I have a number of brick walls on my family tree, most of them on my mother’s father’s branch. There’s my great-great-great grandmother, Mary Ann “Polly” Stuart Pickens, born in Kentucky around 1803. or 1813. or 1817. or 1810. or 1804. or 1814. It all depends on which answer she gave the census taker. It’s hard enough finding female ancestors before 1850 without all this disinformation, Polly!

And then there’s Tom Howard, who was supposed to have been born in East St. Louis in 1840. And that’s all I’ve got really. Not much to go on. I’m hoping DNA can provide some clues.

And then there’s this handsome guy. John Adams. Often called Jack. The only facts we really knew about him were there in the typed note attached to his picture. His origins were a mystery.

In another note on the same picture in another of my great Uncle Earl’s (Earl Kenneth Adams 1918-1999) genealogy books that he self published in 1989, it says, “Jack (John) Adams (September 22, 1884–April 28, 1954) Picture taken July 1941. Parents were Frank Adams and Helen (Rogers) Adams. Born Brooklyn. New York. Had a full sister named Mary. His dad married twice. Five or six half-sisters.”

Oh, and also, Adams was not his real name. He had changed it after he ran away from home and he never did tell anyone what his original name was. Well, this one old boy might have known, but he died before my uncle could ever ask him. There was speculation that he might be Jewish (That nose!), and he used to like to debate with the Catholic priest (and there’s also a receipt somewhere of his donations to the Catholic church here in Georgetown). And there was some convoluted story about someone who had known his name but couldn’t remember it, but he thought it was the same name as those folks who used to live in so-and-so’s house and so Uncle Earl actually went to the courthouse and researched the property records and the name might have been Fontaine? So French roots? Who knows.

But still, based on Earl’s note about Brooklyn and his parents Frank and Helen, every once in a while I would do a search and see what I could find. I never really turned up a likely candidate. Since he was born in 1884, and there is no U.S. Census for Brooklyn in 1890, there weren’t many possible records to search. And searches of the 1900 census for New York turned up lots of Adams families all over the state, but none that had a John who was the right age, or if he was, I could trace him forward to a marriage and a family that weren’t mine.

But there was this one kid. In the 1900 census for New York, in the Burrough of Manhattan, an inmate in The New York House of Refuge, Randall’s Island. Well, that had to be investigated.

My trip down the rabbit hole of the social reform movements of the mid to late 19th century, eventually led me to this website: https://newyorkjuvenileasylum.com/.

There are extensive records for the New York House of Refuge, including individual inmate records that detail their time there, and admission and discharge records that might include information about their family. The records have been digitized and are available on microfilm from the New York State Archive, but there are 350 volumes of material, so I decided to wait until I could afford to have Mr. Clark Kidder, at the above website, do the research for me. I had to wait until last fall, when my genealogy budget could accommodate his research fees, but boy, was it worth it!

It turned out there were two boys of approximately the right age named John Adams, but further research showed that they did not match my John Adams. But then Mr. Kidder went the extra mile. I had provided what few details I had, including the fact that Adams might not be his birth name, so he searched on just the birth date. And he found this: