Wordless Wednesday

 

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Which Ancestral Home Would You Like to Visit?

Randy Seaver asks for a difficult decision in this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) Tell us which ancestral home (an actual building, a village, a town, even a country) you would most like to visit.   Which ancestors lived there and for how long?  

(2) Share your ancestral home information in your own blog post or on Facebook, and leave a link to it in the comments.
 
Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic.

Randy appears to be fortunate in that he has several lines in his family that were in the same location, making it easy to choose that place.  Mine are kind of scattered all over the place, which makes the choice difficult.  On the other hand, Randy did give country as an option, so I think I'll choose "Russian Empire."  As in the one that doesn't exist anymore.  But it was the country from which all of the ancestors on my mother's side of the family emigrated.

All the American documentation I have says that the Brainins came from Kreuzburg, which is now Krustpils, Latvia.  I would love to go there and try to find some European documents that actually confirm that's where they were from.  Supposedly my 3x-great-grandfather was a doctor; maybe that increases the possibility of finding a record about him?

The Mecklers came from Kamenets Litovsk, Grodno gubernia, which is now Kamyanyets, Belarus.  I have that family tracked back to my 3x-great-grandfather Zvi Mekler.  I wouldn't expect to find much about my family in modern Kamyanyets, but I want the opportunity to look.

The Nowicki family came from Porozovo, Grodno gubernia, now Porazava, Belarus.  This is another location where not much has survived regarding the former Jewish population, but you never know unless you try.

The Gorodetskys were at least registered in Orinin, Kamenets Podolskiy gubernia, which is now Orynyn, Ukraine.  I don't know how far back that registration goes or how long it might have been since someone lived there.  The family was apparently at one time in the city of Kamenets Podolskiy (now Kamyanets Podilskyy), which is where my great-grandfather and his older sister are said to have been born, so that's probably the more important location to visit first.

The Schneidermans were also said to have been from Kamenets Podolskiy, although I don't think it was stated whether that was the city or merely the gubernia.

I don't know where the Jaffes, Bindermans, Blooms, or Yelskys are supposed to have been from.  I guess I would start searching for the Jaffes and Bindermans in Krustpils and the Blooms and Yelskys in Porazava.  I might also have Cohen/Kagan and Kardish/Kortisch ancestors.  I would start my search for them in Kamyanets Podilskyy.

So that gives me a lot of territory to cover.  What was once one (very large) country would now necessitate going through at least three modern countries.  And not going at all to modern Russia, because my ancestors all seem to have stayed in the Pale, apparently not having any of the high-end occupations that permitted one to reside in Russia proper.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Ellen's Questions, Part 3

In this week's challenge for Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, we continue to follow up on a previous one.

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) Ellen Thompson-Jennings posted 20 questions on her Hound on the Hunt blog two weeks ago — see Even More Questions about Your Ancestors and Maybe a Few about You (posted 27 June). 

(2) We will do these five at a time, with Questions 11 to 15 tonight (we did 1 through 5 two weeks ago and questions 6 through 10 last week).

(3) Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.

Okay, these are my answers.

11.  If money weren’t an issue, where would you go to do genealogy research?

All over the world!  I would go to Ukrainian archives and hire interpreters to find information about my Gorodetsky and Schneiderman (and maybe Kagan) family lines.  I would try doing research in Moldova with more interpreters, looking for my Gorodetskys.  I would visit the Latvian archives with yet more interpreters, desperately trying to find even one measly document about my Brainins and Jaffes.  I would go to archives in Belarus (yes, more interpreters) to see if any of the record sets listed on the Routes to Roots site include any of my Mekler, Nowicki, Yelsky, or related relatives.  If I found addresses in any of those records, I would look to see if those buildings had survived.  In Belarus I would also search for records and information about the families of my many Mekler cousins with whom I am now in contact.

It would be ineresting to go back to Cuba, now that I have a little more information about my Cuban cousins, to try researching in person, instead of having to rely on e-mail communications with my researcher there.  At least I can read Spanish fluently and understand spoken Spanish fairly well.

And that's just my mother's side of the family!

For my father's side, I'd like to go to Manchester, England (where my brother has been able to go, once) and research the Dunstans and Winns (and I wouldn't need an interpreter there).  If I could trace the Dunstans back to Cornwall, that would be my next stop.  I should also go to New Jersey to do archives research on all of his other lines, because they were all in New Jersey for such a long time.

And after all that I would probably take a break to determine my next destination.

12.  Do you ever feel as though you’re the only person researching your family?

At this point, yes.  A cousin in Ottawa, Canada was doing research for a while, even going to the point of creating a legal-sized two-page questionnaire that she sent around to all the relatives there (I am very fortunate that she made photocopies of all of the pages for me).  I don't think she is pursuing that anymore.  Other than the occasional random forays my brother makes online (which almost always produce something substantive and useful), I'm it.

13.  Why do you think you’re interested in your family history and other family members might not be?

I used to actually listen to the stories that my mother and grandmother told about family when I was a little girl.  For whatever reason, my brother and sister were apparently not as interested.  So I was already primed when, at the age of 13, I had a junior high school assignment to trace my family back four generations.  I still have that purple mimeographed piece of paper and the notes I took at the time while interviewing family members.  That assignment is what got me hooked.  I think being open to the stories and then starting so young, when I had so many older relatives who were still alive and could tell me information themselves, was a rare combination.

14.  Do you intend to write about your genealogy/family history findings?

You mean like a book?  Oh, heavens, no!  I hate writing.  But I do manage to post to my blog on a (semi)regular basis and share a lot of the family stories and discoveries that way.  And I have shared family trees with so many cousins I lost count.  If I could find someone who wanted to do the writing after I did all the research, that would work much better for me.  And then I could edit the manuscript, because I love editing.

15.  Did you ever make a genealogy mistake that caused you to have to prune your family tree?

One mistake, and one discovery via DNA.  The mistake was relying on the information in the IGI to identify my great-great-grandmother Lippincott's parents.  I happily researched the parents that were listed and went back quite a ways.  But as more records became readily available and I did more research, I discovered that there were two girls of almost the same age with almost the same name, my great-great-grandmother and another one.  That, of course, meant that I had to fully research both women.  I was finally able to determine through church records that the parents listed in that IGI record were those of the other Lippincott, not mine, even though the marriage date and husband were correct for mine.  Someone accidentally combined info from two records!  So out went the one line of Lippincotts and I began work on the correct one, which I have not been able to document as extensively, but at least I'm pretty sure they're actually mine.  The two lines will probably end up connecting some generations back, because you can't go anywhere in New Jersey without tripping over a Lippincott because they've been there so long and are interrelated, but I'm not worried about that yet.

The other "pruning" came when I demonsrated through DNA testing that my grandfather's biological father was not the man his mother married.  I actually haven't taken those people out of my family tree, because Elmer Sellers was the only father my grandfather knew, and I put years and years of work into that research.  But I have discontinued further research in that direction and now focus on determining just who my grandfather's biological father was.

Brother, Can You Spare an Hour (or Two)?

It's time for another round-up of projects that are looking for volunteer help, whether in the form of transcriptions, information, or time.  If you have an hour or two a week to spare or some specialized knowledge, maybe you're just the person for one of these requests.

Flooding in Montreal’s Bonaventure Depot in
1886.  Photo: George Charles Arless. Source:
McCord Museum, Montreal, Quebec, MP-1999.6.1

As is becoming more and more common, several of the projects are asking volunteers to transcribe digitized information.  McGill University in Montreal, Québec is hoping people will be interested in working on 150 years of meterological observations from the McGill Observatory.  The focus of the Data Rescue:  Archives and Weather (DRAW) project is studying the historical weather data to identify patterns and trends, but an article notes, “The Observatory ledgers are also full of interesting little notes about the daily lives of our ancestors."  So if you had relatives living in Montreal, you can learn more about what their weather was like and how it affected them.  The project site is still in a beta testing stage, but interested participants can sign up now and practice using the transcription tools.

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Yale University's recent foray into crowd-sourced transcription work is all about the drama — Yale's School of Drama, that is, along with the Yale Repertory Theatre Ephemera Collection.  The aim of the Ensemble @ Yale project is to create a database of Yale theatrical history.  Volunteers can browse digitized programs spanning more than 90 years and transcribe play titles, production dates, and names of directors, cast, and crew.  Once the first two collections have been transcribed and put into a searchable database, more Yale theater-related collections will be considered as additions.  If you had a family member at Yale or are into theater history, this may be the project for you.

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Ukrainian family from Tyshkivtsi,
Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1890

A transcription project more directly related to family history research is the one connected to the recently launched database of genealogical records for Ukrainians born between 1650 and 1920.  The database is said to include information on more than two and a half million people, with plans to increase the total to between four and five million people by 2019.  Documents used as data sources originated with the Tsardom of Muscovy, Russian and Habsburg empires, Poland, and the Soviet Union.  The index is currently searchable only in Cyrillic, but a Roman alphabet search is planned for the future.  (Remember, Google Translate understands Ukrainian and is your friend.)

If you register on the project site you can create a family tree.  The transcription site provides instructions on how to do the transcription work, and lists locations and whether documents have been finished or are waiting to be worked on.  Something I didn't find on the site is a list of what documents are being used, which would be useful for determining whether Jewish individuals might be included in the database.

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There are enough volunteer transcription projects now that someone has created a page to aggregate them.  It's on an education-oriented blog, and the focus is on students working with historical texts, but it's a nice collection of links conveniently grouped together.

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1903 Vacaville Reporter front page

A local request for assistance comes from the Vacaville (Calfornia) Heritage Council, which is looking for volunteers to take on projects such as scanning photo negatives, researching local history, organizing donated historical material, and various computer tasks.  Some of the historical items that scream to be cared for are the Vacaville Reporter's newspaper collection from 1930–2006, microfilm of newspapers going back to 1883, and photo negatives.  Interested individuals can contact council president Doug Rodgers at the e-mail address given in the article.

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Three more local requests, these from museums in eastern Contra Costa County, California, were featured in a recent newspaper article.  The Antioch Historical Museum, East County Historical Museum, and Pittsburg Historical Museum and Society have each received healthy donations of newspapers, microfilm, and other historical items that now need to be sorted and prepared for access.  Contact information for each of the groups is in the article, if you have the time to help.

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Dr. Kimberly Jensen, a professor at Western Oregon University, is trying to find more information about The People's Bulletin, a black community newspaper published in Portland, Oregon.  The only known surviving issue, from June 7, 1917, is Volume 1, Number 34, and is held at the University of California at Santa Barbara's Special Research Collections, as part of its “Portland [Oregon] African-American Collection, circa 1900–1970.”  So far all documentation for the newspaper indicates only the year 1917, although June 7 was in the 23rd week of 1917, so the first issues should have come out in 1916.  It's obviously a very rare paper; it isn't even listed in the Chronicling America directory.  Anyone who can provide information about The People's Bulletin is asked to contact Dr. Jensen at the e-mail address given in the article linked above.

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There are always lots of Irish projects going on.  A releatively new one is Epic Journeys - Ellis Island, which aims to document the Irish experience going through Ellis Island.  The project began in 2015 with a focus on the parish of Tulla, County Clare but has now expanded to other departure points in Ireland, including locations in the counties of Cavan, Cork, Galway, and Tipperary.  The Web site is currently going through an upgrade, so contributions cannot be made through it directly, but they can be sent via an e-mail address on the site.

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The Edmonds Historical Museum (in Snohomish County, Washington State) is asking its area residents, whether military veterans, current service members, or civilians, to come forward and share their wartime memories, from World War II through to the recent War on Terror.  All interviews will be shared with repositories for permanent preservation, and participants will each be given a copy of the oral history interview to keep and to share with family members if desired.  After November 2017, the interview project will expand to general memories of Edmonds and south Snohomish County.  Details and contact information are in an online article about the project.

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This one isn't directly genealogy-related, but identifying the person should help one family.  Authorities from Orange County, California have put out a public request for help with their oldest cold case, who is a Jane Doe.  "Jane" was found dead on March 14, 1968 in Hungtington Beach, California.  She was estimated to be 20–30 years old, 5'2"–5'3", and about 130–140 pounds.  More information about her case, including the clothing and items found with her, is on the Defrosting Cold Cases blog.

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Detail from The Book of Magical Charms

The last project I'll mention today has nothing to do with genealogy, but it just sounds really cool, so I want to share it.  How would you like to transcribe magical manuscripts?  The Newberry Library in Chicago is giving you that opportunity.  The Book of Magical Charms describes how to care for toothaches, cheat at dice, complete a conjuring, and speak with spirits.  How can you possibly pass that up?  Atlas Obscura has an interesting article about the project, and you can visit the transcription project site to get started.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Genea-Bucket List

Wish lists are always fun to create, because you can really go nuts with what you would like to do.  And that's what Randy Seaver is asking us to do for this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I challenge you:

Knowing that a "Bucket List" is a wish list of things to do before death:

(1) What is on your Genealogy Bucket List?  What research locations do you want to visit?  Are there genea-people that you want to meet and share with?  What do you want to accomplish with your genealogy research?  List a minimum of three items, more if you want!

(2) Tell us about it in a blog post of your own (please give me a link in Comments), a comment to this post in Comments, or a status line or comment on Facebook.

Think big!  Have fun!  Life is short - do genealogy first!

Ok, here's mine:

1.  Locations I want to visit:
• Burlington County, New Jersey for an extended research visit, because that's where most of my father's family was from:  Armstrong, Gauntt, Gibson, Sellers, Stackhouse, and other families
• Trenton, New Jersey, because it's the location of the New Jersey State Archives
• Research repositories in New York City and extended area, because that's where most of my mother's ancestors lived after they immigrated to the United States
• Kamenets Litovsk (now Kamyanyets), Porozowo, and Kobrin (minimum), Belarus, all locations from which members of the Meckler and Nowicki branches of my family came
• Kreuzburg (now Krustpils, Latvia), the (claimed) origin of my Brainin family line
• Kamenets Podolsky (now Kamyenets Podilskiiy, Ukraine) and Kishinev (now Chisinau, Modolva), where Gorodetsky family members were born and lived
• Khotin, now in Ukraine (I think), where one branch of the Gorodetsky-Kardish family lived
• Manchester, England, home to my Dunstan line for several generations
• County Cork, Ireland, particularly Ballyvourney, home to my stepsons' paternal ancestors on the mother's side
• Punjab, India, particularly Khatkar Kolan and Patiala, home to my stepsons' paternal ancestors on the father's side

That's the short list.  I can come up with even more if I try.

2.  People I want to meet and share information with:
• Any relatives I can find in the above-mentioned locations :)
• Relatives with whom I am in electronic contact but whom I have not yet met
• Relatives whose names I have from previous research but whom I have not yet met
• Anyone else I find I'm related to
• After I determine who my grandfather's biological father was (see below), people from that branch of the family

3.  What I want to accomplish with my genealogy research:
• Determine who my grandfather's biological father was
• Meet as many relatives as possible
• Collect photographs of as many ancestors as possible
• Learn as much as possible about my ancestors and other relatives as individuals
• Create books or other collections to share with family members
• Document family members who perished in the Holocaust for Yad Vashem
• Find someone else in the family to carry on my work after I'm gone, because I'm going to assume I can't resolve all the questions before I go

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Which Ancestor Moved the Furthest?

There's another genealogy meme with a lot of questions going around, but rather than use the whole thing, it looks as though Randy Seaver will be choosing one question at a time to post for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.  That's ok by me!  It will make the fun last even longer!

For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I challenge you:

(1) The Family History Hound listed 20 Questions about Your Ancestor, and I'm going to use some of them in the next few months.

(2) Please answer the first question:  "Which ancestor moved the furthest from their home?"

(3) Write your own blog post, make a comment on this post, or post your answer on Facebook or Google+.  Please leave a link to your answer in comments on this post.

My Ancestors

For my ancestors, I looked at the side of the family that came from Eastern Europe.  Since Google Maps has problems determining distance when you cross oceans, I used Distance Between Cities for my numbers.

• My ancestors who appear to have moved the furthest distance were my great-grandfather Joe Gordon (~1892–1955) and great-great-grandfather Victor Gordon (~1866–1925).  Although I have yet to verify the information, both are said to have been born in Kamenets Podolskiy, Russian Empire (now Kam'yanets'-Podil's'kyi, Ukraine).  Distance Between Cities gives a result of 4,602.20 miles between Kamenets Podolskiy and Brooklyn, New York, where both men immigrated.

• The next furthest distance for a move appears to be my great-grandparents Morris Meckler (~1882–1953) and Minnie (Nowicki) Meckler (~1880–1936), who immigrated from Kamenets Litovsk, Russian Empire (now Kamyanyets, Belarus) to Brooklyn.  Distance Between Cities shows that was 4,358.40 miles.

Collateral Relatives

If I look at the collateral lines in my tree, there is one clear winner.  Betty Ellett (1935–2006), the mother of a second cousin once removed, moved from Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia to Reno, Nevada, a leap of 9,340.41 miles.  Not quite as far as Linda Seaver's great-great-grandmother, but a pretty impressive distance all the same.

"Who Do You Think You Are?" - Jennifer Grey

I knew I was going to fall further behind on my Who Do You Think You Are? posts, but I'll just keep plugging away.  At least I haven't missed seeing any of the episodes so far.

I was looking forward to the Jennifer Grey episode, not only because I know who she is but because I enjoy seeing what they do with Jewish research.  The teaser told us that Grey would shatter the darkness surrounding the grandfather she never understood.  She would find a family that endured a heartbreaking tragedy and learn about an extraordinary, mysterious ancestor whose remarkable story would turn everything she believed about her grandfather on its head.

Jennifer Grey is shown in Manhattan, and we see her in seems to be her apartment (although her Wikipedia page says she lives in Venice, California, at least as of 2008).  She mentions that she just finished wrapping the second season of Red Oaks for Amazon.  The only other acting credit mentioned is Dirty Dancing, which not only launched her to fame but also defined her as a dancer in the public eye, to the point that she became self-conscious about dancing and stopped doing it for twenty years.  She was asked to participate in Dancing with the Stars but didn't consider it until her daughter convinced her to do it, saying that she wanted her to have the experience.  She won the competition, and after coming back to dance after twenty years without it, she wondered what else she had been missing out on.  She became curious about her life and family history.

Grey was born in 1960 to Jo Wilder (the stage name of Joanne Carrie Brower) and Joel Grey, who was just beginning his Broadway career at the time.  She knows little about her family beyond her parents and jokes about being a bad Jew, saying she wasn't curious enough.  She knows more about her father's side of the family; they were entertainers and "show people" and were more involved in her family's life.  Her mother's parents, Clara and Izzie Brower, were the antithesis of her father's parents.  She doesn't remember much about them, almost as if they were ghosts.

Grey remembers that Izzie was a pharmacist in Brownsville, a Brooklyn neighborhood.  She did know him but remembers only a few things.  When he came to visit he seemed depressed to her.  He wore heavy coats that smelled of mothballs and he always brought a box of pastry tied with a string.  She felt aloof around him.  He looked beaten down and as if he were from another world and time.  Now she wonders why he looked so sad.

She wants to learn about Izzie on the journey she's going to take.  She wonders how old he was when he came to the United States.  What was his life like?  What kind of adversity did he face?

One story Grey remembers hearing is that Izzie was a little boy when he was made to leave Russia in a hurry and came to America.  He had to wear a heavy coat lined with the family silverware.  She figures he must have had a rough life but doesn't know why or where he left from, just that the family were Russian Jews.

Grey asked her mother for what information she knew about the family, and in response her mother sent a packet.  She sits down to open it with her daughter, Stella Gregg, whom she tells that she didn't want to open it by herself.  The first thing she takes out of the envelope is a letter, and she puts on her glasses to read it.  The editing has her reading bits and pieces out of order (as usual on these programs), but this is almost the entire letter:

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Dear Jennifer

When I heard you were taking this journey I was so pleased.  Sitting down to write this letter has really [——] memories.  I am including some information here that should get you started.  I've also sent along a few [photos?] that you may or may not have seen.

My dad, Israel or "Izzie" as he was called, came to New York from the Ukraine (though I don't know [where?] specifically) with his father, your great grandfather, Solomon, a tall stately fellow.  I believe I've heard [——] mill back in the old country.  My father's job on the journey over was to wear a black coat fitted with [pockets in?] which he carried family silverware.  The picture of this young boy, laden with this weight he was responsible [for? —] comical and a little Chaplin-esque.

Our lives were lived on one block:  Bristol St between Pitkin and Sutter in Brownsville, Brooklyn.  We [the rest of this paragraph was not shown]

At my father's pharmacy, they called him "doctor."  It was on the corner of Sutter and Bristol and a lot of my young life was spent there.  In the summer, I'd be swinging from the [—] bars and sitting in a sling chair out front on the street, or running to call people to one of the payphones, in the store, because people didn't have their own phones at the time - I don't know if you know this, but your grandmother, Clara, also graduated from pharmacy school, though she never practiced.

It's sad that you didn't have more of a relationship with your grandpa Izzie, but I understand why you didn't.  You were a kid, and he didn't quite understand the world we were living in, our lifestyle at the time.  I fault myself now for having not been more inclusive.  I guess we were very selfishly into our own world and building our family.  I don't know if you remember, but when you were a kid, I drove you to my old neighborhood to look for Izzie's pharmacy.  It was all pretty grim.  His store, what was left of it, was literally charred.  I think you were too startled and young at the time to really know what you were looking at.

I hope that this experience will offer you a greater understanding of where your relatives came from and how strong they were to come to a frightening new land where they didn't speak the language and didn't know the mores of this place.  I'm more impressed after writing this than I was before.  I mean, we look back and feel sad that we didn't appreciate things more.  I feel like my dad was an emotional person but I didn't give him enough credit for that, nor did you get to see that side of him.  Perhaps you'll get to know him on this journey and find a new appreciation for him.  I know he'd appreciate who you have become...

Love, Mom

P.S.  I never knew your great grandmother, Izzie's mother (Solomon's wife.)  I don't even know her name!  Clearly she died, but I don't know where or when.  Maybe you'll find out?

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Grey becomes emotional at a couple of points, particularly where her mother wrote that she regretted not making more of an effort to include Izzie in the family.  She moves from the letter to the photographs that her mother sent.  The first shown is of Izzie and Clara with their children, Grey's Uncle Mitchell and her mother as a baby in Izzie's arms.  The latter gets Grey and Stella joking about "Bubbie as a baby" and "Baby Bubbie."  (Bubbie is Yiddish for grandmother and is what I called my maternal grandmother.)

The second photo is of two boys in front of Izzie's pharmacy.  Grey proudly reads "Israel Brower, Pharmacist, Chemist."  (There was handwriting in the lower right corner of the photo.  I think it said "Mitchell Brower", who was probably one of the boys, but it wasn't shown on screen long.)

The last photo shown looks like a big family reunion.  A title at the top reads "BROWER FAMILY 1937", and Grey's mother has given some information and labeled some of the people in the photo:

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This photo was taken in 1937 at 107 Bristol Street in Brownsville, Brooklyn.  (I wonder [the rest of this sentence was not shown on screen]

I numbered the immediate family.*

1.  Israel 'Izzie' Brower, your grandfather
2.  William, your great uncle, Izzie's older brother
3.  Tillie, your great aunt, Izzie's younger sister
4.  Mitchell, your uncle (my brother)
5.  Me, your mom.
6.  Sylvia, your great aunt

*Not in the photo:  Rose, Israel's older sister, and Charlie, his younger brother.  (Both died quite young.)

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Grey really likes this last photo and is surprised that her mother has never shared it before.  (It's a great photo to have!)  She's curious why there's so little information about the family before they came to the United States.  Even her mother doesn't know.  Stella suggests that maybe Izzie and Clara didn't share the information, and Grey says she hopes that doesn't happen with Stella.

We don't get a cue from the scene with Stella saying where Grey would go next.  We simply see her in the next segment walking, and she tells us that "she has contacted a historian" (after being told to do so by the producers, of course) who specializes in American Jews.  They are going to meet at the Brooklyn Public Library in Brownsville (the Stone Avenue branch, to be specific), the neighborhood where her grandparents lived, and maybe even where her mother went to the library.

Inside the library is Dr. Annie Polland, credited as an American Jewish historian with the Tenement Museum.  (She's the Senior Vice President of Education and Programs at the museum.)  The first thing Grey asks is why her family knows so little about what happened prior to the United States.  Polland explains that it is common for children and grandchildren not to know much.  She quotes a saying — "What the son wishes to forget, the grandson wishes to remember" (known as Hansen's law) — and adds that sometimes people wait too too late to find the information.  Undeterred, Grey says that she doesn't know when Izzie arrived in the United States.  Polland has a laptop handy and tells Grey to search on Ancestry.com (12 minutes in, the longest so far this season).  She has Grey go to the Immigration & Travel collection and then to the New York Passenger Lists database.  All Grey enters is Israel Brower.  Although Grey knows nothing other than Izzie's name, conveniently Polland knows more and points her to the second result on the list, even though the name is spelled "Braver."  Polland says that the spelling is the "Russian version of Brower", which is a somewhat questionable explanation.

So Grey clicks on the link, and up pops a passenger list from January 16, 1907 for the Pretoria, which departed from Hamburg.  Grey finds Israel Braver on the list, and he is traveling with three other people:  Rose, Cheskel, and Taube.  (They're on the last four lines of the image below.)

Israel was 16 years old, and Grey does the math to determine he was born in 1891 (which Polland does not tell her is approximate, unfortunately).  His occupation is listed as compositor, which Polland explains was someone who set type for printing; it was a skilled position.  He probably served an apprenticeship to gain his training.

Looking over the names of the individuals traveling with her (unproven) grandfather, Grey recognizes Rose as her grandfather's older sister, but she is confused by Cheskel and Taube.  Polland explains that Jews coming to the United States generally had their Yiddish names on the passenger lists but once they arrived they often "Americanized" their old-country names.  So it appears that Cheskel became Charles, while Taube chose to call herself Tillie.

As she reads the information in the other columns on the passenger list, Grey sees that the siblings' last residence is listed as Yampol and that they said they were going to join their father Solomon (called Schulem, which generated more discussion about Jewish names) at an address in Brooklyn.  Grey realizes someone is missing and asks where their mother was.  She recalls that in her letter, her own mother had said she did not know the name of Solomon's wife.

Grey is now visibly distressed (or is putting on a good act, because she is, after all, an actress).  The four siblings, the youngest of whom is only 9, would have traveled at least two weeks on the ship, with no parent beside them.  Grey starts asking one question after another:  Why didn't their mother come with them?  Did she not want to come?  Was she already in the U.S.?  Illegally?  Had she died in childbirth?  Was there some other way to find her?

Polland says that they can look at the censuses for other family members, which could possibly tell if the mother had joined the family later.  The first census after the siblings' 1907 arrival was in 1910.  Instead of going to Ancestry again, Grey asks if the census pages can be printed, because she likes to hold paper in her hands.   (I'm not sure if this was bad editing and Grey made her request after they had found census entries online, or if Grey was simply jumping the gun, assumed that Polland already knew about census pages, and was trying to avoid working on the computer again.  Either way, it came off as a non sequitur.)  Polland says it won't be a problem and disappears momentarily, reappearing with papers in hand.  The only page discussed or shown on air is the 1910 census.

United States 1910 Federal Population Census, 26th Ward, Borough of Brooklyn, Kings County, New York,
April 22–23, 1910, Enumeration District 72-9, page 20A, lines 26–31

In the 1910 census they find Solomon Brower (46 years old), an older son named William, and the four siblings seen on the passenger list.  Grey notes that there is still no mother.  When she checks the box for marital status for Solomon, she finds "Wd", for widowed.  So that's why Grey's mother didn't know her name and why she didn't come — she was dead.  (That, of course, is an assumption on her part.  She could have come with Solomon and died in New York.)  Then she goes back to fretting about the four siblings coming over on the ship all alone with no mother.

Polland points out that the census is like a little novel, because it tells you what people were doing at a given time, such as jobs or school.  When Grey looks for Izzie's occupation, she finds that it says he could speak English and that he was working as a compositor for a printing company.  Now that she has seen this for a second time, she decides she's a little confused.  Everything she knows about Izzie is when he had the pharmacy.  So how and why did he change from working in printing to being a pharmacist?

For how he became a pharmacist, Polland says there was one school, the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy, so that's where he probably went.  Grey makes a comment about whether it still exists, and Polland tells her it is now part of Long Island University.  So that's where Grey is going next.

(This really caught my attention, because I've done research on someone who graduated from the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy, and I had already learned that it's now part of LIU.  So I was particularly looking forward to seeing what documents the show had found relating to Izzie.)

As she leaves the library, Grey is thinking about Izzie and his sad-sack face.  If she had known that his mother had died, she would have acted differently.  She wants to tell her daughter so that she'll have some compassion for Izzie also.  The children lost their mother, but the family forged on and made a new life.  (And, of course, she's assuming that mom was someone whom the children missed.  We'll never know if she was a shrew or a harridan and everyone silently was thankful that she was gone.  But everyone becomes a saint when she dies, right?)

And so onward, to Long Island University (which has a prominent link to the School of Pharmacy right there on the home page).  Exactly where at LIU they are is not stated, but she meets with Mimi Pezzuto, a pharmacy historian at LIU Brooklyn, so they might be there.  Pezzuto tells Grey that she has found some material about Izzie in the archives and hands her a small booklet (this particular copy was digitized from the University of Michigan's collection).

The Brooklyn College of Pharmacy Twenty-fifth Annual Announcement: Session of 1915=1916
Brooklyn, New York:  Brooklyn College of Pharmacy (n.d.).

Grey thinks it looks kind of like a yearbook, and Pezzuto agrees that's pretty accurate.  On page 29 is a list of students who graduated on May 13, 1915:

The Brooklyn College of Pharmacy Twenty-fifth Annual Announcement, page 29.

And there's Izzie!  Now that she knows he officially graduated (when he was 24 years old), Grey wonders exactly what it took to do so.  Pezzuto points her to another page with information about the system of instruction, and Grey reads the paragraph about the Junior Course:

The Brooklyn College of Pharmacy Twenty-fifth Annual Announcement, page 8.

The booklet also has several photographs, which the women do not discuss (at least not on air).  I wonder if Izzie is one of the people in the graduating class shown on the page between 28 and 29:

The Brooklyn College of Pharmacy Twenty-fifth Annual Announcement, between pages 28 and 29

Grey is impressed.  Izzie was very young and didn't speak English before he arrived in the U.S.  Here he had to learn English as a second language (or likely third or fourth language, since he already spoke Yiddish, probably some Russian, and maybe some Hebrew also), and then learn Latin for his pharmacy classes.  He was taking hard science classes.  Obviously he had drive and wanted a better life, and clearly he was very smart.

Grey asks how much tuition cost, and Pezzuto says it was $100/year (although page 13 in the booklet indicates it was $105 for a senior, and I'm guessing Izzie was a senior since he graduated).  To be admitted he would have needed a letter verifying he had "good moral rectitude" from a rabbi or possibly a drugstore owner, if he were working for someone.  A pharmacist deals with poisons and narcotics so has to be someone who can be trusted with those materials.  Grey wonders how being a pharmacist now compares to what it was like then.  Pezzuto says that in the early 1900's about 95% of pharmacists owned their own stores and there was a store on almost every corner.

The narrator interrupts at this point to tell us that in the early 1900's, the pharmacist was at the center of the immigrant community.  He was an educated health professional and could dispense medical advice and medications.  Many pharmacists were community leaders and mentors.

Going back to Grey and Pezzuto, the latter adds that becoming a pharmacist was a move to a professional occupation, which would be an honor for Izzie and for his family.  It was prestigious and a move up from working as a printer.  But why would Izzie have made such a move?  In the early 1900's, Jews were not hired for many jobs.  Some advertisements would actually say "Jews need not apply."  Many immigrants chose to go into professions and work for themselves, where they would be less affected by anti-Semitism and could rely on themselves.  (And suddenly I understood why so many of my cousins became pharmacists.)

Grey asks what happened to Izzie after his graduation.  Pezzuto admits she has one more document and brings out a copy of Izzie's World War I draft registration (which has nothing to do with the history of pharmacy or the Brooklyn College of Pharmacy, but I guess they needed some way to segue to the next talking head).

Pezzuto explains that registration for the draft was mandatory for men between 21 and 31 years old.  Izzie's card shows that he lived at 107 Bristol Street (the same address as the 1937 photograph) and was employed by himself, and his store store was at 207 Sutter.  Oh, and he claimed exemption from the draft as "support conscientious objector" (which is incredibly difficult to read, and Grey had to ask Pezzuto what it said).  Grey's reaction?  "Oh, my left roots."

After Grey asks, Pezzuto says it would be very unusual to be a conscientious objector in 1917.  She doesn't know more about the subject but can send Grey to a Jewish historian, who will be able to give her more information.

Leaving Pezzuto, Grey is surprised by how different Izzie seems now from what she had seen.  She never saw him in his element (wasn't the pharmacy his element?) or his best light.  She is impressed at his ability to make a better life.  He was ambitious, smart, and a self-made person.  And she is almost blown away by the fact that Izzie rejected the draft and was a conscientious objector.

I could not identify Grey's next stop, but she meets Tony Michels, an American Jewish historian from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and asks him what being a conscientious objector encompasses.  In response he hands her a copy of the List of Enrolled Voters for the 23rd Administrative District of the Borough of Brooklyn for the period ending December 31, 1917.  She pages through to the 16th Election District and finds Israel Brower listed as a Socialist.  (Unfortunately, only 1919 is available online for Brooklyn, and I can't find Izzie's name in it.)  The Socialist Party was opposed to World War I because it believed it to be instigated by capitalists and imperialist countries that considered the everyday man to be dispensible cannon fodder.  So Izzie, as a good Socialist, would be opposed to the war and therefore registered as a conscientious objector.

Being a conscientious objector would have definitely been a minority position at the time.  It could be risky because it was not a popular stance.  Someone could possibly have been arrested or fired.  Perhaps worse, you might be perceived as unamerican, not good for an immigrant fairly recently arrived in the country.  As newcomers, immigrants were particularly vulnerable to accusations.  Grey makes the obvious association with today's news.  So to put yourself out there as a conscientious objector definitely took courage.  You were making a statement.

But where would Izzie have learned about these Socialist ideas?  Michels says he probably would have had some strong leanings already and likely was exposed to the ideas in Podolia, where there was already a burgeoning workers union movement among Jews and others.  (Hey, my great-grandfather was from Podolia, and he was a Socialist, too!)

The narrator pops in for another short commentary.  From 1791 on most Jews in the Russian Empire were confined to living in the Pale of Settlement and were barred from many jobs and educational opportunities.  During the 1905 Russian Revolution, some groups, many Jews among them, fought for working class equality.  Afterward, Jews suffered from increased anti-Semitism.  To escape these unpleasant circumstances, many Jews took the risk and left Russia for the new World.

Michels has another document that may shed some light on Izzie.  It is the April 1935 issue of Health and Hygiene, the medical magazine of the American Community Party.  (Michels does not mention that it is actually the very first issue of the magazine.)  Grey looks at him rather askance — seriously, Izzie was a sympathizer of the Community Party?  Michels points out that in 1935 the Community Party was not what she thinks; it even supported FDR.  He tells her to "browse around" the issue.

Grey flips through some pages.  There are articles on children's diseases and the dangers of drugs and beauty aids.  Overall, it seems to be pretty progressive in its views and not out of line with some of today's perspectives.  But what does it have to do with Izzie?

Michels points her to the inside back cover, which has a list of official IWO drugstores in Brooklyn.  Michel says that the idea of the magazine was that health care was a right.  IWO stands for International Workers Order, which was a self-help cooperative.  Members paid dues for insurance and discounted rates.  And when Grey looks down the page (oh, of course she didn't do that already), she finds a listing for Izzie's pharmacy.  (And none of us was expecting that either, right?)

Health and Hygiene, April 1935, inside back cover

By signing up as an official IWO drugstore, Izzie showed an interest in serving his community.  He also committed to adhering to the IWO standards.  Therefore they were recommending him and saying that he could be trusted.  Grey sees how Izzie's belief in Socialism meant that he believed in social justice and giving back.

But there's something else that Grey still wants to find out.  She tells Michels that she's learned a lot about Izzie but that there are still a few holes in the journey.  Izzie's mother never came to this country (which she doesn't actually know, at least based on what we've seen during the program).  Michels says he has a research document that "just arrived yesterday" from the state archive in Vinnitsa, Ukraine.  That archive has documents relating to Yampol, Podolia, where the Brower family came from.

The document is, of course, in Russian, but Michels gives Grey a translation.  She begins to read it and says sadly, "I thought that might have happened."  (And we all know what's coming.)

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No 8  Shayndl, a wife of Shulim Browerman from Dzygovka, died 27th of August 1897 in Yampol at the age of 35 from childbirth

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Grey is in tears.  Izzie was 6 years old when his mother died.  The children came to the U.S. in 1907.  Who took care of them in between?  Michels admits there is no information about that.  (But since we weren't shown when Solomon arrived, there may not have been a big gap of years.)

Grey is still devastated.  Her mother didn't know Shayndl's name.  How could she not know the name of her own father's mother?  Michels gently explains that the immigration experience caused a rupture in continuity, and family information was often lost or not passed down.  If memories of the old country were not pleasant, immigrants had no desire to reminisce about them.

Grey looks at this as an explanation of Izzie's desire to go into medicine and helping people.  He grew up in insecure circumstances (which we don't actually know), political unrest, and anti-Semitism and therefore wanted something more stable.

Before leaving, Grey thanks Michels and tells him how much she appreciates his patience and that he explained things so well.

When Grey saw her great-grandmother's name, which she had never heard before, she was surprised at how sad it made her.  She is devastated to think of a child without a mother.  At 9 years old she couldn't appreciate Izzie while he was alive.  She hopes to do better with her own daughter and doesn't want her to miss family information and connections.

The wrap-up scene is back at the apartment with Stella.  Grey and Stella are eating bierocki, which Grey says is a native food of Ukraine (which would actually make it Ukrainian and not Jewish, but let's not get too picky).  Grey tells Stella some of the things she learned on her WDYTYA journey of discovery, particularly about Izzie's mother.  Now that she has learned Izzie's mother died when he was so young, she can empathize with him more, because he must have felt alone in the world.

Grey feels her experience of Izzie is different now.  People looked up to him and respected him.  She calls him a shtarker, Yiddish for survivor.  Not everyone would have been able to go on and succeed as he did.  Izzie had and she has fight; they come from people who were strong enough to come to a new world and survive.  She tells Stella that she hopes she tells her own children this story about the family, so they know where they came from.  (But at no time does she say she's going to tell her own mother!)

While I enjoyed this episode, I do wonder about some things, like finding Shayndl's name.  From that big family photo we saw, it looked like all five of the Brower siblings married.  While it's big and dramatic to get the death record from Ukraine, I would have been looking first for the marriage licenses for those four siblings.  I'm thinking at least one of the kids would have remembered mom's name and put it on the license.  For example, here's the date of Izzie and Clara's marriage and the Family History Library film on which the marriage record appears:

Something that immediately struck me about the year of Shayndl's death is that it seems that she died giving birth to Taube/Tillie, or soon after.  Taube was 9 years old when the siblings arrived in 1907, which is an approximation, indicating a birth year of about 1898.  Perhaps this subject was discussed with Grey but not shown on air.  I wonder if Tillie knew this herself.

I'm confused by the translated date for Shayndl's death.  The translation clearly said August, Grey read August, but the Russian clearly has a 9, which should indicate September.  The change shouldn't have been due to correcting the date from the Julian calendar (which the Russian Empire was still using and which did not change until after the October Revolution) to the Gregorian calendar.  If anything, the date would be later, not earlier.  So I don't know what's going on with that.

I was surprised nothing was said about the town named in Shayndl's death record.  Dzygovka could be the town the family actually came from; Yampol may have been the province.  It's often difficult to find the actual town of origin of immigrants from Russia, so this is an important piece of information.  But it probably simply became subsumed into the emotions surrounding the discovery of Shayndl's name.

Another subject not discussed was the name being Browerman in Shayndl's death record versus the four siblings traveling under the name Brower.  It's possible that after Solomon and William arrived they shortened the name to Brower, but that normally would not have affected the names of relatives still in Russia.  They had to provide some sort of identification to purchase their tickets for the ship.  I'm confused as to how they would have been using the name Brower.  Perhaps both names were actually used in Russia?

While I don't mean to suggest that Shayndl's death would have had no effect on her children, Grey's reaction is a very modern one and may not have been what happened in 1897.  Presentism is often difficult to overcome when researching history, and particularly hard if someone has an emotional connection to the subject.  And we still don't know what Shayndl was like—if she was not a pleasant person by some chance, then maybe Izzie's reticence was due to that and not to her death.  But seeing that all of Shayndl's children are deceased, that is a question we will probably never be able to answer.

Easy Custom Genealogy Maps beyond North America

A few weeks ago, for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver asked readers of his blog to create custom maps of U.S. states and Canadian provinces they had visited, and then to create maps of where their ancestors had lived in some given year.  This was a fun exercise, and it was interesting to see the results.  I was disappointed, however, that I was unable to map several of my ancestors, because they were not living in North America.

Surprisingly, Facebook came to my rescue.  One of my friends posted a link to MapLoco, a site that creates custom world maps of places you've visited.  They're not as detailed as the maps from the first site — you can only indicate visited or not, as opposed to the four levels of visits available on the other site.  The world map site also doesn't have an option to export a graphic file of your map.  Instead, you can generate a URL to a page that shows the countries you marked.  But the site does give me a quick, easy way to map the rest of my ancestors' locations!

For the SNGF exercise I used the locations of my ancestors in 1865, which I had generated the week before, and mapped those in the U.S.  For this new map I took those same locations, added the European ones (the only other continent where I had ancestors in 1865), and clicked those places on the world map site.  The site then automatically generated a URL for my custom map.  Instead of using the URL itself, you can do a screen capture of the map and use the image.  The map the site shows when you use the URL looks like this:

You can see that the title is "Countries I've Visited", and underneath that it lists the countries "I've been to."  There's no way to change the title, which for this map should be "Countries Where My Ancestors Lived in 1865."  The legend on the left indicates Not Visited and Visited.  If you're doing a screen capture, you could easily cut out the "Countries I've Visited" banner, but the text below that is helpful because it lists the countries, which might be difficult to recognize from the map alone.

You actually have two options for images, though.  While you're making the map, it looks like this:

The advantage here is that the Not Visited/Visited legend and "I" text aren't part of the map.  On the other hand, you don't get the list of countries spelled out.

Something I noticed when mapping my ancestors was that due to border changes, I had to fudge a little.  Many of my ancestors lived in the Russian Empire, but that no longer exists.  So I marked the modern countries (Belarus, Latvia, and Ukraine) that control the specific areas where they were.

You might think of that as being a problem relevant mostly to 19th- and early 20th-century research, but I even had the same situation when I created a map of the countries I have visited myself:

Quite a few border changes have occurred during the latter part of the 20th century.  Two of the countries I have visited are the USSR and the Panama Canal Zone.  Neither one exists today.  For the USSR I marked the countries corresponding to the Soviet republics I visited.  But the Canal Zone is just gone, incorporated into the country of Panama, which I visited separately from the Canal Zone.

Hey, wouldn't it be cool if there were a site that could generate maps for any given year, with the appropriate corresponding country borders?

Extend a Helping (Genealogical) Hand: Flemish Scots, the Apollo Theater, Buffalo Soldiers, Transcription, and More

1869 National Colored Convention
Washington, D.C.

"Colored Conventions" took place before and after the Civil War, with free and fugitive blacks gathering to discuss and create strategies for legal, labor, healthcare, and educational justice and other problems and challenges.  Minutes were taken at these conventions, but the ones that have survived are in rare, out-of-print books.  A new project is crowdsourcing transcription of the minutes so that they can be digitized and made available to researchers of all ages.  Transcribers correct machine-generated OCR text from scanned images, which is easier than typing it all in.  (This would make a great project for a society to work on together.)

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Another crowdsourced transcription project is one started by the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.  The papers of Richard Yates, Sr., an ally of Lincoln and governor of Illinois during the Civil War, have been digitized with money from a grant.  The library has set up a Web site for volunteers to transcribe the pages (currently almost 13,000 pages are available to work on).  The intention is to create a searchable database of the transcribed text.

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Apparently some researchers estimate that up to a third of the current Scottish population may have Flemish ancestry (as in the surname Fleming).  The Flemish immigrants came between the 11th and 17th centuries.  Some Scottish surnames that may have Flemish origins are Armstrong (I have Armstrong ancestors!), Baird, Balliol, Beaton, Brodie, Bruce, Cameron, Campbell, Comyn, Crawford, Douglas, Dowie, Erskine, Graham, Hamilton, Hay, Innes, Lindsay, Murray, Oliphant, Seton, and Sutherland.

Professor Roger Mason, of the Institute of Scottish Historical Research at the University of St. Andrews, is leading the Scotland and the Flemish People project to assess the impact of the Flemish on Scotland.  The project includes a DNA component.  John Irvine (a genealogist and local historian) and Dr. Alex Fleming (a retired economist) of the Abertay Historical Society are part of the project team.  Plans are to have a conference for Easter 2016, and one or possibly more publications.

The project is looking for people to share local historical and genealogical resources with information about Flemish settlements, lives, and work in Scotland.  If you can contribute or are interested in learning more, you can read about the project here and here, or contact members of the project team:  Dr. Alex Fleming, John Irvine, or Prof. Roger Mason.

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Several members of the genealogical community have already been working on the identification of a photograph apparently of ten Buffalo soldiers, but since the mystery has not yet been resolved, I figure more publicity might be a good thing.  The photograph was discovered some 40 years ago, hidden behind an illustration in an inexpensive photograph frame.  The men in the photo were identified by an appraiser in 1994 as being in the U.S. Cavalry, 9th Regiment, Company G.  The owner of the photograph was interviewed recently by a local newspaper, and some input on the photograph is on the Where Honor Is Due blog.

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A post on the Roads to the Great War blog is publicizing a family's search for the location of a World War I portrait.  The portrait of Corporal Jack Marqusee was apparently painted by an "artist of international fame" for the British government.  The family has a photograph of the portrait but is trying to determine the location of the portrait itself.

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The historic Apollo Theater in Harlem has created an archive and is trying to recover documents, memorabilia, and other artifacts that have been lost, discarded, or forgotten over the years.  Some items sought are marketing materials, costumes, band stands, microphones, and original photographs.  Antiques Roadshow featured the Apollo's search on a "Roadshow's Most Wanted" segment.  If your family had any connection to the Apollo, maybe you can help.

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The Jewish community in the town of Dunayevtsy, Ukraine, known by its Jewish residents as Dinovitz, has been allowed to reclaim a building in town that was once known to be a synagogue.  To accomplish this the community needs to provide documentation to the local authorities about the town's former synagogues.  This could be printed materials, photographs, or stories from family members.  Oral and written materials will both be considered.

There is little actual documentation on synagogues in the shtetl.  The community in Dunayevtsy has not been able to find much information in the local Russian archives and libraries.  YIVO has been contacted and also has little information of use.  If you had family that lived in Dinovitz, please look through any papers, photographs, or memorabilia that you may have and send a message to Carol Rombro Rider.

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If you have family from the town of Biecz in Poland and have collected vital records or have testimonies of family members from the 1920's–1930's, the Foundation for the Preservation of Jewish Heritage in Poland (FODŻ) would like to hear from you in connection with a project involving the Biecz Talmud Torah building, built about 1924.  Please write to Marla Raucher Osborn.