Even as one of the first direct-line ancestors handed to me in copies of old clippings when I took an interest in genealogy, my great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Krauss Loop has become something of an enigma in my family tree.

Photo credit: © Sinelnikov | Dreamstime.com

Partly true family stories

The first interesting fact I learned about Elizabeth Krauss was that she was a twin. However, once I started digging, that “fact” turned out to be false. In actuality, the twins were her brother and sister, Charles and Louisa, born in October 1891.

That’s a simple enough misunderstanding, especially considering the second thing I knew about her: she was deaf. However, I don’t know if she was completely or just mostly deaf, and I don’t know if she was always deaf, or became so later in life. The 1910 census asks whether a person is “deaf and dumb,” but the space is not marked on Elizabeth’s entry.

Just the facts?

Family stories describe her no-good husband. Newspaper accounts make it all too clear that she was a battered woman. She raised three children, Evelyn, Mildred, and Richard, and lost three babies, Milo, Ernest, and Annabel.

I knew all this when I discovered something I did not know.

At age 17, Elizabeth had a job.

Workin’ girl–but doing what?

I learned this fascinating fact from the 1905 New York State census. The tight, left-slanting penmanship of the enumerator is difficult to read, and making out Elizabeth’s occupation proved a challenge. It looked like “Gemm examiner,” whatever that meant.

A search for a gem factory in Hornellsville history came up blank, so I returned to the record to see if looking at other entries could help me decipher the difficult handwriting.

I found two other young ladies on the same page who were “Gemm makers” and one young man who was a “Gemm cuter.”

Realizing that at the time, a man might keep his job until he retired and a woman would be more likely to leave her job when she married, I decided to see if I could find that “Gemm cuter” in later records, and that is how I solved this mystery.

Fredrick Phillipson appears in the 1915 NYS census where I first found him listed as as “cutter (silk mill).” In the 1910 Federal Census, his occupation is “Glove Cutter” at the “Glove Factory.”

Bingo.

Mystery solved

Returning to Elizabeth, I could totally see “Glove examiner,” written there once I knew what I was looking at. The Merrill Fabric Glove Company manufactured silk gloves and mitts. It makes sense that young ladies in 1905 would be employed there.

“Over 400 persons are employed in the Merrill glove factory at Hornellsville.”
-from The Whitesville News, March 3, 1904. See a historic postcard picture of the factory here.

Knowing that Elizabeth had a hard life, it’s a little pleasing and a little sad to think of her at seventeen, working and earning her own money, the whole world in the palm of her silk-gloved hand.

Your Turn

Do you have family stories that turned out to be only partly true?