America’s Secret Skeletons

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Introduction

“The American Dream” has long meant a chance to remake your life out of better materials and with more freedom of expression.  People from all over the world still flock to the United States in pursuit of this longed-for chance.  This small virtual exhibit uses the histories of six families to explore how, even when the dream comes true, successful self-making still comes with painful losses.

The study involved five student and one faculty family, linked by participation in the Fall 2015 Advanced Public History Practice class. Each individual researched her/his family history without preconceptions, sharing discoveries with the class.  We compared our work with family histories done by others and in other settings.

Despite the successful launch in the United States of all six families, exploring our stories collectively highlighted what each family had lost and revealed many reasons ancestors and descendants might be disappointed in each other.  We have tried to capture these insights with selected images and brief texts.

We struggled to find a shared narrative that offered insight useful to a general public.  We find ourselves in a fraught historical moment, when the issue of resettling refugees in new countries, including ours, is before us most vividly.  Our research showed both the perils and the opportunities of self-making in a new nation.  In that context, we can offer America’s Secret Skeletons both as a demonstration of how the Advanced Public History class teaches practice and as a stimulant to general reflection about self-making and other American myths.

lloyd WallLloyd Wall, orphaned son of Irish-Americans, left Ohio to work as a clerk in Monroe, Michigan in 1925. Later that year, he married 19 year old Monroe native, Maxine Sprague. Unhappily, the marriage seems to have failed quickly. The couple moved to Cleveland. Possibly Lloyd’s income was too modest to live comfortably there or Maxine may have been unhappy there. In any case, by 1930, Maxine had returned to Monroe with her parents and Lloyd was back in his brother’s Cleveland home.

Interestingly, Cleveland in 1930 also hosted Mildred Newman, single and living with her cousins. She and Lloyd married on May 5, 1930, when she was already 5 weeks pregnant with their first child. There is no surviving paperwork to indicate that Lloyd and Maxine ever secured a divorce. Perhaps, in the rush to hide the pre-marital pregnancy (and extramarital dalliance?), Lloyd and Mildred got their marriage license but neglected to formally end the previous marriage. Maxine Sprague, resettled in her home community, might have had little motivation to advertise herself as a divorcee, and still less perhaps as a woman betrayed.  Mildred and Lloyd raised two children and parted only with Lloyd’s death from cancer in 1971. According to their children, they never marked their anniversary, perhaps to keep the date a secret. None of their descendants ever heard of Maxine Sprague at all.

Greg“What would you do for a Klondike Bar,” more like “What would you do for the American Dream?” Many people wanted a fresh start in America, leaving behind friends and family to follow their dreams. My Great, Great Ancestors wanted that fresh start. Money was tight, and they refused to leave family behind. Five people traveled over together and the costs were high, so high that they actually had to pull their gold fillings out of their teeth. The gold was sold as part of the payment for the trip, but not all of it; some went missing. My Great, Great Grandmother hid some gold, and nobody knew where it was for a long time. That gold has been since found. Before her passing, she shared with us this needlepoint called, “Watch over the Rhine,” where she broke the gold fillings down into tiny little pieces, and sewed it into the stitching on the needlepoint. With tremendous detail, It was created as a reminder of their homeland, and the pain they endured to follow their dreams. Dilella editLouis DiLella was born in New York on December 4, 1888, to an Italian immigrant, Angelo Di Lella, and his wife, Mary J DuBois. Louis joined the United States Army during WWI and travelling between Italy and Philadelphia. (Why Philadelphia when the story starts in NYC?) He married an Italian woman, Marianna Pallotto, and together they had eight children. Louis spent most of his life owning and running bar in Manayunk, a millworker’s neighborhood in Philadelphia. It is here where his not so ordinary life begins.

One night, while Louis was tending the bar, a man complained to him about the beer not being very good. No one knows what was said, but the small issue turned into an argument and eventually into a full-on bar fight. Louis came out on top, but he accidentally murdered the complaining drinker in the process. Louis was arrested when the cops arrived. He was tried for first degree murder, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. He served his sentence at the famous Eastern State Penitentiary.   When he became very ill in 1963, the state sent him home to die in peace with his family. Louis is buried in a cemetery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Generations of his family kept the story mostly quiet. More recently, the excitement of having such an interesting story, and a connection to an important historic site, makes it easier for the family to honor his memory.

patIn the 1870’s in Ireland, forbidden love blossomed between Catholic Thomas F. McTear and Protestant Mary J. Black. Religious intermarriage was extremely taboo and frowned upon, requiring that the couple be ostracized from both families and both religious communions. Thomas hatched a plan to secure his love forever by immigrating to America. Thomas immigrated alone in 1875 and dispatched a letter to Mary urging her to prepare for the voyage to America but begging her not to tell anyone about the plan. In 1876 Mary followed Thomas to America, leaving behind her family, friends and old life. She had left on the pretext of traveling to England, promising to be back. Little did her family know they would never see Mary again.

In 1877 Thomas and Mary were married in Philadelphia, and over the course of their marriage had 7 children, all raised Catholic, 5 of whom lived to adulthood. They lived in Philadelphia in ward 17 with many other Irish families. Generations later, the McTear family remembers and honors the love and courage of Thomas and Mary, though their decision cost the family the connection with its Irish roots.

old philadelphia_editOne event long before my father was born in the 1940s, shaped the lives of his whole side of the family, including me.  My grandmother, Elizabeth, was a young girl in her teens, daughter of a Jewish immigrant who came to Philadelphia from Russia in the early 1900’s. Working long hours as a machinist in an iron and steel mill, her father Samuel finished his day drinking and then would go home and beat his family. He especially attacked his two daughters, Elizabeth and Florence. After surviving this abuse for many years, my grandmother married the first man that she could when she was 21 years old. Her marriage gave her safety for the first time, but since her husband was not Jewish, her entire family disowned her. They stopped all communication, thus leaving her on her own. To make matters worse, her husband turned out to be trouble as well, and left her alone with young children. So at 21 years old in 1949 abandoned but with kids to raise, Elizabeth was on her own to figure out her path in the world. She succeeded in educating her children, owning a home, and launching a career, but she did not pass on her husband’s name to their children, nor did she ever reconnect with her own family.  To this day, my grandfather’s last name remains unknown to his descendants. PerigoldOur sixth family included several generations of illegitimate birth, which drove individual interest in immigration.  Family members now living asked that the details of the story not be published here, though the family’s struggles echo the shared theme.

 

 

 

Thanks to Dolores Fidishun and the library staff for help with our family research, to Tina Kidger for sharing her project on Redditch, England with the class.  Special thanks to Dave Pugh and Dr. Pierce Salguero for indispensable help creating this page!