Lessons His Grandma Moses Taught Him: One Man's Celebration of His American Jewish Family Tree

A portrait of Adeline Moses Loeb was displayed at the party, and is on the cover of the book the party celebrated. (The burst appeared only on the poster version.)

John Loeb Jr.

The celebration last night of an American Jewish family here since the 1690s brought out a crowd of diverse ancestries to the Metropolitan Club. Call it a 2009 our-arms-are-open crowd: there was Marion Wiesel closely examining the large family tree on exhibit at the party; and nearby, Sharon Bush, mentioning her visit to Yankee Stadium to hear Joel Osteen speak; and Anne Hearst and Jay McInerney, Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia, Lady Liliana Cavendish, Daniel Rose, Wendy Lehman, Gordon Hyatt, Kenneth Libo, Jill Roosevelt, Denise Rich, Jonathan and Somers Farkas, Barbara Tober, Elise Cullman, Ann Rapp, and more than 200 others.

Those who stayed until the party’s last moments even saw President Clinton enter the club and duck into the elevator on his way somewhere else. If Oprah Winfrey, Desiree Rogers, and First Lady Michelle Obama had stopped by, it would have been a much greater triumph of diversity, to be sure, but they were close by, just across Central Park, at Jazz at Lincoln Center, for Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People” party, and proximity counts for something.

It was certainly a book-buying crowd: More than 140 copies of “An American Experience: Adeline Moses Loeb (1876-1953) and Her Early American Jewish Ancestors” (Syracuse University Press) — the reason for the event, hosted by its primary author John Loeb Jr., descendant of two once-prominent banking families, Loebs and Lehmans —were sold by the publisher and the Lower East Side independent bookstore Bluestockings. At $54.13 each, that’s an impressive take, all of which Mr. Loeb is directing to the restoration of the Fraunces Tavern Museum.

“We’re so happy that so many of our friends and family and so many others interested in books and genealogy and history are here,” Mr. Loeb said at the podium (scroll below to listen to his remarks). “All of you are too young to have known my extraordinary grandparents Carl Loeb and Adeline Moses. They were an amazing couple. My personal Grandma Moses was an adorable, loving, warm Southern lady who spoke with a Southern accent and called all her grandchildren like me beaus and belles, and in true Southern style, she always called her husband Mr. Loeb except when she got very upset with him and then occasionally she would call him Carl.

“They were very much in love but they bickered most of their lives about what was more important: money or family, and of course, we knew the difference. You may not know this but they built the boathouse, the Loeb boathouse in Central Park, I’m trying to get that to be remembered,” Mr. Loeb said.

Historian Eli Evans, who wrote the book’s introduction, offered some reasons why this particular family story is of interest to a broader audience. “The reason this part of the Loeb family is so important to America is that they were here for every single chapter; they fought in its wars, they lived through its depressions, they lived through the panics, we know about that. They lived through every chapter of American life. This is a family, it’s like a movie, one of those great long family movies… That’s one thing it is,” Mr. Evans said. “It’s also a woman’s story, without any question, as you read about the struggle of families fighting malaria and losing children — one woman has a child in a boat in the middle of a storm. And it is bubble up history: you learn it through the people who are living it.”

Mr. Loeb started the research for the book in the mid-1970s, hiring a freelance researcher, Judith Endelman, to assist him. She is now the director of the Benson Ford Research Center at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. She noted that genealogical research was much more difficult in the 1970s, and that today, those who are curious about their family lineage can find a lot of information on the Internet.

Denise Rich, for one, said she would like to know more about her family (she does not know anything before her grandparents, she said). Anne Hearst said she thought writing down one’s own family history is “a wonderful idea.” Yaz Hernandez said that Mr. Loeb’s example reminded her of her father’s own interest in the subject: he set out to trace a family link to Christopher Columbus, and while he was unsuccessful, his research helped many other families in Puerto Rico learn more about their ancestry. Somers Farkas noted that she shares something with Mr. Loeb: they both have American ancestors who were here during the American Revolution. Jonathan Farkas said his grandfather was a rare American immigrant: he came to America in the 1870s, had a family, made a fortune, and then brought them back to Hungary and bought a title. When he lost his fortune, he returned to America in 1918 and died of influenza.

Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia, whose name evokes volumes of royal family history in a country that no longer exists, resisted the idea of taking too much pride in one’s lineage. “You should only be proud of the good things you do in life, because pride on your ancestors, pride in your country, implies a certain superiority,” Prince Dimitri said.