Story behind the picture: Philip Abrams and family

The Abrams family, ca. 1902

I first started working on my genealogy three years ago this summer. I had set out to answer so many questions, yet one came first and foremost: what happened to my grandmother's grandfather?

His name was Philip Abrams, and the last time anyone had heard from him was 1911. I am lucky in a sense: I still have my grandmother to answer questions, and being the sharp-as-a-tack lady she is (our surname is Needle, after all) she can generally answer any questions I ask her about the family. Yet Philip Abrams remained a mystery. The story always went that he left, and the responsibility to be "man of the house" was left to my great-grandfather, Samuel Abrams. On top of all this, his mother, Sara Holmes Abrams, was a "shrew", and three of the six children would eventually leave her. Thus, my great-grandfather left home in 1914 to go to war in England, and he never saw his father again.

I had a few clues to work with. First off, my granduncle David was born in 1935, and he was named for Philip: those familiar with Judaism know that one cannot be named after a living person. I had a certain inkling that Philip had died prior to this point, as my great-grandparents wouldn't have defied Jewish custom and named a child after a living person. 

My second clue came in a more corporeal form: my great-grandaunt Ruth Abrams, the wife of Philip's youngest son, George. Ruth was much younger than her husband, and he was the youngest of all six children, thus I was provided with a unique opportunity. Ruth also happened to be one of the kindest and most helpful people I have ever met: she immediately mailed me documents and pictures, including a marriage certificate that was issued "January 22, 1922". I hadn't a clue why anyone would have needed a marriage certificate at this point, especially since the marriage had occurred in the 1890s: it was that of Philip and Sara Abrams. I assumed that the death was near this point, and that the marriage certificate was issued for proving kinship upon a death. I checked with the Norfolk County Probate court, but all I found was a bitter 1913 abandonment case entitled "Abrams v. Abrams" in which Philip could not be located.

Clue number three was the most evident, yet took me a while to uncover - Randolph, MA city directories. The listings began calling my great-great grandmother "Sara Abrams, wid. Philip" in 1922. This was the icing on my familial cake. Philip Abrams most likely died around 1921-1922, and in what seemed like a stab in the dark, I found him.

Philip Abrams grave, Riverside Cemetery, NJ

Philip died December 29, 1921 in Manhattan. It's been 89 years since my grandmother's grandfather died, and any hope of learning more about this mysterious progenitor is long gone. Yet there was still one thing I needed to find: I wanted to know what Philip Abrams, a man who had graced my thoughts for so long, looked like. Nobody in my family had ever known him, and as far as my grandmother knew, there was only one picture that had been lost for years. Nonetheless, on my birthday last year (which has always been located conveniently at the end of the spring-cleaning season) I was given the best gift I could have imagined: the subject of this post.