|
a.
|
Note: H00005
Note: Anna Mildred Brill was born on 4 October 1894 at 211 Clifton Avenue, Sharpsburg, PA, a suburb of Pittsburgh, the third living child of Ernest Henry (Ernst Heinrich) Brill and Sarah "Sadie" Bryant. Her brother, Clyde, was 10 and her sister, Fern, was 6 at the time of her birth. A younger sister, Sarah "Sally" Brill, was born in 1896. Her father, born in Etna, PA, was a first generation American of German (Hessen) Protestant (Lutheran) parents. He boot-strapped his way up from the steel mills and was a successful tobacco wholesaler of Pittsburgh "Stogies" in the partnership of Brill & Anglin. Anna was 16 when he died in 1911. Her mother, Sarah "Sadie" Bryant was the second living child, second daughter of Irish Protestant emigrant parents who settled in PA, then for unknown reasons, went to Ontario, Canada where Sadie was born, only to return to PA before 1870. Her father worked in the mills and died when Sadie was a teenager. Sadie's older sister Anna, a piano teacher, and her mother, the widowed Mary Bryant were living with Ernest, Sadie and family on Clifton Ave. in 1900. The children were all christened in and attended the Centenary Methodist Church, as did Sadie Brill. There appears to have been no relationship with Ernest's German family or the Lutheran Church, although his young widowed mother had remarried, and he had many "Dietrich" half-siblings in the area. Sadie Brill was proud to have made it into the middle-class and was determined bury her Irish and his German roots. From an early age she regaled Anna, Sally and probably the older children with stories of her Colonial heritage and her family's relationship to "her uncle," the poet William Cullen Bryant. (These stories were passed down to Anna's children and grandchildren only, in recent years, to have been proved to be pure fantasy.) Clifton Avenue, around the "turn of the century," was a half-developed, suburban street with many substantial new houses and plenty of places to play. The Brill's two-story house had front and pack porches, a basement and an attic. Sadie was adament about keeping up appearances and maintaining Sundays as the Lord's day of rest. The little girls had to stay in their church clothes and play quietly on the front porch throughout the afternoon, or, if they changed out of their Sunday best, they had to stay out of sight in the back of the house or on the back porch. Ann and Sally had a little playmate next door, a girl named Helen Woriner who remained Ann's life-long friend.
|
