived on E. 10th Street, which is around the block from E. 11th Street, but that there are years unaccounted for where he lived and back then people usually stayed in the same area, so it's possible he lived at 190 E. 11th Street in 1866. Second, that if Cornelius Gorry is an uncommon name, Elmer Gorry is an even more uncommon name, so if her father-in-law said they had an Elmer Gorry in their family, it was most definitely one of my Elmer Gorrys. And third, I don't have naturalization information for my James, so if her James and my James are the same, then that's new information for me.

While this new possible branch would only add to the outward growth of the Gorry tree and not to tracing it backward (so far), every piece you can add to the puzzle gives you a bigger, clearer, more complete picture. It connects you to other family members doing their own research. It adds to your new information. And if you can find one new branch, even though they might not add any new information, it leaves you hopeful that it's possible to discover *another* branch, and maybe they're the branch that *will* have that missing information that will finally bring you back another generation closer to your roots.