Myer Cohen, Sr., was the second child of Moses, Jr. and Henrietta Cohen.  As described earlier, he was a lawyer, perhaps the first in the extended Cohen family.  He had married Helen Wolf, daughter of the esteemed Simon Wolf, and they had five children between the years 1891 and 1907.  In 1910, all five children were still living at home, and Myer was engaged in the general practice of law.

As reported earlier, their daughter Marjorie died in 1920 as a young woman.  According to the town clerk in Saranac Lake where Marjorie died in 1920, she died from tuberculosis; the clerk also confirmed that there were several hospitals in the area where TB patients went for treatment.

In 1921, Myer, Sr., was written up in Who’s Who in the Nation’s Capital (Consolidated Publishing Company, 1921) as follows:

Myer died in 1930, and Helen died in 1949.  They are buried at the Washington Hebrew Congregation cemetery.

 

Ruth, their oldest daughter, married Harold B. Chase, the son of Plimpton B. Chase and Anna Bird of Ohio, on October 29, 1913.  Ruth and Harold were the couple who traveled with Harold’s recently widowed sister Ethel Chase Keith to England and probably also introduced her to Ruth’s cousin Jerome Selinger, whom she later married. In following up on my research of Ruth and Harold, I found this New York Times article about their wedding and that of Ethel Chase and B.F. Keith:

 

I wonder how Harold and Ruth felt about B.F. Keith and Ethel Chase stealing their thunder on their wedding day!

Harold had graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1911 and from Georgetown Law School in 1914, bringing another lawyer into Myer’s family, although it does not appear that Harold ever practiced law. ( See Abraham J. Baughman, Robert Franklin Bartlett, History of Morrow County, Ohio: A Narrative Account of Its Historical Progress, Its People, and Its Principal Interests, Volume 2 (1911) (Google eBook), p. 744)

In December 1915, Ruth and Harold had a daughter, Ann Beverly Chase.  In 1917 they were living in Toledo, Ohio, where Harold was then secretary and treasurer of Standard Steel Tube Company, a company owned in part by Harold’s father, who had acquired it in 1915.

In January, 1919, their three year old daughter Ann died of meningitis while the family was visiting Harold’s parents in St. Augustine, Florida, according to an obituary published in the St. Augustine Record of January 31, 1919.

Although the family was still living in Ohio in 1920, when their son Harold, Jr., was born, by 1922 Harold and Ruth had moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, where they were to live for the rest of their lives.  Harold was the owner and president of Chase Motor Cars, a car dealership, for many years, and both Harold and Ruth seem to have been quite active in a number of community organizations and clubs, according to various newspaper reports and documents.  Harold wrote an autobiography entitled Auto-biography: Recollections of a Pioneer Motorist, 1896 to 1911 (Pageant Press, 1955); unfortunately, it seems to be out of print and not available.

Harold, Sr., died in January, 1964, and Ruth, the daughter of Myer, Sr. and Helen Cohen, died in October, 1984. Ruth returned to the Washington area after Harold died.   Despite living for so many years in Worcester, both Harold and Ruth were buried in Ohio at Bloomfield Cemetery with their little daughter, Ann, as well as many members of Harold’s extended family.

Their son Harold, Jr., served in the US Air Force for many years in Colorado Springs, Colorado and then lived in Alexandria, Virginia; he died in 2006 and is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

Myer and Helen’s second child, Edith, married Alexander Ceal Robeson on December 27, 1919.  Alexander, who was known as Zanny according to family members, was a lawyer in a general practice in Washington, DC, like his father-in-law Myer, according to the 1930 census and several city directories.  He was a 1916 graduate of George Washington Law School.  Edith and Zanny had one child, a son, Alexander C. Robeson, Jr., who was born April 13, 1923.  Zanny died July 26, 1972, in Washington, DC., and Edith died at age 90 in September, 1983.  Their son, who was intellectually challenged, lived as an adult in Innisfree Village in Crozet, Virginia, for some time; when Edith died, the family asked that donations be made to that institution in her memory.  Alexander, Jr., died December 15, 1996. His death notice said he was a retired weaver.    (Richmond Times-Dispatch (VA) – Wednesday, December 4, 1996)

 

Roger Stahel Cohen was the fourth child and first son of Myer and Helen Cohen.

Unlike his father and brothers-in-law, he did not become a lawyer but instead became a doctor.  Roger went to Princeton University, graduating in 1919. The family said that he also served in World War I, but I have been unable to find a military record.  Since he was born in 1898, was already at age 19 at Princeton when the US entered the war in 1917, and was still at Princeton to graduate at age 21 in 1919, I had assumed he had been in school throughout the war. His tombstone in Arlington National Cemetery says that he served in World War I and World War II, achieving the rank of Commander (the family indicated the tombstone is incorrect and he achieved the rank of lieutenant commander), so somehow Roger must have taken time off from Princeton to serve and still manage to graduate when he was only 21 years old.

Roger was living at home with his parents in 1920 and working as a law clerk, according to the 1920 census, but then went to George Washington University for medical school, graduating in 1924, according to his family.  After graduating from medical school, Roger married Lee Lenthal Towers on December 17, 1924. In 1926, he was a junior medical officer at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, according to the Washington city directory for that year. The family has a graduation certificate for Roger Sr. from the University of Vienna showing that he studied there from October 3, 1927 to September 29, 1928.  According to family sources, Roger, Sr., said he studied under Sigmund Freud at the University of Vienna. By 1930 he was back in Washington, practicing psychiatry at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, according to the 1930 census.

Meanwhile, Roger and Lee were also having children.  They had four children born between 1925 and 1931, and after a time in Baltimore, returned to the Washington, DC, area, where they settled and raised their family.  Roger was stationed for some time in San Francisco with the Navy during World War II, and the family has a 1959 letter from Dwight D. Eisenhower, appointing him to serve on the Board of Veterans Appeals. The family also told me that Roger and the family enjoyed vacationing in Point Lookout, Maryland, and at 13^th Lake in upstate New York.  He loved photography and his grandchildren and combined the two loves, taking many pictures of his grandchildren.  Sadly, Roger died of a brain tumor on December 14, 1963, when he was only 65 years old.  His widow Lee continued to live in the DC area until she died in May, 1980.

The youngest child of Myer and Helen Cohen was Myer Cohen, Jr., born in 1907, almost ten years after Roger, the sibling closest to him in age.

Myer, Jr., was still living at home in 1920 and in 1930. Myer went to Swarthmore College, where he was an honors student, a member of the Wharton Club, the Philosophy Club,  and the Men’s Debate Club as well as on the staff of the yearbook, the Halcyon.  This is how he was described in that yearbook:

After college, Myer made trips across the Atlantic in 1928, 1929, and 1930.  In 1932, he again traveled overseas, giving his residence as New Haven, Connecticut, where he was a graduate student at Yale.  I would think that these trips were related to his graduate work. Myer’s study of German must have been useful in his graduate studies. Myer received his Ph.D. from Yale in 1935 based on his dissertation, “Austria: An International Problem.”  I tried to locate a copy of it online, but could not find it.  It would be interesting to know what Myer’s thoughts were on what was happening in Europe at the time.

On August 21, 1933, Myer, Jr., married Elizabeth Elson, who was Russian born, but had immigrated to the United States in 1906 when she was two years old and had settled with her family in Chicago. Myer and Elizabeth were married in Chicago, and according to the 1940 census, in 1935 Myer and Elizabeth were residing in New Haven. After receiving his degree, Myer and Elizabeth relocated to San Francisco, where their two children were born, one born in 1937, the other in 1938.    According to the 1940 census, Myer was working as a private school teacher in San Francisco.

Although I cannot locate any military records for Myer, after World War II he definitely had a change of careers.  In 1945 he made the first of many trips to England; his residence was now Silver Spring, MD.  In 1946 he made at least two trips, one in June and one in October.  According to the airline manifest for the June trip, Myer was working for the UN BRA headquarters in Washington as the director of repatriation and (I think) relief division.

Although I could not find an explanation for UN BRA, I found that acronym in several places with reference to the UNRRA, the United Nations  Relief  and Rehabilitation Administration, an organization involved in providing relief to refugees in Europe after the war.  I assume that Myer’s work was related to this endeavor.  The October trip in 1946 was on a flight from Berlin to Frankfurt to New York, and Myer’s address was now Chevy Chase, Maryland, and he was flying on a military permit.  Once again, his German studies must have come in handy.

In 1950, Myer again traveled to Europe, and the manifest for his flight from Zurich to New York has his address as “c/o I.R.O. Washington, DC,” and states that he was an O.I.R. director.   He was traveling with two other people involved with the same agency.  I could not find one definitive meaning for O.I.R or I.R.O, but given Myer’s work in 1946, this might be Office of International Relief and International Relief or Relations Organization.  I need to check further.  A later trip with Elizabeth to Europe in 1954 also lists their residence as Washington, DC.

Eventually, Myer rose to a fairly high level post within the United Nations. In 1962 he was the Director of Operations for the UN Special Fund, a fund created in 1958 by the UN General Assembly “in order to enlarge the scope of the UN programme of technical assistance in certain basic fields.”

In 1969 Myer, Jr., was the Assistant Administrator and Director of Operations and Planning for the UNDP, the United Nations Development Programme, an agency involved in assisting developing nations.

Myer, Jr., and Elizabeth ultimately retired to Newtown, Pennsylvania, where Myer died on January 8, 2003, at the age of 95, and Elizabeth died on July 25, 2004.  She was a hundred years old.

Myer, Sr., and Helen Wolf Cohen must have been very proud of their children.  Although the family suffered some heartbreaks with the deaths of Marjorie and little Ann Chase and the challenges presented to Alexander Robeson, Jr., overall it was a family that prospered.  There were several lawyers and a psychiatrist in the family as well as a Ph.D and  UN official.  The family moved around a bit, but overall stayed close to their roots in the Washington, DC, area.  The family seems to have moved away from the strong Jewish involvement of Helen’s father Simon Wolf and Myer, Sr.’s father Moses Cohen, Jr., as they moved into mainstream America and achieved success in fields that seem quite distant from the family’s beginnings as peddlers and merchants and pawnbrokers.  In just two generations, the family had gone from struggling Jewish immigrants to full-fledged participants in the American dream.