by Julie Klam
We left Clara to keep looking for Guerson, but after nearly an hour with no success, we knew we needed help. It wasn’t like Jim Morrison’s grave where you could follow the crowds.
We went back to the cemetery office and told the woman we just couldn’t find the grave for Guerson Morris.
She was stumped. The cemetery’s director came out of his office and offered to help. We explained that we’d looked where we’d been directed and we didn’t want to say it wasn’t there, but . . . He took us back to his office, where there was a wall-size map of the cemetery like the one we were carrying, but on his map you could actually read the numbers. I was impressed.
We showed him where we had been, and he looked at the number again.
“Okay, there’s a C next to the number. That would mean it was a child’s grave and in a separate section.” He looked at us again, his face more somber than it had been. “So this was a child?”
“No,” I said, “he was in his seventies.”
The director frowned and looked at his map again, and then asked the woman for the file.
She pulled out the original order form and there was a letter attached.
It was typed on onionskin paper, and the top said “29 Charles St. New York City,” and it was dated April 12, 1937. It read:
Dear Mr. Mayer:
With reference to the Mt. Sinai Cemetery arrangements for the ashes of my father, we would rather not ask the association to do this without cost, if we can arrange the matter in any other way. May we impose on you just a little further asking that you ascertain how reasonably we can take care of this ourselves? The space required wouldn’t be large, and it isn’t our intention to put up a marker, but we would prefer to take care of this if we can. Thanking you for your help in this matter, we are very grateful. If you think it would be better that we get in touch with the association, please let us know.
Very truly yours,
Marcella Morris
Beneath that on the same page was a typed note in a darker ink: “Mr. Schlesinger, Please let me know what you can do about this. These people are very poorly, but they are too proud to take this favor without some little compensation.” Handwritten on the page was another note that said, “Mayer, cost will be 15 dollars in child’s grave leveled,” and below that “give him 1336c” and a stamp that read “may 4-1937.”
Each of us read the letter and looked at each other, not sure what to say. I think the director was trying to be sensitive; these were my relatives after all.
“They weren’t poor,” I said. I had a flash of a feeling that I was betraying the Morris sisters, and I was instantly sorry I’d said that. Like maybe the director would exhume him and put him in a grown-up grave? I don’t know, but more and more I was feeling a deepening responsibility for them.
* * *
• • •
We checked the original order ticket for burial. It said Guerson died of pulmonary tuberculosis at the Jewish Sanatorium at Fee Fee. (Fee Fee was the name of a road where a camp—Camp Fee Fee—was located in St. Louis. It was for Jewish children with tuberculosis.) There was another letter from Marcella that she sent with the fifteen-dollar check, where she thanked Mr. Mayer for his kindness for helping them.
If the Morris sisters hadn’t gotten their father a headstone, that would explain why we couldn’t find him. But the director looked through their mother Clara’s file and found the order for her burial and headstone, and apparently the Morris sisters decided when their mother died to give their father a stone, too.
The cost of burial in 1937 was $15, which translates to around $250 in today’s dollars, whereas they paid $200 for their mother’s headstone and burial in 1953, which translates to about $2,000 now.
We walked back to the children’s section of the cemetery and saw long lines of headstones with dates that were either the same year as the birth or a few years later. As I stood there, I had a feeling that this decision was not made by all four of the sisters and agreed upon. I came to this conclusion because I know how hard it can be for two or three siblings to agree, and I had the sense that this wasn’t a decision that would have been made lightly. I imagined myself in the room with the four of them, and a wave of anxiety went through me.
Not far into the children’s graves, nestled among them, was Guerson Morris, whose dates were seventy-two years apart. It was a small rectangle and it said—misspelled—“gerson b. morris” and underneath it “1865–1937.” The sun had shone on Clara’s grave when we found it, but Guerson’s was dark, and rather than lying flat, it was tilted at an angle, as if it had been lumped in as an afterthought—which it had.
Guerson and Selma Morris
I looked at his stone and thought about the man who was known among his descendants only for abandoning his children. I knew the effect his actions must have had on his children’s lives, but standing there, I felt a swell of empathy for him, too. I had no way of knowing what it must have been like to face the future with a wife with mental illness and five children you couldn’t support on your own. I knew he never made it to Los Angeles—he never left St. Louis, and whether he wanted to or not, he stayed married to Clara for all of his life. He must have felt trapped, and maybe putting the children in the orphanage broke his heart. Maybe he really did think he would someday come back for his children and they could resume their lives as a family.
I tried to put a stone on his grave, but it rolled off. I tried several more times, but the stone just wouldn’t stay.
* * *
• • •
The receptionist in the cemetery office gave us copies of all the paperwork she could about Guerson and Clara, and Barbara, Viki, and I headed to lunch, where we discussed the findings. Clara’s burial order included perpetual care, meaning her gravesite receives ongoing repair and general maintenance. Guerson’s had none. I took out the folder with the death certificates. Guerson’s said that Ruth had been present when Guerson died and listed her address as 237 West Fourth Street in New York City—she wasn’t living at Charles Street with Marcella, Malvina, and Selma. It said that Guerson had been born in Romania and that he was married—to Clara. She was still very much alive in the asylum at the time of his death. His occupation was listed as “photographer,” and pretty much everything else was what we’d known—though Viki noticed his birth year on the death certificate was listed as 1864. Lord knows if even that was correct.
The original reason I wanted to meet Viki was that she was an expert in orphanages in St. Louis and orphan genealogy. As she drove us around St. Louis, she told me that in the nineteenth century it was common for children who had only one living parent to be placed in an orphanage. They were called “half orphans.” There just weren’t supports in most places for single parents, unless you had family you could turn to, and many immigrants did not—they were on their own. Which is the situation Guerson faced.
It wasn’t until 1909 that there were any child welfare laws in the United States. (Whereas animal cruelty laws had been instituted in the 1860s. In the late nineteenth century, people complained about abuses of children to the ASPCA.)
Viki theorized that we didn’t find notes on Selma and Sam Morris in the orphanage files because the two of them would have been too old: Orphanages at the time only admitted children under the age of fourteen. In 1910, when Clara was committed, Sam would have been fourteen and Selma would have been sixteen. I had read about men committing their wives because they wanted to get rid of them, though I didn’t believe that was possible in Clara’s case. It just didn’t make sense to me that Guerson would remove the mother of five children and have to find support for them just because he was tired of her. Also, if Clara had been healthy, Selma would have been able to get her released. I had come to the conclusion that Clara’s committal would have been for something dramatic, that she was seriously ill and that her husband and family had neith
er the skill nor the resources to help her.
Viki agreed and thought there might even be something in the St. Louis newspapers of the time about what happened to cause her to be committed.
So we headed to the Missouri Historical Library and Archives. It was housed in a beautiful 1927 Byzantine-style former synagogue. Inside there were high vaulted painted ceilings and elegant wood shelves. Research is a much richer experience inside a beautiful, historic place.
We first looked through the library’s database at old newspapers from 1910 for any mention of Clara Morris, or an accident or a woman’s breakdown in St. Louis. Though we pored over the local papers, we found no mention of Clara or what had happened to her. Her life and her problems seemed to have fallen under the radar.
Ten
Show-Me State of Mind
I hadn’t achieved what I’d hoped to on my trip to St. Louis, but Viki really taught me how to do online genealogy research. As I watched her use the library’s archives, I saw how she searched for information and details—much differently than I had up to that point. The difference was that she went more methodically and had more patience than I did, and you really can look at any detail as a clue. Also she taught me that there were places to find information that I didn’t know existed, even on the Ancestry site—such as in US military records.
Whenever she found a telling detail about the Morris family, I would ask her how she’d found it and she would take me through her steps.
For example, Viki was able to locate the ship’s registry for the SS Kensington, the one that listed Bernard, Clara, and Sali (Selma) and didn’t include the other three children, though it said “with children [ages] 9/8/10/1.” By digging a bit deeper and noticing a tab on the site, Viki found a second page that I had missed, and there they were: Marcella, Malvina, and Sam (Israel). In addition to recording the passengers’ names, the manifest asked other questions of the passengers and recorded their answers:
Age (yrs/months)
Married or Single
Calling or Occupation
Able to Read or Write
Nationality
Last Residence
Seaport for Landing in the United States
Final destination in the United States (City, State or town)
Whether Having a ticket to Final Destination
By Whom Was Passage Paid
Whether in Possession of Money, if so, more than $30 and how much if $30 or less
Whether ever been in the United States, and if so when and where
Whether going to join a relative, and if so, what relative, their name and address
Ever in Prison or Almshouse or supported by charity, if yes state which
Whether a Polygamist
Whether under contract, express or implied to labor in the United States,
Condition of Health, Mental or Physical
Deformed or Crippled, nature and cause
Contract ticket number
Number on the list.
After paying for all of their passages to America—a ticket in 1900 cost about thirty dollars—the Morris family landed in New York with a total of five dollars—about one hundred fifty dollars in today’s money. But that’s getting ahead of things.
The SS Kensington docked in New York Harbor and inspectors came on board to check passengers for infectious diseases—cholera, plague, typhoid, measles, and diphtheria, among others. First- and second-class passengers could avoid Ellis Island, but everyone else aboard had to go through there and pass the full inspections. It could take a day for these passengers to even get off the boat.
Immigrants like the Morris family entered Ellis Island for what was referred to at the time as a “six-second medical exam.” A doctor looked over each passenger, and if he felt the passenger needed further investigation, he wrote a chalk letter on their clothes, the letter and placement representing different concerns:
X high up at the front side of right shoulder—mental defects
X farther down on the right shoulder—disease or deformity
X within a circle—some definite disease
B—back problems
G—struma (swelling in the neck)
H—heart problems
Pg—pregnancy
Ct—eye disease
After each Morris had a medical exam and assuming that all of them were deemed healthy, each one had an eye exam and a two-minute interview/interrogation that would have been conducted with an interpreter, as their language was Romanian. When the interview was completed to the official’s satisfaction, each member of the family got his or her landing card and was sent to exchange their Romanian money—probably lei—for American currency, and then they would have bought their train tickets to St. Louis to finally see C. Morris at 1100 Twenty-Third Street.
I thought a lot about their entry to the United States. Whenever I travel to other countries and have to go through customs, I invariably get nervous. Even though I am traveling for vacation or work and never have live animals or some illegal kind of artisanal sheep’s-milk cheese, I’m still worried that some official will pull me out of line and throw me in a foreign jail. Like maybe I went to a farm in my sleep and have a zucchini stashed in my luggage. I think about the bravery these people had when they left everything they knew for a new life in America, and I doubt very much I would have taken the risk, even if there was a C. Morris waiting for me at the other end.
Viki, Barbara, and I wondered who this mystery relative might have been, so we headed to the Missouri Historical Society Library’s shelves that were filled with city directories, the telephone books of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These directories listed every person with a telephone line in alphabetical order along with their addresses and sometimes even their occupation and workplace. The St. Louis books are called Gould’s St. Louis Directory. We started with directories from 1902, 1903, and 1904 and went through them carefully—and came up with nothing. We went back through the previous eleven years, 1891–1901. There was no C. Morris. No Morris at 1100 Twenty-Third Street. The first time that Guerson Bernhart (now George Bernard) Morris appeared in the phone directory was 1918, where it simply listed his profession as photographer. No other Morrises appeared. In 1919, it listed George’s profession as photographer at Grand-Leader, a St. Louis department store that later became Stix, Baer and Fuller. Such stores often had little photography studios where the sitter could choose to have a picture taken with a chosen background—sort of the Sears portraits of the day. (I collect these types of photos, specifically images in which people sit on a large paper moon.) This discovery was the first confirmation that Guerson Morris had indeed been a photographer. Perhaps he really was planning to become a filmmaker. As a former film student, I knew the first films in the United States had been made in the early 1890s, but I didn’t imagine that the small village in Romania where the Morrises came from would have heard of that (because of course I know everything about early cinema and Romania).
When I did a bit of research, I realized that, unbelievably, I was wrong. Cinema in Romania began before 1900, and at the time the Morrises lived there, there were numerous public screenings of movies made there. Romanian photographers turned cameramen were enthusiastically creating films. The first ones were called “actualities,” which were documentaries and were less than a minute long. But they could have been enough to inspire someone like Guerson Morris. The first film was shown in Romania in 1896, six years before the Morris family left for the United States.
So what we learned from the directories: In 1919, George B. Morris was a photographer at Grand-Leader. But his daughter Malvina, who was then twenty years old, also worked there as a stenographer, while Selma, twenty-six, worked as a saleslady at Hoover Suction Sweeper Company. They lived together in the same home. The family was putting down roots in St. Lo
uis.
By 1920, George was photographing people at a private studio—no longer at Grand-Leader. Malvina was a bookkeeper at Grand-Leader, while Selma was listed as a saleslady at Frank Adam Electric Company. There were no listings for Marcella or Ruth. This was the same for 1921 (except now Selma was working at Bensinger Furniture and Stove Company as a saleslady). Marcella appeared in the directory in 1922 as a stenographer, while Sam, the lone Morris brother, was listed as a musician.
And that is the year the guides end. In 1922, all of them lived together at 4740 Newberry Terrace, St. Louis, Missouri. But it must not have been an overly joyous reunion, because it didn’t quell the resentment the sisters had for Sam throughout their lives.
Once we were done at the historical society, Viki took us to the building where the Jewish Shelter Home orphanage had been when the Morris sisters were alive. It was located in the Shaw neighborhood, which was quiet and filled with trees and Victorian homes. The former orphanage was a grand and cheerful brick building with dormer windows and a large front door set back from a starched white porch with pillars and a flight of stone stairs. There was a brilliant late fall sunset that gave the windows a warm, golden glow. It was nothing like the dark Dickensian orphanages I had in my head: It looked like a large private home, doing its best to appear happy.
Jewish Shelter Home orphanage, St. Louis
As Barbara and I headed back to our hotel, Viki told us to call if we needed anything, and I promised I’d be contacting her to help with my search. I kept that promise. I frequently emailed her questions I had about how to find information. When in 2017 I read about the vandalism and desecration of a Jewish cemetery in St. Louis (though not the one the Morrises were buried in), I sent her a note. She said it was a tragedy and they were very upset about it. She told me the then governor of Missouri (who was the state’s first Jewish governor) was helping with the cleanup.