A Genealogy Tribute to New York City
Last night, the New York Knicks won their first NBA Championship during my lifetime. I was born in Hartford, Connecticut, 90 miles away from New York City, but New York has always been another home for me and I am filled with joy and pride. I believe New York is the greatest city in the world, not because of attractions like Times Square or the Statue of Liberty, but because of the uniqueness of the culture created by New York natives. As I reflect on my love for the city, I think about my mother and grandmother, who also made New York their home during their young lives. Throughout my genealogical journey, I have discovered that my family’s association to NYC goes all the way back to my great-great grandmother’s generation. I did not fully understand this connection until the 1950 census was released in 2022, which coincided with the digitization and publication of NYC Vital Records.
My grandmother in New York in the early 1940s. Photo restored by Olivia Jenkins.
In 2016, I began interrogating my grandmother about her family and verifying her answers with painstaking research. She often claimed to have no family other than her children, but eventually she let it slip that she had an uncle in New York named Bernice McClendon. She had no photos of him and couldn’t quite remember what happened to him, or if he had a wife or children, but she knew that was her mother’s brother. Her lack of connection to Bernice was not surprising to me at that time, since I had just uncovered what happened to his mother, Chesta Anna. Read about Chesta Anna here.
In 2017, I realized that DNA tests could be used to find family members and I asked my mother if she would take one. Within a month of her results coming back, I had connected with Uncle Bernice’s daughters in Queens, NY. One of them was my mother’s closest DNA match at that time. Since then, I have visited them in New York many times and they have also traveled to New England to visit us. They are about the same age as my mom and her siblings, even though they are my grandmother’s first cousins. This means Uncle Bernice’s whereabouts were still unaccounted for in between the death of his mother in 1921 and the birth of his daughters in the mid-1950s!
Enter: Aunt Eva. In 2016, my grandmother told me that her Aunt Eva paid for her bus ticket to come up north. She stayed with Aunt Eva in Harlem. My mother remembered Aunt Eva and told me that her last name was Bass. I found Eva Bass on the 1940 census living at 2570 7th Ave, but I could not figure out how this was her aunt. According to my mother and my grandmother, Eva was not the sister of my great-grandmother, but the sister of my great-great-grandmother! The Eva Bass I found on the census was the same age as my great-grandmother, so I didn’t really understand. At this time, I did not know Chesta Anna’s name or that she was the oldest of 14 children, so I was at a loss. I found no Eva in Blakely, Georgia that could’ve been Aunt Eva as a little girl. Eventually, I discovered Chesta Anna’s name and that she had a sister enumerated as Erie and Era on the 1910 and 1920 censuses, respectively. Era is Eva.
Eva Reynolds Bass (1908-1997) sent this photo to her niece, Annie Mae McLendon Hill (1909-2001), in 1996.
Aunt Eva was the key to understanding my family’s origin story in the tri-state area. Following her has led me to many of my other relatives. She served as the next-of-kin for nearly all descendants of her parents, Ben and Mary Reynolds. This includes her nephew (who was older than her), Bernice McClendon. His 1940 WWII draft card has his name spelled incorrectly and someone else’s birthday, but it also shows an aunt named Eva living at 2570 7th Ave.
This proves that my Uncle Bernice was in New York by 1940. He was living in the borough of Brooklyn, which is also where his children knew him to live. It also proves that the young 32-year-old woman on the 1940 census is truly my aunt… my great-great-grandaunt! Eva was also enumerated on that census with a sister, Louise King. I knew that she must also be my aunt, but it was difficult to find anyone that remembered her. When the 1950 census was released, I saw that Aunt Eva had moved to 525 W 156th, and she was living with her son, daughter-in-law, and grandson, but no sister Louise. I also found Uncle Bernice in 1950, and to my surprise, he was in the Bronx! I had only associated him with Brooklyn, which might as well be a different country (even though it is just another Borough of New York City). Even more shocking was that he was enumerated with a wife from CUBA (an actual different country), and he was living in the same building as his mother’s brother, Sylvester Reynolds!
Uncle Bernice and Uncle Sylvester were living at 1251 Brook Ave in the Bronx.
Until this point, I never knew Uncle Sylvester lived in New York. However, he was the first member of the Reynolds Family to migrate north, settling in the Newark area around 1917. I immediately called his granddaughter, Joyce Reynolds Jones, to find out if she knew anything about this. Joyce was born in 1942, and she was able to confirm for me that her grandfather was living in the Bronx when he died in 1958. She remembered Uncle Bernice living in his building (and she was raised calling him Uncle Bernice, even though he was her cousin). She wasn’t familiar with Mattliene McClendon, the Cuban wife, but she remembered Uncle Bernice having a separate girlfriend in the building named Dorothy (he married her 23 years later). I was also able to locate Joyce on the 1950 census, and she was living in Brooklyn, where I expected Bernice to be. I mentioned that to her and she pointed out that she was living in Marcy Projects. As a hip-hop fan, I was surprised that I hadn’t noticed the address of that census record: my cousins lived where Jay-Z was from. Marcy had just been completed in 1949, so actually, my cousins were one of the first families to live in Marcy, 20 years prior to Jay-Z’s birth. Cousin Joyce passed away a few months after this conversation and I am forever grateful that we spoke that day.
Around the time of the 1950 census being released, NYC published scans of their vital records through 1949 online for free. This has been one of the most important releases in my genealogy journey. I pulled up the marriage license for James Bass, Aunt Eva’s son, and found two very interesting witnesses. The first was John Reynolds, Uncle Sylvester’s son, and Cousin Joyce’s father. He wrote that his address was 1251 Brook Avenue, the same building that Bernice and Sylvester were living in on the 1950 census. This marriage record is from 1948, before Marcy was finished. The second witness was James Redden, a name I had never heard of. But I knew his address: 2570 7th Avenue.
James Redden was living in the same building that Aunt Eva and Aunt Louise were living in on the 1940 census, and likely where my grandmother lived too. I searched for James Redden on the 1950 census and found that he was married to a woman named Louise. Investigation later turned up a 1943 marriage record between James Redden and a woman claiming her maiden name was Louise Rose King. The license says she was born in Blakely, Georgia, and that her parents were “Bennie Reynolds King” and Mary Mason. Louise found an effective way to ignore the existence of her first husband and still let me know she was truly my aunt.
I still have not found Louise in the 1930 census, or the identity of her King husband. Her 1986 death record in Key West, Florida was already saved in my digital shoebox. Aunt Eva’s grandson told me she died there, so I had looked at anybody named Louise who died in Monroe County, Florida. Verification of her other married name was the push I needed to purchase her death certificate from The State of Florida. I was hoping the informant on it was still alive and able to provide photographs. Unfortunately, the informant was Aunt Eva, all the way in Harlem. I hope Aunt Louise had loved ones near her while she was transitioning. Louise probably came to Key West initially to follow her brother, Robert Reynolds, who listed her as his next-of-kin on his 1940 draft card.
From the records I had, I assumed Uncle Robert was a Florida person, but once again, I was proven wrong by the 1950 census. After searching for him unsuccessfully in Florida and Georgia, I gave up. While looking for more family members on Brook Ave in the Bronx, I found someone enumerated as Robert Reynolds. It was him, living on the same block as his brother and nephew. I later found newspaper articles describing when he and his wife at the time moved from New York City to her native Key West in 1953. This means that on one census record, four of my great-great-grandmother’s siblings from Blakely, Georgia were living within a two-mile radius in New York, as well as her own son. Ben and Mary Reynolds had 14 children, but only five were still alive in 1950. This completely changed the narrative of Chesta Anna’s legacy to me. In my head, after her death, her family was fractured forever. But this is proof that they found each other again, in the greatest city in the world, and there is a record of them staying in touch 30 years after the tragedies in Blakely.
Bernice, Robert, and Louise are still missing from the 1930 census, but hopefully they were somewhere together. Sylvester and Eva were found, living together on Hillside Place in Newark, New Jersey. Newark is less than 10 miles outside of NYC and certainly a part of the same region, although the cultures are a bit different. I assumed that Sylvester brought his baby sister up from the south after their mother died, until his grandson showed up at my door one day with some records he wanted to show me. I never knew exactly when Sylvester’s mother (my great-great-great-grandmother), Mary Mason Reynolds, died. I knew she was involved in a shooting in 1920, and it was not clear if she survived. But Sylvester’s grandson brought me pages from the Family Bible of Anna Flanagan Reynolds stating that Mrs. Mary Reynolds died on December 30th, 1925. Sylvester and Anna (his wife) were already in Newark by then, so this record was a clue that my 3x-great grandmother died in New Jersey, not in Georgia.
Knowing that Eva was living with Sylvester in 1930, it made sense that their mother would have been brought into his home too. However, Eva gave birth to her son James in Georgia, in 1925, so this timeline was troubling to me. Would Mary have left her teenage daughter in Georgia? Robert and Louise were very young too. I was still missing a part of this story. The death certificate of Mary Reynolds answered those questions for me. Her address was not the same as Sylvester’s. She was living in a separate residence, and had only lived in the city for six months. Since she died in December and James Bass was born in February, that leaves plenty of time for Eva to give birth, recover, and move to Newark with her mother, a four-month-old, and her siblings.
The discovery of Mary Reynolds’ death record was exciting for many reasons. It confirmed that her mother was Francis Terrell Hanks, which I already knew thanks to genetic genealogy and circumstantial evidence, but it is so much easier to prove when a record simply names the mother. The record also means that six generations of my family have lived in the New York metropolitan area, even if only for a few months. It is wild to know that I have a direct ancestor that moved to this area 101 years ago. As far as the borough of Manhattan, which is what most of us mean when we say “New York”, Eva Bass was the first member of the family to move there. Her 1936 voter registration says she has been a resident of Harlem for six years, placing her arrival in 1930, within months of her only enumeration in Newark.
This is a photograph of 2570 7th Avenue, where several members of my family lived. Each building in New York City was photographed in the 1940s.
My family has lived in New York City for about 96 years, and it brings me so much joy to know this information. The city has always been important to me, but now it has new meaning far beyond my Knicks and Yankees caps. Below are some great NYC databases for other researchers. Congrats to the Knicks!
