‘The Bereaved’ a true story of the Orphan Trains (with a local connection)

It began 33 years ago, with a box.

“In it was a little piece of folded stationery,” explained author Julia Park Tracey, “and, written in flowing copperplate, was the following – ‘Receipt for the train fare of W.H. Lozier, January, 1856, from New York City to Oberlin, Ohio.’”

It was signed, Tracey said, by an agent named Rogers from New York City’s Home for the Friendless. Those brief words were the impetus for Park Tracey’s latest novel, “The Bereaved,” which has just been released by Sibylline Press. The author will appear at Copperfield’s Books on Friday, Aug. 18, for an in-store reading and conversation.

Park Tracey, 60, grew up in Penngrove and attended Petaluma High and Santa Rosa Junior College, studying journalism there and at San Francisco State University.

“I ended up in the East Bay,” she said, “got married, had three children, then divorced.” She and her second husband, Patrick Tracey, eventually moved to Forestville.

“Somewhere along the way, I got a master’s in English,” she said. Her creative thesis turned into her first novel, “Tongues of Angels.” More novels followed, as did a poetry collection and “The Doris Diaries” two books about her extraordinary great-aunt. Park Tracey was also a career journalist, writing for magazines and newspapers, often freelancing. At one time she had her own public relations firm.

The aforementioned box, passed down through generations to her father, was filled with family-related documents including business cards and newspaper clippings.

“We didn’t know where the receipt came from,” Park Tracey said, though they knew it referred to her father’s grandfather. He was always sneered at, she explained, “because he was a foundling.”

Fast-forward 24 years. Park Tracey was trying to get an idea for another book.

“I started thinking, ‘What else is in my history?’” She didn’t get anywhere until she discovered Christina Baker Kline’s book, “Orphan Train.”

“After reading it, I looked in the back of the book and it mentioned the National Orphan Train Complex Museum and Research Center in Concordia, Kansas. I wrote them saying, ‘I wonder if you have any information about my great-grandfather?’”

She included a copy of the receipt, the original was eventually donated to the museum.

The response from Concordia, Kansas was eager. They did indeed have a record of W.H. Lozier.

“They emailed,” Park Tracey continued, “saying, ‘This is one of the most satisfying mysteries we’ve ever solved. Just wait until you open the package.’”

Park Tracey described the package as “a big, fat manila envelope.” What she learned when she opened it and began reading was that her great-grandfather was the youngest of four children, all of whom were given up by their mother to the Home for the Friendless in New York City.

At some point, their mother, Martha, wrote to the Home for the Friendless, asking for her children’s return but, “They wouldn’t give them back,” Park Tracey said. She later learned through her research that, at that time, if a father remarried and wanted his children, they’d be returned.

But not a mother.

“As I was reading, I had to sit down,” she said. “My knees went weak. It took me a while to connect with this emotionally.”

By then, she was consumed, wondering, “What happened next?”

The Orphan Train Movement

The history of the Orphan Train is a painful one, said Park Tracey, explaining that it wasn’t just one train, and wasn’t actually called that at the time. The massive welfare program came about in New York City during the Gilded Age – roughly the second half of the 19th century.

“The railroad barons who lived in New York didn’t like seeing dirty street kids or their streetwalker mothers, so with do-gooder impulses, they formed this orphanage,” she said.

The main thing about this complex historical footnote, explained Shaley George, curator of the National Orphan Train Complex Museum and Research Center, was that the orphanage founders “wanted to make Protestants out of prostitutes.”

“They were very much about getting these women off the street,” Park Tracey went on. “They thought there was something wrong with these women, that they were fallen and needed to be saved, not that they were prostituting themselves out of economic necessity.”

According what Park Tracey discovered, the thought process was that, “The best thing was to put their children on trains and send them west. This would benefit everybody. It would get them off the streets, give them a home and education. If they were over 14, they’d be paid a wage. If they were younger they could be adopted by a loving family.”

She noted this was the era of manifest destiny and conquering the West.

“What they didn’t understand,” she said, “was these were not sinful, fallen women. They were desperate. They had nothing else. There was no such thing as day care. How do you work and take care of your family if you don’t have a partner?”

Park Tracey admits she was outraged and heartbroken on her behalf.

“This book for me is about women’s work,” she said. “I wanted to show what she did do, what were the resources she had. In the novel, she sells her wedding ring, although it was the only thing she had to keep her safe from marauding hands. If she sells her thimble and scissors, she can’t work. So she comes to this impossible moment. How can she feed her children?”

Park Tracey explained that the records show Martha first gave away Ira and George, the two middle boys, but kept the oldest (Sarah, a teen girl) and the baby (Homer, Park Tracey’s great-grandfather). Sarah could look after Homer.

But, six months later, she brought them in as well. The Home for the Friendless put all four on the Orphan Train and sent them West to be adopted.

With these few scraps of information as inspiration, Park Tracey’s journey of discovery began, reaching out to learn who her great-great-grandmother, Martha Seybolt Lozier, had been, and why she had to make the terrible, agonizing decision to send her children away.

When asked if, in her research, she became Martha, she paused.

“It was more like she became me,” Park Tracey said. “I wanted to experience the things she experienced.”

For her, she said, it was similar to method acting. She wanted to go to the places Martha and her family lived in New York City and State, “To know what it smells like, what it sounds like, the cicadas in the trees, the wildflowers, the birds. Some things are timeless – walking on a street where the Home for the Friendless was … from there to the Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue, listening to the ambient street noise. I wanted to feel what it was like to be there – seeing a woman sitting on a sidewalk selling bottles of cold water, dogs running around, soldiers, the sound of traffic. I realized I could have been there 150 years ago.”

In so doing, Park Tracey thought, “What are the things Martha knows? She knows what it’s like to pluck a chicken, how much salt to add by taste and the feel of it on her fingers, what dough feels like on her hands, how to boil maple sugar and try out pork cracklings.”

Martha, of course, was a seamstress, a dressmaker.

“I wanted to know what it was like to make a dress by hand,” she said. “I got a costume pattern, went to a fabric store and started sewing this dress. Sewing is one of those things like knitting or painting a wall – it’s repetitive manual labor. It’s laborious but, for me, it allows my mind to go into the delta state, open to the muse.” With a laugh, she added, “It sounds airy-fairy, and I’m not, but she started speaking to me.”

‘I could feel what she must have felt’

Despite all this, the book wasn’t quite right, she said. By the time Park Tracey was working on the third draft, she knew there was still too much telling and not enough owning of Martha’s feelings.

“And then,” she said, “our son Austin died by suicide and I couldn’t write.”

That was in February 2019 and he was only 21.

“My brain was like mashed potatoes,” she admitted. “I didn’t know if I’d ever write again. I didn’t leave the sofa, just sat there, watched bad television and ate frozen dinners.”

She and her husband were living in Forestville at the time. In addition to the loss of their son, they endured flooding and three wildfire scares before deciding they had to leave.

“The sadness was everywhere – in the sofa, the walls and curtains and rugs. And I couldn’t go through another winter in the redwoods where the sun didn’t shine for three months and banana slugs were crawling on the windows.”

The couple bought a battered house in Grass Valley, and moved there just before COVID-19 struck. Over the course of the pandemic, they began returning their new home to its original warmth and beauty.

“We hammered nails, put up sheetrock, painted,” she said, “the laborious manual labor that leaves you tired to the bone.”

It was the same feeling she’d experienced while making the dress.

By October of 2020, she found she could write again, and brought one major change to the story of Martha Seybolt Lozier.

“I rewrote ‘The Bereaved’ in first person,” she said. “At that point, I understood what it was like to lose your child and could write the story as a bereaved mother.”

As she worked, Park Tracey said, she was able to channel the similarity between Martha’s oldest son Ira’s obsession with the military and her own son Austin’s obsession with the videogame Minecraft.

“In that sense, I became Martha,” she said. “I could feel what she must have felt in a way previous versions of the book didn’t have – they were more detached. This was no-holds-barred, going right into the heart of it. Emotionally, what was the point of holding back? I had nothing to lose. I could tell the story.”

Eventually, Park Tracey learned through her research, Martha was able to find and reunite with Sarah, Ira and George. But baby Homer remained forever lost to her. That detail is one of the reasons she felt so compelled to write the book.

“I couldn’t leave Martha hanging there,” she said. “I wanted to give her a gift.”

Eventually, Park Tracey and her sister went to Fairbury, Illinois, with a literal gift.

“We found the cemetery where Martha is buried,” she said. “There’s no stone. Ideally I’d like to buy one. I took pictures of Homer to show her. It seemed to bring it full circle and was the most important thing. I found where she was laid to rest – and brought her lost son to her.”