Free American Ghost: A Family's Haunted Past in the Desert Southwest by Hannah Nordhaus

in light pencil, the entries written in cautious fountain-pen calligraphy—Julia’s hand, I suspect.
    The first line recorded Julia’s firstborn: “Anna Staab, geboren am [born on] 23 November 1866.” Adela, nicknamed Delia, came next, in 1868. Bertha, my great-grandmother, was born in August 1870—the third girl in a row. This can’t have been an entirely welcome development. A succession of daughters, in the Old World or the New, was reason for consternation—where were the male heirs?
    But at last, in 1872, came Paul, the first of Abraham’s sons. “Born,” the New Mexican reported on January 15 of that year.
    On Sunday morning the wife of A. Staab, Esq., of this city, was safely delivered of a son. Mother and child, we are gratified to announce, are doing well, and the happy father is doing as well ascould be expected under the circumstances. We extend our congratulations to the parents, and particularly to the father, for we know it is just what he most desired. We trust that the child, though born in this time of violence and revolution, may be a perpetual source of joy to his parents.
    I noticed that while Abraham is mentioned by his first initial, Julia appears only as his “wife”—and also that “what he most desired,” was clearly a son—daughters weren’t sufficient. I also wondered what “revolution” the paper referred to, and what violence—the usual dance hall stabbings, or the Indian Wars, or something else? The newspaper article didn’t tell me; I couldn’t know. There was one thing, however, that I knew, that the newspaper—and Abraham and Julia—could not have known: this son would not be the “perpetual source of joy” the newspaper anticipated. Paul suffered from severe epilepsy, and he required an attendant his whole life. He was, explained one family tree, “of unsound mind”; a woman who knew the Staabs as a child described him in an oral history as having been “retarded.” What sadness this must have brought Julia and Abraham when they came to understand his infirmity.
    There wasn’t time to lament, however. The next boys arrived in breathless succession—a boy every year: Arthur in 1873; Julius in 1874, his name honoring his mother’s. The fourth and youngest son, Edward—Uncle Teddy, my family called him—came in 1875. The boys were given English names, nothing Hebrew about them, and all of them shared the same middle initial: “A.” I know from an old passport application I found online that Teddy’s middle name was Adolph, but I could never figure out what all the other A’s stood for. I wondered if Abraham had named them all after himself—and I also wondered if he later despaired that none of the boys seemed to take after him in any other way.
    If there wasn’t perpetual joy, there was surely perpetual motion in Julia’s life in those early years. The newspapers’ social reports are quieton the subject of Julia in those years when her children were small—but it can’t have been quiet in her dirt home on Burro Alley. She had a houseful of young children, one birth and then the next, seven children in the first nine years of her marriage. Each one, I fear, took a small piece of her. By the time Teddy came, the names had outgrown the penciled lines in the prayer book—Teddy’s dangled off into the white below, the inked script of his name blacker and heavier, as if the writer of it was now unduly burdened.
    Those three girls and four boys weren’t Julia’s only pregnancies, either. A historian named Floyd Fierman, a rabbi who wrote books about the pioneer Jews in the Southwest, mentioned fifteen pregnancies, total—eight full-term, seven miscarriages. This may have been standard for women of her day, in the age before widespread birth control and modern medicine, and Julia wasn’t without help in recovering from her confinements. The family had grown rich and richer yet: the Staab & Co. wagons kept coming along the trail, forty, fifty at a time,