The Search for Jennie Newcomb’s Maiden Name
Jennie Van Rees Newcomb: 1873-1957
The lurid stories on Nathaniel Newcomb’s apparent bigamous
marriage neglected to provide a critical piece of information: the maiden name
and background of Nathaniel’s humiliated second “wife” Jennie. I set out to track it down and find out what
happened to her.
New York marriage records are ridiculously difficult to uncover, so I had
no luck trying to find Nathaniel Newcomb and Jennie Newcomb’s marriage license.
There was even some confusion as to which state and city they chose for their marriage ceremony,
and then there is the question of whether it was legal at all given his failure to
get a divorce from his first wife. Did they bother to actually marry at all? Anything
is possible, although they presented themselves to the world as husband and
wife for several years.
Following Nathaniel’s death in 1903, Jennie Newcomb seemed
to disappear. Her brother-in-law implied she came from a well-to-do Brooklyn
family, but to preserve her privacy, he wouldn’t give her last name. He said
she was returning home to Brooklyn after closing up Nathaniel’s New Jersey
home. I searched Brooklyn records for her following the scandal, but found
nothing.
To my surprise, I found her in the New Jersey state census
in 1905, just two years after her husband’s death. She had stated on previous
census records that her parents were born in Holland, so when I found her
living with a Marie Bross, also from Holland, I thought she had to be a family
member. Marie was a year younger than Jennie, and was married with a young son
named Harold. Marie’s husband was also named Harold Bross. It seemed likely
Marie was Jennie’s sister. I searched for Marie’s marriage records to find the
women’s maiden name, but was unsuccessful.
I then turned to Newspapers.com, thinking Marie’s obituary
might reveal her maiden name. Instead my search turned up an obituary for a
Cornelius Van Rees, a successful publisher and Dutch immigrant. One of his
surviving sisters was Marie Bross. Aha! Perhaps Jennie’s maiden name was Van
Rees.
I searched Ancestry records under that name in Brooklyn, and
turned up a New York State Census Record for 1892, listing the entire van Rees
family:
Father Richard, a carpenter, age 65, wife Jennie, age 60,
four sons, Abram, Cornelius, Peter and Richard, ages 30, 23, 22 and 14 (all
mentioned in Cornelius’ obit), and
daughters Minnie, 26, Fannie, 28, and Jennie, 18. Jennie, like her sisters, was
working as a sales lady in a store. Marie must have already been married and
out of the house.
Jennie must have met Nathaniel Newcomb just a year or so
after the census, for they were married two years later in 1894 when Jennie was
only 20 and Nathaniel was 46. They apparently lived a fairly lavish life. Here
is what the newspaper reported after Nathaniel’s death:
“While Newcomb lived he was known as the prosperous president
of the Manhattan Steamship Company, the husband of a woman of wealth and high
social connections and the possessor of a beautiful residence and fine stable
of horses at Westfield, N.J., where he made his home.”
The truth of the matter was that Nathaniel was lower class,
as was Jennie. They re-invented themselves following the marriage—they were
social climbers. Nathaniel’s brother Francis fed the newspapers with false
information that continued the fiction that they both came from wealth.
After Nathaniel’s death, his first wife Sarah and her attorney
attempted to claim all of Nathaniel’s property. In addition, there were other
creditors—Nathaniel apparently had extensive debts. Jennie apparently grabbed
what she could of their possessions before the other claimants could. The
newspaper reported that following the appearance of wife Sarah, “the blue
ribbon horses, all the valuable furniture and Mr. Newcomb’s jewelry and cash
departed from Westfield, as did Mrs. Newcomb No. 2.”
The article goes on to address the issue of the steamship
company shares and the various counterclaims for ownership of the company
assets, and then also notes, “Meanwhile all concerned are seeking to discover
the whereabouts of considerable sums in cash known to have been in possession
of Newcomb just previous to his death.”
The articles seems to imply that Jennie made off with all
the money and valuables, but given that she was forced to move in with her
married sister in lower class Cranford/Passaic, I rather doubt she got much of
value from her dead husband’s estate.
But where did she go after 1905? There was no Jennie van
Rees or Jennie Newcomb in the 1910 census, either with her sister’s family or
on her own. Had she remarried? I examined Cornelius’ obituary more closely, and
realized that one sister was identified only by her husband’s name, a Mrs.
Jacob Van Reen. Could this be Jennie? A little searching confirmed my
suspicion.
Jennie met a Dutch businessman in Passaic, Jacob Van Reen.
Jacob was just a year or so older than Jennie and was a wholesale dry goods
merchant. They seem to have married around 1907, for his 1947 obituary states
that he and Jennie had been married for forty years. They remained in the
Passaic area until his death. They had no children, and Jennie's name does not appear
in any newspaper articles, and her husband only occasionally pops up as a member of various
charitable groups.
 |
| 392 Lafayette Ave., Passaic today |
Census records show that they lived at 392 Lafayette Avenue
in 1920, and moved to 72 Belmont Place by 1930. The Lafayette Ave. house, built
in 1900, was quite large—over 3400 square feet. The Belmont property was
considerably smaller, under 2000 square feet. The family does not appear to have been wealthy, but were just comfortably middle class. Jennie’s sister Marie apparently
left her husband before 1920, and she and her son Harold moved in with Jennie and
her husband, living with them for over a decade. Harold returned to Jennie's home in the 1940s and 1950s, perhaps to help care for his aunt and uncle as they aged.
Jennie died December 19, 1957. She was buried on Staten Island.
Interestingly, she left her estate to Harold Bross, her sister Marie’s son.
However, Harold was identified in estate documents and Jennie's obituary as Jennie’s son. I am not sure
if she adopted Harold at some point, or if this was a sort of honorary
relationship in recognition of Jennie taking him in while he was young. Another
interesting mystery in a fascinating life. At least now Jennie can be properly
identified on my family tree, and on Ancestry.
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