The Almost Legendary Morris Sisters

July 1, 2021
Unraveling the thread of a tangled family history. Growing up, Klam heard tantalizing stories about Selma, Malvina, Marcella, and Ruth Morris, her first cousins twice removed, who led astonishing lives. According to family lore, they had come to America from Romania in the early 1900s and settled with their parents in St. Louis but soon were put into an orphanage when their mother died in childbirth. Their father promised to return to get them; when he failed to appear, Marcella managed to leave the orphanage and go to work to pay for her siblings' release. Thereafter, the sisters became inseparable. They moved to New York City, lived in one house together, and finally relocated to Southampton, on Long Island. Most astoundingly, Marcella became a millionaire, donating generously to Brandeis University. When Klam heard the story from various family members, enough contradictions emerged that she decided to investigate. Her breezy family history recounts whatever she could find about the sisters' lives as well as the surprises and frustrations she encountered during her research. With no training in genealogy or history, the author depended on the generosity of librarians and archivists, whose correspondence she includes. She recounts her travels to St. Louis; Southampton, where the sisters endowed a local library; and Romania, where she found a congenial, helpful guide. She even visited a psychic. Often, she checked in with one of her relatives, whose stories sometimes yielded useful nuggets and sometimes assumptions that Klam discovered were preposterous. Marcella, for example, who apparently became a successful financier, never had an affair with J.P. Morgan, as some in the family believed. Nor did the sisters' mother die when they were young. Instead, she lived for more than 30 years in an insane asylum in St. Louis, diagnosed with schizophrenia. Klam's persistent curiosity pays off in a lively portrait of her "weird family." An entertaining, rambling journey into the past.

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July 26, 2021
Klam (The Stars in Our Eyes) mines the complicated past of her grandmother’s four cousins in her half-baked genealogical memoir. “How much of what defines us at various points in our lives is based on what we are told by the people we trust,” she writes, explaining how the “strange” family lore she grew up with was full of embellishments and gaps in memory. The story that preoccupied her most was that of the Morris sisters—who came to America in the early 20th century, were orphaned in the Midwest, and eventually became millionaires in New York City—one that was discovered to have been more misinformation than facts. In colloquial prose, Klam sets out to understand the lives of these “completely crazy, obscenely wealthy” women, incorporating excerpts from email exchanges and letters with family members and genealogical experts along the way. She learns that, despite toiling in industries dominated by men—one sister was a successful Wall Street financier—the Morrises were anomalies of their time, as they only did business with other women, “leaving the bulk of their money for the benefit of female related causes,” according to a second cousin. While their feminist ideals make for fascinating material, Klam fails to paint the sisters as interesting, multidimensional characters, favoring her process over her subjects. By the book’s end, readers may be left with more questions than answers.