The photograph arrived at the New York Historical Society in early January 2024.
Part of a larger donation from the estate of retired judge Harold Bennett among boxes of legal documents, family papers, and miscellaneous artifacts.
Archivist Diana Foster discovered a Manila envelope containing several dozen photographs from the early 1900s.
Most were typical family portraits and street scenes, the kind of images that filled archives across the country.
But one photograph immediately caught her attention.
The image showed two children, [music] formerly dressed, standing close together in what appeared to be a photographers’s studio.
The boy looked to be about 8 years old, the girl perhaps six.
They held hands tightly, their fingers intertwined with an intensity that seemed unusual for a posed photograph.
The boy wore a dark suit that appeared slightly too large for him, while the girl wore a white dress with elaborate lace trim.
Both children stared directly at the camera with expressions that Diana [music] found difficult to interpret.
What struck Diana most forcefully was the children’s eyes.
In decades of examining historical photographs, she had developed an instinct for reading the emotions preserved in century old images.
>> [music] >> These children weren’t displaying the typical discomfort of long exposure times or the stiff formality common in early photography.
Their expressions conveyed something deeper, something that looked remarkably like grief.
Diana turned the photograph over.
On the back in faded ink, someone [music] had written Emma and William Kowalsski, September 14th, 1901.
Final documentation, family court, New York County.
The word final [music] sent a chill through her.
She had seen similar notations on legal documents before, usually associated with custody proceedings or institutional commitments.
But why would a family court require photographic documentation of two [music] children, she carefully placed the photograph under her magnifying lamp, examining every detail.
The children’s clothing was well-made but not expensive.
The kind of garments that might be purchased specifically for an important occasion.
[music] The photographers studio backdrop showed a painted garden scene standard for the era.
But there was something in the way the children held themselves, the desperate grip of their clasped hands that suggested this was not a happy occasion.
Diana photographed the image with her digital camera and began the process of creating a highresolution scan.
Whatever story this photograph held, she was determined to uncover it.
Diana spent the following morning researching the Kowalsski name in New York records from 1901.
The name was common among Polish immigrants who had flooded into New York City during the 1890s, seeking escape from poverty and political oppression in Eastern Europe.
Thousands of Polish families had settled in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, creating vibrant ethnic neighborhoods where they maintained their language, customs, [music] and community ties while struggling to establish themselves in their new country.
She started with immigration records, searching the Ellis Island database for Kowalsski families arriving in the years before 1901.
She found dozens of entries, each representing a family’s hopes for a better life in America.
After cross- refferencing ages and arrival dates with the children’s approximate ages in the photograph, she identified a promising lead.
John and Katzena Kowalsski had arrived in New York in 1894 with two young children, William, aged 2, and Emma, an infant.
Diana pulled the ship manifest for the vessel that had brought the Kowalsski family to America.
The document showed Yan listed as a laborer, Catzena as his wife, and the two small children.
The family had traveled in steerage class, the cheapest accommodation, packed into the ship’s lower decks with hundreds of other immigrants.
They had arrived with virtually nothing, as the manifests notation of their possessions indicated, one trunk, clothing, and personal items.
Next, Diana searched census records.
[music] The 1900 federal census listed the Kowalsski family living in a tenement building on Orchard Street in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
Jan worked as a factory laborer in a garment sweat shop, earning wages that would have kept the family in perpetual poverty.
Qatarina was listed as keeping house, though Diana knew many immigrant women also took in peacework sewing to supplement family income.
William and Emma were both listed as attending school, which suggested the parents were trying to give their children opportunities through education.
Then Diana searched for death records, [music] fearing she already knew what she would find.
In March 1901, a death certificate appeared for John Kowalsski, age 34.
Cause of death listed as industrial accident.
The certificate indicated he had been killed in a factory collapse at the garment facility where he worked.
Just 4 months later, in July 1901, [music] another death certificate, Katarzena Kowalsski, age 31, cause of death consumption.
the era’s term for tuberculosis.
By September 1901, when the photograph was taken, William and Emma Kowalsski had lost both parents within 6 months.
They were orphans in a city where they had no extended family, no resources, and no protection.
With the children’s background established, Diana turned her attention to the notation on the photograph’s back.
Family [music] court, New York County.
She contacted the New York County Clerk’s Office requesting access to family court records from September 1901.
The records from that era were not digitized, requiring her to visit the municipal archives in person to examine original documents.
The archives occupied a massive building in lower Manhattan.
Its basement storage rooms filled with more than a century of legal proceedings.
A helpful clerk directed Diana to the section containing family court records from 1901, 1905.
dozens of boxes of handwritten documents, case files, and legal forms that documented the city’s attempts to manage the welfare of children in an era of massive immigration and urban poverty.
[music] Diana spent hours searching through boxes looking for any reference to the Kowalsski children.
Finally, in a box labeled September 1901, dependency cases, she found a thick file folder labeled in the matter of William Kowalsski and Emma Kowalsski, [music] minor children.
The file contained a detailed record of legal proceedings that had determined the children’s fate.
Following their mother’s death in July, a neighbor had reported the orphaned children to the city’s Department of Public Charities.
A caseworker had investigated and filed a report [music] describing the children as destitute without family support, living in condemned tenement housing with insufficient food or supervision.
The report recommended that the children be declared dependent wards of the state and placed in appropriate care.
But what Diana found most disturbing was the next document in the file, a petition filed by two different [music] parties, each seeking custody of one of the children.
The first petition came from a Mrs.
Caroline Ashford of Fifth Avenue, requesting custody of Emma Kowalsski for the purpose of domestic service and Christian instruction.
The second came from a farmer named Robert Patterson of Sullivan County, New York, requesting custody of William Kowalsski for the purpose of agricultural labor and moral education.
Neither petition mentioned adoption.
Neither suggested keeping the siblings together.
These were not families seeking to provide a home for orphaned children out of compassion.
These were requests to acquire child laborers under legal supervision of the court.
Diana felt her stomach tighten as she read the clinical language that reduced two grieving children to potential workers who could be distributed to separate households.
The court had scheduled a hearing for September 12th, 1901 to determine the children’s placement.
According to the judge’s notes, both petitioners appeared and made their cases.
No one appeared to represent the children’s interests or to argue that siblings should remain together.
The next document in the file was the court’s official decision dated September 13th, 1901, written in the precise hand of Judge Thomas Whitaker.
Diana read it slowly, feeling anger build with each paragraph.
The judge had granted both petitions, ordering that Emma Kowalsski be placed in the custody of Mrs.
Caroline Ashford and that William Kowalsski be placed in the custody of Robert Patterson.
The siblings would be separated permanently.
The judge’s reasoning, as stated in his decision, reflected the attitudes of progressive era reformers who [music] believed they were acting in children’s best interests.
He wrote that Emma, being female and young, would benefit from instruction in proper domestic duties and feminine comportment in an affluent household.
William, being male and approaching working age, would benefit from the wholesome influence of agricultural labor [music] and removal from the corrupting influences of urban poverty.
Nowhere in the decision did the judge acknowledge that these children had already suffered the trauma of losing both parents within months.
Nowhere did he consider that separating them from their only remaining family connection might cause additional harm.
The children were viewed as problems to be solved, burdens to be distributed, not as individuals with emotional needs and family bonds that deserved protection.
The file contained additional documents detailing the practical arrangements.
Mrs.
Zashford would assume custody of Emma immediately and would be responsible for her maintenance until age 18, at which point Emma could either remain in service or seek other employment.
Mr.
[music] Patterson would take custody of William under similar terms with the expectation that the boy would work on Patterson’s farm in exchange for room, board, and basic education until reaching adulthood.
Diana found a document she had been dreading, the transfer papers that officially removed the children from New York City.
[music] The papers were dated September 15th, 1901, just one day after the photograph was taken.
Emma had been delivered to the Ashford residence on Fifth Avenue that morning.
William had been placed on a train to Sullivan County that same afternoon.
The timing made Diana’s theory about the photograph’s purpose clear.
The court had required a final photograph as documentation before the children were permanently separated.
Then Diana discovered something that made her hands shake as she held the yellowed paper.
Attached to the transfer papers was a handwritten note from the case worker who had supervised the children’s removal.
[music] The note read, “Children extremely distressed at separation.
Boy had to be physically removed from his sister.
Girl became hysterical.
Both children required restraint during transfer.
recommend future cases be handled with less advanced notice to minimize emotional displays.
The bureaucratic language couldn’t hide the horror of what had occurred.
These children had been torn apart while fully aware of what was happening to them.
The photograph taken the day before suddenly took on new meaning.
It was the last moment William and Emma had together before being separated forever.
Diana’s next task was tracing what had happened to each child after the separation.
She began with Emma, whose placement with the Asheford family on Fifth Avenue left a clearer documentary trail and city records.
The Asheford residence was part of New York’s Gilded Age elite, a world of enormous wealth built on industrial fortunes, while millions of immigrants struggled in poverty just miles [music] away.
The 1905 New York State Census provided her first confirmation that Emma had indeed been placed with the Asheford household.
>> [music] >> The census listed Emma Kowalsski, age 10, as servant in the Asheford residence.
This classification was telling.
Despite her young age, Emma was not listed as a ward or adopted daughter, but as household staff.
She was there [music] to work, not to be part of the family.
Diana searched through city directories and society pages from the early 1900s to learn more about the Asheford family.
Caroline Ashford was the wife of Theodore Ashford, a banker whose wealth derived from investments in railroads and steel manufacturing.
The Ashfords maintained a six-story mansion staffed by more than a dozen servants.
They were regular fixtures in society columns, attending balls, hosting dinners, and conspicuously donating to charitable causes, including, ironically, organizations that claim to help immigrant children.
Through the New York Public Libraryies digital archives, Diana found household account books from similar wealthy families of that era.
These documents preserved by historians studying domestic labor practices revealed what life would have been like for a child servant in an elite household.
Young girls like Emma typically worked from before dawn until late evening, cleaning fireplaces, hauling water, assisting with laundry, [music] running errands, serving meals, and performing any other tasks demanded by the family or senior servants.
The education promised in custody arrangements rarely materialized in any meaningful way.
Some households provided basic literacy instruction, [music] but many provided nothing beyond religious teaching.
The Christian instruction mentioned in Mrs.
Ashford’s petition [music] likely meant compulsory church attendance and Bible readings, not genuine education.
Emma would have been expected to be grateful for the opportunity to serve, to remain invisible, except when performing duties, and to accept her station without complaint.
Diana found one direct reference to Emma in a memoir written by a distant Asheford relative and published in the 1950s.
The author mentioned in passing [music] the little Polish girl who helped mother with various household tasks and seemed quite devoted to the family.
The casual dismissive tone suggested Emma had made so little impression that she wasn’t even remembered by name decades later.
She had been reduced to the little Polish girl.
Her identity, history, [music] and trauma erased.
Tracing Williams path proved more challenging.
Sullivan County in 1901 was rural farming territory.
about 90 mi northwest of New York City.
Recordkeeping in rural areas was less systematic than in the city, and many documents had been lost to time, fire, or simple neglect.
But Diana was determined to find what had become of the 8-year-old boy, who had been sent away from everything familiar.
She contacted the Sullivan County Historical Society, explaining her research.
The society’s volunteer coordinator, an elderly man named Arthur Green, was immediately interested.
He explained that Sullivan County had been a destination for many children removed from New York City during the early 1900s, part of broader movements that placed urban children with rural families, ostensibly for their benefit, but often resulting in exploitation as farm labor.
Green searched the society’s records for any mention of Robert Patterson, the farmer who had taken custody of William.
He found Patterson listed in agricultural census records from 1900 and 1910, [music] operating a dairy farm of approximately 150 acres.
The 1900 census showed Patterson, age 52, living with his wife Martha and one adult farm hand.
They had no children of their own, which made their petition for custody of William more obviously about acquiring labor rather than providing a family.
The 1905 New York State census provided confirmation that William had indeed been placed with the Patterson farm.
The census listed William Kowalsski, age 12, as farm laborer living in the Patterson household.
Like his sister, William was classified as a worker, not a family member.
His childhood had effectively ended at age 8, replaced by years of agricultural labor.
Green located several documents that painted a picture of what Williams life would have entailed.
Farm labor in Sullivan County during that era was brutal, particularly for children who lacked the physical strength for the work demanded of them.
Boys placed on farms typically rose before dawn to milk cows, mucked out barns, hauled water and feed, worked in fields during planting and harvest seasons, and performed countless other tasks in all weather conditions.
Education again promised in custody arrangements rarely occurred.
Farm families valued labor over schooling [music] and Truan officers rarely ventured into rural areas to enforce attendance laws.
Then Green found something that made Diana’s research take a darker turn.
A brief notice in the Sullivan County Record newspaper from August 1906.
The notice just three lines long reported farm accident on Patterson property.
William Kowalsski, age 13, injured in fall from hoft, treated by local physician for broken arm and severe bruising.
The notice provided no additional details, but Diana recognized the language as potentially euphemistic.
Farm accidents often masked abuse or dangerous working conditions that would have violated child labor laws had anyone been monitoring compliance.
The 1910 census showed William still listed at the Patterson [music] farm, now age 15, still classified as farm laborer.
But after [music] 1910, William Kowalsski disappeared from Sullivan County records entirely.
Diana [music] searched death records, finding nothing.
She searched marriage records, employment records, and military draft registration from World War I.
William had simply vanished from the documentary record.
With the children’s subsequent histories partially reconstructed, Diana returned to the photograph itself, examining it with new understanding of what it represented.
She now knew that when this image was taken on September 14th, 1901, William and Emma already knew they were about to be separated forever.
The court hearing had occurred 2 days earlier.
The transfer was scheduled for the next morning.
This photograph was literally their last moment together.
Diana created an ultra-igh scan of the image, examining every detail with forensic precision.
The children’s clasped hands, which had initially caught her attention, now seemed even more significant.
Their grip was so tight that Emma’s small fingers appeared white from the pressure.
This wasn’t a casual pose suggested by the photographer.
This was two children holding on to each other with desperate intensity, [music] knowing they were about to be torn apart.
She examined their clothing more carefully.
Both children wore garments that appeared new or nearly new, significantly better quality than what they would have worn in their daily lives as children of poor immigrant laborers.
[music] Someone, likely the court or a charitable organization, had purchased these clothes specifically for the photograph.
The children had been dressed up to look presentable to create an image that suggested they were being cared for properly even as the system was preparing to separate them permanently.
The photographer’s studio was identified by a small stamp on the photographs mounting.
Jay Morrison fine portraiture 127 Bowery.
Diana researched Morrison’s studio and found advertisements from 1901 indicating he frequently contracted with city agencies to provide documentation photographs for legal proceedings.
This wasn’t a family portrait commissioned by loved ones wanting to preserve a memory.
This was an official photograph required by bureaucracy, paid for by the city, taken to satisfy legal requirements before children were distributed like property.
Diana noticed something else in the highresolution scan.
Both children had been crying recently before the photograph was taken.
Their eyes showed the telltale puffiness and redness of recent tears.
Someone had likely cleaned their faces and composed them for the camera, but the evidence of their grief remained visible to anyone looking closely enough.
The photographer had captured not just their images, but [music] their trauma preserved in silver and chemicals for more than a century.
She examined William’s expression more carefully.
His jaw was set in a way that suggested he was trying desperately to be brave, to be strong for his younger sister.
Emma’s face showed naked fear and grief.
The face of a six-year-old who understood she was losing her brother.
Her last family connection.
The only person in the world who knew her history and shared her loss.
The photograph documented not just two children, but the moment of their family’s final destruction.
Diana’s investigation took an unexpected turn when she received an email from Arthur Green at the Sullivan County Historical Society.
He had continued searching for information about William after their initial conversation and had made a discovery.
In the society’s collection of local newspapers, he had found several letters to the editor published in the Sullivan County Record during 1907 and 1908, written by someone identified as a concerned neighbor.
The letters which Green scanned and sent to Diana painted a disturbing picture of conditions on the Patterson farm.
The writer described seeing a teenage boy identified as a city child placed with the Pattersons working in dangerous conditions appearing malnourished and showing visible signs of physical abuse.
One letter from March 1908 stated, “The boy called William, no more than 14 years of age, was observed working in freezing temperatures without adequate clothing, [music] his hands raw and bleeding from handling frozen equipment.
When this observer attempted to speak with the boy, Mr.
Patterson intervened aggressively and ordered the boy back to work.
This is not Christian charity, but rather exploitation of a child with no one to protect his interests.” Another letter from May 1908 described, “The same boy was seen in town with visible bruising on his face and arms.
When questioned by the shopkeeper about his injuries, the boy claimed to have fallen, but his demeanor suggested fear rather than clumsiness.” Several community members have expressed concern.
Yet, no official investigation has occurred.
What is the purpose of placing city children with country families if we allow such treatment to continue unchallenged? Green had also found a response to these letters published by the Sullivan County Department of Public Welfare in June 1908.
The official statement defended the placement system and specifically addressed the Patterson situation.
All placements are made with careful consideration of family suitability.
The Patterson family has been investigated and found to provide adequate care.
The boy in question has shown behavioral difficulties, including lying and theft, [music] which necessitate firm discipline.
Anonymous accusations do not constitute grounds for removal.
The bureaucratic dismissal of documented concerns enraged Diana.
Here was
evidence that community members had tried to intervene on William’s behalf, and the system had protected the abusive family rather than [music] the vulnerable child.
The language used to describe William behavioral difficulties, lying, was typical of how authorities blame children for their own victimization, reframing abuse as deserved discipline.
Then Green shared something even more significant.
He had contacted descendants of families who had lived in the area during that period, [music] asking if anyone had family stories or documents related to Place City Children.
An elderly woman named Helen Pierce had responded with copies of diary entries written by her great aunt, who had lived on a neighboring farm to the Pattersons in the early 1900s.
The diary entries written in faded ink on yellowed pages provided eyewitness accounts.
One entry from winter 1907 stated, “Saw the Kowalsski boy in Patterson’s Northfield today.
He couldn’t be more than 13, but he was hauling water buckets that looked too heavy for his small frame.
His coat was thin and torn.
Martha won’t meet my eyes when I ask about the boy.
She knows it’s wrong.
Diana’s breakthrough in finding Emma came from an unexpected source.
The genealogy website where she had posted inquiries about the Kowalsski children.
A woman named Jennifer Martinez contacted her explaining that Emma Kowalsski was her great grandmother.
Martinez had family documents and stories passed down through generations, and she was eager to help Diana understand what had happened to Emma after the photograph was taken.
Martinez invited Diana to her home in Queens, where she had assembled a collection of family materials.
Among them was a short memoir Emma had written in the 1950s near the end of her life, describing her experiences as a child servant in the Asheford household.
Diana [music] read it with growing sadness and anger.
Emma’s memoir described years of isolation and labor.
She had been given a small room in the servants quarters, woken each morning at 5:00 and worked until late evening.
Mrs.
Ashford had been cold and demanding, criticizing Emma constantly and using physical punishment for minor infractions.
Emma had attended school only sporadically during her first two years with the family, [music] then not at all after age 8, when Mrs.
Ashford decided she was needed full-time for household work.
What struck Diana most painfully was Emma’s description of her grief over losing William.
I cried every night for months, sometimes for [music] years.
I didn’t know where my brother had been sent.
I didn’t know if he was alive or dead.
I wasn’t allowed to write letters or receive mail.
Mrs.
Ashford said I needed to forget my old life and be grateful for my new opportunities.
But how could I forget William? He was the only family I had left.
Losing him was like losing my parents all over again.
Except this time, I knew exactly who had taken him from me.
Emma had remained with the Ashford family until age 16 when she left without notice, essentially running away from what had been a decade of servitude.
She had found work in a garment factory, the same kind of workplace where her father had died, struggling to support herself while living in cramped boarding houses.
At 19, she had married another Polish immigrant, a man named Joseph Martinez, and they had built a modest but stable life together in Brooklyn.
Emma had spent decades trying to find William, writing letters to various agencies, searching records, asking anyone who might have information.
[music] She never found him.
She never learned what had happened to her brother after he was sent to Sullivan County.
The last time she saw him was in that photographer’s studio on September 14th, 1901, when they held hands and tried to memorize each other’s faces, knowing they were about to be separated forever.
Martinez showed Diana a photograph Emma had kept her entire life, the very image Diana had found in the archives, presumably a copy Emma had somehow obtained years later.
[music] Emma had kept it in a small wooden box along with the few items she had from her parents.
On the back of her copy, Emma had written in different ink at different times, recording her ongoing search.
Still looking for William, 1920.
[music] No news of William.
1935.
Never stopped searching.
1960.
Diana spent the following months compiling a comprehensive report on the Kowalsski siblings, drawing together all the evidence she had gathered.
With Jennifer Martinez’s permission, she prepared an exhibition at the New York Historical Society titled Separated: The Hidden Cruelty of Progressive Era Child Welfare.
The 1901 photograph of William and Emma became the exhibition’s centerpiece, enlarged to wall size so visitors could see every detail of the children’s griefstricken faces and desperately clasped hands.
The exhibition opened in September 2024, exactly 123 years after the photograph was taken.
Dozens of Emma’s descendants attended, many meeting each other for the first time, brought together by their shared connection to a woman whose childhood trauma had echoed through generations.
They stood before the massive photograph, seeing their great-g grandandmother or great great grandmother as a terrified six-year-old girl about to lose everything.
[music] Diana’s research had also uncovered the broader context.
William and Emma were not isolated cases, but representatives of thousands of children who had been separated from siblings during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Progressive era reformers, [music] believing they were helping children, had created systems that routinely destroyed family bonds, distributed children to households that exploited their labor, [music] and dismissed the emotional trauma that separation caused.
The systems were designed to solve the problem of poor immigrant children, not to protect the children’s well-being.
The exhibition included records showing that between 1880 and 1920, [music] New York courts had separated more than 150,000 sibling groups, sending children to different locations with no plan for maintaining contact or eventual reunion.
The practice reflected attitudes that viewed poor children as salvageable raw material to be distributed where they could be made useful rather than as individuals with emotional needs and family attachments deserving protection.
Williams fate remained unknown.
[music] Despite Diana’s extensive research and appeals for information, no definitive records emerged showing what had happened to him after 1910.
He had either died young, left Sullivan County, and disappeared into the broader population, [music] or changed his name to escape his past.
The uncertainty itself became part of the exhibition’s message.
William represented thousands of children who simply vanished from historical records, their lives and deaths unrecorded, their stories lost.
But Emma’s story, preserved through her memoir and her descendants memories, provided testimony that could not be ignored.
She had survived, built a family, and ensured that her own children and grandchildren knew their history.
She had kept that photograph for 60 years, a reminder of the brother she never stopped searching for, and the family that had been destroyed by a system claiming to help.
The photograph from September 14th, [music] 1901, now resided in the historical society’s permanent collection, properly contextualized with the full story of what it represented.
Those clasped hands, that visible grief, that last moment together, all of it preserved not just as historical curiosity, but as evidence of institutional cruelty that had operated with legal sanction and moral certainty.
William and Emma’s photograph had become testimony, speaking across more than a century to document how easily systems can destroy the very people they claim to protect, and how trauma reverberates through generations long after the original wound.
