The Mystery of Fanny Wiler: A Two Part Saga

Posted on December 18, 2014 by Amy

Here’s a mystery for you to ponder while I take a short break. This is Part I, and I will post Part II within a week. But meanwhile, see if you can solve the mystery.

As I mentioned a few posts back, I was having trouble filling the holes in the story of Fanny Wiler, the daughter of Moses and Caroline (Dreyfuss) Wiler. I still am. Let me tell you what I know and what I think I know, and see if you can add your insights.

What I know for sure: My cousin Fanny Wiler was born in Pennsylvania, probably Harrisburg, in either 1845 or 1846. She is listed as four years old on the 1850 census, living with her parents in Harrisburg, and as fourteen on the 1860 census, living with her parents in Philadelphia.

That is all I know for certain.

Fanny does not appear on the 1870 census with the rest of her family. Her siblings Simon and Clara are listed (Eliza was married by this time), but Fanny is not. Fanny would have been 24 in 1870 and thus possibly married, but I have yet to find a marriage record for her between 1860 and 1870.

I did find a marriage record for a Fanny WYLER to Max Michaelis, dated 1874. I was not sure that this was the same Fanny, not only because the name was spelled differently, but also the record says Fanny was born in Switzerland and that her age was 22. My Fanny was born in Pennsylvania. If Fanny was in fact born in 1846, she would have been 28 in 1874, not 22. But I thought Fanny might have lied about her age; I have seen that many times on marriage records. And I thought maybe she put her father’s birthplace, which was Switzerland, by mistake. So I decided to assume tentatively that this was my Fanny and chase down what I could find about Fanny and Max Michaelis.

Fanny Wyler marriage to Max Michaelis July 12 1874
Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Historic Pennsylvania Church and Town Records; Reel: 792

But I could not find Fanny and Max on the 1880 census anywhere. What I did find was a census entry for a Fanny Wiler (correct spelling), aged 24, whose parents were born in Switzerland and Germany. This certainly matches my Fanny except for the age, which is off by ten years. But this Fanny was working as a servant in someone’s home. Could this really be my Fanny? I was not sure.

Fanny Wiler 1880 census
Source Citation
Year: 1880; Census Place: Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Roll: 1169; Family History Film: 1255169; Page: 243B; Enumeration District: 090; Image: 0495

So I started to search for Max Michaelis. The first thing that came up was a second Philadelphia marriage record for a man with that name to a woman named Donice Coyne in 1876. This was a church record, and it was not at all legible to me. Could Max and Fanny have divorced already, thus explaining Fanny’s return to her birth name? Did women do that back then? It seemed possible. But I could not find any other documentation of Max Michaelis with a Donice Coyne or with anyone with a name even close to resembling Donice. So I put that aside.

When I could not find Max on the 1880, 1900, 1910, etc., census reports in Philadelphia, I started to wonder if he had died. And so I looked for death certificates. And I found this one:

Max Michael death certificate 1884

I was horrified. Could this be the Max who married my cousin? I looked for news articles to learn more and found this one:

A Madman’s Act. How Max Michael Killed His Child and Committed Suicide
Date: Thursday, May 1, 1884 Paper: Trenton Evening Times (Trenton, NJ) Volume: II Issue: 70 Page: 5

Although there were many hits for news articles about this horrific event, they all were essentially the same article. The story was picked up by Associated Press and published in many papers. But none gave more than these bare facts: Max Michael was 40 years old, so the same age as the Max who married Fanny Wyler in 1874. He had been a patient at Norristown State Hospital for the Insane (as it was called then). His wife and three children were living at 945 Leithgow Street in Philadelphia, and one child, Rose, a sixteen month old girl, was killed in the fire. But not one of the articles revealed the name of the wife of Max Michaels or the names of the other two children.

How could I find out if this was the Max who married Fanny Wyler in 1874? I searched for information about the child who died. It did not take long to find the death certificate for the child, Rose. It was heartbreaking to read this certificate. And it did not provide me with the information I needed. There was no indication of the mother’s name, not even her first name, let alone her birth name.

Rose Michael death certificate 1884 Pennsylvania, Philadelphia City Death Certificates, 1803-1915,” index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.1.1/JKQJ-T8Z : accessed 17 December 2014), Rose Michael, 27 Apr 1884; citing , Philadelphia City Archives and Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia; FHL microfilm 2,069,561.

I then searched for a birth record for Rose. I found a Rosa Michaels, born December 21, 1882, in Philadelphia. This had to be the right child. Right name or close anyway, right age. Father’s name: Max Michaels. Mother’s name: Farmer. Farmer?? I did not have the actual document, just the information listed on FamilySearch. The image itself is not available online, so I ordered the microfilm. It meant a long wait.

You see, the Family History Library has discontinued its free photoduplication service. In fact, there is now no photoduplication service even for a fee. You have to order the microfilm and have it sent to your closest Family History Center. The one closest to me is in Bloomfield, Connecticut. It took me an hour to get there the one time I went (yes, I got lost, and yes, I did not take the highway, but it would still take 45 minutes even if I went the fastest way). And it is only open limited hours during the week. So I ordered the microfilm, but then received a notification that another user had it and it was not available. Arggh. It will get there eventually. But I am not a patient person. How long would it take until I knew whether Farmer was really Fanny? Or was it the mother’s birth surname?

My next step was to use the address where the fire occurred, 945 Leithgow Street, and see if I could find out who lived there at the time of the 1880 census. Although I had had no luck finding Max on that census, maybe if I searched by the address, I would find him with some mangled spelling of his name. I went to stevemorse.org and used his Enumeration District tool, and after many hours of scanning numerous EDs, I finally found 945 Leithgow Street. No luck. Someone else was living there in 1880. Not Max or Fanny or anyone with a name anything like Michael.

Now what? I turned to the Philadelphia city directories. Perhaps I could track Max through the years by looking at every Philadelphia city directory available online. Since only a few listings came up by searching under the name “Max Michael” and since I know these directories are indexed by use of an OCR scanner, I knew that the index might not be completely accurate. So I went year by year, looking through the directories for any listing for a name like Max Michael. Here’s what I found:

1875: Maximilian Michaelis, 140 Noble Street

1876: Maximilian Michaelis, hairworker, on Green Street

1877: no listing found

1878: Max Michaels, laborer, at 2133 East Thompson Street

1879: Same as 1878

1880: Max Michel, peddler, at 1072 Leithgow Stret

1881: Max Michaels, laborer, 2133 East Thompson Street

1882: same

1883: same

1884 through 1889: no listing found

At first I thought that the Max Michel at 1072 Leithgow might be the right Max, but after searching further, I found that there were two different men with similar names, but the Max Michel who lived at 1072 Leithgow was much older and had a wife named Caroline and several children born in the 1860s. So despite the fact that he was living on Leithgow, I eliminated him from consideration.

That left Max Michaels of 2133 East Thompson Street. So I started searching for that address through stevemorse.org. I searched about ten EDs, but not one of them had house numbers even close to 2133. I was stuck.

I decided to try another approach. The 1884 news articles said that Max and his wife had three children. Who were the other two children? Since I had no census reports that included Max for 1880, I had no idea. I decided to search for all people named Michaels born in the 1870s and 1880s in Philadelphia. Ancestry revealed that there was an Isabella Michaels who died in 1890, whose father’s name was Max, mother’s name was Fannie. Bingo! I thought all my problems were solved. I went to Familysearch.org to get the image of that death certificate and was frustrated to see that Fannie’s maiden name was not included. (I also realized that I was so eager to solve this mystery that I was losing sight of the fact that a sixteen year girl had died.)

Isabella Michael death certificate 1890
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia City Death Certificates, 1803-1915,” index and images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-267-12389-23257-67?cc=1320976 : accessed 10 December 2014), 004009728 > image 968 of 1766; Philadelphia City Archives and Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

So was this MY Fanny? It certainly seemed like it was the Max and Fanny who married in 1874, since Isabella was born in 1874. But was that Fanny Wyler the same as my Fanny Wiler? I still didn’t know.

But now I had another clue. Isabella’s residence at her time of death was 918 Hutchinson Street in Philadelphia. But the 1890 US census was destroyed in a fire, so I would not be able to use a census to learn who was living at 918 Hutchinson in 1890 when Isabella died. My best bet was to use the directory database again. Max Michaels had disappeared from those directories in 1884 (the year of that terrible fire that killed a man named Max Michaels). I had been assuming that the Max who had been a laborer and lived as 2133 East Thompson was the one killed in the fire so had stopped searching for him after 1889.

So I started with the 1890 directory this time, and I found a Fannie Michaels, widow of Max, living at 934 Poplar Street (with a separate listing under Max Michaels as a laborer, living at that address, even though he was dead, presumably). But in 1891 there is a Fannie Michels, widow of Max, living at 918 Hutchinson Street, the address where Isabella Michaels had been living when she died in 1890. There was the same listing for 1892. Certainly this was the same Fannie and Max whose daughter Isabella died in 1890. And Max was dead. I thought I was getting closer. Didn’t it all add up? Fannie Michaels had a husband named Max who had died sometime before 1890, and they’d had a daughter Isabella. That much seemed fairly certain.

But was this MY Fanny? I still wasn’t sure because I had no document that included Fanny’s birth name other than the 1874 marriage record for the Fanny Wyler born in Switzerland. But I was getting more and more convinced that Fanny Wyler was my Fanny Wiler, despite the discrepancies. Wouldn’t you have been?

To be continued…

Question mark (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Maria Cohen 1856-?: A Hard Story to Find, A Harder One to Tell

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Amy

It took me a long time to find the story of Maria Cohen, the seventh[1] child of my great-grandparents, Jacob and Sarah, and once I did, I wished I hadn’t. Things started easily enough, as I was able to find a record in the Philadelphia marriage index identifying her husband as William Levi. They married on December 15, 1875. I was able to find them on both the 1880 and 1900 census reports with their sons Lewis, Jacob, and Isaac, but on both there were entries that were inconsistent with the facts I know about Maria. On the 1880 census, it says her parents were born in Germany, and in 1900 it says her parents were born in Russia, when I know that her parents were in fact both born in England.

Had the census taker received erroneous information or did I have the wrong Maria? Certainly her sons’ names, Lewis, Jacob and Isaac, were all names that ran in the Cohen family. The age given for Maria on the census reports seemed close enough. In 1880 Maria would have been 24; the census says she was 21 with two sons ages two and one. If she really married in 1875, that means she would have been only 16 when she married, which seems unlikely. In 1900, Maria would have been 44; the 1900 census reports it as 40. I am accustomed to census errors, and these were not any worse than others I’ve seen.

So this could be the right Maria Cohen, but I cannot be absolutely sure because after 1900 she and her husband disappear from the records. I cannot find Maria or William Levi on the 1910, 1920, or 1930 census. Perhaps they both died between 1900 and 1910, but I also cannot find any death records or burial records for either of them. At first I thought perhaps they all changed their names, but after a lot of looking I was able to find death records for three of their four sons, and that is where this story gets harder to tell.

The first record I found was for their oldest son Lewis, who died on May 4, 1915, from heart disease at age 38.

Lewis C. Levy death certificate

His wife Emma Fogle, whom he had only married five years before in 1910, lived another almost 50 years, but was buried beside him at Adath Jeshurun cemetery and apparently never remarried. Since the headstone is marked “father” and “mother,” there must have been at least one child born during that brief marriage, but so far I have not been able to locate that child.

Lewis and Emma Levy headstone

This morning, after much looking, I found a death certificate for Maria and William’s second son Jacob, who also died at a young age. He died only a year and half after his brother Lewis on December 22, 1916, from tuberculosis. He also was 38 when he died. The death certificate reveals that he had been residing at the Norristown State Hospital for the Insane when he died and had been there for just over ten years. He also was buried at Adath Jeshurun.

Jacob Levy death certificate

I was already feeling sad for Maria and William for losing two sons before either reached forty years of age when the story got even worse.

In searching for records for Maria, William and their sons this morning, I was surprised to see a death record for a Benjamin Levy, son of William Levy. It was the first time I knew that Maria and William had had a fourth son, Benjamin, born in 1881. Since he was born in 1881, he was not on the 1880 census. Since he died in 1897, he was not on the 1990 census. I had missed him completely in doing my initial research of Maria and her family. I gasped when I found his death certificate and saw his cause of death: “found drowned.”

Benjamin Levy death certificate

I looked to see if I could find any other information and found this story, quoted in its entirety from the Philadelphia Inquirer dated March 18, 1897.

The body of the young man which was found on Monday in the Delaware River at the foot of Callowhill street was that of Benjamin Levy, aged 16, who lived at 1580 Fontaine Street, and who has been missing since January 9. It is thought that he committed suicide.

Before going away, he said to his brother: “Good-bye, Jake, forever. I’m going to jump overboard.” He was not seen alive afterwards. It is believed he drowned himself because he had been rebuked for drinking.

(“A Young Suicide,” Thursday, March 18, 1897,Philadelphia Inquirer (Philadelphia, PA) Volume: 136 Issue: 77 Page: 10 )

Benjamin had been missing for two months when his body was found. I cannot begin to imagine how his family felt. Could it possibly be that just getting scolded for drinking led him to commit suicide? Or was there something else behind the story? Was there underlying mental illness, as was the case with his older brother Jacob?

Although the death certificate for Jacob said that he had been hospitalized since October, 1896, ten years, one month and 28 days before his death, this news story about Benjamin seemed to indicate that Jacob was still home when Benjamin committed suicide in March, 1897. One has to wonder whether Jacob’s mental illness was precipitated or at least exacerbated by his little brother’s death and thus whether Jacob’s death certificate was off by a year in describing his stay at the state hospital. Did Jacob feel guilty, knowing that his younger brother had talked about suicide but Jacob had not being able to stop him? How did Maria and William cope with these two traumas?

It was less than twenty years later that their son Lewis died in 1915, with Jacob dying a year later in 1916. Only Isaac remained, their youngest son. Fortunately, Isaac’s story is not tragic. In 1909, he had married Rose Hicks, who was a few years older than Isaac and had a son William from a previous marriage. Although marrying an older divorced woman with a child might have been somewhat unusual back then, given what this family had been through, that must have been small potatoes to them. In 1910, he and Rose were living at 133 Walnut Street in 1910 with several boarders, and Isaac, now using the name Harry, was working at a pawnshop.

Isaac “Harry” Levy and Emma Levy 1910 census

In fact, it was his uncle Lewis Cohen’s pawnshop, as revealed in Harry’s World War I draft registration (and as confirmed by an address check for Lewis Cohen in 1917).

Isaac “Harry” Levy draft registration World War I

Harry, Rose, and Rose’s son William as well as her nephew were living on Reno Street in 1920, and Harry and Rose continued to live in Philadelphia at least until 1942 when Harry’s draft registration for World War II continues to provide a Philadelphia address at 222 North 52^nd Street. Harry was working for the WPA in Philadelphia at that time.

Isaac “Harry” Levy World War 2 draft registration

It does not appear that Harry and Rose had any biological children of their own. I cannot yet find any record for Harry or Rose after 1942, nor have I yet had any luck locating any records for Maria or William after the 1900 census. I plan to contact Adath Jeshurun cemetery in Philadelphia to see if they have records for Harry/Isaac, Rose, Maria or William Levy. Since the other members of the family were all buried at that cemetery, I am hoping that I will be able to get at least some greater information about the others.

Genealogical research is filled with twists and turns. I spent many hours this week, focused on Maria Cohen and her family with William Levy, and until this morning I had found almost nothing except their marriage record and those two census reports. I went to sleep feeling that I would never know the rest of the story. Then with just a few lucky keystrokes this morning, I opened the door to a terribly tragic family story. I almost wish that I hadn’t. Careful what you wish for, as they say. I hope I can put some closure on Maria’s life. Only time, persistence, and lots of good luck will tell.

[1] Reuben was the sixth child, but I am skipping over him for now as I wait to hear from one of his descendants.

Brotmanblog: A Family Journey

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The Mystery of Fanny Wiler: A Two Part Saga

Maria Cohen 1856-?: A Hard Story to Find, A Harder One to Tell

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