hello everybody I am Jarrett Ross the GeneaVlogger and on today's vlog I
will be discussing how I was able to identify people from an old Film. are
an amazing view into the past and something that people really treasure
and especially genealogists when you're doing family history research and you
find a photograph of your ancestor or relatives it can really be an emotional
experience and especially when you're able to find multiple photographs
showing somebody throughout their life there are even professional genealogists
who specialized in analyzing photographs not only helping people identify who is
in the photo but helping squeeze up all sorts of information you may not have
been able to know otherwise but something even better than finding
photos are finding videos I've been lucky in my own experience having
relatives send me all sorts of videos, from super 8 film shot by my grandfather
to videos of my cousin interviewing my great-grandmother as well as his mother
and a lot of other relatives. Film can be really intriguing even when it's not
about your own family, especially when you're looking at film that's back to
the early 1900s. It's really intriguing to see how life was not that long ago
but it was so different so when I found this video that was uploaded to YouTube
by guy Jones it was a 1911 video shot by a Swedish
team depicting just everyday life and they were shooting in New York City and
there were all these different scenes and it was just really intriguing and as
I watched it there were just all sorts of thoughts going through my head. Were any
of the people in this video relatives of mine? Or even ancestors of mine? What
happened to all of these people? And did they even realize that they were going
to end up being immortalized in this
video? And people over a hundred years later we're going to be watching them as
they were just going about their lives. And as I'm watching this video all of a
sudden it cuts to this scene on the streets of New York and it seems that
the video is now set up on the back of either a car or a wagon of some sort and
it's shooting the traffic behind it and clear as day you can see this very
well-to-do family in a car with a chauffeur and you can see their license
plate and I was just thinking... could we actually name these people? If we have
the license plate, there couldn't have been that many cars in 1911 and there
has to have been some sort of registration for cars if they're having
license plates so could we actually find these people and so I began to search
the first thing to do was to learn about licenses being issued in New York in
1911 or earlier I'd found statistics from the Federal Highway Administration
that showed that 1911 there were eighty one thousand three hundred and seventy
automobiles registered in New York so I'm looking at more information I found
that license plate registration was actually published publicly in different
newspapers and magazines and from that information I was able to find this page
automobile owners of Brooklyn and Long Island in the Brooklyn Life magazine
from July 1st 1911 and this shows that license plate six five four six five was
a new car registered on June 12th 1911 it was an EMF registered to mrs. F LA
quits of five four eight eighth Street so this
is a whole lot of information to go off of we've got a name we got an address we
even have the type of car that they had so from there I looked in the EMF and
they were an automobile manufacturer who had manufactured cars in the early
1900's and in looking at all the different models they had I found one
that seemed to match up perfectly and that was the 1911 EMF model 30
touring-car that this made sense being that the license plate registration said
that this was a new car so bought in 1911 it was the 1911 model and just
looking at a picture side by side it looks exactly the same you have all
these different little features that are matching up perfectly so the car is
matching up so from here let's try to find out who's mrs. F la quits at 5:00
for 18th Street so the first place that I really want to look is the 1910 census
being that it's only a year earlier than this registration in the video so we
have a high likelihood that the Lockwood's family is still living at
five four eight eighth Street in 1910 and a quick search quickly turns up the
lock oh it's family living at five four eight eighth Street now the household
consisted of six people that included Florian Lockwood's who was the head of
the household his wife who's listed as in Tony la quits three of their children
and then a servant Mary Moriarty looking at the information from the 1910 census
and then looking at the people who were in the car from the 1911 video it looks
like we can match everyone up pretty easily so then the front passenger seat
is Florian la quits and sitting in his lap is either his daughter Elsie or
Emily and I think the girl in his lap looks a little bit older than the one in
the back seat so I'm guessing this is Emily in the front seat with Florian
then in the back we have Antoinette and she is holding the children Francis and
likely all see or though possibly Emily and then sitting next to her is possibly
the servant Mary Moriarty now for Mary the census shows her as 25 and 1910 so
she would have been about 26 when the video was taken and I really don't think
she looks 26 but it's really hard to tell so it is possible that it's her
although it could be another servant it could be a different relative over
out any photographs of what Mary actually looked like it's really hard to
tell now unfortunately either didn't seem to be any information that would
show us who the chauffeur was and I was really hoping to figure that out because
he really seems to be enjoying being on video and he can really kind of get an
idea that this guy had a really jovial personality but everything that I looked
at in Lockwood's family there wasn't anything that talked about I chauffeur
or any sort of servants or Butler's who were african-american but now that we
had the names of the family I really wanted to learn a lot more about them
Florian was born in Posen Poland in 1871 and immigrated to the United States at
the age of 19 in 1890 his wife Antoinette who was born
Antoinette laccoliths was a cousin of Florian's
although I haven't been able to figure out exactly how they were related
Antoinette was actually born in New York and her father Constantine la quits and
immigrated the u.s. in 1864 being that Antoinette's father constantine had come
over in 1864 it's very possible that he had actually come to the u.s. because he
was escaping the aftermath from the January uprisings the January uprising
was a Polish insurrection against the Russians which had started in January of
1863 it lasted over a year and ended right around the spring of 1864 as the
uprising was being squashed in 1864 a lot of the resistance fighters who were
fighting against Russia started to flee and many of them went to the United
States but by the time florian arrived in New York in 1890 Constantine was
already fairly well set up and was working as a cobbler and had many
children including his daughter Antoinette it's not known when Florine
and Antoinette met but based on the documentation they were likely married
by 1895 Florian worked as a barber and built up a really big reputation because
one of his patrons was JP Morgan Florian began to open up a lot of shops
and was even able to open up a shop in the Wolves worth building in New York
City not only was Florian are well-to-do businessman but he also was in a lot of
different social societies I was in a lot of different committees for the
public as well in fact just days before his death in 1918 he was elected to the
streets committee for the South Brooklyn Board of Trade before he died in 1918
they were about a dozen different newspapers that ran an obituary about
him when Florian died he Nance when that had five children one child had been
born in 1911 just months after the video was taken so in that video Antoinette is
actually pregnant and then they had another child in 1918 just before
Florian died after poor Ian died the family still stayed at 5:48
eighth Street which is actually a really nice brownstone home that still exists
today the same building and in looking at records of the building it was just
recently sold in 2017 I was also able to find some information from a relative
who had posted about how his aunt Nettie who is Antoinette had kept at the
barbershop businesses running even after Florian died and his relatives said that
while a lot of these shops were lost during the Depression they were still
able to hang on to at least the one in the walls worth building and Antoinette
had run that until at least 1950s Florian was definitely very well-to-do
man for his time and just looking at that video of the family you can tell
that they really were well-to-do but in looking at his woe from 1918 we can
actually see that when he died just seven years after that video was taken
his estate was worth $70,000 which today roughly translates to about 1.2
million dollars. Thank you so much for checking out this video if you enjoyed
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