Sarah Riddner Greenberg (1908-1969), Misfortune and Mystery – 52 Ancestors # 12

My mother-in-law, Sarah Greenberg, might easily be said to have lived a life of misfortunes, starting with her father’s desertion of the family when she was an infant and ending with her husband’s losing his federal job in the McCarthy era.  She was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Pearl Scheier Riddner and Ben Riddner.  She was the 2nd child born to them, having an older brother (but only briefly because he died the summer after she was born).

Sometime in 1908 her father Ben Riddner left the family, and, as I discovered after much looking, went to Canada for a couple of years.  He returned to the U.S. in December 1910 (so didn’t show up on the 1910 census).  Misfortune number one.  I don’t have the record of exactly when he left (or why he went to Canada) but I did find the record of his coming back into the country two years later.  He came back into the U.S. in Detroit and went (immediately?) to his sister’s in Fort Wayne, Indiana rather than returning to his wife and daughter in Milwaukee.  Not being in a household headed by Ben Riddner, combined with surname mis-indexing and various spellings, meant that I had a hard time finding Pearl Riddner in the 1910 census, and I still haven’t found Sarah who was only 2 years old at the time but wasn’t enumerated with her mother.  I wrote about this search several years ago, and my searching since hasn’t turned Sarah up in any of the 1910 census sheets.  Mystery number one.

Having been abandoned, Pearl and Sarah apparently lived with various relatives for awhile and then on their own.  Pearl’s brothers must have helped support her, since she did not seem to have a steady occupation.  Sarah went through elementary and high school and into college with little record of her life and few family stories.  She did tell her children that she and her mother were very poor during her childhood.  She started at the University of Wisconsin Extension in Milwaukee and worked while she was in school going part-time, but was able to go to the University of Wisconsin at Madison to finish her degree and she graduated with a B.A. in 1932.  Sarah was helped financially by two of her uncles to be able to go to college and later to graduate school in Chicago.  At some point, her mother was hospitalized for mental disorder for some period of time, but nothing more is known about this so far (not how old Sarah was, or what the problem was, or how long her mother was there).  Another misfortune and mystery at the same time.

Sarah went to Chicago in 1937 to attend the School of Social Service Administration at the University of Chicago.  She was enrolled for 3 semesters, but did not finish her degree.  This time seemed to be a pretty positive one for Sarah: she had friends and saw cousins, and liked her classes.  She told her son that she had lived just down the street from the site of the infamous Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre that happened in 1929, which he was impressed by.  She must also have met her husband-to-be before the end of this time, since she was enrolled through the fall semester of 1938 and they married in March of 1939.  Sarah would never talk about how or when or where she met Iz Greenberg.  Another mystery but there doesn’t seem to have been much misfortune during her time in Chicago.

The final notable misfortune was the result of the McCarthy Era in Washington, D.C.  Her husband, Iz Greenberg, was a lawyer with the National Labor Relations Board but came from a family of socialist agitators.  Family rumor is that he traveled as a young man, organizing various labor groups.  Because of this history, Iz came to the attention of the McCarthy investigation and had to leave the Washington job unexpectedly and precipitously.  The young family had just purchased their first house, and could not keep it.  They ended up moving back to New York, living for a period of time with Sarah’s sister in law and her family in Rochester while Iz figured out what he was going to do for work and where.  Of course, this was a major misfortune for him as well as for Sarah.  Sarah seems to have dealt with all of this by not talking about much of the experiences she’d had, which contributed to the mysteries about her life.  Like many others, she preferred to focus on the present and on the future.