Anna Tannenholz—Annie to her friends and family—was born in the city of Augustów, in 1849, in what was then the Russian Empire and today Poland, to Eliza Reichstein and Lazarus Tannenholz. By 1852 her family had immigrated to the Unites States, settling in New York City. Her father may have worked as a carpenter, and he raised Annie and her three siblings on Baxter Street, in the heart of New York’s notorious Five Points.
Her granddaughter Eudice Wyzanski Shapiro years later would write that Annie had seen Abraham Lincoln deliver his famous Cooper Union speech in 1860, and that just before her sixteenth birthday Annie had her portrait painted by an unknown itinerant painter. At sixteen she married Jacob Goldstein, a peddler, nineteen years her senior. They moved to Adrian, Michigan, where her first and only child, Eva Bertha, was born.
By 1870 Annie and Jacob had moved to Detroit, where he was listed in tax records as a traveling salesman selling hooped skirts. While traveling in the south for business he was stricken with Yellow Fever in the epidemic of 1873 and buried in a mass grave in Shreveport, Louisiana.
Widowed at twenty-four, Annie moved in with her sister, Jennie and her husband, Marx Horowitz, also residing in Detroit, and the sisters were soon joined by their mother. Sometime the following year, Annie, herself, took to the road as a traveling saleswoman, a rare move for women at the time. She sold hairpieces for a New York company, Graff Hair Goods, leaving her daughter with her sister while she traveled by rail between Detroit and New York City, taking two weeks in each direction. She most likely picked up damaged hairpieces and took new orders on her way to New York, delivering the orders and repaired items on her way back.
After ten years travelling and working, Annie met Barnard Aaronson, a widower from Portland, Maine. She brought Eva, then seventeen-years old, to Portland in 1874 and married Barnard in August of that year.
Barnard was one of the founders of the Jewish community in Portland, having arrived in 1866 with his first wife Anna Bella. He became a successful clothing merchant and served as president of Portland’s first synagogue, Sharith Israel. In 1886 he represented the “Jewish Church” at Portland’s centenary celebration, at which he recounted the contributions of the city’s Jewish community.
Annie and Barnard lived in Portland until 1900 when they decided to move to Boston to be near Eva and their son-in-law, Maurice Wyzanski. When her daughter died at age 38, in 1905, Annie and Barnard move in with Maurice to help him with his three daughters, Eudice, Leah and Essner.
