How the Tenement Museum Got a New Tenant

Reason two: in the eighties, a woman named Gina Manuel sent a letter to the museum’s founders, asking them not to forget her Black ancestors. “Their spirits walk those halls and their bones lay in the earth there,” she wrote. (She added, “Forgive typo’s, on coffee break.”) Recently, the museum looked into Manuel’s ancestry. “We have her great-grandmother and great-great-grandmother living at Laurens Street,” Polland said. “That was, like, ‘Whoa,’ because that’s the same address as Joseph and his wife, Rachel!” Manuel’s great-grandmother, Parthenia, overlapped with the Moores.