This Fourth of July, I want to introduce you to Mrs. Ida Epstein, nee Davis (1879-1949), the first relative I found through the Ancestry mobile app. She began life in the Russian Pale of Settlement, immigrated to New York, settled in San Francisco, and worked as a merchant in China and Japan a century ago.
How I found Ida Epstein and documents about her life shows how the field of genealogy has changed. Back in the days of yizkor zeiten (roughly Yiddish for "the old days"), I found the relatives my Grandma Frances mentioned in census records, which led me to more names to search for in Ancestry.com, Google, and Google Newspaper Archive.
My family members had no memory of Ida, who was probably my great-grandmother's cousin. I only learned of her through the predictive software of Ancestry's mobile app, which linked to Ida's gravesite on FindAGrave.com. I give credit to the FindAGrave team for linking Ida back to my Davis family in Spokane, although it did not get the relationship exactly correct. It did help my search on other websites.
The incredible aggregation and indexing of U.S. historical records by the Church of Latter-Day Saints — let's call it "big dead data" — has led to one powerful search engine on FamilySearch.org. I soon found the record for the marriage of Joseph Epstein and Ida A. Davis, which took place on June 12, 1899 in Spokane, Washington. Joseph was listed as a resident of Butte, Montana and Ida was listed as "formerly of New York." So why did they marry in Spokane?
Ida's father — my great-great-great-uncle Joseph Davis — lived in Spokane, and I wonder if maybe he had arranged the marriage and sent for his daughter. I described Joseph Davis's scandal-tinged life in full in my blog post on Davis family history, but by 1899 he was around the age of 40, working as a Spokane jeweler. Just three years earlier "Uncle Joe" lived in Cripple Creek, Colorado, site of one of the last major gold rushes in the Wild West. A newspaper article described Joe Davis as being "well known" in the local red light district and "prone to mixing up with the opposite sex in an undue degree."
Joe Davis then attempted to be at least outwardly respectable, marrying in August 1896 a U.S.-born woman named Margaret Ann McDonald, having a son named Reuben in 1898, and then acting as father of the bride the following year.
I don't have definitive proof that Ida A. Davis is the daughter of my relative Joseph Davis, but Joseph's signature on the wedding certificate bears a striking resemblance to the handwriting of my great-great-grandfather Paul Davis and his brothers Ruben (aka Reuben) Davis and Isaac (aka Ike) Davis. As you can see below, they all wrote "Davis" almost identically, implying that maybe they learned to write in the same place. Even in this age of digital genealogy, sometime I fall back on analog evidence.
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| Joseph Davis and his brothers had very similar handwriting. |
What do we know about the bride, Ida A. Davis? She was born on July 11, 1879 in Kiev, Russia (now Ukraine). In later years, she would subtract three or four years from her age. The Davis family had an original Russian surname that sounded like "Davinsky," and Ida's Hebrew name was possibly "Chaya." Ida said in her marriage record that her mother was named Rebecca Rabanow, the only record I have of Joseph Davis's first marriage.
Joseph and three other Davis brothers became widowers at a young age and later remarried. It's possible that Ida and another first cousin named Ida/Chaje (born 1884) were named for the deceased first wife of Reuben Davis, Ida Mostrofsky Davis. It's also possible that my Great-Grandma Bess (born 1900), who had the Hebrew name Rebecca, and another first cousin named Rebecca (born 1896) were named after Joseph's deceased first wife, Rebecca Rabanow Davis.
I assume the Davis family was orthodox Jewish since Ida's uncle Isaac Davis helped found Spokane's orthodox synagogue in 1901. Yet it's interesting to note that Joseph Davis had remarried a gentile woman and the wedding of his daughter Ida was conducted by a Methodist minister. Amazingly, Joseph Davis said in the 1900 census that he was born in Ohio, which shows the degree to which he wanted to assimilate.
Ida said in different documents that she immigrated in 1885 or 1889, but clearly spent her adolescence in the United States and was educated through the second year of high school. With the USA offering more opportunities for Jewish women than the Russian Pale of Settlement, Ida and her Davis first cousins developed a bit of a rebellious, independent streak. My Great-Grandma Bess Karasov eloped at 18 and was a manager of several clothing stores. Her cousin Anna Davis ran off and became a Catholic nun and a nurse. Another cousin, Annabelle Marshall, was a suffragette whose daughter became a social worker.
Ida's independence took time to grow. She appeared in the 1900 and 1910 census as a Montana housewife. There's an unfortunate eight-year gap in the paper trail, and then on October 2, 1918, Ida Epstein went before a San Francisco judge and did something unusual for a women of her time: she applied for a passport. She described herself as a "merchant" who wanted to go to Shanghai, China for "commercial business," in the "interests of The Associated Mercantile Co. of San Francisco."
The application has a literal snapshot of Ida Epstein, seen at the top of this post, and a written list of her features: 36 years old, 5 feet 3 inches tall, "normal" forehead and mouth, brown eyes, "Roman" nose, round chin, light brown hair, medium complexion, round face.
Then the record gets really crazy. The application is followed by a small typed note, seen below, that says "The Agency is [of] the opinion" that Ida Epstein "is really [going] 'prospecting'", which I assume means gold-digging for a rich husband. The note also says that Ida was "informally" separated from her husband and ends with the incredible handwritten line "tried to tip the stenographer."
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| Sexism in a 1918 court document. |
Whatever the authorities' thoughts of Ida's intentions, she got her passport and made her way to East Asia. The China Monthly Review (accessed through Google Books) notes that Ida checked into the Grand Hotel Kalee in Shanghai. There is also a "Report of Extension of Passport" that Ida filled out on January 5, 1920, where she listed her address as the Palace Hotel in Shanghai, and which extended her passport by another six months.
Ida Epstein made at least two round trips across the Pacific Ocean. The S.S. Empress of Asia brought her from Shanghai on June 15, 1919 and docked in Vancouver, British Columbia on June 30, 1919. Then she sailed aboard the S.S. Colombia, which left Yokohama, Japan on February 6, 1920 and arrived at Honolulu, Hawaii on February 17, 1920. She then sailed home on the S.S. Persia Maru, which left Honolulu on February 24, 1920 and arrived in San Francisco on March 2, 1920.
In June 1920, Ida again appeared before the San Francisco court to apply for a new passport to return to China, Japan, and Hong Kong. She included two letters of support from trading companies that said she was "honest and upright and a very capable business woman" and a "Lady of the highest type and standing." Unfortunately, I have not yet found evidence suggesting that Ida received another passport or was allowed to return to Asia.
Digitized directories of Oakland, CA uploaded by the San Francisco Public Library show Ida in 1922 as the manager of the Santa Fe Hotel on San Pablo Avenue in Emeryville. Her husband Joseph Epstein was listed as the hotel's manager from 1923 to 1933.
Ida Epstein took another major step towards independence by the 1930 census, which lists her as "Divorced," living on her own in San Francisco, and working as a "manager" of apartments. The Great Depression took its toll on Ida's career, as the 1940 census found her sharing a San Francisco apartment and working as a "knitting instructor" for the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Ida died in San Francisco on November 28, 1949 and is buried in the Home of Peace Cemetery in Oakland, CA. She had one son, Sidney Epstein (born November 25, 1901 in Milwaukee, WI; died March 18, 1970 in Oakland, CA). Sidney worked as a radio engineer and appeared in the 1940 census with a wife, Frances (born c.1901) and two sons, Stanley (born c.1931) and Robert (born c.1937).
I would not have known about Ida Epstein and her incredible life without Ancestry's mobile app and the vast indexing projects of FindAGrave.com and FamilySearch.org. The bureaucratic, patriarchal processes that frustrated Ida's ambitions a century ago are now replaced with breakneck internet and improved social equality, and I can only imagine how far Ida's adventurous spirit would have taken her now.
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| RIP Ida Epstein. Link: FindAGrave.com |
Questions? Comments? Please email me at ruedafingerhut [at] gmail.com
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