Visitors can explore the Moore family’s cramped kitchen.

Photograph: Keiko Neiwa

Drink milk for strong bones and teeth, wash your hands after using the bathroom: The advice seems straightforward enough today. Yet just over a hundred years ago, eating well and keeping clean were tough tasks, a fact that surprised my ten-year-old daughter, Isabel, when we visited the Lower East Side Tenement Museum for its new tour, “The Moores: An Irish Family in America.” The program takes place on the fourth floor of 97 Orchard Street, where the Moores actually lived beginning in 1869.

Sarah Pharaon, the museum’s director of education, began the tour in a tiny backyard, where a privy with four toilets once serviced the building’s nearly 100 residents. After imagining the inadequate, unhygienic toilets, we headed inside and traveled along a narrow, dim stairwell to the upstairs living quarters. Pharaon encouraged us to run our hands along the railings, because skin’s oil helps to polish the wood. Isabel ran both hands extra hard.

Upon entering the bedroom of the minuscule apartment (its other rooms are a kitchen and parlor), we learned that Joseph Moore, a waiter-bartender, and his wife, Bridget, shared the lumpy, not-quite-double-sized bed. Their four-month-old, Agnes, slept in a nearby cradle. The couple’s older daughters, ages three and four, likely slept in the warm kitchen, squeezed between a rickety table and the stove, or on a trundle bed stored under their parents’ bed.