James Levinson Estate Papers

I always wondered about Grandma Rachel raising her family with little money and four minor children and no other family around. How wrong that was! Rachel had three brothers in Pittsburgh: Morris, who originally was part of Levinson Schubb and Caplan junk dealers, was five years older, and Thomas and Julius were four and five years younger. And as these records show, although James came to this country with very little and started work as a laborer, in about 20 years he had built the junk business up to something worth quite a lot of money by the time he died.

The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh's Pennsylvania room has an index of estate records. The index states the date of death as April 15, 1917 and points to the Allegheny County Proceedings Index. For James Levinson, the Proceedings Index states that the estate records consist of Letters of Administration (#1055, 1917), Invoice and Appraisal (#764, 1917), and Final Account and Audit (#8, 1918).

I went to the City Count Building, Registrar of Wills office and filled out slips with those numbers and dates. They sent them down a rope-pull dumb-waiter to the basement, and five minutes later I was holding the original, yellowed, crumbling sheets that our ancestors and their lawyers held and signed. They are reproduced here.

Here is a summary:

Here are the envelopes for the three sets of papers
Rachel makes Samuel the administrator
The next of kin are listed
The Invoice and Appraisal totals $8110.40 including $100 for "horses and wagons"
The distribution is one third to Rachel and two thirds to the seven children
The law required Proof of Publication
The minors (Abe, Hyman, Sadie, and Emanuel) had their portion of the proceeds of the estate put in trust with South Side Trust Company
Rachel, Jacob and Ida signed for their share with Harry C Reuben attesting
Here are the fees and individual distributions of a total ammended estate of $16,823.65.
The additional money appears to come from the liquidation of the partnership of Levinson Schubb Company.
The Ammended Decree shows some final financial details

The net distribution of $15,601.13 is equivalent to between $190,230 and $223,582 in 2003 dollars. (The wide uncertainty is due to the rapid inflation during the WWI years.) So Rachel certainly had a good financial cushion in those early years after James died.

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