Hangin’ in Mr. Morgan’s Neighborhood

Site of the former Hotel Morgan in Carnegie, Pa., in September 2023; model of the Hotel Morgan in its later incarnation as the Zug building in the historical museum across the street.

Exploring Site of the Hotel Morgan in Carnegie, Pa.

Well, howdy there, family history buffs. It’s a been a little while. Let’s dive right back in.

#3 on my list of “holy grails” of genealogy — as shared almost four years ago in this space (!) — was putting a place to a name. Key, of course, being that you’d already combed through enough records and matched enough milestones to the finely-pruned boughs of your family tree that you knew of the location and its significance, well, in the first place.

In September last year, the research and our madcap itinerary aligned enough that my oldest son, Jonah, and I were able to spend a few hours at the end of a visit to Pittsburgh to pass through Carnegie, Pa., home in the late 1800s to early 1900s of my great-great grandparents, Thomas and Janet Morgan.

We’d spent a few days back in the burgh so I could run The Great Race 10K for the first time in college, then show Jonah around both the University of Pittsburgh and my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon. In between we took in a couple favorite eateries (Primanti Bros.; Pino’s); rode to the top of Mt. Washington from Station Square on the Monongahela Incline, and pored over the excellent Heinz History Center right across from our hotel.

Credit Jonah for being a game enough explorer to squeeze in one last stop before turning in our rental Tacoma. I punched in coordinates for Chartiers Cemetery in Carnegie, where Thomas and Janet were laid to rest.

At Rest in the Green Hills

When I’d researched my great-great-grandparents’ lives and deaths, I’d relied on the photos of others, posted on FindAGrave.com, to appreciate their burial place. So it wasn’t absolutely necessary to take a detour off the main road into Carnegie into the tree-shaded lanes of Chartiers Cemetery to snap my own photos.

But there’s always been something mystical about visiting our ancestors’ places of rest and remembrance. I just didn’t know how much time we’d have, with a couple hours until our flight home later that afternoon. And I didn’t have precise coordinates.

Still, there may have been some familial magic guiding us as we took a single lap around the cemetery, peering through the passing rain showers up into the pines. We were turning back toward the entrance again when I spotted their monument and the two familiar gravestones.

We got out of the car and stood quietly for a moment, contemplating how long it had been since they were laid there — nearly 110 years now, for Janet, and close to 130 for Thomas — and wondering at the pilgrimages my great-grandmother and her brother and sisters, or my grandmother had made there before.

I dutifully recorded images of their headstones and some related names around them, including their son, Thomas, a war veteran. And we turned back onto the pike to head into Carnegie.

Corner of Chartiers and Main

In my research years ago, I’d marveled at discovering a map of Carnegie from 1897 that recorded the town in high-resolution detail, including my great-great-grandfather’s namesake hotel.

In keeping with my early tradition of employing my journalistic skills to gather all the genealogical sources I needed online, I was also tickled to find at least two different views of the Hotel Morgan in newspapers from the period, recounted here and here.

But from years winding in and around Pittsburgh during college, and whizzing by that Carnegie exit in a blink on my way in and out of town, and even contemplating that map from a bygone century, I just couldn’t imagine making an easy stopover. And so, I’d resisted on previous occasions.

Well, our incredible luck this trip held. Or, maybe it was divine ancestral invention? We managed to drive right up to the former site of the hotel, now a PNC Bank at Chartiers and Main streets, and even grabbed change from a teller inside for the meter.

After scoping out the views on the bridge over the river, and from either corner, we were drawn to the old building across the street, home of the Carnegie Historical Society and the actual building from that map I’d pored over years ago. What the heck, I thought, let’s take a look inside. Maybe they knew even more than Honus Wagner, famed baseball star from the early Pirates (and well known as owner of the most pricey oldtime tobacco card).

Well, not only did our incredible streak hold, but we were treated to an actual scale model of oldtime Carnegie, complete with little Hotel Morgan — in its later guise as the Zug building — set the way the neighborhood looked from the 1890s through the 1950s.

I snapped a few shots from all angles — next best thing to being there, I guess — and Jonah had a chance to heft one of The Flying Dutchman’s bats.

Inspired, I punched in the address of Jannett Morgan’s house at the time of her obituary into Google Maps and we drove across the tracks and wound uphill to her old neighborhood. But this is where our deadline-drive luck finally ran out. The addresses, it seemed, had changed since 1915, and though we were still tingling with a sense of history, we knew it was time to get back to the present and head for home.

Still, it was a fine interlude in an honored family place. And I hold to the notion we would not have been able to find our way there and back without something deeper in the blood and spirit guiding us through. Till next time, then.

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  The Morgans appear on their first U.S. Census in 1880, in Appollo, PA. By the time the family appears again, in 1900, they live in Carnegie, and Jannett Morgan is widowed. An entry in an 1896 book provides a clue as to what Colt’s great-great grandfather Thomas Morgan was doing in the years before his death.

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  Another view of the Hotel Morgan, shown about 1890 in Carnegie, Pennsylvania. This was the hotel managed by my great-great grandfather, Thomas W. Morgan, until his death in 1897.

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