Time to 'fess up: I've been doing something other than just blogging. I started an online genealogical research service called BEGATS. You can check it out at www.BEGATS.biz.
In preparation, Rick Richman volunteered to be my first test case and this morning has posted a piece about his/our experience at Jewish Current Issues:
A Short Trip, A Long Journey
If you want to go back a little further, here's how it all started... with my own bits and pieces:
You remember the "begats" in the Bible, right? Everyone thinks they're so boring.
"This is the narrative of the generations of man; on the day that G-d created man, in the likeness of G-d He created him. Male and female He created them and He blessed them and He named them man (Adam) on the day they were created. And Adam lived one hundred and thirty years, and he begot in his likeness after his image, and he named him Seth."
... and so on, for some thirty-two verses.
Well, when it gets down to your own begats, it's not so boring after all. I should know, I worked on my own genealogy for years. At a time when I wanted very badly to be adopted into the Jewish people but had no rabbi to work with me on my conversion, I took the advice of a dear friend who told me to look at my line of mothers. Maybe I could find a Jewish lady there, and I wouldn't have to convert!
It was easier said than done, and in fact impossible in the end. But I did find that I am Anne, daughter of Nancy, daughter of Clara, daughter of Clara (no, that's right - it's not a typo), daughter of Angeline, daughter of Nancey, daughter of Sarah. . .
I never did find out if that Sarah (from the 1700s) was Jewish or not, but I did find out a lot about the lives that were necessary in order for me to exist. I found out that my great-grandfather was a tobacconist and his father before him was
"...judge of Bedford County Court, and one of the most sincerely honored residents... of a family eminent among the early settlers here.... Micajah Davis rode as sheriff of Bedford County about fifteen years; was ten years justice of the peace; three years collector of taxes, under the Confederate States government..."
I found English indentured servants, Confederates and Yankees, Quakers and Hugenots. I even found a family secret, that the birth of one great-great grandfather was "illegitimate," but by then it was quite past the time when anyone would care.
I learned about the English Civil War because one immigrant ancestor fled England shortly after it, and I learned about the American Civil War because I had blood invested and spilled on both sides. And there are still many things I may never know, like the full name of Great-Great-Grandfather "A. W." Sparkes, who was a fireman and died at 42 of pneumonia.
When I was as finished as I could get, I felt a little guilty that I could trace some of my origins back to the 1600s, while The Husband didn't know the names of his grandparents! It didn't seem fair to leave our children with such a lop-sided bunch of begats. But his side of the family was difficult, his grandparents were all immigrants. You would have to know Russian or Polish, or at least Yiddish and Hebrew, to find them -- and nailing down spellings with any certainty was an exercise in extreme futility. It took me a long while to accept that names can be fluid:)
I tried sporadically over time but could never find anything of his family; I was convinced they had conspired not to commit their existence to any public records whatsoever. And then one day, it happened. The "Gramma Annie" I had heard about, the one known mostly as forever sitting in a nursing home somewhere, was a real person. Her name was Fruma Henyeh Zlatkin. I cried at the knowing of that, and she wasn't even my grandmother.
Fruma was born in 1887 in a shtetl called Shepelevichi in the Russian Empire, now Belarus. At some point she had moved to a place called Borisov, some 44 miles away, and from there made her way to Antwerp... to sail to America in August, 1908.
Three years later, she gave birth to my children's grandfather somewhere on the Lower East Side of New York City.
And thirty years later, the Nazis "liquidated" the Jews of Borisov.
Stay tuned... more stories to follow. Maybe even yours.
Posted by: Hope | Tuesday, 02 March 2010 at 06:26 AM