Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: A Family Heirloom

This week for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver is following up on another question on the Family History Hound's list.

Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is:

(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 question, "What heirloom do you have that has been handed down through the generations?" 

(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.

I'm a little short on heirlooms in my family.  On my father's side, my grandfather's father died young and the family was poor.  (In fact, my great-grandfather's mother paid for the funeral.)  If there were any heirlooms or family items, I haven't heard about them.  My grandmother's family were farmers in southern New Jersey, again without a lot of money.  Perhaps there was a family bible on one side, but if so it went to a different line in the family.

My mother's grandparents on both sides came to the United States as poor immigrants with not much more than the clothes on their backs.  I don't know of any significant items they brought with them from Europe.  That said, the closest thing I can describe as an "heirloom" is the set of silver-plated flatware that my great-grandmother Sarah Libby (Brainin) Gordon owned.

Definitely obtained here in the United States, it's a service for twelve in one of those cases that has cut-outs where you stack the forks, spoons, and some serving implements and bands on the inside of the lid where you slide the knives.  My mother kept it, apparently for several years, and gave it to me before she passed away.  She's the one who told me it belonged to my great-grandmother.  I believe my grandmother held the set for a while before giving it to my mother,

The utensils don't have a monogram or family initial and the set isn't anything really fancy, but I guess I'm now the fourth generation to have it.  I used the set every year when I held my annual Passover seder (dinner), for about thirteen years or so, but I haven't been able to do that for the past four or five years.  I'm hoping to be able to start again next year.

I don't have any description of the history of the flatware in the box to explain that this is a family item.  I should print a copy of this blog post and include it to document the history,

A Vintage Jewish Indian Cookbook

I just learned about a blog called "The Shiksa in the Kitchen", written by a recent (2010) convert to Judaism who has been exploring the world of Jewish cooking, including kashrut (the rules for keeping kosher).  She posted about a copy of an Indian Jewish cookbook published in Calcutta about 1922.  I found a few references to the cookbook online, but it doesn't seem to be available anywhere, and I'm sure it was printed in only small quantities to begin with.  She mentioned it has "several kosher Jewish Indian recipes", but I'm not sure if all of the recipes are kosher.

I love Jewish cooking and Indian cooking and now just have to find a copy of this book!  One year for Passover I even cooked an Indian-themed seder, including mulligatawny-spiced matzoh ball soup and an egg curry.

Recipes and food traditions can sometimes impart information about family history.  This cookbook, for example, probably has recipes that follow Sephardic traditions, because most of the Jewish communities in India had Sephardic roots.  But first I need to find a copy of the cookbook to read the recipes ....