My Fantastical Family History

Searching through some old family albums, I came across several wonderful turn of the century portraits. As I find time I will post some on this blog and include any information about the subject I can.

Pictured here: Daniel John McCroskey,  Margaret Edin-McCroskey, Alden McCroskey, Anna (Pip) McCroskey and Alphonse the dog

I have been able to ascertain, based on disparate family stories that, sometime just before 1900, this quaint family unit emigrated from Scotland to Staten Island. Their first two years in the States found them living in squalor and nearly starving.

Daniel had attempted to find work bussing tables in the emerging industry of diners, only to learn that most of the diners on Staten Island had already relocated to the more lucrative area of Northern New Jersey.

Now, I was told that for at least two winters the children's shoes doubled as their food bowls. Some may find it a bit depressing that children would have to eat out of a shoe, but it actually wasn't all that uncommon and doctors of the time actually recommended the practice to nursing mothers. I believe it had something to do with the idea that leather held some medicinal property. Also, the laces added fiber.

Anna, who also went by Pip or Maggie May and sometimes Lisa, was able to find work sewing wool hats (or Scottish wigs) from the sleeves of surplus civil war era army coats. She would sell the hats to migrant workers as they made the voyage between Staten Island and New Jersey on their way to Woodbridge. It was Anna who would be the breadwinner for the family during those first two years. She also took up cigar smoking and price gouging.

Young Alden, also found some work where he could. Because he was young and unskilled, Alden would often find work as a billiard ball retriever. My grandmother explained that her grandmother had once told her that originally the pockets of the billiard table didn't have a way to catch the balls as they fell. A tavern owner would hire a boy from the street to chase down the errant balls and return them to the man who made the shot. When outdoor tables became popular a billiard retriever may have to chase a loose ball several blocks before it came to rest in a gutter or worse. Eventually tables began to be built with a leather webbing below the pockets and put an end to the billiard ball retriever.

Between the accounts of my grandmother, two of my great aunts, my father, and some distant cousins; I wasn't able to get too far past this point in the story. The accounts started to seriously contradict each other and a shouting match almost came to blows.

Here is the remainder of the information I have:

Either Daniel ended up becoming a fire fighter or joining the military as a nurse. Margaret may or may not have gone on to birth an additional five children. Apparently the family completely lost track of Anna after she was deported back to Scotland for burning down a brownstone. Alden either opened a Scottish immigrant buffet or moved to Ohio and died in a row boating accident on Lake Erie, or both.

I would have liked to learn more of this part of my family's past, but I am happy (and a bit confused) to know this much.

My Fantastical Family History

Searching through some old family albums, I came across several wonderful turn of the century portraits. As I find time I will post some on this blog and include any information bout the subject I can.

In this photo is my Uncle Ennis Givens. The photo was taken between 1899-1900.

Uncle Ennis was my great great (there may be another great in there, but I am not sure) uncle on my mother's side of the family. He was born on Nantucket to a single mother, his father having left a few years after Ennis' birth for fear of being drafted to serve in World War I some fifty years before it began.

Despite growing up with no father in a time when fathers often taught their sons the family trade, Uncle Ennis learned to care for himself and his mother by selling souvenir clam shells to tourists in the summers and jarring Atlantic Ocean salt water for export in the winters.

At age sixteen, on advice from his paternal grandmother, Uncle Ennis left home for New York City in the hopes of making his fortune as a shrimp boat captain on the Hudson River. Shrimp being turn of the century slang for New Jersey Sucker-eel. Unfortunately for Uncle Ennis, he learned too late that the Hudson River had not produced any "shrimp" since before the industrial revolution and that he had been lied to by his grandmother who wanted to be rid of him and his Sunday afternoon visits. Ennis fell into to a brief, but terrible depression upon realizing that he had been suckered by his own grandmother. He would later return to Nantucket to leave several large pales of Hudson River water on her front porch as an indication that he got the joke and he only found it a little funny.

Ennis eventually made his way to Boston where he arranged with a childhood friend to take over management of his friend's molasses factory, but instead decided he would rather become a patent clerk. Not realizing that patent clerks did not get to keep the items they helped patent, Ennis decided to become an inventor himself. Due to his lack of education, Uncle Ennis found it hard to invent much beyond new uses for rope and spare coinage. He focused his attention on finding a wealthy mate.

Around age thirty, Ennis met and courted a young lady from Florida who had been visiting family in Boston. He would later recall in his memoirs, which consisted of a few pages of notes and several pages of dirty drawings, that he only knew her first name and even then he couldn't pronounce or spell it.

Beyond this, Uncle Ennis' story gets a little spotty. What we do know is at some point in the late 1800's he founded an organization that championed the legalization of vagrancy in Minnesota and he lived on a houseboat in Maine for some time.

The photograph above shows Uncle Ennis hours before he was hanged for attempting to unlace a lady's shoe without her knowledge or prior written consent (an actual law in most states at the time). We don't know who the cat belonged to.