I’m not sure if Genealogy Fog Brain is an actual condition or if I just have regular Fog Brain. Lately though, I find myself being a little… slower to make things click in my brain. It might be that I’m slowly but surely kicking my caffeine habit, it might be the 5 days a week of exercise I’m trying to adhere to. Who knows why it’s happening, the important thing is that it is in fact happening.
I recently had to “repair” my Windows installation. Except a “repair” doesn’t fix my recurring problem, so I ended up doing a new installation of Windows. I know it’s probably overkill on my part but when the problem spread itself to Roots Magic, I’d had enough. So now that my computer is cleaned out of most of the clutter on the main drive, I’m back to working with my family files. My only issue is that with Fog Brain, I haven’t been able to wrap my head around much. So instead of getting nothing done, I’m working on going through and searching for alternate sources on my Dad’s side of the family. Eventually, I’ll find that one clue that leads me to a discovery of something that’s going to break down the walls for me. Not brick walls, but the wooden ones that have built themselves in front of me. With a little hard work, and a hammer, I should be able to get them down!
One of the things I know is that my first known Moore ancestor, William H Moore, had three sons and a daughter. The daughter, Mary, took care of him for his whole life after her mother passed away after a lengthy illness. The logic tells me that she most likely took care of her sick mother too. The youngest son, Robert (my great-great grandfather), was a house painter. The other two boys, apparently went into the printing business. It wasn’t until I discovered the Moores in the Brooklyn City Directories that I realized the two brothers might have been working together. I knew that William H Moore Jr was a lifelong compositor/printer. What I was unaware of, was his brother John‘s involvement in his printing business.
Today I did a Google Search for “William Moore, printer, 1567 Broadway” just for fun. It led me to a Google Book listing for “Printing Trades Blue Book for the Greater New York and Surrounding Towns Edition“. You can read the excerpt in the image above. What’s interesting is it gives an established date of 1898. It also shows the the brothers had a partnership. I had always assumed that William was the more involved of the two. That’s what I get for assuming! After combing through the Brooklyn Directories, I found something today that I should have noticed months ago.
At the end of every MOORE section in the Brooklyn Directories, there is an entry for MOORE Bros, printers, 1567 Broadway. Oops. Not only does it happen every year from 1898 to 1913, but the brothers are shown working out of that address for the previous 3 years also. So while they might not have established their partnership until 1898, they were already working in that space, as printers as early as 1895. Another fun fact is that their father, William H Moore Sr, was also doing business at that address in 1895. So maybe their father was using the space for his carpenter business, but after the death of his wife in 1896, he left the business space for his sons? I don’t know, there I go assuming again!
