By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO—There is something enchanting about historical research. You can visit a library or an archive in almost any city and provided you read the local language with sufficient understanding, you can peel back the mysteries of the past in pleasant academic surroundings.
For historians, genealogists and antiquarians, the lure of the archive can be magnetic and the routines within can be quite satisfying. By application of the librarian’s logic, one may locate sources that few other people have read, see documents written or signed by historical figures, and even experience a vicarious thrill from holding in one’s hands something previously handled by someone who may have died years or even centuries before.
Recently, I was flattered to receive from New Orleans an email message from Linda Canada, a researcher who recently had graciously served as the interim director of the San Diego Historical Society. She had accompanied her husband to New Orleans where he was attending a convention of anesthetists, which, in my opinion, could put any lay person to sleep.
To liven things up for herself, Linda found in the French Quarter near their hotel the Williams Research Center, and upon entering the archive knew she had found a spiritual home-away-from-home. A lover of San Diego history, she tried to recall connections between New Orleans and San Diego that she might research. She remembered that Louis Rose, San Diego’s first Jewish settler, had previously lived in New Orleans to which he had immigrated in 1840 from Germany. Recalling that I had written Louis Rose’s biography, she asked me if there was any information I would have loved to have dug up.
Of course there was. In any research project, there is that imperative extrapolated from Ecclesiastes: a time to research, a time to write. Rose, who came to San Diego in 1850 after spending a decade in Louisiana and Texas, had left behind a financially troubled marriage in New Orleans. After arriving in San Diego, he became quite successful as a businessman with a hotel, saloon, general store, tannery and butcher shop; was a prominent landowner (Rose Canyon, Roseville), and also served as a member of the City Board of Trustees and the first County Board of Supervisors.
He wrote to his wife that she should join him in California and they would make a new life together—but Caroline, believing she had been abandoned, had already begun a new life. She declined Rose’s invitation and not long afterwards became pregnant by a certain Frenchman. Embarrassed, her sister and brother-in-law sent her from New Orleans to South Carolina for the term of her pregnancy, but she miscarried and the fetus was buried somewhere under the name of Caroline Rose. Rose subsequently obtained a divorce in San Diego from Caroline.
So, thanking Linda for her kind offer, I asked her to check if the archives could divulge anything about whatever happened to Caroline Marks Rose after the miscarriage. Did she return to New Orleans? Did she remarry?
If such information had been in the Williams Research Center archives, Linda would have been the one to find it—she is an incredibly accomplished researcher. However, the sought-after epilogue was not to be found.
In the course of her investigation, Linda found not an end but a Rose-related beginning. She extracted from the archives a 165-year-old French-language document, written in Louis Rose’s handwriting. French was but one of several languages Rose spoke, also including his native German as well as Spanish and English.
I serve on the board of the Louis Rose Society for the Preservation of Jewish History, of which SDSU history professor Lawrence Baron is now the president. Among the other board members is Norman Greene, formerly my co-publisher of the San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage. For many years, his wife Bobby taught French at Montgomery High School in the Sweetwater Union High School District in southern San Diego, so it was to her I brought the document for translation. Although she was able to give me a fairly comprehensive early reading, because some of the language was archaic, Bobby faxed the photocopy for corroboration to Stella Salzmann, a native of Brussels who now lives in San Diego.
Their joint verdict was that the April 28, 1844 document was the minutes of a meeting of the Mason’s Germania Lodge No. 43 in New Orleans in which charter members including Rose admitted other members to the order upon verification of their good character. The founders also voted to have pins or medallions made for themselves identifying their Masonic affiliation. For many years, this particular lodge kept its records in both French and in German.
Rose subsequently would participate in the founding of the first Masonic Lodge in San Diego; the Masons being one of the chief organizations over the years that brought Jews and Christians together in fraternal association.
I have to admit that when Linda came back to San Diego with the photocopied document in her hand, I felt two conflicting emotions. My yetzer ha tov felt gratitude, because Linda had expended time and talent to further my knowledge of a central figure in early San Diego Jewish history. On the other hand, my yetzer ha ra felt a bit of envy—making a discovery in an archive is akin to the thrill archaeologists must feel when they find an artifact of consequence under the soil. I felt myself longing for that feeling again.
Perhaps some time I will have the opportunity to return the favor to Linda – and to myself that special researcher’s sense of accomplishment.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World and author of Louis Rose: San Diego’s First Jewish Settler and Entrepreneur.