Finding the Mazzille's

 (C) 2021 by Frederick E Walton, Walton Family Historian.

Researching and documenting family history has been my hobby since the early 1990's. It can be very frustrating when hours or days of researching doesn't turn up the item you were looking for and very rewarding when it does. New information is constantly being made available on-line, replacing the tedious and expensive process of traveling to distant cities to search through dusty volumes or scratchy microfilms manually looking for information. This was the norm when I started and is still an option for many documents not currently on-line. I have personally traveled to distant cities and foreign countries chasing down clues, but my job is made much easier with the tools on my computer. Today I can sit in the comfort of my home and find a lot of information my predecessors had no hope of uncovering. Here is a recent example:

Recently, while cleaning up my records.  I “found” an unpublished article I wrote in 2017.  I polished it up a little and added it to the family blog. It is amazing that It took me at least three days to polish up a completed work, but I wanted to make a few minor additions, which included some additional research. One task was adding a picture I took back in 2010 when Dad and I took a trip down memory lane in Tarrytown and the surrounding area. Dad could still navigated his way around 70 years later like he had been living there his whole life! We found and I took a picture of the apartment building he lived in as a child and he told me the place had been a tavern on the ground floor called Mazelli's (dad pronounced it Ma-Zell-ease). I have spent literally YEARS unsuccessfully trying to find the “Mazelli’s” in Census records, city directories and the document…until yesterday. 

2010 view of Dad's childhood apartment in Elmsford

Using the old 2010 photo and Google maps in street view, I "cruised" down route 9A through Elmsford  just like when I drove down it with dad a decade ago. Suddenly, the dilapidated building appeared in front of me, looking the worse for wear, but still standing, and judging by the cars, still being used in 2021. In fact a Zillow report suggested the property was worth $1.3 million! (I would suggest it would cost nearly the much to clean it up and make it safe!)

2021 Google Street view of Apartment house  in Elmsford

Now I had a street address to work with: 172 Sawmill River road.  What was the address in 1940? Clearly the roads and highways criss-crossing what was once a sleepy rural village had overtaken it by 2021 completely changing its shape and character.

Google map of Elmsford, New York

I looked up the 1940 Census Enumeration District maps for Elmsford and the town of Greenburgh and tried to compare the road network to a modern Google view, which was not easy. There where lots of changes. But I managed to find some long established neighborhoods in the vicinity that hadn’t been changed and was able to pinpoint the property, a large building at a crossroads…a good place for a tavern.

1940 Census Enumeration Districts- Elmsford

Unfortunately the tavern was just on the other side on the thick black line marking the edge of the enumeration district, so back to searching maps for the unlabeled district that encompassed it. I finally found a "flag lot" map amongst twenty maps in a folder labeled "other" maps of rural Westchester that filled in the areas between the villages and towns including this one. The Tavern was located in Enumeration district 60-77. 

1940 Enumeration district map for "Other" districts

I now had a solid chance to find the property owners, who I expected to be the Mazelli’s. Over the years, I had entered their name using every variation I could think of, and never found a match. Now I would find them by searching for their tavern, street by street. I finally found them on Page 25A, Line 17-20: Nicholas “Mazzille” and family. Somehow I had managed to miss that particular spelling. (And even that was mis-transcribed as "Maholas Mazzille") The address in 1940 was 170 Sawmill river road, and it was a tavern and, at the time, four families called it their home.

excerpt from 1940 US Census

In 1940 the Walton’s had  already moved to 27 Harding Avenue in White plains, but their address in 1935 is simply identified as “Elmsford”. 

After years of searching I had finally found what I was looking for! If not for that drive down memory lane in 2010, there would be no record of the Walton’s living at this building.