19 May 1919 – 6 February 1928
Irving Glassman was the second of four sons born to immigrant parents Sophie Panijal (from Romania) and Harry Glassman (his records initially list Russia but the Glassmans were from Warsaw so once Poland became an independent nation after 1918, the records list it as his country of origin). Iriving’s father immigrated with family at the age of nineteen, but his mother was a very small child when her family came to the US.
The couple married when Harry was 21 and Sophie 18 and had their first child ten months later. Irving was born just over two years after his big brother. Irving was five years old when their next child was born, making Irving a big brother himself.
As is usual, we don’t know what happened to Irving. A cause of death is rare in these records, but many things that are survivable now were not in the early Twentieth Century and many children did not survive to adulthood. Three months shy of his ninth birthday, Irving passed away and was buried in what was at the time called Breslover Cemetery. As I said on my previous post from Waldheim, it is more a collection of smaller private cemeteries than one big one, which accounts for the different name on the death record.
His parents and siblings (including one more brother born almost three years after his death) lived for several more decades, the world transforming itself around them over and over again. His big brother fought in World War II though it doesn’t appear as if the little brother he knew enlisted or was drafted, though he was 18 in 1943 when he registered for the draft.
His parents and oldest brother eventually moved to Florida and all three died there, his mother in 1978 and his father and brother in 1980. (A poignant sidenote on that is his father apparently remarried in the brief window between becoming a widower and his own death, and his wife of 62 years and the mother of all his children gets no mention at all in his obituary which I think was likely Second Wife’s decision and honestly, ma’am: tacky AF.)
Irving’s two younger brothers died in 2011, both still in the Chicago area, but none of his relatives are buried near Irving, nor was he mentioned in any obituaries. He’d died it seems in another lifetime, his memory as cracked and broken as the little portrait of his face, his headstone faded and wearing away quietly in a cemetery no longer called Breslover.
RIP little Irving
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