My Family

I grew up in a modest house built by my mother's father on farmland developed along the BMT Brighton line after the Great War.  My parents, my brother and I lived on the second floor of the house with my grandparents on the first floor. Even in the 1960's, this part of Gravesend, Brooklyn was still somewhat rural with signs at the local Avenue U station identifying the tracks as "To The City" and "From the City".

Mom adored her father, David James Lambon, who was born in Greenpoint at the time of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883. She seemed to know very little about his family except that his parents were English and both had died in Brooklyn before she was born and while her father was still in his teens. Through my research, I discovered that her grandfather, James Lambon, a brass finisher from Birmingham, England and her grandmother, Laura Elizabeth Isabel Sunley from Leeds, both arrived in New York in 1872 and settled in downtown Brooklyn.

Her mother, Matilda was the youngest of four siblings and the only child of Jakob Ludwig Klink and Christina Katharina Mitschele to be born in America. They had immigrated from Wurttemberg in 1884. My grandmother was born in 1887 on Orchard Street in the large German neighborhood on the lower East side of Manhattan then known as Kleindeutchland. Tillie and my grandfather James met in the early days of the 20th century when they were both living across the East River in Williamsburg. There, they married in 1905 but moved across the Hudson River to Hoboken, NJ, another popular enclave of German Americans. My mother loved to talk and often told stories about her childhood in our Brooklyn neighborhood. However, any information about the lives of her family in Europe was not discussed or known, not even the birthplaces of the Lambons or the Klinks. All I learned from my mother was that we were “Americans”.

Tilli and Jim, my maternal grandparents.