by Julie Klam
“Maybe,” I said. And then I went to the gym.
While I was there, Ann started texting me all of the details she was discovering about the Morrises on Ancestry.com. She was right: The details were intriguing, and there was much more information about them than Claire and Bobby had told me several years ago.
Sometime on the StairMaster while I was trying to ignore The Price Is Right, a book about the Morris sisters seemed possible, and something that I could get really excited about.
I went home and pulled out the old proposal and found that I had taken a lot of notes and had a small folder of research. It had been ten years—ten really difficult years. Divorce, anxiety, and insomnia, too many glasses of sauvignon blanc. All of this left my brain a little worse for wear, but the good news was that the story of the Morris sisters still felt new to me. I was still fascinated by what I had found and intrigued by the possibilities of what I could find that lay in front of me. It began to feel that I couldn’t not write this book.
When you start researching family, well-meaning people direct you to genealogists. As with most vocations, there are amateurs and professionals, and they are all similarly driven: They are the experts at digging for information about your ancestors and family. This, I have learned, is a double-edged sword.
I have always felt that the copy editors who have worked on my books and magazine pieces have a genetic makeup fundamentally different than mine: Their brains operate on a different wavelength. They notice mistakes and inconsistencies that in a thousand years I never would have found. I have the same feeling about genealogists. They think differently than I do. They keep looking even when they’re not finding anything and it seems that they won’t learn anything new about the people you want information about.
Someone I talked to early on in the research for this book told me that genealogy is just a series of paths that lead to brick walls. “Brick wall,” I learned, is actually a very common term you hear in genealogy. I am not a genealogist. (It’s taken me three years to spell it without looking it up.) I am not a researcher. (I research people and topics the same way my child looks for something he can’t find in his room, sort of a fast scan of a large space and then falling to the floor in defeat.) I came to this conclusion about myself when I spent several hours at the New York Public Library trying to track down information about the Morris sisters and the only useful detail I was able to find that day was the location of the bathroom. And I was so psyched about it.
And although I’ve written for newspapers and magazines, I’m not really a journalist. I don’t like bothering people. If I call a source and the person doesn’t respond right away, I quietly assume the information can’t be found.
I straddle two mindsets. I grew up without the internet, so when I was young if I wanted to find something, I went to the library. If I wanted to find a word within a document, I read the whole document as carefully as I could looking for the word. It was a slow, step-by-step process.
But now I—and everyone else—live in the world where it’s possible to locate just about any piece of information immediately in the palm of my hand, which suits my short attention span well. As soon as you start even a cursory exploration into your family’s past, you see inconsistencies. Names and dates and places change throughout the records. In one place it might say a person was born in London, and in another it says Liverpool. My point is that genealogical records are neither a straight line nor consistent. Like a lot of life, it’s open to interpretation.
For example, not a single one of the US Census records I found in my investigation of the Morris sisters spelled their names correctly. Some of the records didn’t even list them at all. Each sister had about five different dates of birth. People of their time may have taken down the information correctly, but I couldn’t be certain that the Mormon librarian who read the information from these handwritten documents typed them correctly into genealogical databases.
From the very beginning I understood the difficulties I faced. As a writer and essayist, I’m resourceful at finding information when I know it’s out there, but when I wanted to get to know the Morris sisters by researching their lives, I was aware that I was not going to be able to find everything I needed or wanted to know. It’s literally impossible. A lot of genealogical information comes from census reports, and they aren’t available to the public until seventy-two years after they are taken. The law governing this, passed in 1978, was an outgrowth of an agreement between the Census Bureau and the National Archives. For privacy reasons, access to personally identifiable information in US Census records is restricted unless you’re the one in the record or their legal heir. So, at the time of this writing (2020), the census data available took me up to only the 1940s. The last Morris sister, Marcella, died in 1997.
So it’s a shame not to know more because census information can neatly define someone’s life. But unless I want to wait another ten or twenty years, I have to contend with what’s available. And I know that there are always going to be limitations to what we can know about the past and our ancestors, and in the future I know I will have more information—census reports and beyond—but at the same time then there will be fewer people around who will remember the sisters. Trying to find the truth in your family is a balancing act between learning facts and learning what people thought.
As I read over what I’ve written here so far, I realize that it meanders and hits several “brick walls” that genealogists talk about. Those experiences turn out to be pretty accurate metaphors for the journey I went on to learn and write about the Morris sisters. Their stories didn’t turn out the way I expected: What happened to them and what happened to me as I learned about them startled and unsettled me, and it took me to places and introduced me to people I never expected to meet. In the end the search made me reconsider how families tell the stories of the people they’re related to in order to make sense of the world and the legacy they left. And the Morris sisters were about to add a very different chapter to my own story.
Two
What I Don’t Know Could Fill a Book
As far as I knew it from my family, the story of the Morris sisters was this:
In 1900, George and Clara Morris and their four children, Samuel, Selma, Marcella, and Malvina, left Bucharest, Romania, and boarded a ship for New York City. When they arrived in the United States, they stayed in New York City for a few weeks and then decided to move to Los Angeles, where George wanted to become a director in the movie business. Along the way, in St. Louis, Clara had another baby and died in childbirth. George put the children in an orphanage there before heading on to Los Angeles, where he promised to send for them. The children stayed in the orphanage until the oldest child, Marcella, was able to make enough money to get them all out. She moved them back to New York City, where she became the first Jewish female to hold a seat on the Wall Street stock exchange, where she made millions of dollars that she later gave to Brandeis University. She lived with her sisters in an apartment on Charles Street in Greenwich Village and had a house in Southampton, New York, and somewhere along the way had an affair with J. P. Morgan.
Interesting? You bet. But don’t worry about remembering any of this, because it’s 90 percent wrong, which I didn’t find out until years later.
* * *
• • •
I decided that my first plan of attack would be to uncover information about Marcella Morris and J. P. Morgan. I figured that, being the richest man in the world at the time, Morgan had plenty written about him over the years and that tracking down his connection to Marcella and the Morris sisters would be possible, maybe even fairly simple.
In the early 1990s, my friend Jancee and I would often meet at the Morgan Library on Madison Avenue, where we’d have a proper English tea with sandwiches and scones and lemon cookies. The Morgan Library is an astonishingly beautiful building inside and out, and its permanent collection includes a Gute
nberg Bible, some of Mozart’s original compositions, a Rubens, a collection of Henry David Thoreau’s notes, and other priceless treasures that Morgan had collected over the years. It also has a lot of information about J. P. Morgan himself that is available to the public.
I was sure that the Morgan Library archive would have information on Marcella and her career and possibly her affair with Morgan himself. Once I had Marcella’s background clear, I could fill in the rest of the sisters’ stories around that.
One day in early spring, I headed to the Morgan, where I spent several hours walking through the place looking at paintings of J. P. Morgan and searching for clues about Marcella in the public archive. I remembered that Claire had mentioned on her cassette that Marcella had decorated one of Morgan’s New York City homes. Had she bought the chair that Morgan was seated in in one of the oil paintings that hung on the walls of the Morgan? It was exciting to imagine.
I read the descriptions beside each of the paintings, and I began to get a vague sense that something wasn’t right with the story of Marcella and Morgan. But I brushed aside such thoughts and bought a fat biography of J. P. Morgan in the gift shop. Surely, I figured, I could get the nuts and bolts about Marcella from it, and then I’d come back to the library and talk to a research librarian.
* * *
• • •
It probably comes as no surprise to you that there was no mention of Marcella anywhere in the book. It was long—more than eight hundred pages—and it was full of details about Morgan’s professional and personal lives. But the more of the book I read, the more I realized that it was nearly impossible that Marcella and Morgan had ever known each other—that it was more than probable that she never even met him. Even at this early point in my research, when I didn’t know much about Marcella’s life, I did know that she had died in her late nineties at the end of the 1990s, which meant that when J. P. Morgan died in Italy in 1913, Marcella would have been about twelve years old and living in an orphanage in St. Louis.
I spent the next few days trying hard—really hard—to fit that square peg of information into the round hole of my family’s stories about Marcella. Then I had a great epiphany: They must have been talking about J. P. Morgan’s son, J. P. “Jack” Morgan Jr. I stayed up all night reading so much about him that I could have written his biography, and to my crushing disappointment, nothing remotely connected him to Marcella—and believe me, I tried to make it possible. It just didn’t work.
So this foundational piece of the Morris sisters story was blasted to smithereens by a giant wrecking ball of reality. I was surprised at how devastated I felt. The very first detail I looked to corroborate turned out to be absurdly off base, which made me wonder: What if none of the stories I heard about the Morris sisters were true? What was I writing? Who were these women? Was this going to be another Irving Berlin? Who was I?
Three
The Morris Family Foundation, Inc.
I was disappointed but not discouraged. In fact, I redoubled my efforts and started emailing libraries, historical societies, and financial museums in all of the places where I knew the Morris sisters and their family had lived. I was searching for confirmation—any confirmation—about what I had been told about them.
My first response came from the Rogers Memorial Library in Southampton, New York. The head librarian there told me not only that she knew who the Morris sisters were, but also that the most popular conference room at the library was called the Morris Meeting Room after them.
When I learned that, I may have exhaled for the first time in days.
The librarian also told me there is a plaque on the wall that commemorated their contribution to the library, and emailed me the text:
A gift from the Morris Family Foundation, Inc., has enabled the library to enhance this important part of the Library’s services. The gift honors the Morris sisters, Marcella, Selma, Malvina and Ruth, who were long time residents of Southampton. As youngsters, they were traveling across the country with their parents who were headed toward a better life with hopes of working in the motion picture industry in California. Unfortunately, they were abandoned along with their brother, Samuel, by their destitute father when their mother died in St. Louis in the early 1920’s. Raised in the Jewish Orphanage until their early teens, the Morris children not only survived their hardships but eventually distinguished themselves in their careers and financial accomplishments. At age sixteen, Samuel left the orphanage and headed for Texas where he worked to buy his own business and live out his life in San Antonio.
Marcella, at age thirteen, convinced the orphanage to release her so that she could earn enough money to pay the orphanage back the $250 for each of the sisters and take care of them herself. She went to Cleveland and became a filing clerk in the J.P. Morgan and Company office. Her extraordinary intelligence and memory skills earned her many promotions and a transfer to New York. Marcella became the first woman commodity trader in the financial world dominated by men. Her specialties were pork bellies and winter corn and her fame was such that during World War II she was invited to the White House to enlighten the President and his cabinet about worldwide supplies.
The sisters, Malvina (who suffered from polio), Selma and Ruth were reunited through Marcella’s efforts and they lived together for the rest of their lives, working and amassing a fortune.
The Morris sisters lived moderately and gave generously. They were self-educated once they left the orphanage. They read and studied widely and relied on public libraries more than on building their own collections. Each of them succeeded in their chosen fields, but it was Marcella’s wealth that insured their fortune. It was her plan to take care of her sisters and try to time it so that when the last one died all the wealth had been given away to the causes they believed in. All the sisters lived together for their entire lives, and helped many people who never knew the Morris sisters or their history. The Morris Family Foundation, Inc., continues to fulfill their wishes.
We dedicate this center to them in grateful memory
Marcella Malvina Selma Ruth
1902–1995* 1899–1994 1903–1991 1904–1978
Well! This was a lot! A pretty clear biography. And also, the White House? I was breathing quite evenly now.
I asked the librarian who had written the inscription, and she sent me a longer version of the biography, which she indicated had come from “the Morris Foundation,” an organization I had never heard of and I knew had never been mentioned in any of the lore about the Morris sisters that I had heard.
With so much detail, I thought this book might be too easy to write. (Feel free to chuckle.) If there is a foundation that had been established by the sisters and a biography about them already available, then all I would really need to do was flesh out their individual stories, add some interesting details and colorful asides, and I’d be done.
I downloaded the biography from the librarian and printed it out—two pages, single spaced. And it was a surprise from the very beginning.
Around the turn of the century, the Morris family started out on a journey from their home in Montreal, Canada, to somewhere in California. It was winter in Montreal and winters in that part of the world were cold, very cold. The mother had been treated for a well-known and much feared disease called “consumption” and many people of that period who were so afflicted did not survive the winter. Her husband was an unemployed photographer who got the idea that he should take his wife to a better climate and with the motion picture industry just getting started, it might provide opportunity for an available photographer. He just had to get an automobile big enough to fit his wife and five children ages 2 to 11; Selma, Samuel, Malvina, who was lame, Marcella and Ruth. He was in luck when he learned that his brother would lend him an old seven passenger “Pierce Arrow” automobile. So off they went on their adventure, using mostly roads and pathways that for the most part were used for horse
drawn vehicles.
The journey was a lot harder than he anticipated and his wife was getting a lot worse. She had a constant cough, coughing so bad that it seemed she would explode. As the family reached St. Louis, she was put in a hospital and soon died. The father was out of money and with five very young children on his hands, thought it best to leave his children at the Jewish Orphanage on a temporary basis or until he could find a job and accumulate enough money to continue their journey. He stated to his children, “Mother would certainly want him to do this” and he promised to be back no later than the end of the month to reclaim his family.
He was not there at the end of the month, nor at the end of a hundred ensuing months; at the early months there was disappointment but the older children felt he would definitely return someday, but he never did. Soon the children got into life at the orphanage; it was clear now they had to stick together to survive this uncertainty they knew nothing about. A short time ago they had a loving mother and father and now they only had each other.
As the days went by there were new routines to learn, still at the end of each month they felt their father might be there, they would never give up, always wondering whether their father took a wrong turn, whether he was in some institution, terminally ill from some misfortunate accident, maybe he was just detained by someone or something. This became an obsession with them, years later they employed enormous resources of time and money to try and find him, but of no avail.