The Reher Center For Immigrant Culture and History:Deeds and Building History

Through the various projects and tasks that I have worked on at the Reher Center, I discovered a couple specific topics of interest that heightened my interest into work in the field of history. My task at the beginning of the semester, creating an institutional history of the Reher Center proved to be too much, and so I began to focus on certain aspects of the institution rather than approaching it holistically. With this change, I decided to focus on the history of the building, 99-101 Broadway in Kingston, NY. As I delved into the history of the property, I began to become interested in some of the people that once lived there, such as the historic Reher family. However, in researching the people that lived there and working with a time constraint, I realized that it would be more feasible to focus on when and how people acquired this property than their respective impacts. 

In researching the building’s history, I began to track down the deeds of the property at the Corner of Broadway and Spring Street by working in the archives at the Ulster County Clerk’s Office with current Ulster County Historian Geoffrey Miller. At the Ulster County Clerk’s Office, I tracked the deeds of the property from the current deed written in 2004 to its first recorded deed in 1868. However, in discovering 9 deeds for the property of 99-101 Broadway, I discovered that the Reher family also owned another property on East Broadway. This surprised the people at the institution as they had heard rumblings of another property but never went to look at the deeds themselves. However, I am unsure of this properties significance to the family and their history at the moment. In the 9 deeds of the property where the Reher Center currently is, there are some quite interesting things that relate to Kingston, the Reher family, and local history. For example, in 1908, the Reher family acquired the property when Bessie Mones sold the property to Ade Reher for $3,500 one month after buying the property for $3,400.  The notary section notes that Bessie Mones’ signature was in Hebrew, and the Rehers were a well known Jewish family in the area. This may suggest that there was a connection between Ada Reher and Bessie Mones as Mones only netted a small percentage of profit,100 dollars for selling the property. 

The 9 deeds also serve as a great way of understanding the family history and lineage, for example, the deed is passed through and held by 8 members of the Reher family before Hyman Reher gave the property to the Jewish Federation of Ulster County in 2004. In other words, the deeds depict a clear timeline of death and ownership throughout the Reher family as Ade and Frank Reher only own the property for roughly 20-30 years before they die.  This is extremely helpful in understanding the different generations of people who lived and worked at 99-101 Broadway for roughly 136 years from 1868 to 2004. Through these various discoveries and work with the deeds, I have gained a much clearer understanding of how people used the property in different time periods.