The streets of Brooklyn in 1849 were alive with clatter and change. Horses clopped over cobblestone. Steamships puffed clouds across the East River. And in a red-brick row house in one of the city’s working-class neighborhoods, a baby girl was born. They named her Anna Charlotte, after her grandmothers, most likely, and she would grow up in a house filled with the rhythm of German dialects, the smell of yeast from bread left to rise overnight, and the clang of tools from her father’s trade.