By the early 1880s, all but one of the children of my three-times great-grandparents Seligmann and Hincka (Alexander) Goldschmidt had left Germany and settled in the United States. The next series of posts will address how each of those children and their descendants continued to fare in the US, starting with my three-times great-uncle Jacob Goldsmith, Seligmann and Hincka’s oldest son and second oldest child. He was also the first to emigrate from Germany.

Jacob and Fannie had six children who lived to adulthood: Caroline, Emma, Hannah, Philip, Harry, and Huldah.

As noted in my earlier post, in 1870, Jacob and his wife Fannie were living in Philadelphia with five of their children, and Jacob was working as a merchant. On the census he claimed that he owned $8000 worth of real property and $2000 worth of personal property. Their oldest daughter Caroline was living in Dubuque, Iowa, with her husband Nathan Rice and their baby daughter Rena.

During the 1870s, Jacob continued to work as a clothing merchant with a store at 726 Market Street and a residence at 413 North 4^th Street in Philadelphia.¹ By 1880, however, the family had moved, and Jacob was working in a new business with his son Harry. According to the 1880 census, he was now a hardware merchant, and the family was living at 1328 Franklin Street.  Living with Jacob at that point in addition to his wife Fannie were three of their children, Hannah, Harry, and Hulda.

By 1873 their oldest daughter Caroline had returned from Iowa to Philadelphia with her husband Nathan Rice and daughter Rena; Nathan is listed in the Philadelphia directory as a clothing merchant in 1873.  Their second child, Sidney, was born in Philadelphia on September 7, 1873.²

On the 1880 census Caroline and Nathan were living with their three children: Rena (1869), Sidney (1873), and Jessica (1880). (The spacing of the children made me wonder whether there were other children who had not survived; however, on the 1900 census, Caroline reported that she had had three children, all three of whom were alive.)

Jacob and Fannie’s second child Emma was married by 1880 to Henry Meyerhoff, who was about ten years older than Emma and a German immigrant. In 1870 he’d been living in Hastings, Michigan, working as a saloon keeper³ but he is listed in the 1878 Philadelphia directory in the liquor business. On the 1880 census, he reported that he was a liquor dealer.

Jacob and Fannie’s third child and first son Philip married Nellie Buxbaum on September 28, 1881, in Philadelphia.  He was 25, Nellie was only eighteen.

Nellie was the daughter of Joseph Buxbaum and Theresa Anathan, who were German immigrants; her father was working as a travel agent in 1880. I can’t imagine what that meant back then in the era before vacation traveling and airplane reservations, but perhaps it involved hotel and train planning.⁴

Philip and Nellie had three sons born in the 1880s: Sydney Byron (1882), Herbert Nathaniel (1883), and Joseph Jerome (1888). They were living in Bridgeton, New Jersey in the 1880s.⁵

Hulda, the youngest of Jacob and Fannie’s daughters and the youngest surviving child, married Chapman Raphael in 1881, according to the 1900 census.⁶ Chapman was a Philadelphia native born in about 1850, and in 1880 he was living with his widowed mother Clara and his two brothers; he was a dealer in men’s clothing:

Hulda and Chapman had three children in the 1880s: J. Herbert (1882), Arthur Seligman (1883), and Adelaide (1888). When I saw the name of their second child—Arthur Seligman Raphael, it stopped me in my tracks. My great-great-uncle from Santa Fe who became New Mexico’s governor in 1930 was named Arthur Seligman. But that Arthur was born in 1871 and was only twelve when Arthur Seligman Raphael was born. I assume this was just a coincidence. His middle name might have been Seligman for his great-grandfather, Seligmann Goldschmidt.

Thus, by 1882, all of Jacob and Fannie’s children were married with children, except Harry and Hannah. How were Jacob and his sons supporting themselves and their families during this period?

According to the Philadelphia directory for 1881, Jacob was in a business called J. Goldsmith, Ancker, & Co.  But by 1883, Jacob listed his business as J.Goldsmith and Son, and he and Harry were engaged in the fishing tackle and cutlery business, according to the 1883 directory. Jacob and Harry were in that business together for several years according to the directory listings.

But in 1888 the directory lists Jacob as a “manager” at 510 Market Street and his son Philip as being in the fishing tackle business at 510 Market Street, obviously working together.

I am not sure what had happened to Harry by 1888.  There are three Harry Goldsmiths in that same 1888 Philadelphia directory—one in the cigar business, one in the clothing business, and one working as a boilermaker.

The listings for Jacob and his son Philip are the same in 1889, but in the 1889 directory there is only one Harry, and he is in the cigar business. I don’t know, however, that that was Jacob’s son Harry.

 

If that was Jacob’s son, he found himself in some legal trouble later that year:

Of course, I hope that this is not my cousin Harry Goldsmith, but I cannot be certain. It appears he was being charged with fraud. The article states the plaintiffs sued to recover $849.24 “on a promissory note given by Goldsmith for tobacco bought by him on the representation that he was making money and was about to increase the facilities of his factory.” Eleven years later a Harry Goldsmith, possibly the same one, declared bankruptcy. ⁷

In 1891, Jacob and Philip were still in the fishing tackle business, and there is no listing for a Harry Goldsmith at all in that year’s Philadelphia directory.

The 1890s were in some ways a challenging decade for the family of Jacob and Fannie Goldsmith. First, Emma Goldsmith’s husband Henry Meyerhoff died on September 18, 1891. He was only 49 years old. The cause of death was phthisis or what we call tuberculosis.

Emma’s sister Hannah Goldsmith married Isaac Levy in 1892. She was 38, and he was 51. According to the 1900 census, Isaac was born in Germany in April 1841 and had immigrated to the US in 1880.⁸ But I have no independent verification of those assertions, and because the name Isaac Levy is so common, I’ve been unable to find out much about Hannah’s husband. ⁹ Given their ages at the time of their marriage, it is not surprising that they did not have children.

Two years later, Emma remarried.  Her second husband was Abraham Cohlman.¹⁰ According to census records, Abraham was born in California sometime in 1869  making him eighteen years younger than Emma. The 1870 census lists him as a six month old baby living in San Francisco with his parents; his father was a junk dealer.  According to the 1880 census, Abraham was then eleven years old, living with his family in Philadelphia.  His father was the superintendent of a silver mine.¹¹

In the 1892 Philadelphia directory, Abraham was in the clothing business with his mother Bertha in a business called B. Cohlman & Son.¹²

Jacob and Fannie’s family’s experienced sadness again in 1895 when Jacob, my three-times great-uncle, died on August 11 of that year.  He was 72 years old and died from interstitial nephritis and pulmonary tuberculosis. He was buried at Mt. Sinai cemetery in Philadelphia, where so many of my other relatives were buried.

Unfortunately, that was not the end of the deaths the family suffered in the 1890s. A year later they lost two more members of the family in a terrible accident. More on that in my next post.