The Thrill of the Hunt

How do you prove that your great-aunt ran a brothel?

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe my mother’s stories. It’s just my personality. I needed proof. For years I searched, but crime, by its very nature, tries to fly under the radar, so I never found a thing.

Lucky for me, I wasn’t the only one looking. Over 120 people are descended from family Dora brought to America with the money that she allegedly raised running her brothel. Almost 100 years had passed, and Dora’s generation was long gone. The descendants of family brought to America by Dora moved on with their lives. We drifted apart.

It wasn’t easy for me, the classic introvert, to pick up the phone and contact long-estranged cousins. But once I did, my search consumed me, and changed my life. Even before I started calling cousins, I was spending hours in front of my computer, scrolling though search results and following up every lead. But once I started talking to my cousins, I had even more leads to follow, and their stories gave me a peek into Dora’s life running a brothel in Philadelphia during the first decades of the 20th century.

My mother’s generation remembered Dora and what we in the family called “the business.” Cousin Diane’s father ran errands for “the girls.” When Diane asked him how they paid, his entire face turned a deep shade of red. Cousin Lillian remembered wearing their hand-me-downs, and Cousin Hesh told me that “a bevy of pretty girls” could always be found hanging around Dora’s back stairs. Connected by blood but separated by time and distance, my cousins and I reunited, eager to learn more about our elusive great-aunt Dora. More than ever, I wanted to see proof in black and white, and my cousins did too.

As my big birthday approached, I only wanted one thing; a six-month subscription to Ancestry.com with full access to Ancestry’s collection of digitized newspapers. My husband Bill didn’t see much of me for the next six months, though I did take breaks most evenings to throw dinner on the table. Six months of hunting passed and I didn’t find a thing. When my subscription ended I moved on, but I never gave up.

Ancestry.com didn’t give up either. They continued to send me emails offering tantalizing deals, “Get 30% off NOW!” As the months went by and the deals got better those emails became harder to delete. Finally, in a moment of weakness, I hit the “Buy Now” button, and resumed my search for Dora.

According to Albert Einstein, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. This may be true in life, but at this moment, it isn’t true for online genealogical research. New records are constantly being discovered, digitized and indexed. Not available today, records can magically appear tomorrow. And that’s exactly how I found the newspaper article detailing Dora’s arrest.

I was sitting in my comfy chair with that first morning coffee. My previous highly accomplished canine research assistant D’Artagnan was at my side as usual, and I was doing what I always do first thing. With my tablet in hand, I was scrolling through the results of an online genealogical search. This particular morning, I was searching digitized newspapers. I stopped scrolling down when I noticed the words “bail” and “court” below Dora’s name.

Screenshot - Newspapers.com search results, June 2023. The article about my great-aunt Dora is third from the top.

For a moment, the world stopped spinning. In my empty family room, I leapt to my feet and shouted “Bingo!” Even D’Artagnan thought I was crazy. I caught my breath and pondered my find over another cup of coffee. I had no idea that this would lead to so many more discoveries. When I found that first newspaper article, I thought I was at the end. But as I came to learn, in genealogy, every new discovery is also a new beginning.

The Midnight Phone Call

I’ve Always Known