Great Grandparents. What a treasure, if you are fortunate enough to be blessed with them. A rare, fleeting treasure that quickly becomes rich with legend.
My father’s maternal grandparents were married 119 years ago today. I didn’t come close to knowing either of them, but oh, what stuff of legend.
Michael Naujoks was a Prussian Lithuanian, born in 1862 in Memel (today Klaipeda), a historic and strategic port city that was politically German but ethnically Lithuanian. With the unification of Germany in 1871 it became the northernmost city of the German Empire; after centuries of German rule, it only became part of Lithuania in 1923.
Michael’s family, bilingual in German and the area’s Lithuanian dialect, moved to Holstein, Germany when he was a baby. He sailed around the world as an engineer with the German Merchant Marine. He first came to America in 1891 for a five year stay with an uncle in Dayton, OH; he returned to Germany for less than a year and then purchased a $10 (equal to $275 today) ticket to sail from Bremen aboard the SS Halle, arriving on March 28, 1897 at the port of New York.
There he met Elise Fuchs. She was born in 1874 in the town of Orbis in the German Rheinland, not far from the French border. She had emigrated to the US in 1891, at the age of 17, indentured to a wealthy family which she left behind at the port of New York.
Michael and Elise obviously hit it off. By her 23rd birthday (December 9, 1897) Elise knew she was pregnant with Michael’s child.
On March 19, 1898 – 119 years to the day I write this – they exchanged vows at the Martha Memorial Reformed Church on 434 West 47th Street in the Hell’s Kitchen section of New York, attended by its Pastor, Rev. Paul H. Schnatz. This was Elise’s church — she was living at 555 West 50th Street, Michael a bit further south, at 501 West 31st Street. The church was Presbyterian, a mainline reformed protestant denomination and an offshoot of the original Dutch Reformed Church; after an influx of Palatinate Germans (from Elise’s birthplace) in the mid-18th century it worshipped exclusively in German.
Elise and Michael moved together to an apartment at 454 West 53rd Street, and Henrietta, called Hattie, was born July 24 1898. At the turn of the century they briefly moved to East New Durham, NJ, where their second daughter Bertha, my grandmother, called Bada, was born on June 12 1901. Both girls, named for Elise’s sisters, were baptized at the Martha Memorial Reformed Church but later converted to Catholicism (or at least raised their children Catholic) for their husbands. “It means more to them than it does to us,” her father told her.
I already knew the wedding date from the inscription in Michael’s wedding ring, which I still have but can’t wear – it’s big enough to spin around my thumb. But I was curious for more detail. I looked up the official NYC record of their marriage, and found it filled with flourishes and surprises.
On the registration, Michael declared himself born in Moscow (‘Moskau’), Russia, which conflicts with what we were always told. He also gave himself and his parents noble names – groom Michael Alexander Von Skarrendorf Kretzky, son of Alexander Nicholas Von Skarrendorf and Anna Maria Von Broscheid. Elise seemed to get caught up in the moment and wrote in “Rheinpfalz” after her own name, which either a clerk or Rev. Schnatz subsequently crossed out.
Maybe Michael tried to pass himself off as nobility to seduce a younger woman? But if I had to make a deduction based on general character details handed down, my guess is that they did not take their vows sober.
Another surprise came with the witnesses listed on the marriage record:
There was Elise’s sister Henrietta “Hattie” Fuchs, and her husband (the first of at least two), Johann Steuerwald. No surprise here. Though Hattie was eight years older than Elise, the sisters were close throughout their lives. Hattie was the one who found the newlywed’s apartment in the same building where she was raising her own growing family.
But the surprise was the third witness: John Fuchs, Elise and Hattie’s younger brother.
Wait! Whaaaaattt?
Nobody ever said anything about Elise having a brother. But there he is, and additional records corroborate his being the son of the same parents. Subsequent search turned up another sister, Margaretha, also of whom we were never made aware.
Well, regardless of witnesses, I know the marriage didn’t last; they took a family trip to Germany to visit Michael’s parents in 1905 and divorced sometime between their return and 1910.
Digging more, I found the census records of 1910 (242 West 144th Street) and 1915 (220 West 149th Street) showing not only Elise and her daughters living with her new husband, but a boarder – Michael Naujoks.
Wait. Whaaaaattt? Talk about two’s company…
Well, whatever – they made it work. Elise eventually also divorced the second husband, Charles Brierly (or was it Karl Brauerlei?) as well, and Michael ended up living with their daughter Bertha before he died in 1926. In her later years, for decades after Michael’s passing, Elise still regularly visited his grave and celebrated his life at the local tavern. Now they rest alongside each other.
Today I’ll raise a toast to both of them!
So The Story Goes Like This... 