Faces of a Family in 19th Century New York: the Ramus Collection

The first set of photographs originating from the former Brooklyn Historical Society to be featured  in the Center for Brooklyn History digital portal is the Ramus family collection.  

It is a tantalizing set of images rich in examples of fashionable dress between 1848 and 1910 and a variety of photographic techniques including daguerreotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes and cartes de visite. A small set of documents round out the picture: citizenship papers, estate documents, wills, land and property documents, correspondence, ephemera, and genealogical notes. These give some details of the family’s history, but leave much to be wondered at and discovered.  

The patriarch Isaac Ramus and his wife Esther (nee Baruth/Baruch) came to New York from England and both were naturalized by 1855.The family lived in Brooklyn and Isaac had a hosiery business based in Manhattan. They are recorded in the 1850 census and the household list gives us an idea of the immigration story. We have Isaac and Esther with two teenagers born in England, Serena and Angelo, the younger, around 1834. Three younger children, Rosina, Marai[h] and Louis, were born in New York with the eldest around 1837, so we have a neat window of around 3 years for their arrival. The family is well documented in pictures although some of the titles are partial and could use more sleuthing to definitively name the subjects. Angelo made his way to San Francisco as an adult and some of his letters to the family are preserved in the collection, mostly inquiring about the health of family members, sending warm regards and speaking about his business being brisk or slow. Sadly, he died in 1860 at 26 there of yellow fever. An Ancestry family tree mentions Serena who also died in San Francisco a year after her brother in 1861. 

Since assembling my own family’s photographs I have been fascinated by seeing faces change from youth to old age. The photographs that spoke to me are those of Esther, because we have some fine examples of her at different ages. 

The first, with Isaac around 1855, is an ambrotype, a photograph on glass. These fragile objects are often housed, as this one, in an ornate protective gold frame. The couple look placid and prosperous, dressed in satin. In the second, a cabinet photograph, a paper print mounted on card from around 1870-1886, Esther is alone and the photograph is considerably less fussy. Her expression is more world-weary here - by this time she has lost her two older children and possibly her husband. Her dress is more austere but she sports ornately curled hair and a lavish lace collar. There is a delicate pink blush on her cheeks, and hand coloring on the long gold chain we see in all of her photographs. Isaac died in 1876, Esther in 1886, and both of their obituaries mention their connection to the fraternal Jewish organization: the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith, Samuel Lodge, No. 63.  

I am fascinated by the questions that this collection elicits and does not answer about life in nineteenth-century New York and I look forward to see this story expanded by someone who finds them similarly intriguing. 

Interested in seeing more photos from CBH’s collections? Visit our online image gallery, which includes a selection of our images, or the digital collections portal at Brooklyn Public Library. We look forward to inviting you to CBH in the future to research in our entire collection of images, archives, maps, and special collections. In the meantime, please visit our resources page to search our collections. Questions? Our reference staff is available to help with your research! You can reach us at [email protected].