Celia’s Cousin Rose

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That is Celia, standing in the back row, second from left. To her left (our right) is her cousin Rose (born Reisel).

Let’s take a look at the 1910 census (originally posted in “Celia’s Uncle Max and Family”). Seventeen-year-old Rose is an “operator” in a “waist shop.” There is a second page, where Celia is listed as “Jennie” and 19-years-old. She is also listed as an operator in a waist shop.

So what was a waist shop? Think of it as a blouse shop. They sold shirtwaists.

What was an operator then? Did the girls work together in this shop? If so, did they make the shirtwaists or did they sell them? I’m guessing that since this was right after Celia arrived, and the family trade seems to have been seamstress/tailor, that the girls sewed the blouses.

Because of something that Amy Cohen mentioned below, I am adding a link here to information about the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. History: Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. It is possible that the place where Celia and Rose worked is similar to this place or a smaller version perhaps. The fire that killed 146 people (mainly young women) occurred in 1911, just one year after the 1910 census. Just one or two years after Celia arrived. I hadn’t put it together until Amy mentioned Triangle, but family lore is that Celia became a bit of an Emma Goldman, standing on a crate and lecturing to people about the need to form unions.

In order not to be complicated here, I am going to skip to the 1925 New York State census to show you something very interesting and gives an idea of how close Celia and Rose became.

This first one is Max’s census report. It shows Max and Anna living with their children Harry, Grace, and Silvia. Presumably, the others have grown up and moved out.

In this second one, we have Celia living with her husband Isidore and their 4-year-old son, Murray. Daughter Eileen has not yet been born, although Celia would have been pregnant with her when the census was taken.

There is a duplication of names on this document, so be careful. Glance at about halfway down on the left side. Look who is living as boarders with Celia and Isidore! Rose and her husband Isidore Cohen and their 5-year-old daughter Grace!

So the two couples lived together with their first children. Imagine! This information was not passed down in the family at all. In fact, none of us had even heard about Rose or this other Isidore!

One note: notice that Rose has a sister and a daughter named Grace. How can that be, given that Jews name their children after deceased relatives? Anna’s mother was Gertruda Yaglovsky, so we believe that Rose’s sister was named after her, her maternal grandmother. It’s possible that Rose named her daughter after Goldi/Gittel Suskin Goodstein, her paternal grandmother.

Another note: Rose’s age at 28 is a little screwed up on that 1925 census, but we have confirmed that this is “our Rose.”

 

 

18 thoughts on “Celia’s Cousin Rose”

  1. I am pretty sure “operator” just meant a line worker in one of those sweat shops where women sewed shirtwaists. I had several relatives on the Lower East Side who also worked in these “factories.” They were awful places—some small just in tenements, some big like the ill-fated Triangle Shirt Waist Factory.

    How sweet that Rose and Celia stayed so close! And they both married Isidores. There just was too little diversity in the names that Jewish immigrants adopted! It’s thus not even that surprising that Rose had both a sister and a daughter named Grace!

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    • Amy, thanks so much for your comment about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. I’ve actually read so much about it, and it was really remiss of me not to mention it here. I’ve added a paragraph (see above), thanks to you. I also have a grandmother who worked in one of these sweatshops in Chicago. They were so common.
      I think it’s astonishing that they lived together and that nobody in the family realized it. I love knowing that the gardener’s father lived with his little cousin Grace when they were still practically babies.
      Yes, the naming makes research sooooooooo difficult! I thought the naming of deceased ancestors might make things easier, but you can see that in the case of the two Graces, the use of the first initial for an American name isn’t very useful to those researching haha!

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  2. I love the way Rose looks in the photo–like she’s a cool, no-nonsense type. 🙂
    I thought of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, as soon as you mentioned a “waist shop.”
    The names in my mom’s family seemed to repeat. I suppose they were named after dead relatives, but they all chose the same ones, and/or they liked the same Americanized names.

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    • I know–she looks very in charge, but “I am a cool person, so take me the way I am.” Oh, those repetitive names. They are such a nightmare! And the fact that they had Hebrew, Yiddish, and American names, plus maybe more than one of Yiddish and American!!!!!!! The only thing for sure were the Hebrew names, which don’t generally show up on the secular documents!

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  3. Hi Luanna, I think it might be me but I am a little confused with Rose, Celia and Jenny. Celia/Jenny same person? She is Rose’s cousin? Could they be sisters? On the 1910c it does say that Jenny is a daughter of Max? What am I missing? I have a whole branch of Lipschitz that my great grandfather lived with and no one alive seems to know who they were in relation to him. Couisn’s with Uncle, brother’s possibly, I am so into their mystery and then I have the great-grandmothers family and everyone thought there were just 3 sisters and I found there were brothers as well,no one again new anything about brothers. It’s crazy but I love it!

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    • Yes, I should explain better. Celia is my husband’s grandmother. She was called Jennie and Max’s daughter on the census, but she was his niece and came to be called Celia. Maybe she experimented with Jennie at the very beginning? Or maybe it was a mistake. Rose is Max’s oldest child, and she and Celia were cousins, but lived like sisters when Celia first came to the U.S. Then when they were both married with one child, they lived together! That was such exciting news! That is something about the Lipschitz family! That is going to take a lot of work to figure out . . . .

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  4. The Squire is having pretty much the same confusion with his family. William, Charles, and John all married and had sons – whom they named John, Charles and William. It drives him wild!

    My side of the family has never named any of the children after a person who is still alive, and since my mum was an only child and there was just my sister and me, we didn’t have too much duplication on our side of the family, but his? Wow! Of course, I’ve always sworn that God gave me sister two sons because she was going to name her daughter Paulina Maude. Pauline was our grandmother’s name, and I have NO idea where she came up with Maud.

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    • Oh, wow, William, Charles, and John repeated. So difficult to see this. It’s so interesting to see a family tree with the same names repeated over and over and then see the wealth of name variety in the more recent generations!

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