Russell Ramblings: Genealogy Story

In 1870, the population of the town of New Milford, CT was only 4000. But even so, it was the largest town in northwestern CT – an area that was mostly rural and filled with tree-covered hills. It was here that the many of the major events of my grandmother’s life were to take place over the next several decades.

Maurice Levy was the son of Jewish immigrants from England. He had been born in Brooklyn in March of 1870, but the Levy family had moved to New Milford when he was just a few months old.

Caroline Canfield Northrop was just a year younger than Maurice. Like him, she had been born elsewhere – in her case, Lee, MA. The Northrop family had moved to New Milford when she was two years old. The Levy and Northrop families only lived a few blocks apart and so Maurice and Caroline, then known as Carrie, attended the same small school in town.

After having grown up together, it was only natural that Maurice and Carrie decided to get married – which they did in 1893. He was 23 and she was 22. But Maurice’s aspirations were larger than New Milford and the young couple moved back to Brooklyn, the place of Maurice’s birth and where Maurice’s older brothers, Joseph and Benjamin, had also moved a few years earlier.

It was here that Maurice and Caroline began their family. Vera was born in June of 1895. When she was 3 the family expanded with the birth of her sister Irene in January of 1899. Vera had the lighter complexion and light blue eyes of her mother, but Irene had the darker complexion of her Jewish father. They lived in a three-story, three-family tenement building surrounded by many immigrant families – from Germany, England, Ireland, Norway, Italy, Scotland, Sweden and Holland among others. There were two other children born to Maurice and Caroline in the following decade, but neither of them survived. For a while, Caroline’s youngest brother, Carl, also lived with them and apprenticed with Maurice.

In 1910, tragedy struck the Levy family as Maurice passed away suddenly. Caroline, unable to support herself, immediately moved back to New Milford with her two daughters – then ages 14 and 11. She also took her husband’s body with her. If her connections with Maurice’s Jewish family were tentative before because of her not being Jewish, they were now totally disconnected when she had her husband buried in the Protestant cemetery in town alongside her Northrop relatives.

Moving from the hustle and bustle of Brooklyn, NY, to the rural quietness of New Milford must have been a shock for Vera – especially at the vulnerable age of 14. And with losing her father at the same time, she apparently wanted a father figure in her life. In June of 1914 she married a local boy by the name of Erskine Russell. He was only 19 and she was 18. They moved from New Milford to the closest city of Bridgeport, CT – about 30 miles away – where Erskine got a job working in a foundry.

It was in Bridgeport that Erskine and Vera began their family, with Dorothy being born in 1916 and Vernon (my father) four years later in 1920. When my father was born, they lived at 754 Norman St., but that was their third address on Norman St. in the past few years as they rented and moved frequently.

But despite having children together, that was not sufficient and things were not going well otherwise. In 1922, when my father was not yet two-years old, Erskine abandoned his family and moved to Waterbury, CT where he began living with his father and step-mother (they had moved from New Milford to Waterbury a few years earlier). The next four years would have been very difficult for Vera with two small children and trying to support herself. During this time Vera’s mother, Caroline, moved in with the family so she could care for the children while Vera was working at a series of different jobs.

In mid-1926, Vera and Erskine tried to work things out again – he rented a house in Waterbury for the two of them and their children – who were now both in school. But that did not work out any better and after two years they once again separated and this time divorced – Vera moving back to Bridgeport with the children (and Caroline again joining them) and Erskine moving back home with his father and step-mother. Erskine would not see his children again for nearly a decade.

In order to have the children have stability in their schooling, Vera remained in Bridgeport for a while, but they had six different addresses over the next two years. Finally, in early June 1930, Vera married again, to Charles Rogers from Danbury, a man 30 years her senior – even older than her father. It appears that she really missed that father figure from 20 years earlier. They remained in Danbury for a year, then the following summer moved to New Milford, Vera’s hometown.

After a decade-and-a-half of instability, Vera finally had the stability that she craved. Although Charles was of typical retirement age, he was a self-employed watchmaker and continued to provide the family income for the next decade-plus. Vera could stop working, they could remain in one place for more than a few months, and she could spend time raising her children.

This situation remained for 4+ years. But when Dorothy was out of school and Vernon was a junior in high school, they both left home and moved to Waterbury where they began living with their grandfather and step-grandmother – the spare rooms in that house having been vacated by Erskine who had finally gotten remarried and moved out of his father’s house a few years earlier.

Vera and Charles remained together in New Milford for the next twenty years. It was not until the mid-1950s that Charles, then nearly 90 years old, moved into an assisted-living home in Woodbury. By then Vera, who had always been a bit unstable also needed to move into a nursing home, even though she was only 60. For the remaining years of her life she was moved from one nursing home to another until her passing in 1963 at the age of 68. I’ve shared that story before (see https://ramblinrussells.blogspot.com/2016/01/shell-keep.html), so I’ll not repeat it here.

Vera had a hard life – growing up in a mixed-religion household, losing her father as a teenager, being abandoned by her husband, having to raise two children during the depression, not having a stable home life or even being able to stay in one location for many years, and even having her children move out prematurely. As I was able to visit her in the various nursing homes where she spent the last several years of her life, the visits were never happy experiences as she complained incessantly. But nonetheless, she was my grandmother and I still loved her.

[Very Levy]