Bertha, Jacob, & Addie Bernhold

In June 1877, Adolph Bernhold and his wife, the former Ida Gideon, were living in Helena, Arkansas, when Ida died of causes unrecorded today. By August, the Home board approved Adolph’s petition to admit his three youngest children – Bertha (6), Jacob “Jack” (4), and Ernestine “Addie” (3) – but directed that the children not travel to New Orleans until October “on account of their not being acclimated,” a reference to the children’s perceived susceptibility to contracting Yellow Fever during the summer.

Bertha, who was described in the Home’s registry as “a good, intelligent & industrious girl,” lived in the Home for ten years, before being discharged to Isaac Keller of Assumption Parish, Louisiana and later reuniting with her older married sister. In 1894, she married Sam Solomon, a merchant tailor, and lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, where they raised three children. Bertha died in 1943 at age 72.

Headstone of Home alumna Bertha Bernhold Solomon. From Find a Grave.

Jack lived in the Home until 1886, during which time he attended the Laurel School. By 1897, he was working as a stockkeeper for dry goods wholesaler A. Lehmann & Co. on Canal Street, and was regarded highly enough to earn the distinction of delivering the Home’s anniversary address that year. It was time, urged Jack, “to add to this Home a school, wherein the orphans can be prepared for a trade, a profession.”  Although Jack had found gainful employment, he lamented the plight of other alumni who had not fared as well. “How difficult it is for one who has neither father nor mother, nor relative nor protector, to find employment in the whirl of competition.” In 1904, the Home undertook to better prepare its charges for life by opening the Isidore Newman Manual Training School.

In 1899, Jack married Julia Cahn of Port Gibson, Mississippi. The wedding was officiated by Rabbi Max Heller and attended by Isidore and Rebecca Kiefer Newman. After Julia died in 1900, Jack married Rosa Marx. By 1930, they were living in Kansas City, Missouri, where Jack worked as a furniture salesman. He died in 1949 at age 74.

During her seventeen years in the Home as a ward, Addie distinguished herself as a honor student at McDonough Public School Number 1 and as a responsible young woman. In 1894, instead of discharging her, Superintendent Michel Heymann hired 19-year-old Addie to serve as assistant kindergarten teacher, a position she fulfilled for the next nine years. In 1903, Addie married Louis Solomon, a cashier at Helena’s Security Bank & Trust Company, who died in 1926. Addie died in 1951, at age 76, and was buried in Helena’s Beth El Cemetery, joining her parents and her sister Bertha.