by Julie Klam
While this was a step in the right direction, it wasn’t a great leap forward.
Thanks so much for getting back to me. I don’t know the name of the institution, none of the children ever got married or had kids and the people who remember them now don’t remember much else. I would be very interested in anything you have, though it’s seeming more likely that I won’t find actual records but may at least be able to get a sense of what life was like.
From the archivist:
Hmm. I also have some information about the other orphanages in the community. If you have some names (and dates of when here), I’d be happy to do a cursory check before you head this way.
Not sure when in October you are heading this way, but the Archives (actually all entities in the community) will be closed for much of October because of the Jewish Holidays.
There are other places in St. Louis, such as the Missouri History Museum, that also might be able to assist you. I’d be happy to chat with you about that also.
Me:
My October trip was sort of arbitrarily chosen because I’m going to Romania in December, but I can definitely change it to later (November?) if more facilities are open. (Also, my boyfriend is from Iowa and he said to get there before weather becomes an issue with flights.)
The names of the children are:
Samuel Morris b. 1897
Selma Morris b. 1893
Malvina Morris b. 1899
Marcella Morris b. 1901
Ruth Morris b. 1904
They are listed as living at home in the 1910 census so it would have been probably very close to 1911–1915.
I am very interested in the Missouri History Museum (there is also a historical society I believe?).
Thank you again so much!
From the archivist:
I’ll run these names and let you know if we have anything that can help immediately. You might indeed want to change your date of coming this way because of the holidays. November is usually OK here in terms of weather.
The Missouri History Museum is indeed the historical society. They were originally the society, then changed to the museum, and are now trying to decide if they want to return to society. Whew!
They do have a good online presence (website under library & research center, under search the collections, then genealogy index). Although that is by no means all they have, it is a good way to get started. Their archives are excellent and they have a card catalog that defies description in that it is a card index of things in the library. And they have the city directories—hard copy! Wonderful stuff.
I’ll check these names in my indices and let you know what I find.
Me:
Oh fantastic and wow! I will go to their website right now and in the meantime plan my trip for November!
Thanks a million!
I realized I was starting to develop relationships with people based on their enthusiasm for my project (and their kindness), and I was feeling less alone and daunted. I wished the Morris sisters had had this kind of help.
I knew it was probable that the Morris children were out of the orphanage by 1920, as all of them would have been sixteen or older by then, and the likelihood was very low that all of the kids had been in the one orphanage that she had the minutes for and that they’d be mentioned in them. I was discovering on my own something that I later realized all genealogists know: The experience of tracking down leads is like working for weeks and weeks to figure out how to get a locked door to open. You do everything you can, banging and tinkering with the lock, and finally you pick up a key you never thought would work and the door magically opens. And then you find there’s a cement wall behind it. You might take a chisel to the wall for a while, a few promising chunks fall out, but at some point you think, “I’m going to get through this cement wall and find a steel door.” Then you wonder whether you should look for a completely different door or just keep trying to figure out a way through this one. There were so many gaping holes in my knowledge of the Morris sisters, and I was very realistically afraid that some of them might remain that way.
In my discouragement, I took a break from research and did something I knew I could accomplish: I booked two trips, one to St. Louis for November and another to Romania for December. If searching wasn’t uncovering what I wanted to know about the Morrises while I sat in New York, at least I could visit the places the family had lived and maybe glean something from them.
During this time, I was having lunch with my “aunt” Alex (she had been married to my parents’ best friend until he passed away in 1991). Her father was the famous magazine editor and writer Herbert Mayes. I explained the problems I was having finding the truth about what happened to the Morris sisters. She told me that her father had written the definitive biography of Horatio Alger, except it was all made up. It was called Alger: A Biography without a Hero and was published in 1928. She said her father had started to research Alger and found that the facts about him were either boring or impossible to find, so he decided just to write the book, making most of it up. Then when it was published, what he had made up was taken as fact, and he just went along with it. The Horatio Alger Society nominated him as a member and declared his book to be required reading for all Horatio Alger fans. It’s still listed on the Horatio Alger Society’s book list, but the society now admits, “Up until 1961, this completely fictitious account of Alger’s life was the only biography of Alger ever written. The book recounts a version of Alger’s life based on a diary and letters that never existed. For nearly forty years, this biography was accepted as definitive and accurate, and even today it is still mistakenly cited as a reliable source in most reference texts. In the author’s own words, this version of Alger’s life ‘literally swarms . . . with countless absurdities.’ ”
I laughed and Alex said, “Of course I’m not suggesting you make anything up, but it worked for him for thirty-three years.”
Reader, I have made nothing up, but I know exactly how Alex’s father, Mr. Mayes, felt.
* * *
• • •
I talked to several historians and historical novelists about how they track down facts that are difficult to find. One historical novelist explained that most of the people she writes about are famous enough that there is a lot of research available and in a variety of sources: books, archives, museums. But sometimes the details or background you’re looking for are just not to be found. She told me about a time when she was desperately trying to locate a particular gravestone in a vast cemetery. She searched the cemetery for hours and finally stopped, tired and discouraged. She took a deep breath and asked the universe for help. She continued walking and suddenly saw a bright red cardinal land on a gravestone. She walked over to it and lo and behold, it was the gravestone she was looking for.
“Sometimes you ask for help and it comes and you don’t know why or where it’s come from,” she told me. “You just accept it and give thanks.”
I thought at the very least I’d have a chance of spotting a cardinal or two in St. Louis.
Seven
Small Medium at Large
I kept thinking that if only I could just talk to the Morris sisters, all of my questions would be answered. And I’ve always believed that there’s more to life than what we see. Given those two beliefs, I decided to explore an unconventional research avenue and consult a medium. I hoped that it might be my version of asking the universe for help.
I have consulted with psychics and mediums and astrologers many times before, especially when I was in my twenties, so it wasn’t a totally foreign idea to me, though every person I asked for a psychic recommendation made some lame joke about the absurdity. (I gently hexed them.)
A friend who’d written a book about ghosts suggested that I contact Lily Dale Assembly, which is a community in upstate New York that consi
sts entirely of spiritual mediums. The place calls itself “the World’s Largest Center for the Religion of Spiritualism.” Spiritualism is a belief that is based on the communication with the dead. It was hugely popular in the Victorian era—even Mary Todd Lincoln practiced spiritualism in the White House. Many of the stories you read about spiritualists are that they are charlatans looking to make money off desperate, grieving people, but there are as many who truly believe certain people have a gift for communicating with the great beyond.
The Lily Dale community has a website with listings of its mediums. The site suggests looking through the list and seeing whom you are drawn to in order to determine which medium to make an appointment with. I spent several days staring at the names as I tried to keep a very open mind. I had to admit I was drawn to none of them. I don’t know why, but looking at mediums’ websites doesn’t give me a spiritual zap. Also a lot of them looked like the old AOL web pages, and while I know that shouldn’t have counted against them, it somehow did. (Maybe it should have been the opposite, that their communication was so otherworldly that they didn’t bother with updated mortal technology.)
I called my friend Patty, an author who writes about a lot of unusual topics, for help. She remembered that she had read an article about a medium who sounded really good. The writer’s husband had died, and when the writer called to make the appointment to consult the medium, the husband started talking to the writer through the medium. And the information was verifiable and, in Patty’s and my opinion, miraculous.
I read the piece and tracked down the medium to make an appointment with her, explaining what I was looking for.
“Contacting dead people is not like calling someone on the phone, you know,” she said. “I mean I can request people, but it doesn’t mean they’ll show up. Someone will come, but it may not be these sisters.”
At this point I was willing to take my chances, mainly because I had nothing to lose but four hundred bucks, and maybe there was some spirit out there who would offer me a key that would open a door into a room that had not been filled with bricks.
I wanted to talk with the medium before my trips to St. Louis and Romania, in case she had any addresses for me (how adorably optimistic I was), so we made the appointment for the upcoming Sunday evening. Several days before the call, I Googled her so I could have an image of her. She looked like she was in her forties, short, dark hair and a nice smile. She was located in New York City, as was I, but she only conducted appointments on the phone. On Sunday evening I sat down with a legal pad and pen and called her.
She was ready for me. She said there were “people” there with her, and she named some names, but none that I knew. Then my aunt Susie popped in. Susie was my dad’s only sister. She was fifteen years younger than him. In 2000, she was diagnosed with ALS, Lou Gehrig’s disease, the same disease that took her mother, my grandma Billie, in 1983. Susie died in 2004 at age fifty-five. The words really sounded like her, and I was very happy to hear from her. I told her I loved her and missed her. I wondered if I should tell her how everyone was doing, but then figured she knew already. I asked her if she had ever bumped into the Morris sisters, because I was writing a book about them.
The medium went quiet for about thirty seconds.
“Getting someone, it might be one of them,” the medium said. She sounded as if she had her eyes closed.
I was quiet.
“Margaret?” the medium asked.
“Marcella?” I said.
She didn’t respond. I was hopeful and anxious.
“Hmm,” she said, “they’re saying that . . . they are glad you are writing this book.”
“Oh great!” I wasn’t sure who “they” were, but any of them being there was good news.
She spoke slowly. “They said please don’t make it like Grey Gardens.”
It was funny, I had been thinking a lot about the 1975 documentary since I’d started researching the Morris sisters. Grey Gardens was the name of the decrepit home in East Hampton, New York, where Jackie Kennedy Onassis’s relatives Edie Bouvier Beale and her mother, Edith, had lived. Albert and David Maysles made a documentary about them called Grey Gardens, where they told the story of their lives. The Beales’ was a story of riches to rags, and they were truly eccentric and unconventional. The house was not far from where the Morris sisters lived in Southampton at the same time the Beales lived there.
“Okay,” I said, “like how do they mean?”
“Something . . . people will laugh at,” the medium said firmly. And then she paused to listen again, adding, “She’s talking . . .”
I waited. This was what I was hoping for.
“You have to understand that we loved each other very much,” the medium said. “We were very close and loving and cared for each other. We only had each other and we were very devoted, and we really, really loved each other.”
It wasn’t the illuminating insight or long-hidden clue I’d been hoping for, such as the location of an antique trunk filled with a trove of diaries the sisters had kept over the years and photos and clothes and documents. But later, after I’d had a chance to think over what the medium had told me, the more I thought that if I were dead and communicating with a descendant of mine who was writing about me, the one request I’d probably make is “Don’t make me into a joke.” The fact is, the Morris sisters’ attributed quirkiness was a big part of what attracted me to their story and what I thought made it interesting: Everything I had heard about them over the years was framed in that context. So here one of them—though I don’t know which one—was asking me not to make them look foolish. Whether or not it was really them, I couldn’t help feeling the request was kind of brilliant. And very human.
The only other detail the sisters passed on to me through the medium—and I was more and more certain that it was the Morris sisters—was that they were sorry to hear that Carnegie Deli was closing.
I said I was, too.
Eight
Meet Me in St. Louis, Louis
I can’t really explain why I felt so strongly that I should visit every place the Morris family lived, but I did. It might have been because I always have a very strong sense of place. Would I be able to feel something if I walked where Clara and Guerson had walked, or seen where the sisters grew up or even played? Maybe some insight or truth about them might hit me and I’d start to understand a bit more about them and their lives. That was my hope, anyway. At the very least, it was a tangible activity, an action, and I really needed to feel that I was doing something. Plus it seemed really interesting.
I knew that all of the Morris family came from Romania, and that they came from the part of the country that was closer to Moldova than Transylvania (which was a little disappointing because I wanted to visit Dracula’s castle). Before I went, though, I wanted to make sure the Morrises really came from there and that there was a town or something remaining to visit. It turns out if you Google “Romanian birth records from the nineteenth century,” you get a bold message that says there is no central office for vital records in Romania. And if you want copies of birth, marriage, divorce, or death records, you have to write to the Civil Registration District Office in the town hall where the birth, death, or marriage occurred (and it’s best to write the request in Romanian).
Birth certificates from that era were handwritten in Romanian, and most of them are still located in physical file cabinets in the original places where the births were registered, guarded by bureaucratic golems. In other words, sitting in my apartment in New York, I was not going to be able to get the Romanian birth certificates myself. I needed help.
Before I left, I contacted the Romanian Genealogical Society in Mendota Heights, Minnesota. (The Midwest is a hotbed of genealogy!) I was directed to an expert genealogist in Romania named Dr. Ladislau Gyémánt, an author and a professor of Jewish history at a university in Cluj, a city in northwest Romania near
Transylvania. I emailed him and told him I was looking for any documents—birth, marriage, land deeds, death certificates—relating to the Morris family. I told him I had come across the names of two towns in documents I’d found—Focşani and Râmnicu Sărat.
Dr. Gyémánt replied to say he could help me. He would charge me for his work (finding and translating any vital records) as well as his travel and accommodations, which he said would cost around $150 for two nights. However, at the moment he was teaching, so he wouldn’t be able to make the trip from Cluj to Focşani (which was about an eight-hour drive) for another six weeks or so.
I was thrilled, and encouraged. He seemed to know what he was doing, and I had no doubt we would find out a great deal about the early parts of the Morris sisters’ lives.
In the meantime, I firmed up plans to go to St. Louis. I told my friend Barbara that I was going to track down what happened to some relatives of mine (I had been trying to make it sound like an Indiana Jones adventure). She said it sounded like fun and asked if she could come with me. She had moved out of New York City to New Hampshire several years ago, so we didn’t get to see each other enough. I was grateful for the company.
* * *
• • •
Why the Morrises ended up in St. Louis was among the early and trickier questions I tried to answer. There was the family story of them getting marooned there on the way to Los Angeles, but I knew now that it wasn’t true. When I found the SS Kensington’s manifest, the answer to the question “Whether going to join a relative and if so, what relative, their name and address” read “C. Morris, 1100 23rd Street, St. Louis, Mo.” Bernhard, Clara, and Sali had St. Louis as a destination in mind even before they left Europe, most likely when they decided to come.