May Williamson Mannon, my great-grandmother, is a mystery to me and perhaps always will be. At this point, I can find very little on her and I would love to know her better. A Philadelphia policeman’s daughter, how did she meet and marry a young George Mannon? Did she (and her policeman father) know that George had been tried and acquitted of murder charges when he was 19 years old? Maybe that story had already been squelched. It certainly didn’t get passed down at all.
May was the eldest of five and the only daughter. Her mother died very young at 35 when May was 12. Her father did eventually remarry, but not until May was already a young mother herself. She married George Mannon in May 1894 when she was 22 and George was 26. They had Clara Belle 18 months later in Maryland. Alfred was born in 1897 in Philadelphia and Hamilton in 1902 — back in Maryland. Sometime between 1902 and 1905, the family moved to the Bronx. George Mannon doesn’t appear consistently in city directories in Philadelphia, but he was working at a grocery about 1897. In New York, it seems he was consistently a railroad conductor.
May died in June 1917 at the age of 46 from complications of a hysterectomy (as per her death certificate). The family bible says “fibroid tumors of the stomach”. Grandad was 19 at the time and HE was the one who purchased her burial plot at Woodlawn Cemetery, and not his father, George.. My uncle Bob, did not know anything about his grandmother, May, but he did know that his father adored her and was devastated when she died.
The photo above was in a group of photos we inherited. They were mostly photos of our Hamilton-side relatives. For years, I thought this photo was actually Ella Hamilton, my great-grandmother’s sister — other side of the family! — and there is some resemblance. But, there are a lot of Hamilton photo collections out there and this photo is not in any of those collections. So what’s going on?
It wasn’t until I scrutinized the photo (right) of my grandfather taken in his Manhattan apartment, that I noticed the above photo in a frame sitting on the shelf right behind him — over his left shoulder. Knowing that my grandfather had been very fond of his mother, it was not surprising that he displayed a photo of her, and this made me rethink my guess. I now believe this photo is May Reiff Williamson Mannon, Grandad’s mother, and I think I can see something of my dad and uncles in her face.
So…..a few years later, in an old Mannon scrapbook, I found another photo that was just loose with nothing written on the back. It is of the same woman sitting on a porch with a cat on her lap. This one is interesting because I think I know where it was taken. It’s definitely on a front porch. At the time of May’s death, she was living at 1956 Anthony Avenue in the Bronx. Look at the Google Maps street photo from September 2018 — where the white rocking chair on the right is. It is a little hard to see that there is a window on that side of the bay-shaped projection. You can see the window much clearer in the photo we took in 2019 after the building’s siding had been replaced. I think that May is sitting where that white rocker is to the right side of the front door. I can really see it when I look at the closeup photo and see how much space there is in that spot. Okay, you might think this is a stretch and wishful thinking on my part, but it is certainly possible since we don’t know what the building actually looked like in 1917. (It was built in 1901.) Wherever she was, it is a precious photo and one of only two we have of this woman.
So……what about the woman’s photo over Grandad’s OTHER shoulder? I don’t actually have that photo but I’m guessing that might be Clara Belle, his sister — known as Belle. That’s another post!