Genealogy is like a jigsaw puzzle, but you don't have the box top, so you don't know what the picture is supposed to look like. As you start putting the puzzle together, you realize some pieces are missing, and eventually you figure out that some of the pieces you started with don't actually belong to this puzzle. I'll help you discover the right pieces for your puzzle and assemble them into a picture of your family.
It's my brother's birthday! And I've managed to put together a short (random) timeline of photos from over the years.
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| July 1963 |
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| Circa 1964-1965 (with me) |
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| 1968 (with me) |
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| 1971 |
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| 1990's |
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| 2001 (with our father and sister) |
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| Early 2000's (with our stepnephew) |
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| Circa 2010's |
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| Circa 2010's (with our father) |
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| 2016 |
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| 2018 (with his son, wife, daughter, and me) |
I'm posting a little late for this past Saturday Night Genealogy Fun from Randy Seaver, but since this topic is practically perfect for Jewish research, I had to weigh in.
Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission: Impossible! music, please!):
1. Do you have an ancestor with no defined birth and death dates or places?
2. This week, please tell us about that ancestor and what clues you used to estimate birth and death dates and places.
3. Share your ancestor and his estimated birth and death dates and places with us in your own blog post, by writing a comment on this blog post, or putting it in a Substack post, Facebook Note, or some other social media system. Please leave a comment on this post so others can find it.
And here I go.
1. Do I? Hoo, boy! I have at least a dozen just on my Meckler line! But every single one of my Jewish lines has ancestors like that.
2. The ancestor I decided to write about is my great-great-grandfather Simcha Dovid Mekler (before about 1862–before about November 16, 1903). I have his name from the yizkor book about Kamenets Litovsk, former Russian Empire (now Kamyenyets, Belarus). He was the father of my great-grandfather Moshe Mekler, who went by Morris and Max here in the United States and eventually spelled his last name as Mackler.
I have no original documents about Simcha Dovid Mekler from Europe. I have his parents' names, Zvi Mekler and Esther, from the yizkor book and from a cousin who was born in Kamenets Litovsk.
I estimated Simcha Dovid's death date based on the birth date that my granduncle chose after he immigrated to the United States. Simcha Mekler was my grandfather's oldest brother. He used the name Sam in this country, and Mekler became Meeckler at some point. He was named after his grandfather Simcha, and because my Ashkenazi Jewish family members followed the minhag ("custom") of naming their their children after deceased ancestors, that means Simcha Dovid had to have died before my granduncle was born. But because he didn't know his exact date of birth and I have no documents for it, it's a rough estimate. The birth date he used for his Social Security application was November 16, 1903, and it's all I have to work with.
I based my very rough estimate of a birth year for Simcha Dovid on the ages for my great-grandfather Morris in the records I have found for him, including his incoming passenger list and several censuses. He apparently was born roughly around 1882. I have no documents with an actual birth date, so it's another estimate (he didn't apply for Social Security, as far as I can tell). I don't know if Morris had any older siblings, but I figure his father was probably at least 21 years old when he was born, so I backdated it to before 1862.
As for where Simcha Dovid might have been born or died, we have another guessing game. In his will, Morris Mackler left a bequest for a new tombstone for his father's grave in the cemetery in Kamenets Litovsk. Morris Mackler was said to have been born in Kamenets Litovsk himself. So my guess is that Simcha Dovid died in Kamenets Litovsk. Because I have no other location associated with him or Mekler family members, my guess is that he was also born there.
Maybe someday I will find documents relating to Kamenets Litovsk about my family members, but I'm not holding my breath. The Nazis were extremely thorough in destroying almost all archival material about Jews in Grodno gubernia, so there's hardly anything left. I do want to investigate what is there, just in case there's something about my family, but I need to save a bunch of money to have the research done. So this is as far as I can get for now.
Yom HaShoah, the annual day of remembrance commemorating the deaths of the approximately 6 million Jewish victims of the Holocaust during World War II, falls on 27 Nisan of the Jewish calendar, which measures days from sunset to sunset. This year it began last night, April 13, at sunset, and ended today, April 14, at sunset.
The following are my known family members I believe died in the Holocaust. They all are from the Mekler/Nowicki branch of my family and lived in what was fornerly called Grodno gubernia in the Russian Empire (mostly now in Belarus). I repeat their names every year to ensure that they are not forgotten. May their memory be a blessing.
Beile Dubiner
Eliezer Dubiner
Herschel Dubiner
Moishe Dubiner
Sore (Mekler) Dubiner
Aidel Goldsztern
Golda Goldsztern
Josef Goldsztern
Pearl (Gorfinkel) Goldsztern
Tzvi Goldsztern
Esther Golubchik
Fagel Golubchik
Lazar Golubchik
Peshe (Mekler) Golubchik
Pinchus Golubchik
Yechail Golubchik
Mirka (Nowicki) Krimelewicz
— Krimelewicz
Beile Szocherman
Chanania Szocherman
Mobsza Eli Szocherman
Perel Szocherman
Raizl (Perlmutter) Szocherman
Zlate Szocherman
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| Beile Dubiner was my 1st cousin 2x removed. She was likely named after her grandmother (my great-great-grandmother) Beile. |
I'm still trying to catch up from missing last week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, but I'm happy to participate in this week's challenge from Randy Seaver!
Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission: Impossible music, please!):
1. Family stories are often about "turning points" and "major decisions."
2. This week, please describe a "turning point" in the life of one of your parents (or for both of them, or for grandparents). Describe the decision and discuss the outcome of it.
3. Share the turning point with all of us by writing your own blog post, writing a comment on this blog post, or putting it in a Substack post, Facebook Note, or some other social media system. Please leave a comment on this post so others can find it.
From my perspective, probably the most important turning points in my parents' life was when my mother decided to go to a party with her best friend. They were living in Miami at the time. Their car broke down on the way to the party, and my mother was fretting about what they could do. Her friend said, "Don't worry, my uncle is a mechanic. I'll call him and he'll come fix it." And that uncle became my father, because my mother's best friend was my first cousin.
I don't know when exactly this happened or the specifics of how things developed from there, but I do know that my parents were married October 21, 1961 and shortly thereafter left Florida and drove across the country to Los Angeles. I'm pretty sure the first place they went was my godmother-to-be's home in Whittier. Ruthie was my maternal grandmother's best friend. My mother told Ruthie that she was pregnant (with me!) before she told my grandmother.
So if my mother hadn't decided to go to that party, I might not be here. I guess my brother and sister wouldn't be either. And maybe my father would have become a famous musician!
I found this meme accidentally because Banai Lynn Feldstein, the Ginger Genealogist, had her blog hacked and some of her older posts, including the 99 Things Genealogy Meme, were sent out as new items. I discovered that Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, which I use as weekly inspiration for posts, covered this topic, but in 2009, two years before I started blogging. So I'm going to do it now.
Because my Jewish ancestry is a huge focus of my research, I'm using Banai's Jewish-focused version of the meme, although I do not agree with her logic on removing American Revolution, Civil War, and DAR as topics. For several of the items, I changed "ancestor" to "relative" because not only did I not think it was realistic for all of those items to be for ancestors, my collateral relatives are also important in my research. And I did a few edits just because I'm an editor and found things, and I couldn't help myself.
The list should be annotated in the following manner:
Things you have already done or found: bold type.
Things you would like to do or find: Italicize (color optional).
Things you haven’t done or found and don’t care to: plain type.
So I have done 84 of the 99 items. There are eight I would like to do (a couple of which I could probably justify as putting in bold already) and seven I have no interest in. Seriously, who wants to get injured on a genealogy trip or doing the genealogy happy dance? Why are those even on the list?
Image from Wikimedia Commons and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
I sent this suggestion for a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun topic to Randy Seaver a while ago to use this year. I thought it was perfect timing that National Memory Day should fall on a Saturday.
Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.
1. March 21 is National Memory Day. How can we celebrate, and participate, in the day? I asked AI tool ChatGPT how, and it suggested "Capture a Memory before It[']s Gone"; "Rescue and Identify Old Photos"; "Record a[n] Oral History"; "Organize One Small Thing"; "Share a Story with Family"; "Visit or Virtually Honor Ancestors."
2. For SNGF this week, do one or more of those tasks or some other related task of your choosing.
3. Share your selected National Memory Day activity in your own blog post or in a Facebook, SubStack, BlueSky, or other social media post. Leave a link to your post on this blog post to help us find your post.
[Thank you to geneablogger Janice Sellers for telling me about National Memory Day and suggesting this topic.]
The emphasis on National Memory Day is your brain and keeping your memory functions in good shape. One of the many wonderful things about doing family history research is that it should help increase your own memory capabilities, because family history is really puzzle solving — figuring out which pieces belong to which puzzle, assembling them and helping make sense of them, determining where you can find additional documentation to add more pieces. I have often read that studies indicate puzzle solving is one way to keep your brain and your memory working well.
In genealogy, the aspect of memory we tend to focus on is remembering people and the past, which seems a natural corollary. I celebrated National Memory Day by teaching an introductory class in Black American genealogy and encouraging the attendees to share their research with family members, genealogical and historical societies, archives, libraries, and as many other people and institutions as possible to ensure that the memories of our families are not lost after we, the researchers, are gone. When we share our information, we increase the probably that others will remember our family members, and all of the work we have done will not be in vain. I guess that comes under Randy's suggestion to "Visit or Virtually Honor Ancestors."
I looked up National Memory Day and found one page that indicated it was first celebrated in 2017 and that it was started to honor memories. I like to think the people who created it would find the connection to family history appropriate.
