Behind the Scenes
Finding Norman Jacobs
Heartbreak and Mystery
The letters, diary, and photo books of the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway collection were donated to the APS in 2009 by Dr. Ellen Lehman. Conservation and processing of the collection was supported by a monetary donation from Dr. Lehman.
Processing the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway collection involved cataloging the materials, performing conservation work, and scanning the originals.
The letters are relatively straightforward. In some places, the handwriting is less than clear, but since the letters are little over a century old, the style of writing is easily recognizable. Words written in pencil have smudged and faded over the years. But generally speaking, they are quite legible. Most are dated, and with only a couple of exceptions a date can be reasonably inferred where it is not explicitly stated.
Assigning dates to undated letters is a matter of close reading and familiarity with the other items in the collection. Taken together, the letters map Norman Jacobs’s movements, so the inclusion of a return address can also point to a date. A reference to the “month of strawberries” implies a June date.
The conservation department cleaned the letters and built new boxes to house the photographs. The two photo books include handwritten descriptive notes about the pictures, which were produced using a variety of processes. Both of the photo albums were in pretty poor condition. The pages were tattered and torn, and the binding was unable to be salvaged. Because the pages had handwritten notations for many of the photographs as well as decorative embellishments, it was important that they be kept. The albums were unbound, and each page was interleaved with non-buffered tissue. Since the albums were now in loose sheets, a wrapper was made to hold them together, and then a clamshell box was made for each album. The original covers were ultrasonically encapsulated, and the original ties used for binding were included in the boxes.
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Since the letters were written on a variety of papers and in different media over the years, they required different courses of action. All were surfaced cleaned with eraser crumbs grated to increasingly finer grain. Letters written in graphite pencil were then ready to have corner folds relaxed and tears repaired with Japanese paper and wheat starch paste. The thin but strong Japanese papers were toned to match the colors of the original papers.
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Photographs and letters were scanned at high resolution using a flatbed scanner. The resulting images were not merely used for the online exhibit, but incorporated as part of the finding aid. Though the original materials are available for researchers’ use, anyone with access to the Internet can view high quality images of the entire collection.
Initially, we had very little information about the writer of the letters. We only knew that the letters and photographs had been in the possession of the donor’s grandmother, Bessie Anathan, and that there were references to the building of the railroad and encounters with First Nations peoples.
.thumbnail.jpg "Norman Jacobs")
[9]Our first research breakthrough was an answer to a very basic question: Who wrote the letters? A lighthearted photograph of soles with the letters “N” and “J” and the writer’s self-directed advice to “Buck up, Jacob!” offered hints. A return address, buried in the text of one letter, confirmed the writer’s name: Norman Jacobs.
Now we knew who we were looking for. The next stage of research involved tools familiar to genealogists: birth certificates, census data, and travel records. We established that Norman Leonard Jacobs had been born in Bath, England in 1885, that his parents were named Isaiah and Josephine, and that he had two younger sisters, Ruth and Dorothea. We were able to map out the family’s travels, unearthed references to a maternal grandfather serving as Chazan of the Great Synagogue of London, and traced the descendants of Ruth and Dorothea. We discovered that Ruth had a successful career as a journalist and poet, writing under the names “Sheila Rand” and “Wilhelmina Stitch.” We saw the Jacobs family “wanderlust” end with Dorothea, who settled permanently in Milwaukee.
Conspicuously absent in our research were any references to Norman Jacobs himself. The latest reference, discovered in an online search, was in 1913. His sister Ruth’s 1936 obituary in the Winnipeg Free Press made reference to many other members of her family—grandfather, parents, sister, husbands, son, and grandchild—but said nothing about the existence of a brother. This raises questions about whether Jacobs had predeceased his sister by a significant period of time or if he had become estranged from his family.
Thanks to an oral history from 1975, Bessie Frank Anathan—-the silent half of the conversation represented by Jacobs’s letters—does speak in her own voice, albeit at a significant remove from the time of her correspondence.[44] [10] She describes her family history, growing up in Pittsburgh, a whirlwind courtship in 1913, and her community and philanthropic work for the Crippled Children’s Home, Irene Kaufmann Settlement, the National Conference of Christians and Jews (now the National Conference for Community and Justice), Planned Parenthood, Montefiore Hospital, and Anathan House. But events six decades and thirteen hundred miles away still resonated: the disappearance of Jacobs was one of the “great tragedies” of her life.
Bessie Anathan provided tantalizing hints about Jacobs’s activities. She spoke of a boyfriend who worked on the railroad in Canada and proposed marriage. She declined and he subsequently proposed to another woman (“whom I knew he didn’t love”). After the engagement was announced, Jacobs returned to Canada and “lost himself somehow.” His father and uncle mobilized a search, hiring detectives, but Jacobs was never found.
This account provides a useful sketch of a few years in Jacobs’s life. Given the 1910 date of the final letter to Bessie Anathan, in which Jacobs declared his intention to return to Pittsburgh, and the 1913 reference which placed him in Canada, we had a narrow window to look for other evidence of romantic entanglements. In a September 1911 issue of The Jewish Criterion we found an announcement of his engagement to Flora Baer, a Germantown resident and former Pittsburgher. Discovering the name of his fiancée did not bring us any closer to learning Jacobs’s ultimate fate, but was viscerally satisfying.
The 1913 reference was to a Manitoba court case, a follow-up to an earlier case in which Jacobs, along with his partner in a company contracted by the railroad, were successfully sued. (Was it related to the labor issues plaguing the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway, or a more mundane contractual dispute? Unfortunately, the county court records from that time period no longer exist, so the details of the original lawsuit are unclear.) Presumably contemporary investigators would have learned about the business and legal problems, and while Bessie Anathan might not have learned anything of Jacobs’s life after 1911, it is quite reasonable to assume that his family did.
Was he effectively disowned? Did the broken engagement rouse familial disapproval? Did he die in some mishap in the field? Or did he wish to make a complete break with his old life? London was oppressive. Pittsburgh, which he had happily left years before, was now a site of great disappointment. But Jacobs had written with great fondness and enthusiasm of the Western wilderness. Might Bessie Anathan’s words—“he lost himself somehow”—correctly reflect a conscious choice?
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