The Mayors of New York City need your help!

Question

Announcing the New York City Mayors Challenge!

The WikiTree free-space page List of New York City Mayors is an amazing collection of information. It was created back in 2009 but we noticed that many of the mayors still lack profiles, and some of the profiles that do exist could benefit from improvements.

To remedy that we decided to have a New York City Mayors Challenge!

You can participate in 3 ways:

1. creating profiles for Mayors not on WikiTree yet,
2. improving the profiles that already exist, or
3. getting the unconnected Mayors connected to our Tree.

To see more details and/or join in the fun go here.

Thank you for helping!

Comments

There was another head honcho of consumer affairs in New York City that I remember.  After writing a very successful book about a badly flawed car, he was hired by the mayor at that time, then parlayed that position into a national consumer affairs title and later even had an abortive run for President - that was Ralph Nader.

---

Trivia Question: The mayor of Chicago used to be called "da Mare" - but which Mayor of New York City was first called "Hizoner" (corrupted version of His Honor - for those who never lived in New York) ????

it would go back a long time.

---

I remember, Wagner, Lindsey, Koch, Giuliani

after that...

---

I think it was Robert Wagner, but can't be absolutely sure.  Actually, I think they were all called that - it was simply the NY pronunciation of the title accorded to that office.

For another piece of trivia, I believe the phrase "smoke filled room" came from the days of Tammany Hall, the corrupt political machine that pretty much controlled who would be the mayor.

---

My husbands grandfather was Joseph V McKee!  I will be delighted to add to the profile.

---

That's wonderful, Denise. I bet you will connect him to the tree, too. 

---

I see that he's connected now! (And he has a photo...)

---

Hello, my name is Julie Howell, question, earlier this year I came across my great grandfathers WWll registration card, listed as his occupation: "Borough President" the borough president office- "161 St. and GR. Concourse Bronx, New York." What is a borough President, is this an official government position or is it a local chapter, like a Moose Logde or a Union Chapter?

______________________________________________

Name; Emilio Toro

Residence; 2136 Amsterdam Ave. N.Y.C, NY

Age: 50

Birth date: April 5, 1892 Utuado, Porto Rico (Puerto Rico)

Relative Name and Address: Antonia Toro-161 St. Amst. Ave. and GR.Concourse, BX, NY.(Bronx,NY).

______________________________________________

Thank you,

Julie HOWELL

"United States World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1942," database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HT-XX67-K3Y?cc=1861144&wc=SPQ5-2NL%3A169095001 : 7 April 2016), 004126359 > image 1015 of 6248. Citing NARA microfilm publications M1936, M1937, M1939, M1951, M1962, M1964, M1986, M2090, and M2097 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.).

---

Julie, think of the boroughs of New York City as the five counties that make up the City. Each borough has an elected borough president who is the highest elected official of that borough sort of like a mayor of the borough. The office of the Bronx Borough President is still located on Grand Concourse. http://bronxboropres.nyc.gov/

---

The post above is as good an explanation as there is....

Each county in New York State has a County Executive, except the 5 boroughs of New York City, they have a borough president.

AND, at one time Brooklyn, now a borough, was the 4th largest city in the U.S. before it was folded into New York City along with the other 4 county/boroughs.My G-Grandfather James Lamberton was a roads inspector for the City of Brooklyn before he died.

rsl

Answer 1

I did not realize La Guardia's Holocaust connection

https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/La_Guardia-9

a few profiles for the Holocaust Project - his sister and brother-in-law

Comments

Thanks for your efforts to connect him. He may not be connected yet, but you have a very interesting assemblage of relatives!

---

Congratulations on connecting Fiorello LaGuardia!!! Not only does he have his name on an airport that connects to the world's cities (although it's now mostly for domestic flights), but now he's also connected to our world tree.

It's interested to see the diversity of the nationalities he's connected to at a relatively short relationship distance.

PS - My mother spoke admiringly of Mayor LaGuardia for reading the newspaper comics on the radio during a newspaper strike. She was a college student (no longer a young child) at the time, but it made a big impression.

---

thanks!  his connection is through his first wife brother and it is a bit of a stretch.  I was hoping to connect his maternal grandmother, a lot of the sources speak to her notable family but could not find any sources that had the specific connection to the Italian Prime Minister.  One of the notable family members has a small family tree on his wikipedia page but could not find the original source and it was so small and hard to read.

just need his PM to connect him to his parents and sister.

---

I submitted a Trusted List request for LaGuardia's profile with the aim of making it available for editing by people other tgan the profile manager.

Answer 2

HINT:

The New York City Hall Portrait Collection looks like a great resource for improving profiles of mayors by adding images. Search on "mayor" to limit the list to mayors. We shouldn't use portraits painted later than 1923 (so we can't the portraits of mayors like Abraham Beame and Fiorello LaGuardia), as those could be considered copyright-protected, but the earlier ones apparently have been on public display every since they were painted, so they would be regarded as in the public domain. 

Answer 3

I'm just looking at George B. McClellan and my, the profile is in poor shape, with Gedcom junk and siblings who shouldn't be there. I'll see if I can clean that up. Unfortunately, I'm no good at biographies, so can't promise to produce a complete profile in the end.

Comments

Eek! Cleaning up a profile like that one is a major challenge.

McClellan has a portrait on the city website at https://www1.nyc.gov/site/designcommission/public-programs/city-hall/portraits/portrait.page?portraitId=67 , but it was painted in 1940 so it's still presumably covered by U.S. copyright. However, the short biography there could be helpful...

---

Seeing the confusion about his place of death, I looked for his death notice in the online archives of the New York Times. The Times reported on 2 December 1940 that he had died at his home in Washington, DC. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1940/12/02/113123645.pdf"M'CLELLAN RITES TODAY; Services for the Former Mayor to Be Held in Washington"(I could put the full citation details in the profile, but I'll wait until you're not actively editing.)

The suggestion that he died in Arlington, Virginia, is attributable to the fact that he was buried in the national cemetery there. I have no idea why he is said to have died in New Orleans.

---

Yes, thank you, I did wonder about the place of death so will definitely use that source. The bio will help too.

Found many sources that mention his wife Georgiana, (including several passport applications) but none with her maiden name so far, except Find A Grave and that is unsourced as far as her birth name goes.

The extra siblings are gone - they were undated and had the same names as George B McClellan (senior)'s siblings, so I merged them away.

---

I didn't find any wedding announcements for this George McClellan in the Times archives, but I did find a marriage notice for his sister Roxelee, who married Captain Charles W. Exton in London on 10 September 1912. https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1912/09/11/100376249.pdf

---

I found solid documentation for Georgiana's maiden name of Heckscher, and I added the citation to the profile. The source is a New York Times article reporting that her wealthy father had largely ignored Georgiana and her sister in his will. The father was described as a "turfman and yachtsman" -- indicating that he devoted his days to horse racing and pleasure boats.

---

Thanks, Ellen.

I'm sorry I did not do much for this profile in the end - and now someone has adopted it and posted their personal connection on it, so I'll leave it alone.

Answer 4

Are there Connectors around looking for a little challenge? Mayor Bill O'Dwyer is still unconnected but now has a few family members - three younger siblings (two of them married), wife and parents-in-law. They are all first or second generation emigrants from Ireland but there are now several potential branches to explore (Catherine O'Dwyer was from a large family).

Comments

I have him connected via the Mayor's second wife's first husband.  However I do not love the connection here https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Hipp-365 and his father's profile.  Could someone have a look. 

I added the profiles of the Mayor's second wife's father and grandfather as they sounded like they had an interesting life.  Maybe an expert on Theodore Roosevelt could expand on her grandfather's profile.

As I do not love the current connection, off to look for another connection.

---

I have found two other solid connections and picked up an unconnected branch along the way.

---

Awsome work!

Answer 5

I've tentatively improved the profile for John P O'Brien - his biography is very short but at least it covers his family, and there does not appear to be loads to say about his career. I'm still working on adding more family - so far parents, wife, and children (all deceased) have been added.

Answer 6

Way to go, WikiTreers! In the past month, this challenge has resulted in adding 20 new profiles for Mayors of New York, as well as improving several other profiles, and connecting several mayors to our big WikiTree tree.

Current scores (if my calculations are to be trusted) are:

• Selvaggio-84 - 97 points (12 new profiles plus a bunch of new profile connections and improved profiles). Thank you, Lucy!!
• Lewis-24639 - 21 points (7 new profiles)
• Stevenson-3628 - 15 hard-earned points for connecting profiles
• Rassinot-1 - 9 points for profile improvements

Unfortunately, it seems like the supply of NYC mayors is almost infinite, so there's plenty of opportunity to add to the tally...

Comments

Oops -- I overlooked one!

• Roehl-22 - 8 points for profile improvement and connection for Mayor McKee 

Thank you, Denise!

Answer 7

I added Abraham Beame's nuclear family (with this exception of a possibly surviving child). As expected, his parents are both brick walls in Congress Poland, but there are ways to expand the family through in-laws.

Also, I could find no evidence of Beame's birth in England. If dates on his father's petition for naturalization are accurate he would have been born at sea. Which is probably not true, otherwise such a good story would be known.

Comments

Yeah, it was reading here that the father came first that helped.

As with Isabelle, I can find no registration under multiple spellings, including his mother's maiden name, for Abraham, Abram, Abe, no first name.

I'm really leaning towards "he was simply not registered" -- perhaps because they were Jewish.  I wonder if she was pregnant when they left Poland, because with the next older brother being born 1905, they weren't wasting any time between kids - and couldn't have been in England for long.

---

Although -- if Joe were aged 3 on immigration in 1906, he couldn't have been born 1905.

---

Also - Isidore's SSDI record says he was born 01 Feb 1901, not as the profile says 17 Apr 1902.

I think the dates on that naturalisation record are all a bit off.

---

Errors and inconsistencies in dates are very common in United States records like these. Arithmetic competence does not appear to have been a requirement for census enumerators, and the same may be true for the people who processed immigration and naturalization records.

---

I used the dates found on the petition for naturalization of Abraham's father because I had no other dates. They are inconsistent. His sister Rose's birth date in New York Births is completely different and 1 year off. So yes... definitely take them with a grain of salt.

---

Philip's profile says "the family" immigrated in March aboard the vessel St Paul.  That  should probably change to "he", seeing the family came in August.

(I won't do it, because my "style" of writing is different, and it should be consistent.)

---

I fixed it.

---

Is that immigration info enough to do a source/citation?  I still have the image open in another tab.

---

I listened to part of the oral history (only part of it -- it is over an hour long, and he was well into his teenage years when I accidentally did something that caused it to stop) and I documented some of the content in the Abraham Beame profile. It seems that his parents left Warsaw in a big hurry when the father heard he was about to be arrested, with the father going directly to America and the mother and children going to London to stay with her sister until her husband was ready to send for her.

---

Marty Ingels was a nephew of Abraham Beame's wife (his father was Jacob Ingerman). His profile is private so we need the profile manager's help to get him attached to the family (that won't help for a global connection however).

However, another brother-in-law, Henry Ingerman, married a Mary Baker Smith in Louisiana. Perhaps that would be a good direction to investigate.

Answer 8

How about James Duane, first mayor, after the revolution.  Duane-25, https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Duane-25?  His biography is pretty poor and protected by the American Revolution Project.

Comments

As a Duanesburg resident, I would love to see his profile improved.

---

Please go ahead and continue your efforts to edit and expand that profile, Mark. Project protection does not prevent members from editing an Open profile. 

Answer 9

I will connect John Vliet Lindsay, because his middle name is the same as Captain Beefheart's last name!

John Vliet Lindsay is now connected through his wife, Mary Anne Harrison.

Comments

Love it!  

Answer 10

All the NYC Mayors are now entered in WikiTree, but there are still a handful not connected if anyone is interested in lending a hand. There are quite a few who could still use a better biography!

Comments

Awesome work, Lucy!!! 

---

You are clearly the winner of this challenge, and entitled to all of the honors and privileges pertaining thereto (whatever those might be)...

---

#57, 67, 68, 77, 96.5, 98 were connected during connect-a-thon

#88 was connected just prior to the connect-a-thon