Who could have imagined that Winthrop Jacobsʼ carpet design would be a matter for the U.S. Supreme Court to decide? Or that the subject would become relevant again 150 years later in the smartphone patent lawsuits between Apple and Samsung?

It may have been at that point that the two women began their careers as serial novelists, authoring multiple titles in several series of book for girls published in Boston by the L.C. Page Company. It may have been Mellie who got them started, but their Blue Bonnet and Cosy Corner book titles were credited to Caroline E. Jacobs, some by herself and some with a co-author.

The Jacobs family into which Edward married traces back to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, but not to the Mayflower, contrary to a tree online that connects the Jacobs line to the famous Elizabeth Tilley. Nicholas Jacob (it later became Jacobs) settled in Hingham, Mass., in 1635, where he kept an inn.

Edward Lawrence Rehm, born in 1884, the youngest of the Rehm children, was by all evidence an industrious lad. He secured his first employment at age 15 as a clerk for The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the progressive university in today’s East Village where Abraham Lincoln had spoken several decades before. At the corner of Third Avenue and East 8 th Street, Cooper Union sat on the edge of Kleindeutschland, still vibrant at the turn of the century.

The changing neighborhood in the garment district came to Matthew Rehm’s door when the building on 27th St. was demolished for new loft construction in the late 1890s. The family first moved to a building nearby on Ninth Ave., but then by 1905, with the oldest son married, the family was residing in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, years before the original Yankee Stadium would be built nearby. That same year, Matte Rehm, after 40 years in the country, was naturalized as a United States citizen.

This was the neighborhood where the Rehm family grew up in the 1870s and 80s, not in Little Germany but in the Tenderloin district, at 242 27th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues (smack in the middle of today’s Fashion Institute of Technology campus) and later also at 346 Ninth Avenue at 29th St.

Their children, in order, were William J. Rehm (1871), Joseph Matthew Rehm (1877), Pauline E. Rehm (1879), and after a five-year gap, Edward Lawrence Rehm (1884). Eliza was 42 when Edward was born.

Matthew the apprentice German tailor arrived into a chaotically growing New York garment industry. The American Civil War, which had boosted the industry with the manufacturing of uniforms, had just ended. The demand for ready-to-wear clothing was surging.

While German immigrants were present in New Amsterdam since its earliest times, the mass transatlantic migration of the mid-nineteenth century brought a huge wave of new arrivals. The city’s German population reached a peak of three-quarters of a million in 1900. A vibrant German neighborhood full of tenements and beer halls—Kleindeutschland or Little Germanydeveloped in the 1840s east of the Bowery in what is now the East Village.