It was great to listen to this narrative about researching family history, written by someone who has written several other books. She had heard family talk about the four sisters who were cousins of her grandmother; their names were Selma, Malvina, Marcella, and Ruth. Three of them and their older brother were born around the turn of the century in Romania while Ruth was born in the US. The family story had it that when Ruth was born in St. Louis as the parents were headed for Hollywood, the mother died in childbirth. The four sisters were in an orphanage in St. Louis, until one of them made enough money to take care of them. It was said they became fabulously wealthy, never married (except the youngest, briefly), and lived in New York City to a ripe old age. Marcella was the rare woman who traded on the stock exchange at the time, and was said to be such an expert in pork belly futures that she advised Franklin Roosevelt. Oh yes, and there’s the affair with JP Morgan.
Given the subtitle A True Story of Family Fiction, we are not surprised to learn that the family’s stories were in some cases, wrong, and in others unprovable. Take the JP Morgan affair: Marcella was a child living in St. Louis when JP Morgan died. The sad story that their mother died in childbirth is sadder yet; she was schizophrenic and lived for years in an asylum in St. Louis. The author was unable to establish clear facts about Marcella’s prowess as a trader, but did learn that her will indicated she left the current equivalent of $10,000,000, a tidy sum if you live into your 90s and have sisters to support.
The book is the author’s chatty recounting of the wonders of Ancestry.com and its limits and her other pursuits of information about her relatives. She and her boyfriend traveled to Romania and found snippets of their lives there. What she discovered did not give her much insight into these lives. Having done family history research both before and after the advent of Ancestry.com myself, I observed how easy it is to find factual information now. But it is letters, personal memories, and newspaper stories that uncover the person and their times.
Julie Klam, The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters, Riverhead, 2021, 272 pages (I listened to the audiobook). Available in the public library.