“Surprise” is the theme for Week 39 of 2023’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my 3rd great-grandfather, Jacob Wolf, and accidentally uncovered a surprising newspaper article. I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. I think Jacob and his second wife, Clara Dorre, may have abandoned a baby!
The family lived in New York, and since "Jacob Wolf" is an incredibly common name, I figured it was pointless to search newspapers outside of New York. I was searching papers for one of his sons in Massachusetts and mistakenly hit "enter" before I changed the name, and BAM -- up popped this Boston Herald article from March 23, 1850.
Child Found. Last evening about half an hour after the arrival of the Worcester train, a child was found in the water closet of the ladies’ room in the Worcester Depot. It was lying quietly sleeping in a band box, in which it had been placed by its mother. On examining its clothes, a card was found in its sleeve on which was written, “Jacob Wolf, cabinet maker, Brooklyn, N.Y.” It is a boy, and probably five or six weeks old. A band box containing the clothes of the mother was also found there, which probably had been left by accident; the box contained a letter which was a correspondence between the parents, and rendered it certain that the parties were married. The woman came from New York, as was ascertained by the check attached to the band box found at the depot.
A temporary home was provided for it at an asylum on Albany street. There were several who wished to adopt the child.
The letter is at the Marshal’s office. Since the demand for babies is so great, we would suggest that Mrs. Wolf would send on a few more of the same sort.
If this baby was the son of Jacob and Clara, they were married no more than a year and some change at his birth. Jacob’s first wife, Julianna, died in December of 1848. This child was born around the end of January or beginning of February of 1850. It wasn’t unusual for a man to marry soon after his wife’s passing – especially if he had young children at home. Jacob, age 50, and Clara, age 35, appear together on the 1850 census, residing in Kings, Brooklyn, New York with Jacob’s sons, Conrad (17), Jacob (16), Philip (14), Ferdinand (10), and Charles (9). The census was conducted on September 4, 1850, which was months after the baby was found.
To my knowledge, Jacob and Clara never had children together, which I always found odd since she was only 35 when she married. I chalked it up to fertility issues. There were no new children on the 1855 or 1865 New York State Census. The only mystery child is a Bertha Wolf, age 11, found with the couple on the 1860 US Census, but as she doesn’t appear elsewhere and I can find no birth or death records for her, I don’t believe she was their child. Perhaps she was a niece, or even a friend incorrectly given the surname Wolf by the census taker. When Clara died in 1879, the majority of her estate was left to Jacob’s sons, Jacob Jr. and Charles Wolf, and she named Charles executor. As executor, he sought out blood relatives of Clara, running ads in the newspaper, but none came forward. Her probate records state that she died with no known living children, grandchildren, parents, siblings, nieces, or nephews.
I searched for additional information about this child and found only one other article of substance. This was published in the Boston Courier two days after the baby’s discovery on March 25, 1850:
A CHILD ABANDONED. On Friday evening, one of the men employed at the Worcester Depot, heard the wail of an infant in one of the closets of the building, and went to the spot, where he found a male infant six weeks or two months old, in a band-box. The cover of the band-box had been taken off, and placed crosswise upon the top. A woman with two band-boxes resembling that in which the infant was found, arrived in the Albany evening train, with a child in her arms. The child was taken to the “Temporary Home,” in Albany street.
The first article indicates that the names in the letter match the business card on the baby, as the author makes that flippant remark at the end asking Mrs. Wolf to send along more babies. What did the letter between the parents say? Was the father even my Jacob Wolf? Many tradesmen immigrated from Germany to New York, so there could have been a second Jacob Wolf, cabinet maker from Brooklyn, though I haven’t come across one in my research. If it was my Jacob Wolf, why did Clara abandon this baby? Were they experiencing financial difficulties at the time? Was Clara plagued by post-partem depression? And what became of this little boy, abandoned in the ladies’ room of the Worcester train depot? Was he adopted into a loving home? Did he live to adulthood and have children? I’m completely invested in this mystery now and I’m dying to know all the details!
So far, I've been unable to find any information about an orphanage on Albany St. in Worcester in 1850. I’ve reached out to the Worcester Historical Society in hopes that they have some information about the orphanage or maybe even additional details about this story. Maybe the letter or the business card survived; historical societies are often the final home of all kinds of ephemera. I’ll write an update if I hear back from them with anything helpful.
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