The story begins in New Rochelle, New York, around 1910, but some of the characters in the book travel the world. The upper-middleclass family (Father owns a small manufacturing company) whose lives are described in the book are never named. They are referred to as Father, Mother, the Little Boy, and Mother’s Younger Brother. They may be nameless, but their lives intersect with people whose names are still familiar to us today. The title of the book is taken from the style of music played by one of the few named but fictional characters in the novel.
The story opens with Harry Houdini’s car running into the telephone pole outside the family’s house. They invite him inside while his driver gets the car operational again. Having introduced us to Houdini, the narrator follows his story for a while, and also refers back to him several times in the book. This turns out to be just the beginning of the family’s contact with famous people. Father goes on a trip with Robert Peary in his attempt to find the North Pole, and Mother’s Younger Brother has a crush on Evelyn Nesbit. These celebrities lead the story to others, well-known in their day; some less so now.
While this book may not give you an idea what day to day life was like in the early 1900’s, it will give you a pretty good idea which people and issues Americans were reading about in their newspapers. From J P Morgan and Henry Ford, to anarchist Emma Goldman, to Lavinia Warren Stratton (Mrs. Tom Thumb), names are dropped with regularity. The narrator takes us from comfortable New Rochelle, to the immigrant slums of New York, to J P Morgan’s mansion, among other places. Doctorow touches on the topics of Egyptology, anarchism and worker’s rights, the plight of immigrants in the New York ghettos, spiritualism, and racism.
If this was your family, how would you research them? If you know your ancestor owned a business, you should be able to find it listed in city directories from that era. Did your ancestors ever encounter someone famous, or infamous? While this is something that would be incredibly difficult to prove, you might be able to determine if they at least lived in the same town as someone well-known. Look up a town your ancestors lived in, either on the town’s own webpage, or through Wikipedia. There should be a list of notable residents. You should be able to tell if their lives covered the same timeframe as your ancestor. Also, if you have a tree on WikiTree, you can search for any of these individuals that are deceased, and see if you have a connection to them.