Celebrating Mary Lou

This year to celebrate the birthday of my half-sister's mother (my father's first wife; I'm still convinced that some language must have a one-word term for this), we have a two-person guest post!  My sister and my nephew each wrote something about Mary Lou.

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On November 13, 1976, my mother became a first-time grandmother to my son, Joel, and my 4-year-old sister, Shanyn, became an aunt.  Shortly after Joel’s birth, my parents moved to Virginia and then to Florida.

In the summer of 1983 Shanyn started spending part of the summer with us in Pennsylvania.  A few years later, Joel started making the return trip with Shanyn and visited for a few weeks to a month in Florida.

It was great fun for Joel, but I was always worrying that they were getting into mischief at Grandma’s instigation!

Of course, as Joel got older the visits were not as frequent, but my mother would tell anyone who would listen how proud she was of Joel’s military service and that he had given her the new title of great-grandmother, with the births of his sons Zachary and Connor.

In observation of Mary Lou’s birthday on October 16, I asked Joel if he could write a Grandma memory.

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I remember getting up at the wee hours of the morning to go fishing.  My grandmother, an insomniac, was already awake and vacuuming when the alarm went off.  There were several steps in the fishing process, first stopping so she could fill up her massive cup of Diet Rite cola at the convenience store.

Sand flea (Talitrus saltator) ,
by Arnold Paul / edit by Waugsberg
 - Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 2.5

Instead of buying bait, we would catch it.  If we were fishing off of a pier then she had a cast net to grab some wayward mullet.  Mission complete, I thought, we had caught some fish!  If we were surf casting then she had a makeshift sand flea trap made from the remnants of an appropriated street sign and some chicken wire.  The trap went into the sand as the surf retreated to catch the little crustaceans.

Not long after the sun came up we would be headed back to the house.  There were always porpoises breaching in the intercoastal along the causeway.  Grandma James would look at the red and white smoke stacks of the power plants as her daily vision check.

I wasn’t much for the fishy part, but I enjoyed the time with my grandmother, who never met a stranger.  Oh, the stories!

— Joel Kent III

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Mary Lou (Bowen) Sellers James would have been 86 today.

Mary Lou and Shetland Ponies

To celebrate the birthday of my half-sister's mother (my father's first wife), here is my half-sister Laurie with a guest post!

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And here I am again, faced with my mother’s birthday, and yet another request from my Seester to write something for her ancestry blog.  Except THIS time . . . .

On this October 16, Mary Lou Bowen-Sellers-James would have been celebrating her 85th birthday.  Having been a single mother for a good part of her working years, she managed to find jobs or situations where she could work while I was at school or bring me along on her workday.

In 1967 we lived in El Monte, California in a house owned by the family she worked for.  In exchange for rent, we got to care for their horses and train Shetland ponies for the owner’s business.  At any given time, there were three to four horses and 30 to 35 ponies, along with a number of dogs and cats.  This in itself was her dream job, but there was a secondary job that seemed to be a part of every child’s life in the Los Angeles area in the '60's.

Along with a host of others, my mom worked as a roving photographer, taking photos of kids on Shetland ponies.  The crew would show up at the owner's property, prepare the ponies, load them up on the trailer, and then drive to a targeted neighborhood.  From there, each photographer would start walking, pony in tow, carrying a tripod, camera, chaps, vest, cowboy hat, whatever other equipment was necessary, along with her lunch, water and snacks for the pony, and a shovel, for a long day of photographing cowboy poses.

I was thrilled to be able to work alongside my mother as she got the children ready for the shoot and hear her talk about the horses to the kids and parents.

Of course, those were the days of developing film, so once the photos were ready, she’d be back to deliver the sleeves of photos to the parents, but while I was in school.

We took SO MANY photos of kids on Shetland ponies!  I grew up thinking every kid in the world had a picture taken on a Shetland pony!  Later in life I remember being shocked at the number of people with no knowledge of photographers and ponies just showing up in neighborhoods, looking for kids to dress up like cowboys!

It was a cool job and we were happy.  Even at the age of 10, I felt like we had found our place to be.  She loved what she was doing and I thought we were settling in.

Unfortunately, Mom suffered a back injury when she was thrown from one of the horses and we had to give up the house and the job.

That was the bad news.

Our salvation came in what most people would find an unconventional source:  My stepmother invited us to live with her, my father, and their three young children until my mother got back on her feet.

I thought I had hit the family jackpot!  I could actually LIVE with my siblings and, I’m pretty sure, we all had Shetland pony photos!

I’m not sure why, but we trained the ponies to stand in this manner as in the photo above, stretched out for the photo.  This guy’s ears were back, which my mother would never shoot.  She’d click and talk until the pony was looking at the camera, alert and ears forward.  She told me that making the pony look like it was enjoying its situation as much as the kid is what sold photos!

Photo posted by Maia C. and used under a creative commons license.

The Frustrating Fate of the Record Books of the Jews from Egypt

This article originally appeared in the October 2016 edition of Kosher Koala, the journal of the Australian Jewish Genealogical Society.  It is reprinted with permission from the author to help spread word about the situation with these records.

Dani Haski, guest author

Community registers in Alexandria.
Photo credit:  Association
Internationale Nebi Daniel

In July 2016, the newspaper Egypt Independent reported the death of Lucy Saul.  Saul’s passing reduced the official Jewish population of Cairo to just six old and increasingly frail women.  In an interview with the BBC a couple of years ago, Magda Haroun, the nominal head of the Cairo Jewish community, voiced her anguish at what would happen to the cultural legacy of this once thriving community.  Unfortunately, Mrs. Haroun proved to be just as resistant as her predecessor, the late, formidable Carmen Weinstein, when it came to facilitating access to the large library of community registers housed in the various synagogues to those who have been fighting for decades to preserve this rich heritage, so her lamentations were somewhat disingenuous.

Then, in early April 2016, Mrs. Haroun gave the libraries of the Adly, Ben Ezra, and Abbasseya synagogues, in their entirety, to the National Archives of Egypt.  She did this without consulting any of the organizations which had been fighting to digitize and preserve these records.  Upon receiving these assets in Cairo, officials from the National Archives descended on the community in Alexandria, which had shown no such desire to surrender its heritage.  M. Ben Gaon, the community leader, was pressured to hand over its collections to the archives as well.  These included personal religious and civil identity registers dating back to 1830.  Placing these records with the Egyptian Archives has not so far improved access.  Those fighting to save them are concerned that the records will simply disappear into this vast collection, much like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of the Hollywood movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, never to be seen again.

Egypt and the Jewish people have a history going back to before Moses.  In more recent times, Egypt was home to a thriving and successful Jewish community, numbering more than 80,000 through the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries.  In synagogues across the country, the day-to-day lives of the community—births, bris and bar mitzvahs, marriages, divorces, and deaths—were dutifully recorded by hand in hundreds of leather-bound registers.  No one foresaw the tumultuous turn the 20th century would take.  Sadly, after World War II and with the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, the fall of the monarchy, and the Suez crisis in the 1950’s, the community was forced into what many today call the Second Exodus.

For individuals with roots in Egypt, it has been an increasingly frustrating and difficult exercise to access those vital genealogical records, records which are more than historical curiosities and can actually be crucial in matters of religious identity—often being the only way some people can verify their Jewish status for religious purposes.

Yves Fedida (left) of Nebi Daniel with
M. Farouk Hosni, former Egyptian
Minister for Culture, in 2010.
Photo credit:  Association
Internationale Nebi Daniel

The Association Internationale Nebi Daniel, based in France, has been working tirelessly for years for the opportunity to access, digitize, and preserve these record books.  It was close to success in 2010, having secured a letter from the then Culture Minister, M. Farouk Hosni, acknowledging the legitimacy of its claim.

And then came Tahrir Square.  The Arab Spring in Egypt threw the whole project back to square one. Hopes were once again raised with the downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood administration, but after fruitless attempts to revive negotiations through official channels, Yves Fedida, from Nebi Daniel and the Heritage of Jews in Egypt Facebook page, initiated a Change.org petition addressed directly to President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and the current Minister of Culture, M. Helmy Namnam, exhorting them to urgently authorize:

• scanning of all existing Jewish archives, particularly religious and civil identity records, and making the scans freely available;
• donation to various Jewish community synagogues across the world of some of the 150 Torah scrolls which fall outside the 100 years Egyptian Antiquities rule;
• restoration of the existing synagogues and cemeteries—in particular, the Bassatine cemetery in Cairo, one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in the world—giving easy access both virtually and on the spot;
• development of a comprehensive inventory of the remaining communal assets and of a plan for their preservation; and
• creation, within one of the existing synagogues, of a museum of Egyptian Jewish heritage, which would encourage tourism.

A copy of the petition, which has, to date, gathered more than 1,500 signatures, was also sent to the Egyptian Ambassadors in France, Great Britain, Italy, Switzerland, Israel, Canada, the U.S.A., Brazil, and Australia.  Not a single diplomat has responded.  (I contacted the Egyptian Consul-General to Australia in Sydney for comment, but, at the time of publication, none has been forthcoming.)

The main concern of Egyptian authorities appears to be a perceived threat of reparations being demanded by descendants of Jews who were expelled and whose businesses and properties were confiscated.  The reality is that none of the registers in question has any connection to property ownership and cannot be used for this purpose.  Separate cases for reparations have already been prosecuted in the Egyptian courts and settled by individuals.  There is, in fact, no good reason to withhold permission for access to, and preservation of, these records, particularly when Nebi Daniel has committed to footing the bill for the whole exercise, ensuring positive PR and media coverage for the Egyptian government, and leaving the physical registers in Egypt.

The Egyptian government is not blind to the value of its Jewish cultural heritage.  In 2010, the government invested almost 8.5 million Egyptian pounds (US $950,000) in restoring the Maimonides Synagogue in Cairo and opening it to the public as a museum.

As recently as early September this year, a report in Al Monitor quoted the current head of the Islamic and Coptic Monuments Department at the Ministry of Antiquities (who is also responsible for Jewish antiquities), M. Saeed Helmy, as saying, “I know very well that the Egyptian monuments—including the Jewish antiquities—capture the attention of people all around the world. Therefore, I’d like to make it clear that Egypt pays considerable attention to its monuments, whether they are Islamic, Coptic or Christian .
. . . However, we need the support of the countries that are interested in cultural heritage in order to protect these great antiquities.”

Collection of the Jewish community registers might have been an unwritten part of this response, as on June 11, the Ministry announced the formation of a special committee, with Helmy as its chair, to take stock of Jewish antiquities and register them in the ministry’s records—an activity undertaken several times already by previous Antiquities ministers.  But he admitted that, with the drastic fall in tourism revenue, the country had scarce funds to achieve its goals.

Community registers in Alexandria.
Photo credit:  Association
Internationale Nebi Daniel

But should the community registers be classified as antiquities or as artifacts?  Their importance lies more in the information they contain than in the physical books themselves.  Unfortunately, the Ministry has consistently ignored repeated offers of financial assistance from Association Internationale Nebi Daniel specifically to preserve these books and to help raise money for other preservation activities.  It appears that this very public show of attention to part of Egypt’s recent history might simply, once again, be mere lip service, as it coincided with Helmy’s meeting with the U.S. cultural attaché in August 2016.

So what is to be done?

Egypt claims it wants to preserve these artifacts and records but cannot afford to.  Members of the diaspora have repeatedly offered to help raise money and to pay for the preservation, digitizing, and indexing of important community registers, on the proviso that these records are available to the international community.

Are the Egyptian authorities deaf?  Have the messages been lost in translation?

Or is the Egyptian government simply telling the international community what it wants to hear while continuing to do absolutely nothing?

Disclaimer:  My father was a refugee from Egypt. I have a personal stake in wanting to access his records, along with those of his parents and grandparents, so that I can understand more of my family’s history.

©2016 Dani Haski. All rights reserved.

Wordless Wednesday

Trusting Obituaries

Today I have a guest blogger:  my friend Carol Townsend.  Her mother recently passed away, and after writing her mother's obituary, she was struck by the nature of obituaries and how they fit into genealogy research.

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Frances Lathrop Gundrum

One of the cornerstones of genealogical research is the newspaper obituary.  There is so much information packed into a small space, and they often contain names of relatives that appear nowhere else in other documentation—aunts, uncles, cousins—who are listed in the "survived by" or "preceded in death by" sections.  Obituaries can be one of the best ways to break through a brick wall in your research and give you a new avenue of research.

One caveat:  You can't always trust them.

Having just written my mother's obituary, I know how easy it is to get facts wrong or include information that we who wrote it understand, but which might seem misleading.  But once an obituary goes into print, many people take it as gospel truth.

Case in point:  My brother married a woman with three very young children but never legally adopted them.  They all call my brother "Dad" (their biological father is referred to by his first name, if at all), and my parents were Grandpa and Grandma.  They are listed, rightfully so, as my mother's grandchildren.  Each of those grandchildren has the name of a significant other included:  Marie (Kurt) Edwards, Katie (Bob Deelstra) Kortlever, and Jared (Katrina Eisma) Kortlever.  Looking at those names, it seems obvious that Kurt and Marie are married, but you don't know if Bob and Katie are married and if Katie just kept her maiden name.  The same can be said for Jared and Katrina.  More research is required.

(For the curious:  Kurt and Marie are married and have each brought children into the marriage; Bob and Katie are engaged, have one child together, and share custody of an older daughter with Bob's ex-wife; and Jared and Katrina are living together with no current plans to make anything official.)

Another example:  I have a cousin who is rather a vagabond and a drifter.  All we could really say in the obituary was that he was somewhere in Hawaii.  We're not sure which island he's on, or if he's still there.  We're pretty sure it's accurate, but we don't actually know.  That's what it says in the obituary.  It may or may not be true, but it's in print.

One thing to remember when doing research is that most often, at least in this day and age, obituaries are written by funeral directors from information given to them by grieving families.  The families do their best, I'm sure, to give accurate information.  But it is a time of stress, and one does not always think clearly at such times.  I was fortunate that I had a few days to fact-check; I had originally gotten a couple of dates wrong, but I was able to find the information in my home files and correct the obit before it went to print.

Now that I've written an obituary myself, I will look at them with a more careful eye as I do any research.  Obituaries can be wonderful goldmines of new facts, but you can't be sure that everything in them is accurate.  Take the information down, certainly, but verify each fact with at least one other documentary source.  That's good research practice in any case.

Carol is a former teacher and ASL interpreter who is transitioning to becoming a professional writer.  Her mother's memorial page is hosted by the Miller Funeral Home.

Family History at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival

Sometimes as family historians, we are fortunate enough to have documents our family members left behind, and we invariably wonder how we can use them to help tell our family story.

Longtime San Francisco genealogist Judy Baston was able to preview some films from the upcoming San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (July 19-August 6) and told me that among the lineup are a quartet of documentaries that take as their theme family history, secrets, and the significance of what is left behind:  photographs, home movies, a memoir, letters, and even a family business in the old country.

In The Flat, Israeli filmmaker Arnon Goldfinger sifts through his grandmother’s apartment after her death and finds old German newspaper front pages with the story of a Nazi leader’s visit to Palestine in the 1930's.

British filmmaker Daniel Edelstyn’s discovery of his grandmother’s tattered journal takes him to their ancestral town in Ukraine and a vodka distillery that once belonged to her family, in How to Reestablish a Vodka Empire.

For Argentinian filmmaker Gaston Solnicki, hundreds of hours of home movie footage of his grandparents (survivors from Lodz) and other family members become the film Papirosen.

And Israeli documentarian David Fisher’s Six Million and One begins with his discovery of the diary that his father Joseph kept during his time in a labor camp in Austria.

Of this quartet, to Judy, The Flat and Six Million and One are the two stand-out films.  Along with the newspaper articles detailing the trip to Mandate Palestine of Nazi official Leopold Von Mildenstein, accompanied by German Zionist leaders Kurt and Gerda Tuchler, filmmaker Goldfinger found caches of old letters sent between the Von Mildensteins and the Tuchlers and tried to come to grips with how his grandparents and the man who was Adolph Eichmann’s predecessor in the SS could have had what appeared to be a cordial--and even warm--relationship.  The film includes a trip to Austria in which Goldfinger’s mother meets Von Mildenstein’s daughter, both of whom are trying to fit their own personal perceptions of their parents into the broader historical context.  (July 26, 3:50 p.m., Castro Theater, San Francisco; July 29,  4:25 p.m., Roda Theater, Berkeley; August 2, 4:20 p.m., Cinearts Theater, Palo Alto)

In Six Million and One it is also a trip to Austria--scene of the former Gusen work camp detailed in Joseph Fisher’s diary--that provides the film its strongest scenes.   It is not the visit itself that makes the film unique and important, however, but rather our opportunity to eavesdrop on the exchanges between four of Joseph’s children who make the trip:  David, his two brothers, and a sister. They each bring very different perceptions--of their father, of the Shoah, of their relationship to history--to the trip, and it is the exchange--sometimes hesitant, sometimes angry, eventually heartfelt--between the second-generation members of this family that makes this a “don’t miss” film for family historians.  (July 21, 12:00 noon, Castro Theater, San Francisco; July 28, 11:30 a.m., Cinearts Theater, Palo Alto; July 29, 12:00 noon, Roda Theater, Berkeley; August 4, 12:00 noon, Rafael Theater, San Rafael)

The festival will have showings around the Bay Area, in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland, San Rafael, and Palo Alto.  For a complete schedule of showings, visit http://www.sfjff.org/.