{"id":9924,"date":"2015-01-12T14:26:41","date_gmt":"2015-01-12T19:26:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=9924"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:43:05","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:43:05","slug":"finding-ellen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2015\/01\/finding-ellen\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding Ellen"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the heartwarming story about two grade-school summer playmates, a small-town boy and a big-city girl, who were apart more than fifty years but rediscovered each other, shared their experiences and renewed their simple friendship in their golden years.<\/p>\n

No it isn’t.\u00a0 It’s a story about a man in his early 60s who let curiosity get the better of him, so he decided to spend more than a few hours at his computer to ferret out whatever became of Ellen.<\/p>\n

Ah yes, Ellen.\u00a0 My extraordinarily faithful readers may remember my earlier post<\/a> about Ellen two years ago.\u00a0 Here is how I introduced her then:<\/p>\n

One summer, when I was 8 or 9 years old, a girl was visiting her grandmother just up the street from my house in Western Pennsylvania.\u00a0 Her name was Ellen.\u00a0 Her grandmother’s last name might have been Ruskin.\u00a0 The only things I recall about Ellen are coloring in coloring books on her grandmother’s side porch, her sandy-colored hair, and the ice-cream or popsicle stains on her T-shirt.<\/em><\/p>\n

At the time, I thought that the name Ruskin<\/em> in my post — along with some curiosity and search engine magic — might eventually draw Ellen’s attention to my blog, but it was not to be.\u00a0 I had nearly forgotten about Ellen until a few weeks ago when I took a nostalgic Google Street View trip through the neighborhood where I grew up.\u00a0 I viewed my house first, of course, and then I made my way up the street where Ellen’s grandmother once lived.\u00a0 And there it was, the brick house with the side porch — except that I remembered it as a sun room with knee-to-ceiling windows.<\/p>\n

\"Ellen's
\nFor some reason, it had never occurred to me to find out the number of this house on Moreland Blvd. and do a search for anyone who may have lived there.\u00a0 This turned out to be the key to unlocking the puzzle of Ellen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Note: In this story, I use actual first names but fictional last names.\u00a0 I also use fictional street names and generic place names.\u00a0 I do this so no one else can make use of this post for their own research.
\n<\/em><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

My search for 211 Moreland Blvd. led me to several hometown newspaper articles from the 1950s and 1960s mentioning Morris and\/or Sylvia Ruskin.\u00a0 [Ruskin<\/em> is similar to but was not their last name.]\u00a0 Morris owned a jewelry store bearing his family name, and he often ran classified ads in the local paper.\u00a0 He sold his business and retired in the early 1950s.\u00a0 Morris passed away in the mid-1960s at age 77, leaving his wife Sylvia, his daughter Joyce, born in 1927, and his son Edward, born in 1933.\u00a0 Morris’s obituary also mentioned two grandchildren, but not by name.<\/p>\n

Sylvia passed away in 1973 at age 75.\u00a0 (By then, she had moved to an apartment building where, by coincidence, my own children’s grandmother lived for many years.)\u00a0 So it was Sylvia who was keeping an eye on her granddaughter and her playmate that summer day in 1961, and who served us treats on her porch as we colored away.\u00a0 Sylvia’s obituary mentioned Joyce and Edward but again the two grandchildren were not named.<\/p>\n

If Sylvia was Ellen’s grandmother, then who raised Ellen?\u00a0 Was she Edward’s daughter or Joyce’s?\u00a0 Ellen was about my age, meaning she would have been born between 1952 and 1954.\u00a0 In 1953, Edward would have been 20 and Joyce 26.\u00a0 But Edward was still a student at the state university in 1953, according to the college newspaper.\u00a0 So it was more likely that Joyce was Ellen’s mother.<\/p>\n

This conclusion was borne out when I found Edward Ruskin’s obituary.\u00a0 He passed away in 1976, only 43 years old.\u00a0 His obituary said that his only survivor was his sister, Joyce Hoffman of Long Island.\u00a0 This meant I could turn my attention to Joyce.<\/p>\n

In August 1947, the social page of the local newspaper announced that Joyce Ruskin and Joseph Hoffman, son of Albert and Ruth Hoffman, had married and were planning to reside in New York City.\u00a0 In August 1950, the same paper published an announcement that Joyce and Joseph, now living on Long Island, had given birth to a son, whose name was not provided.\u00a0 He would have been one of Morris and Sylvia Ruskin’s two grandchildren.<\/p>\n

I failed to find any kind of record verifying that Ellen is Joyce’s second child.\u00a0 But there is a good deal of supporting evidence.\u00a0 One important piece is a legal decision involving the estate of Joseph Hoffman, who died in 1972 at the age of 46.\u00a0 It notes that his children Paul and Ellen were 22 and 18 at the time of his death, and it also mentions his mother Ruth.\u00a0 All of this fits the narrative, but the decision refers to his widow as Florence, not Joyce.\u00a0 My guess is that Joseph and Joyce divorced some years before Joseph’s death.<\/p>\n

My ensuing searches for Ellen Hoffman<\/em> gave me an outline of her adult life.\u00a0 Ellen married Edward Tisch in December 1974.\u00a0 Their daughter Sarah was born in 1978.\u00a0 At some point, Ellen moved to Indiana, and Ellen and Edward divorced.\u00a0 In 1986, Ellen Tisch married Mark Mayer.\u00a0 They divorced in 1988 and Ellen reverted to her birth surname, Hoffman.\u00a0 Ellen Hoffman married Robert Harnick in April 2003.\u00a0 Robert passed away in 2008 at the age of 56.\u00a0 From what I can tell, Ellen has not married again.\u00a0 She is about 61 years old.<\/p>\n

\"\"Ellen does not have a social media presence, at least not one that she shares with the public.\u00a0 But her daughter Sarah does.\u00a0 She posted this photo of Ellen (seated at right) on her old MySpace site.\u00a0 I have to admit, Ellen does look familiar.\u00a0 I didn’t think I would recognize her without the popsicle stains on her T-shirt.<\/p>\n

I don’t know Ellen’s occupation, but I do know that she is — or was — a songwriter and singer (a video of her performing one of her songs is posted on YouTube).\u00a0 Ellen used a stage name derived from her first and middle names.\u00a0 I have not found any references to performances by Ellen beyond 2011, so I’m not sure she is still playing.\u00a0 It may be that she has enough on her plate, looking after her mother Joyce (who now lives in the same Indiana city) and being a grandmother to Sarah’s three-year-old son.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u2022 \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 \u2022\u00a0 \u2022\u00a0 \u2022<\/p>\n

Without going out of my door, and without having paid for information, I am about 98% confident that I could now phone Ellen, or send her a message on Facebook, or drive to her house, knock on her front door and reintroduce myself.\u00a0 But I am not going to do that.<\/p>\n

First, there would be no point.\u00a0 Ellen and I were playmates for a few days one summer.\u00a0 This is the not the kind of experience that justifies insinuating yourself into another person’s life, no matter how much curiosity is involved.<\/p>\n

Second, my very research created a gross asymmetry in knowledge.\u00a0 While Ellen could have scouted me as easily as I did her, it would be incredible to think she has done so, even if she had, by some unlikely misfortune, retained a similar vague memory of me.\u00a0 Friendships do not develop from one person having such advantage over the other.<\/p>\n

Finally, there is the creepiness factor.\u00a0 Imagine how you would react if a person you do not know or remember called you on the phone, claimed to have known you from childhood, and then proceeded to recite assorted details of your life that you figured only your family and the government knew.\u00a0 I would suspect I was either being stalked or that my identity had been stolen.\u00a0 Even if the story sounded convincing, I still might change my number, cancel my credit cards or contact the police.\u00a0 I would probably feel violated.<\/p>\n

I hadn’t set out to be creepy.\u00a0 For me, it was about the challenge of solving a puzzle, of seeing how far I could go on such small fragments of my memory.\u00a0 I did solve my mystery, so good for me I suppose.\u00a0 But at the same time, it is unsettling to see how much personal data is out there waiting to be collected, and how easy it is to gather via sites like MooseRoots, Mocavo, Yasni and many others, all of which are delivered free to our doorsteps by our friends at Google.<\/p>\n

The irony of this endeavor is that in the end, in spite of all the facts I found, I really know nothing about Ellen at all.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u2022 \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 \u2022\u00a0 \u2022\u00a0 \u2022<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n
CRITO:\u00a0 Yes, indeed, Socrates… But did you carry the search any further, and did you find that which you were seeking?<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
SOCRATES:\u00a0 Find! my dear sir, no indeed.\u00a0 And we cut a poor figure; we were like children after larks, always on the point of catching that which was always getting away from us.\u00a0 But why should I repeat the whole story?\u00a0 At last we enquired whether that gave and caused happiness, and then we got into a labyrinth, and when we thought we were at the end, we came out again at the beginning, having still to seek as much as ever.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
\u00a0— excerpt from Euthydemus<\/span> by Plato, 380 BC<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

\u00a0\u2022 \u00a0\u2022\u00a0 \u2022\u00a0 \u2022\u00a0 \u2022<\/p>\n

I have deleted all the links and files related to the search.\u00a0 This blog post is all that remains of my finding Ellen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the heartwarming story about two grade-school summer playmates, a small-town boy and a big-city girl, who were apart more than fifty years but rediscovered each other, shared their experiences and renewed their simple friendship in their golden years. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-interests"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9924","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9924"}],"version-history":[{"count":133,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9924\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10087,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9924\/revisions\/10087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}