Some Family History



Some Family History

Bits and Pieces of Family Lore and Origins

By Carol Prescott McCoy, Ph.D.

My interest in family history started as a child from listening to my grandparents, who were wonderful story tellers. Both my father’s parents lived into their 90s and my mother’s mother lived to be 95. They were all colorful characters and made me intensely curious about their origins. I was especially curious about my grandmother’s father, Sam Pollak, who literally drowned before her eyes when she was a baby! I was also very curious to learn about the McCoy family to see if they had anything to do with the famous Hatfield-McCoy feud of West Virginia. While my McCoy ancestors are from “West By God Virginia”, they seem to have been fairly peaceful farmers and rather civilized lawyers.

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My grandfather Paul McCoy, upper left hand corner c. 1896

University of West Virginia Yearbook

The Glee Club

Besides being wonderful story tellers, my family has always liked to take pictures and hang on to memorabilia, such as old autograph books and yearbooks, and diaries. I have enjoyed learning about the people who owned these precious objects and documents.

Irish, Welsh and West Virginia Roots

On my father’s side my roots are deep within West Virginia, where John McCoy a Scot Irish weaver and his wife and children migrated from County Tyrone Ireland in the early 1800s.

The McCoys married into the family of Colonel John Evans, a pioneer and Revolutionary War fighter who settled in Monongalia County Virginia (later West Virginia.) The Evans were Welch and came to the Philadelphia area in the early 1700s before migrating to the Fairfax Virginia area.

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Colonel John Evans’ Cabin in Morgantown, WV.

Unknown Man in front of the cabin. (Ghost in window?)

Photograph from the WV Regional Collection, Morgantown

The McCoys also married into the Martins who came to New Hampshire in the early 1600s, migrated to the area that became Piscataway, New Jersey (where she later went to graduate school at Rutgers), and then traveled down the Ohio River to become early settlers of Ohio County (later called Tyler County) Virginia (later became West Virginia.)

My great-grandfather, John William McCoy, was a WV lawyer who married Delia Maria Evans (grand daughter of Col. John Evans.)

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Delia Maria Evans and John William McCoy

I have been fortunate to receive some of his letters and documents from the mid to late 1800s. Their son, Paul McCoy, obtained his law degree from West Virginia University in 1898. (I have his college year book from 1896!) He moved to New York City to make his fortune in the early 1900s and wed the lovely Constance Irma Pollak (Pollock).

Austria to New York City

My father’s mother’s family, the Pollaks, came from Austria to New York in the 1860s. Her great-grandfather, Samuel Pollock/Pollak, was a dry goods merchant who started the first dollar store in the South in Montgomery Alabama. He was the buyer for the business in NYC with an office on Canal Street near to the NYC Archives.

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Picture of Pollak & Co. from a Montgomery Alabama Panoramic Map

Samuel Pollak married Julia Wollner, who came from a large family of also emigrated from Austria to NYC in the 1860s. They were butchers in lower Manhattan. Having fathered six children, he drowned in front of the entire family at the age of 40 in 1883 at the New Jersey shore. (See my article on the drowning of Sam Pollak for more information.) At least five of the children graduated from college.

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Marriage Certificate of Sam Pollak and Julia Wollner

NYC Archives, 30 Chambers St., NYC

I was quite intrigued to learn of my maternal grandmother’s Jewish roots since my grandmother was raised Episcopalian and attended church. The families of both Sam Pollak and Julia Woller were Jewish in origin and spoke Yiddish. (In fact one of my grandmother’s sisters, Wilma Pollock, wrote a book with a lot of Yiddish dialect, The Upps of Suffolk Street, about a Jewish matchmaker named Kuppelman Upp.)

Apparently Sam and Julia decided that it would be easier to be Protestant than Jewish and were married by a minister, not a Rabbi. Nevertheless, Julia’s parents, Koppelmann Wollner and Caroline Fleischman, are buried in the Jewish cemetery, Salem Fields on the border of Queens and Brooklyn, NY.

Unbeknownst to me Sam Pollak’s brother Ignatius (born Ignaz) continued to maintain his Jewish faith. I never even knew Sam had a brother, even though he had been a guardian of my grandmother’s during her young years after her father drowned. Ignatius Pollak, who continued to run Pollak’s Dollar Store in Montgomery Alabama, was a prominent Jew in Montgomery and Cullman Alabama. He was a successful business man and philanthropist in Cullman.

From England to New London, Connecticut to the Catskills of New York

My mother’s father, Prescott Barker Wiske, is descended from a colorful character, Johnny Whiskey, was impressed into the British navy at an early age. He came to America having been captured aboard the Macedonian during the War of 1812. He was held captive in a barn in New London, Connecticut, and managed to escape and within three months married Betsey Rogers, who was descended from the Rogerenes, a strange religious sect in the New London area. (Naturally I knew nothing of my actual New London roots while I attended Connecticut College in New London.)

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Battle of the United States and the Macedonian from

Thirty Years Beyond the Mast by Samuel Leech

Eventually Johnny and Betsey Rogers Whiskey settled in the beautiful town of Catskill New York. After surviving the British navy, Johnny Whiskey supposedly died unloading tea from a ship in 1829. His 39 year old widow, Betsey Whiskey, who had teenage children, married a 19 year old man. At the New York State Archives, I found their marriage announcement in a Catskill paper and they were the only couple for whom the paper bothered to mention the ages of the bride and groom.

From Vermont to New York to Maine!

Charles Mortimer Wiske, grandson of Johnny Whiskey and my great-grandfather, was born in Bennington Vermont and lived in Troy New York and moved to Brooklyn New York where he hoped to make his living as a choral director and music teacher. He founded several choral groups and also was an active producer of the Newark Wagner Festivals of the 1880s. A famous choral conductor, he actually conducted a chorus of over 3,000 voices. One review said that what it lacked in quality, it made up for in volume. (This is a scary thought.)

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Mortimer Wiske and Emma Demott in the 1870s

Mortimer married the lovely singer, Emma Elizabeth Demott, whose mother, Emma Hart, was descended from an old Long Island New York family. She was the daughter of Lemuel Hartt (Hart), a shipwright, who lived in Smithtown NY and in NY city, and Tabitha Darling. The Darlings, Harts, and Demotts all came to Suffolk county New York in the 1600s.

Poor Lizzie Wiske died very young and my g-grandfather Mortimer married “Aunt Fanny.” (I knew Aunt Fanny, who taught me to play chop sticks on the piano, and I never realized she was actually my great step grandmother.) They both bought land in Bryant Pond (Woodstock) Maine in the early 1900s and ran a wonderful music camp attended by people such as Caruso! I have a funny caricature that Caruso made of himself and Mortimer. In any case, my family on started summering in Maine early in the 1900s. I began summering me as an infant. Aunt Fanny ran the kitchen of Birch Villa, whose main house still looked as it does below.

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Birch Villa Music Camp, Bryant Pond Maine

By the early 1930s Mortimer Wiske finally moved to Bryant Pond where he died. There were numerous articles on his death from papers in Maine, New York, and New Jersey. My Aunt Fanny Wiske pasted his obituaries into Mortimer’s autograph book, which he began during the Civil War. By some miracle, I am the lucky custodian of it.

New York City to Westchester County New York

My father, Rawley Deering McCoy, an electronic engineer, was born in New Jersey and raised in Greenwich Village New York. The family moved to Bronxville New York when he was fairly young. My mother, Jane Wiske, a gifted artist, was born and died in Bronxville. Her parents moved from NYC to Mount Vernon (next to Bronxville) in the 1890s. Several of my teachers taught my mother at Bronxville High School.

More German and English Ancestors to New York City

My great grandfather, John Utz (my mother’s maternal grandfather) was born in NYC to a German immigrant, Johannes Utz, who came to America around 1850.

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John Utz was a highly successful builder in Bronxville and contributed several beautiful homes, which still stand today.

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John Utz married another German, Amalie Neander, whose father, Theodore, came to NYC from Bremen Germany at age 15 during the 1840s. Theodore Neander was a struggling grocer in NYC and he married Jane Victoria Ferrier, whose family came from Barnard Castle in Durham England during the 1830s. Jane seems to have been the youngest of a very large family and she was born in NYC. The Ferriers were in the water bottling business and apparently knew the Neanders through their grocery business.

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