Laura and Ruth Move Forward Together

Great grandmother Laura Sechler was forty years old with seven week-old daughter Ruth when they lost husband/father George in April 1907. In the years to follow, chaos and public spectacle would give way to a new everyday life as the pair adapted to their situation.

The 1910 Census shows that Laura moved back to her family home in Bushwick / Stuyvesant Heights, Brooklyn, giving up the home she had shared with George in downtown Brooklyn. The census names Laura and daughter Ruth living in the home with parents John and Eliza Wright, as well as Laura’s 31 year old sister, Ada.

The New York theater benefit performances had earned $23,000 in support of the families of officers Sechler and Sellick. The effort was quickly bogged-down in legal challenges because Sellick had no immediate family, only distant relatives making claims against the funds. Laura was given half the money within the first year. The legal wrangling went on for nearly three years, but Laura was eventually given the other half.

$23,000 in 1907 would be worth about $600,000 today. It was a significant amount of money but, divided over a 20 year period, would need to be supplemented to sustain the pair through Ruth’s childhood. Records show that they lived in at least four places through the late 1920’s, all in the same neighborhood. Census records generally list Laura as a “housekeeper” which may mean that she worked for other families, but it may just reflect the way to which women’s occupations were usually referred during that era.

Photography was just becoming accessible to the mass market around 1910, and Laura took advantage of the new technology, leaving us several photographs of Ruth as a toddler.

A photo of Ruth on a picnic with an unknown dog is particularly intriguing. From the estimated age of the baby and the leafless state of the trees, the picture must have been taken in early Spring 1908 (possibly 1909), one year (or two) after Georgeʼs death. It may be in a park in Brooklyn, or in Connecticut (where Laura still had family) or perhaps in Danville on a return visit to the family.

One photo of Laura and Ruth together captures their situation perfectly. The photo was found in the family home in Redlands, which is still owned by our cousin Chris. A professional portrait (as indicated by the fade effect at the bottom), it must have been taken around 1910, judging from the age of Ruth. This would have been about the time that legal processes had drawn to a close and New York was moving-on, leaving the family to resume normal life.

A lot of preparation went into this pose, down to the ring on Ruth’s middle finger. It speaks to mother and daughter being ready to face the world together, the bond between them unbreakable. Laura and Ruth would remain inseparable for the next 35 years, their caretaking roles eventually switching. According to Mom, Laura never spoke of the events of 1907.

Over the next decade, Laura and Ruth faded into routine life, their days of newspaper headlines behind them. A 1911 note in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle lists Ruth participating in her preschool Christmas pageant.

By 1915 Laura and Ruth lived alone, according to the New York State Census. Laura’s father, John Wright, had died in 1914. Her mother Eliza had moved in with her daughter Ada and her husband William Hellmund.

Laura must have had to deal with the flu epidemic of 1918-1919, although less serious in New York than in Philadelphia and Boston.

By 1925 Ruth, at age 18, was working as a telephone operator the (family story being that she was an international telephone operator, able to deal with calls in multiple languages).

In 1925 the two lived at 987 Hancock Street, one block southwest of the Bushwick Avenue Baptist Church, the next convergence point in this branch of our family history. We will continue this part of the story in a future post.

A final note: Laura’s affinity for photography may be related to the drawing of George Sechler, the only image I have of him. I do not know the source of the drawing, only that it appears in the NYPD officers’ memorial web pages. There are no similar sketches for other officers of the era, so this was not something that was normally done. Newspaper photos were not common either, during the early 1900s–big newspapers had photo sections perhaps once a week and were almost exclusively devoted to high society.

My theory is that when George became a police officer in 1905, photography not quite yet being accessible to the middle class, Laura arranged for a sketch to be made of him in his new uniform, perhaps enlisting a paid artist or an artistic friend or family member. The corner of some kind of wall hanging appearing in the upper right suggests that he was sitting at home.