Permit me to introduce you to my great-great uncle Ural Stillwell Traub (1874 – 1917), whose genealogical trail has included dumb luck, a Random Act of Genealogical Kindness, and the administration of quite a shock for a living family (not mine). I’d love to include a picture of him, but as will become clear, I wasn’t intended to get as far as I have, let alone be that fortunate.
Uncle Ural was the brother of my father’s mother’s mother Grace Stillwell Traub Holihan, whose own story could serve as serious fodder for historical fiction plots – I plan on returning to her, with pictures, at a later date; but first, here are the two things about Ural my father claimed to know:
1) When it came time to name the boy, Pa Traub spun the globe, and his finger hit on the Ural Mountains. He only tried that trick once; the other kids all had regular names – no Aunt Bolivia nor Uncle Indus.
2) Ural was a dentist.
As a newbie, I started where most everyone does – the census online. There he was in 1880 in the household of his widowed mother in NYC, though 1900 – 1930 yielded no joy. I’d pretty much given up on him, assuming he’d died young (well, not long after dental school at any rate), or taken up work overseas, etc. Then I discovered Italian Gen, and their fantastic index to NYC vital statistics, opening up loads ‘o’ possibilities for the extended Traub Clan – Grace and Ural’s uncle, Elias Traub, had 14 children. When I entered the surname Traub for each of the five boroughs one day on a whim, to see what might pop up on my screen, I wasn’t prepared for Ural to appear under Queens deaths (the dumb luck). I sent for the cert right away, stunned to see “suicide” under the medical details. My next option seemed to be getting a hold of the inquest report from the Queens coroner’s office, so I asked at Rootsweb how one might go about it. Here’s where that act of kindness comes in – a fellow from a local historic society offered to send me copies of the coverage in the local Queens papers; when I offered to cover postage and costs, he politely suggested a donation to the society, which I sent as soon as the envelope arrived.
The gist of the story is that Uncle Ural was discovered by Leta Traphagen, his office assistant, lying on the floor of his bedroom which adjoined the office premises, when she arrived for work. The police and medical examiner were summoned, with the cause of death being strangulation from an overdose of cyanide of potassium. As to motive:
Worry over domestic trouble is believed to have been troubling the dead man of late. Miss Traphagen told the coroner and detectives that Dr. Traub’s wife divorced him about two years ago and had since remarried., and his constant thought was of his child, a boy fifteen years old, from whom these circumstances had separated him. The former Mrs. Traub and her son are now living in Yonkers, from which town Dr. Traub came to Flushing ….
And this one:
From another source (not Miss Traphagen), it was learned that Dr. Traub had been divorced from his wife about two years ago, and that she remarried. Dr. Traub had a fifteen year old son, who lived in Manhattan, and who frequently wrote to his father here. The boy was gradually going blind, it was said today and this fact may have caused the father to become downcast.
Ya think?
I found Ural (misspelled) in the 1910 Census for Yonkers, New York, along with wife Marian and son Herbert, born nine years earlier in Massachusetts. The boy’s birth certificate gave me his mother’s information, so that I was able to determine that she and her new husband resided in Yonkers with a (younger) son in 1920. There’s a lesson here in holding onto information that means little or nothing at the time, but may come in useful later: some time earlier, I had contacted a Yonkers cemetery (where the Traubs had a plot) for an inventory of burials, with “Herbert Traub, died 1949” was among those listed.
There matters remained until a year or so ago, when on an impulse I looked at some online trees to see whether Marian’s family might be found with a reference to Herbert and Ural. Well … yes … and no. Such a tree had been posted since I’d left off investigating Ural’s story, but no mention of any Traubs. I wrote to the owner asking if the Marian were a close relative; she was. It turned out that she had told her new family that she had given birth to a son, but the child was “disabled and being cared for by his father’s family in California” (she was originally from there). Cared for? Well, the Traubs who lived in Yonkers, as did she and her second family, certainly seem to have been there for him. (A side note - Marian’s parents lived in Yonkers then, too – must’ve been quite a strain on them I’d say.) As for disabled, he went through rehabilitation at Perkins Institute, and went on to run a small business, marry and father two sons.
So … do you folks have any stories of finding info you weren’t specifically searching for, any acts of genealogical kindness, or unearthing of matters hushed up back then?
(P. S. - thanks to you all for inspiring my first ever DK dairy!)
(P. P. S. - speaking of things intended to be hidden, in looking over a copy of an ancestor's 1915 marriage cert I noticed someone had written Do Not Publish, double underlined, on the original.)