Josie’s Story: Birthplace

First of eight parts. Read more about this series here.

A few years ago, while visiting my old hometown in New Jersey, I had dinner with some high school classmates. Danny’s wife was excited to hear that I live in Alaska.

“My great-grandmother was born in Alaska,” Amy Weiss said.

I smiled and wondered how far back in Alaska’s history a great-grandmother would take you.

“She was the first white American girl born in Sitka after Russia sold Alaska,” Amy said.

My eyes grew wide. I tried to mask my skepticism. Family stories handed down through generations sometimes get exaggerated. But Amy wasn’t done.

“Because she was born on U.S. soil, she was able to get an American passport many years later and escape the Holocaust.”

After I got home, I emailed Amy to say I was looking into her story. I would see if any historical records could prove her ancestor was Alaska’s first colonial daughter. Birth certificates in Alaska dating back to 1867 were not easy to find. In fact, there were no birth records from those days at all, according to the state’s archivists, unless a child was born into the Russian Orthodox Church.

The decennial United States census of 1870 was another dead end. Alaska, an American possession for three years by 1870, had been excluded from the national census. But then I learned that the U.S. Army, while preparing a report to Congress on the former “grand depot of the Russian Fur Company,” undertook its own census in October 1870 of the birthplace of modern Alaska.

It is a remarkable document.

Lt. D.A. Lyle, Second Artillery, was under orders not only to take down names and occupations, but to assess likely needs for public assistance in the coming winter. He obligingly appended personal observations regarding various civilians, contemptuously dismissing many of the military outpost’s majority mixed-race “creole” population, families with Russian names and Native, mainly Aleut, mothers and grandmothers.

The entry for Vasilla Sligistoff, a 56-year-old male born in Siberia and father of three, lists the occupation of fiddler and the added note “Worthless, drunken wretch.”

Anaska Kokotoka, 25, is identified as “Indian she-slave kept by Griffin.” The occupation for Vasilla Ephanoff, age 12, is “thief and rascal.”

The fact that prostitutes (36) outnumber housewives (27) — with one woman double-listed as “wife and prostitute” — is a testament to the community’s lack of employment opportunities. Anna Koratsina, a 37-year-old prostitute, receives a fuller note: “Kept by the barber, Franklin, or rather she keeps him. She says he don’t pay her a cent for value received, and gets drunk on her daughter’s wages.”

Lt. Lyle did not attempt to interview or differentiate the Tlingit people living outside Sitka’s defensive log palisade, whose numbers were estimated at around 1,200. (Most Alaska Natives were not recognized as American citizens until 1924.) Nor did he include the local Army garrison of 125 men and a few families.

Of the 390 non-military persons listed as living in Sitka in 1870, only 100 or so were newcomers from America. Many of the town’s new white Americans — merchants and tradespeople — are entered in the census without comment, including Amos Whitford, “dealer in trash and Indian curiosities.”

Young Alexander Miletich, a saloonkeeper from Austria, is commended as “Honest, good man: reliable.”

Thomas Groves, 34, a saddler, cook and steward, and Martha Groves, 20, a laundress, are identified as “Colored couple, freshly married.”

Martin and Fanny Rudolph, Jewish merchants from Bavaria, operators of a store and a brewery in town, are said to have a “Very clean and comfortable house.”

And there she was, on line 285 of that 1870 Army census, her name slightly misspelled: Josephine Rodolphe, female, age 15 months, birthplace Sitka.

Encouraged by my discovery, Amy Weiss and her cousin, Susie Hoffman, dug out papers documenting their family history. They found a letter explaining why Martin and Fanny Rudolph eventually returned to Germany with young Josie after many years in Alaska and Oregon. They recalled stories they’d heard: how their mothers, as girls, listened at their grandmother Josie’s open apartment window in Nuremberg to cries of “Sieg Heil” from the massive rallies that helped lift Adolf Hitler to power.

Regarding the years in Alaska, unfortunately, no such stories or letters had been handed down. Josie Rudolph’s story would have to be assembled piecemeal, like so many family genealogical accounts, then fitted into a larger story of a time and a place.

Records from those first years of American rule are sketchy, but the Rudolph name pops up from time to time. I even found an advertisement for Rudolph’s store in Alaska’s first newspaper, the Sitka Times, whose inaugural edition, copied out in longhand with no printing press on hand, set forth this eternal promise of small-town journalism: “We shall spare no pains in giving a well-defined description of all fights, recording in language of flowers the matrimonial pursuits of mankind, with the respectful details of those ‘whose souls have fled to the Spirit land.’”

Susie Hoffman, an epidemiologist and professor living in Brooklyn, had visited Alaska back in her college years and looked into her great-grandmother’s origin story. She was eager to discover more. At one point in our conversations, however, Susie hesitated, weighing Alaska’s history and modern political perspectives. Was the story of one pioneer immigrant family worth telling, she wondered, when the big story from those years was the theft of Tlingit homelands?

It was a good question. These days, the epithet “pioneer” — uttered as praise through much of Alaska’s history — has become complicated by its association with the global conquest and decimation of Indigenous communities. For most historians, “settler colonialism” has replaced “manifest destiny” as the explanatory narrative behind America’s frontier drive. Efforts are underway to “de-colonize” everything from museum collections to school curriculums. Classroom conversations address new and difficult topics, such as the differences between assimilation and genocide.

Nostalgic pioneer accounts of Alaska’s origins are currently being recast in this new light. Indeed, early Sitka would seem a paint-by-numbers illustration of settler colonialism, where white pioneers fresh off the boat were claiming dominion over the Alaska Native population just outside their stockade’s log walls.

And yet — that first wave of settlers coming to Alaska proved to be a less-than-inexorable force. Their experiment in imperialism didn’t last a decade. And as Josie Rudolph’s story makes evident, the “white pioneer” community that first settled Sitka was far from homogenous, its makeup complicated by a world, then as now, awash with immigrants and refugees.

On the very week in August 1869 when Josie Rudolph was born, Sitka played host to none other than retired Secretary of State William H. Seward, once President Abraham Lincoln’s right-hand man, whose imperial project it had been to unfurl the stars and stripes over the North Pacific.

Seward arrived on the steamship Active and was welcomed as a hero for negotiating the treaty with Russia two years earlier. He predicted a great future for the settlers of the north. The statesman delivered a long-winded oration, declaring himself pleased that Sitka’s summer weather so effectively rebutted the calumny of Alaska as “Seward’s Icebox”: “It must be a fastidious person who complains of climates in which, while the eagle delights to soar, the hummingbird does not disdain to flutter.”

Seward toured the local vanguards of American enterprise, including a brewery part-owned by Josie Rudolph’s father, and he met with the military. Since raising the flag on Oct. 18, 1867, Sitka had mainly been an Army post. A long and uneasy truce between the Russians and the local Tlingit clans was slowly giving way to American rule by gunboat. The post commander, Brig. Gen. Jefferson C. Davis, was a veteran of the recent Civil War — a former Union general best known for two things: sharing a name with the president of the Confederacy, and shooting dead an unarmed superior officer who had insulted him in a Kentucky hotel lobby before the battle of Perryville.

Secretary Seward was avidly courted by Sitka’s businessmen — the small circle of saloonkeepers and traders and “dealers in Indian curiosities” to whom Davis had delegated authority in most civil matters. The civilians had set up a city council, traded town lots and complained about lack of support from the federal government. But several things set Sitka apart from similar boom towns on the American frontier: its northern latitude, the lingering presence of hundreds of mixed-race Russians — and the prominent roles played by 10 Jewish individuals and families, most of them immigrants from Europe and Turkey.

Susie and Amy wondered what part their ancestors, Martin and Fanny Rudolph, played in those first years of American Alaska. The question of who belongs in America’s frontier story has been asked through many generations, through many changes in law and public sentiment about immigration. Who belongs in America?

Could Josie Rudolph, the daughter of German Jews driven from their homeland, really be Alaska’s first pioneer daughter? Because in the 1930s, when grown-up Josie was desperately trying to escape the Nazis and the U.S. government floated a plan to admit refugees to Alaska, the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner ran a memorable headline: “German Jews Unsuited for Alaska Settlers Is Prevailing View Here.”

By June 1936, Josie Rudolph’s thoughts had turned to Alaska.

She was alone in Nazi Germany. Her grown children had fled. Her husband, Bernhard Thurnauer, had died five months earlier. Bernhard had been older, a widower back when he married 19-year-old Josie. He had given her a good life: two children and a lovely home in Nuremberg. Bernhard was from a prosperous Jewish family that went back generations in Bavaria. Like many successful Jews of his time, he was proud of German art and culture. Bernhard had been the one who wanted them to stay in Germany.

They had seen the rise of the Nazis up close. Their home city was the scene of mass rallies where Hitler vilified Jews as the nation’s internal enemies. In 1933, when the Nazis gained firm national control, local officials wasted no time going after the prominent Thurnauers. Josie’s son, Martin, in charge of the family’s industrial ceramics factory, was thrown in jail — for his own protection from Jew-hating mobs, the Interior Ministry said.

To win his release, he agreed to surrender the factory. Martin left the country soon after, taking his family to New Jersey in 1934. Then Martin’s sister, Lilly, fled to London, dragging along a sulking teenage daughter who missed her friends and complained that her parents were ruining her life by making her leave Nazi Germany.

The clamor to get out had only grown louder since. In 1935, Hitler brought the German parliament to Nuremberg for a rally with 50,000 Hitler Youth, after which the Reichstag voted to take citizenship from Jews, remove them from government positions, and ban intermarriage. These parliamentary acts would become known as the “Nuremberg Laws,” aimed at protecting the “purity of German blood.”

Other European countries were closing their borders. Getting a visa to the United States was all but impossible. The U.S. Congress had set strict immigration limits — 27,000 allowed from Germany for 1936 — and the State Department was admitting only a fraction of that quota. By 1939, the waiting time in Germany for U.S. visas would be 11 years.

One factor set Josie apart.

Her parents had lived in Alaska for three-plus years beginning in 1867, the year of the Alaska purchase. While they lived there, the reunited states ratified the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, guaranteeing citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. The amendment was adopted to ensure full rights to slaves freed by the Civil War. But the children of immigrants received that same constitutional birthright — one that is being challenged again today, as debates continue over who gets to be an American.

Josie had grown up speaking perfect English from her childhood, but had no memory of her birthplace in the coastal rainforest of the Sheet-ká Kwáan.

Next: Intrigue and social jostling in the new colonial outpost.

Support for this project was provided by the Alaska Center for Excellence in Journalism.