Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Five Questions for an Ancestor

Randy Seaver went way over his allotment of five questions in his post, so maybe I'll do the same for this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music) is:

1.  If you could go back in time to interview one of your ancestors, what questions would you ask him or her?  Tell us your selected ancestor's name, birth and death years/locations, and spouse's name and marriage date/location.  List at least five questions to ask that selected ancestor.

2.  Tell us about your selected ancestor and your questions for that person in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook comment.

Ah, so now I see that Randy allowed for more than the allotted five questions by saying "at least five" in the more detailed instructions.  I can work with that.

I'm going to choose my great-great-grandmother Beila, who was married to my great-great-grandfather Simcha Dovid Mekler.  As her given name is pretty much the only fact I have for her, I'm going to start with much more basic questions.

1.  When and where were you born?  What were your parents' names?  What was your full name before marriage?  Do you remember when your parents died?  When and where did that happen?

2.  Did you have siblings?  What were their names?  When and where were they born?

3.  What were the names of your grandparents on both sides?  Did you know them?  Do you remember when they died?  When did that happen?  What did the family do at that time?  How did you commemorate them?  What are their yahrzeiten?

4.  Did you have aunts and uncles?  What were their names?  Do you know when and where they were born?  Do you remember when they died?

5.  When and where were you married?  Was it a civil marriage as well as a religious marriage?  Who attended the wedding?  After you were married, where did you and my great-great-grandfather live?  What did my great-great-grandfather do for a living?

6.  How many children did you have?  When and where were each of them born?  How many survived to adulthood?  Which of them married during your lifetime?  Did you get to know any of your grandchildren?

7.  What was everyday life like for you and your family?  Were there other Jewish families where you lived?  What was the community like?

8.  What do you remember about the end of your life?  Do you remember how old you were?  Did you become ill?

I can think of so many more questions!

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Was Your Biggest Genealogy Wild Ancestor (Goose) Chase?

I'm sure everyone has had at least one wild goose chase that would qualify for tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver, right?

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  All genealogists are human, and most of us have made gone on wild ancestor (goose) chases in our genealogy research careers.  What was one of the wild ancestor chases in your research?  Explain the situation and how you (hopefully!) solved the puzzle.

2.  Tell us about your biggest genealogy wild ancestor (goose) chase in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

I've written previously about my biggest wild ancestor chase.

Way back when I was 13 and started researching my family, my father, my aunt, and my grandfather told me that my great-great-grandmother was Kate Moore and treated her name as though it were her maiden name.  So that's what I wrote down and then began to look for.

I searched for a Kate/Katherine/Catherine Moore marrying a Sellers and having a son named Cornelius Elmer Sellers for years and couldn't find her.  I searched lists of marriages and other records with no success.

I even bought a book about the Moore family of Burlington County, New Jersey, because that's where my family was from.  I found a Catherine Sellers who married George W. Moore, but that didn't fit what I was told, which was Kate Moore marrying a Sellers.  I kept the book, though.

Not long after I had read the book and decided it didn't have the person I was looking for, I spoke for the first time with my grandfather's last surviving sibling, Aunt Betty, the baby of the family.  After warming up to me, she was giving me information about the family when I said something about her paternal grandmother, Kate Moore.  She responded, "Well, you know that Moore was her second husband."

Well, no, I didn't know that.

Aunt Betty explained that her father's father had died young and that her grandmother had remarried, to George W. Moore, a few years after that.  That's when she became Kate Moore.  And George and Kate had a son, Howard Evans Moore.

Whoops!  Time to restart all my research!

That conversation was on a Sunday.  The next day at work, we were having our staff meeting and talking about what we done over the weekend.  I was telling them about my talk with Aunt Betty when I suddenly remembered the book about the Moore family, which was still sitting in my van a month after I had read it.  I jumped up, ran down to the van, got the book, and ran back into the office.

I excitedly found that entry about Catherine Sellers marrying George W. Moore and looked to see if they had had any children.  Well, whaddaya know?  They had a son named . . . Howard Evans Moore!

So I accidentally had found Kate Moore after all.  Her maiden name, by the way, was Catherine Fox Owen.

The second half of the wild goose chase, however, came when I learned through DNA testing that my grandfather — and by extension my entire family line descended from him — was a Sellers through informal adoption.  Elmer Sellers was not the biological father of my grandfather; he had married my great-grandmother when my grandfather was seven months old and had raised him as his own.  All the research I had done on the Sellers family, back to Hans Georg Söller, born in 1615 in Weinheim, Baden, had been on my adoptive line.  Still my family, just not in the way I had originally thought.

I'm still working on that part of the puzzle.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Genealogy Fools Day Is on Monday

I always associate April Fools' Day with my brother and myself, because my mother told me that she was told her due date for each of us was April 1.  It's one of the few times I can say I'm happy I was late.  But this week, for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver is asking when we genealogists were fools.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. 

1.  April Fools Day is Monday.  When were you a Genealogy Fool?  What wrong, funny, or silly genealogy effort did you make?

2.  Tell us about them in a comment on this post or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

One of the biggest genealogy mistakes I have ever made, and which lasted an extraordinarily long time, was trusting an index entry without looking for the original record from the beginning.

In the LDS International Genealogical Index (IGI), I found an entry for what appeared to be the marriage of my great-great-grandparents Joel Armstrong and Sarah Deacon Lippincott.  It stated that Sarah's parents were Jesse and Elizabeth Lippincott.

Because I knew that information in the IGI generally came from actual microfilmed records, as opposed to unsourced family trees, I trusted this and added the information to my tree, then researched the people listed as Sarah's parents.  I took the tree back two or three more generations, which was the result of some effort, because you pretty much can't go around New Jersey, and particularly Burlington County, without tripping over lots and lots of Lippincotts.  They're everywhere.

Then FamilySearch added images of church records from New Jersey to its online record collection.

And I discovered that there were actually two different Sarah Lippincotts who married close in time to each other in Burlington County.  Mine did marry Joel Armstrong, but her parents were not Jesse and Elizabeth Lippincott.  They were Abel A. Lippincott and Rachel R. Stackhouse.  Jesse and Elizabeth were the parents of the OTHER Sarah Lippincott.

Somehow the two different marriage entries had been conflated in the IGI.

Oops!

So I excised a huge amount of my research and started over.  And yes, I absolutely felt like a fool.

On the other hand, at least I was willing to admit I was wrong and start over.

My cousin's husband, who had made the same mistake I had, refused to believe it was a mistake and stuck to his guns, even when I sent him the information about the two different Sarahs' marriages.  (And it's even correct in the IGI now.  Well, somewhat correct.  Now it says that Sarah's parents were Abel A. Armstrong and Rachel R.  At least the given names are right.)

As of the last I heard, he still had Sarah's parents as Jesse and Elizabeth.

You can lead a horse to water . . . .

Calendar Coincidence

A couple of days ago, on November 9, I picked up a photo of my great-great-grandparents' tombstone which was sitting on my desk.  They are buried in Mount Hebron Cemetery in Queens.  And I saw that my great-great-grandmother had died on that exact date, November 9, in 1934.

Maybe she was calling to me?

November 9, 1934 on the Hebrew calendar was 2 Kislev 5695.  So my great-great-grandmother's yahrzeit (date of commemoration of her death) is 2 Kislev.

On the 2023 secular calendar, 2 Kislev will fall on November 15.

So even though I blew it by not posting this on November 9, I'm ahead of schedule for the yahrzeit.

And thank you to Steve Morse for the handy calendar conversion tool.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Which Ancestor Lived the Shortest Life?

I love it when I remember that I've done some research already and can just look it up to get the answer to a question, as in this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver.

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along; cue the Mission:  Impossible! music!):

1.  Which of your known ancestors lived the shortest life?  Consider only the last eight generations and those ancestors with known birth and death dates.  Do you know the cause of death?  Was there an obituary?  How many children did s/he have?  How did you figure this out?

2.  Write your own blog post, leave a comment on this post, or write something on Facebook.

My ancestor with known birth and death dates with the shortest life is my great-great-grandfather Frederick Cleworth Dunstan, who is my paternal grandmother's maternal grandfather.  He married Martha Winn October 18, 1858 in Manchester, Lancashire, England.  He was born January 18, 1840 in Deansgate, Manchester, Lancashire, England and died September 21, 1873 in Hulme, Lancashire, England. His lifespan was 33 years, 8 months, and 3 days.

His cause of death was chronic bronchitis for 11 months.  I don't know of an obituary, and since the family was very poor, I consider it unlikely there was one (doesn't mean I'll stop looking, of course).

Frederick and Martha Dunstan had six children that I know of, of whom four survived to adulthood.  The youngest was my great-grandmother Jane Dunstan (1871–1954).

I figured out the answer to Randy's question by recalling that for two previous Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenges he had asked readers to determine their female and male ancestors' ages at death.  All I had to do was find the two posts (from 2016) and look at the results I had computed then.

I had one female ancestor who died at a similar age as that of Frederick Dunstan, but I don't have a documented birth date for my great-great-grandmother Esther Leah (Schneiderman) Gorodetsky, who is my maternal grandmother's paternal grandmother.  I have her date of death from metrical records of Kishinev, Bessarabia, Russian Empire (December 10, 1908, adjusted from the Julian calendar still in use at that time in the Russian Empire), but I don't know when or where she was born.  My estimate is that she died at about 34 years old.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Then and Now, Oral Interviews

I think I've gotten a little rusty with writing, it's been so long.  But I need to start again, and today is as good of a day as any.  Thank goodness for Randy Seaver and his Saturday Night Genealogy Fun writing prompts.

Here is your assignment, should you decide to accept it (you ARE reading this, so I assume that you really want to play along; cue the Mission:  Impossible music!):

1.  Then and Now:  Did you ever conduct oral interviews of family members or friends and neighbors about your ancestors over the years?  Who did you interview, how did you record the interviews, and what did you learn from them?  Please share your experiences.

2.  Write your own blog post, leave a comment on this post, or write something on Facebook.

I first got hooked on family history after a school assignment at age 13 to fill in my family tree four generations back.  I still have the original purple mimeographed piece of paper, even though it no longer has that special mimeograph ink smell.

To fill in more information than what I knew already, I conducted oral interviews of all my relatives who lived nearby:  my mother, father, paternal grandfather, paternal aunt, and cousins (my aunt's children).  I recorded the information from the interviews by hand in a spiral notebook, and I still have my original notes.

I learned a lot more about my father's family through this process than about my mother's, because I had grown up hearing information about my mother's side of the family.  My father was not as close to his family, however, so much of the information was new to me:

my great-grandmother's name, Nanny Ireland

my great-great-grandmother's name, Kate Moore

my aunt's first husband's name, Zeke Lore

When I began working more diligently on researching my family, however, I learned that a lot of what I had been told was accurate but was not pointing me in the right direction.

Ireland was my great-grandmother's second husband's name.  No one knew or remembered his given name, with the story being that Nanny (given names Laura May) had been told that she really needed a man to look after her, so she married Mr. Ireland, then figured out he wasn't worth the trouble and got rid of him.  It took thirty years to track down that he was John Ireland.

Moore was my great-great-grandmother's second husband's name but was told to me as her maiden name.  That also took almost thirty years to straighten out, after my grandaunt told me that was her second marriage.

And my aunt's first husband's actual given names were Clarence Newcomb.  To this day, no one has been able to tell me where Zeke came from.  And I still haven't found documentation proving that they were really married, either.

Oral interviews are great, because you get to know your family members better and learn more about the family.  Just make sure you check everything they tell you to make sure it's right.

Mother's Day 2022

For Mother's Day this year, here is my maternal line in photographs.  I have five generations.

My mother Myra with her three children:
me, my sister Stacy, and my brother Mark

My mother Myra, her mother Lily (my grandmother),
and *her* mother Sarah (my great-grandmother)

My great-great-grandmother Rose Dorothy on the left

And somewhere I have a photo of my great-great-grandmother with my great-grandmother.  I really need to find that.

Top 10 Posts of 2020

The dawn of the new year is always the time to look back at the old year and see what you've done.  For bloggers, that usually translates into seeing which of your posts piqued people's interest the most.

Last year was another full of health problems for me, so I'm still posting only about once every three days, and most of those are Wordless Wednesday and Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.  Maybe now that I've had my long-planned surgery I'll be able to get back up to speed.

Unlike 2019, when all of the top posts were from the first quarter of the year, in 2020 they were spread out through the first half of the year.  So I'm still benefiting from the long tail, but not in as concentrated a fashion.  Well, let's start counting them off.

In the #10 spot for 2020 is a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun exercise which was the second half of a two-part pandemic meme from Pauleen.

The #9 position is held by another Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post, this one about where I expect to find my ancestors in the 1950 census when it is released in 2022.  I have an address for only one of them, but I have a good idea where everyone should be.

#8 is a Genealogy Blog Party post (just to be different!).  The theme was "Create!", so I wrote about all the photo books I have created as gifts for family members.

A Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge came in at #7, this one about favorite sites for genealogy research.  Not unexpectedly, there's a lot of similarity between people's lists.

The #6 entry on the list is the Saturday Night Genealogy Fun exercise for the first half of the two-part pandemic meme, courtesy of Pauleen.  Oh, for those early days when we were still getting used to the pandemic!

For #5 we find (yet another) Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post, about a time machine to witness an event from my family history.  I wrote about wanting to witness the adoption of the son my aunt gave up in 1945, so I could find out who adopted him and what his name became.

#4 is a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge (are we seeing a theme here?), the "Where I'm From" poem meme that was popular for quite a while.

Believe it or not, a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun post is at the #3 position on the list.  This one was about my genealogy goals for 2020 (I'm not saying yet how I did on them).

I am happy to report that the #2 position on the Top 10 list has nothing to do with Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (nothing personal, Randy!).  It's the post where I described the tortuous path I took to finally find my great-great-grandmother and her three youngest children arriving in the United States after emigrating from the Russian Empire.

And of course the #1 post on my blog for 2020 was . . . something for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (that makes eight of the ten, for those of us who are counting)!  This one was when Randy shared a meme from Jill Ball to focus on what we had accomplished with our family history during 2019.

This was another year when my posts did not generate many comments.  The post with the most comments was #6 on the list, the first half of Pauleen's pandemic meme, which I did as a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun exercise.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Maternal Grandfather's Matrilneal Line

When I saw the subject for this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, I knew I was not going to get as far as Randy Seaver did.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music here), is:

(1) What was your mother's father's full name?

(2) What is your mother's father's matrilineal line?  That is, his mother's mother's mother's . . . back to the most distant female ancestor in that line.  Provide her Ahnentafel number (relative to you) and her birth and death years and places.

(3) Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.  Please put a link to your post in the comments here.

See, my mother's side of the family is the Jewish one, and once you get past the most recent generations I don't always have a lot of information.  But I discovered that for this line it wasn't as bad as I expected.  I actually have a few generations AND surnames.

1.  My mother's father's full name was either #6 Abraham Meckler or Abe Meckler (1912–1989); I've been told both.  There is an Abraham Machler listed in Ancestry's New York, New York Birth Index, who appears to have a birth date of July 23, 1912.  If I could get a copy of that birth certificate from New York City (ha!), I might be able to verify that's him, but I'm pretty sure it is.  I called him Zadie ("grandfather" in Yiddish).

2.  Zadie's mother was #13 Mushe Zelda Nowicki, called Minnie in the United States (about 1880–1936), who married Moshe Meckler, Morris or Max here (about 1882–1953).  Mushe was born in the Russian Empire, probably in Porozowo, Grodno gubernia; married in the Russian Empire, probably in Porozowo or in Kamenets Litovsk, Grodno gubernia; and died in Brooklyn, Kings County, New York at approximately age 56.

• Mushe's mother was #27 Dube Yelsky, Dora in the United States (about 1858–1936), who married Gershon Itzhak Nowicki (about 1858–1948).  Dube was born in the Russian Empire, probably in Porozowo; married in the Russian Empire, also probably in Porozowo; and died in Brooklyn, Kings County, New York at approximately age 78.

• Dube's mother was #55 Frieda Bloom, which was probably not really Bloom, but it's the only name I have (about 1838–about 1898), who married Ruven Yelsky (about 1838–about 1898).  Frieda was born, married, and died in the Russian Empire, likely in Porozowo and almost definitely in Grodno gubernia.  Based on the scant information I have, she lived to be about 60.

And that's it.  I have no idea who Frieda'a parents were, and I'll probably never know, since Grodno gubernia is the black hole for Jewish records.

Unlike Randy's line, all these women probably started in the same place, Porozowo.  The two who immigrated to the United States both died in Brooklyn, which is likely the only place they ever went after their arrival at Ellis Island.

I Love It When Cousins Call Me!

Ruchel Dwojre (Jaffe) Brainin,
one of the ancestors my
cousin asked me abour.
She is our great-great-grandmother.

I had a wonderful surprise on Wednesday.  Out of the blue, I got a phone call from one of my younger cousins!

He told me that his mother had given him all of the genealogy materials I had shared with her.  I haven't heard yet what prompted this, so I don't know at whose instigation this happened.  But he apparently started reading thorugh it avidly and then had lots of questions.  So his mother gave him my phone number.

We spent an hour and a quarter on the phone!  Mostly he seemed to want to know what I knew about any rabbis on the Brainin branch of my family (the line we have in common) and which members of the family were Orthodox Jews, but he also asked about anecdotes and stories, things that went beyond just the bare facts that are in the family tree information he already had.  I was able to remember lots of things (really good, since I didn't have any papers in front of me and I was totally unprepared), which seemed to satisfy at least some of his curiosity.  But some of what he asked about I still don't have answers for.  Now that someone else is asking, however, I feel a little reinvigorated about researching that line.  Maybe that was just the motivation I need to make some new discoveries!

I met this cousin and his family in person in 2013, when the IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy was held in Boston.  I actually stayed at their house for the week.  One of the amusing things about the phone call today is that my cousin didn't seem to remember having met me, even though that was only six years ago and at the time we made a big deal about the fact that we share the same birthday.  I don't feel so bad about some of my forgetfulness if someone 34 years younger than I am is forgetting things also!

Identifying Esther Leah (Schneiderman) Gorodetsky

Avigdor, Etta, and Esther Leah Gorodetsky, circa 1890, Kamenets Podolsky, Russian Empire

The path to the discovery had begun two years previously, in 2002.  I had visited my grandmother in south Florida, and we had eaten lunch with cousins on her father's side of the family.  During conversation, Bubbie (Yiddish for "grandmother") had made comments to various of the cousins there:  "I have a photograph of your parents on their wedding day."  "I have a photo of your brother when he was a baby."  "I have a photo of your mother."  And she promised to give them the photos.

When Bubbie and I returned to her apartment, she instructed me to pull out four big boxes of photographs.  We went through them, not focusing much on the photos in general but searching only for those to be given to the aforementioned cousins.  I was not permitted to label any of the other photos.  We ended up with a small pile of about seven photographs, which she would make sure got to the appropriate cousins.

Fast forward two years to 2004.  My grandmother's memory had started to slip a little.  In conversation, she began to repeat statements and questions four or five times.  I was already planning on a trip to the Orlando area for Thanksgiving to visit a cousin on my father's side.  I remembered those four boxes of photographs, all unlabeled and unidentified beyond my grandmother's memory, and worried about identifying them before it was too late.  So I made a spur-of-the-moment decision.  I called Bubbie and asked if she would like me to visit for a few days.  I added a round-trip ticket from Orlando to Ft. Lauderdale to the front end of my existing trip.

When I arrived at Bubbie's apartment, I asked if we could look through the boxes of photographs again, and this time could I label them, please?  I was surprised and elated when she said yes.  I had prepared by bringing a large supply of sticky notes.  I brought out the boxes again, and every time Bubbie identified a photo — "This is my grandparents, Mendel Herz and Ruchel Dvojre."  "This is my parents' engagement photo."  "This is Uncle Willie in his Army uniform." — I wrote a short note on a sticky and put it on the back of the photo.

Bubbie looked at one photo and announced, "I have no idea who these people are," then tossed it aside.  I picked it up to check it out.  The photo was of three people:  a man seated on a chair on the left, a young child on a column in the middle, and a woman standing on the right.  The printing on the card was in Cyrillic and gave the photographer's name and location, Kamenets Podolsky, Russia.  I knew that's where Bubbie's father and grandfather were supposed to have been from, so I thought the people might be relatives.  I asked if I could take the photo with me, and Bubbie said, "Sure."

After working through all four boxes, almost everything was put away again and I had far fewer sticky notes remaining.  The photos for the cousins which had been pulled out two years ago were still sitting around, never having been delivered, so I was allowed to take them (and accept responsibility for mailing them), in addition to the unidentified photo of three people in Kamenets Podolsky.

When my visit with Bubbie was over, I flew to Orlando to spend Thanksgiving with my cousin and his family.  While I was there, I talked about the photographs my grandmother and I had pored over and the few I had been permitted to take away with me.  My cousin's wife was interested in seeing the photos, so I brought them out.  We looked at the ones destined to be sent to cousins and then came to the one from Kamenets Podolsky.  Fern declared, "We've seen her before!"  My response:  "We have?"  We went slowly through the photographs and came to the one Fern was talking about.

The photo was one that my grandmother had identified as being of Sarah (Gordon) Millstein, a younger sister of my great-grandfather Joe Gordon.  She was the spitting image of the woman in the photo.  They looked so much alike, one might easily think they were of the same person, or that the two women were twins.  The giveaways were the clothing and the photographer locations.  The woman in the Russian photograph is wearing a lovely Victorian dress, whereas the photo of Sarah shows her in a stylish 1920's dress, a moment captured by a photographer in New York City.

So if the Russian photograph wasn't of Sarah, who could it be?  Given the clues of time and place, I realized it was probably my great-great-grandmother Esther Leah (Schneiderman) Gorodetsky, Sarah's mother, and also mother of my great-grandfather.  She died in Kishinev (now in Moldova) in late 1908, a month after the birth of her eighth surviving child.  Early the next year my great-grandfather began the chain migration of the family to the United States.

I was very excited but not quite willing to commit.  When I returned home I compared the man in the photo to a known photo of my great-great-grandfather Victor Gordon (formerly Gorodetsky).  It looked like the same person!  Furthermore, I could date the photo, to approximately 1890.  The child in the photograph appears to be a little girl.  The oldest child in the family, my great-grandfather's older sister, was Etta, who was born about 1890.  All the pieces were fitting!

Because Esther Leah died in Russia, any photos of her had to have been taken there.  So far this is the only one that has surfaced.  I thought it was such an important discovery that I had the photo digitally cleaned up and then mailed prints to all the cousins on that side of the family, so everyone would know what Esther Leah looked like.  I did not want her to be forgotten again, tossed aside with a comment of "I have no idea who these people are."

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Two Degrees of Separation

This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun is one of those where I tend to come up on the short end because of limited information about my family on one side and short lifespans on the other.

1)  Using your ancestral lines, how far back in time can you go with two degrees of separation?  That means "you knew an ancestor, who knew another ancestor."  When was that second ancestor born?

2)  Tell us about it in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, in a status line on Facebook or a stream post on Google+.

1.  Similar to one of Randy's connections, I have been told that I met my maternal great-grandmother, Sarah Libby (Brainin) Gordon, but I don't remember it.  My mother told me she flew with me from California to Florida shortly after I was born in 1962, when I was just a babe in arms, so that her grandmother could see me; my father remembers that it happened.  Unfortunately, my mother's father, who took photographs of everything else in the family, somehow didn't commemorate the four generations of women.  My great-grandmother was born about 1885 in the Russian Empire.  She was the daughter of Mendel Herz Brainin and Ruchel Dwojre Jaffe.  Based on the naming patterns in her family, it's likely that she knew at least one and probably most of her grandparents — Solomon and Yetta Brainin, and Joseph and Anna Jaffe — who would have been born at the latest about 1840 in the Russian Empire and possibly as early as the 1820's.

2.  I met my paternal grandmother, Anna (Gauntt) Stradling, more than once, while she was living in Florida (I think in Jacksonville?).  She was born in 1893, as I recently discovered, the daughter of Thomas Kirkland Gauntt and Jane Dunstan.  Because her family members lived close together in Burlington County, New Jersey, she almost definitely knew her paternal grandmother, Amelia (Gibson) Gauntt, who was born about 1831 and died in 1908.

3  I knew my paternal grandfather, Bertram Lynn Sellers, Sr., born in 1903, the son of Laura May Armstrong and Cornelius Elmer Sellers (if my grandfather was actually a Sellers, but that's still research in process).  He may have known his maternal grandfather, Joel Armstrong, who was born about 1849 and seems to have died about 1921 or so in Burlington County.  Grampa also probably knew his paternal grandmother, Catharine Fox (Owen) Sellers Moore, who was also born in 1849 and died in 1923.

So with two degrees of separation, I can reliably get back to a great-great-grandmother born about 1831.  That's 50 years shy of Randy.  Even accounting for the fact that Randy is 20 years older than I am, I feel kind of deficient.

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday