Cornelius and Ellen Elizabeth Ann
As we saw in the last post, Cornelius Robert Schaller, bachelor, had married Ellen Elizabeth Ann Flood, spinster, on 6 January 1852, cementing their fathers’ business partnership. By 1856, we saw that Cornelius and his counterpart, James Flood, junior, appear to have become the principles in the Flood and Schaller business by succession or gift, inasmuch as they were publicly listed as bankrupt partners in that year. I believe that the following locket photograph is of Cornelius Robert:
There is little surprise that the couple’s first child arrived not long thereafter, on 6 November 1852. What is astonishing, as the story plays out, is that Ellen Elizabeth Ann, the daughter, was not English but American: she was born in New York City. A note in Cornelius Robert’s hand gives the New York address as 201 West 15th St., New York. A New Yorker might tell me whether that qualifies as Greenwich Village or Chelsea. Whatever building they lived in is long since gone.
The baptismal registry of the Church of the Redeemer in Yorkville (on 84th St., basically across 2nd Ave. from the fabulous Heidelberg Restaurant), conserved among the New York City Episcopalian records, lists her and her parents at a baptism on 2 April 1854. I’m always surprised when I see these months-long delays before baptism in an age when children died like flies, but there it is. Interestingly, the church appears to have been organized only in 1852.
A certification obtained in 1863 by consulting the very book excerpted above makes things look even worse! The sloppy certifier has for a start given the year of the baptism as 1863 instead of 1854.
Curious is the rector’s attempt to write GOD (“Church of GOD”, “GOD Parents”) in cursive. The God parents are James and Isabella Maria Roberts, who are question marks at this point. A bit of context suggests itself here: the battle of Gettysburg was but 20 days in the future.
Amongst the collected immigration records from Ellis Island and Castle Clinton in New York City is the passenger manifest of the ship that carried them to the USA in 1872. It corroborates that Cornelius Robert was born in England, whereas Ellen Elizabeth Ann had been born in the United States. Presumably she served, in this definitive arrival of the Schallers, as one of those now-famous ‘anchor babies.’
