Artisanal Genealogy
Like many users of Ancestry, Family Search and Jewish Gen, I spend an inordinate amount of time “doing” family history and genealogy. There is nothing special about my family’s story: generations who lived as Jews in the Pale, some more religious than others, some a bit wealthier, some who die young and some who live to a ripe old age. Then, between 1880 and 1910, my gang make their way to the U.S. Within a generation they all Americanize. Some remain closer to their Jewish roots than others, most all go to college, find work, have kids and die.
When I was about 7 my father took me on the train to North Carolina to meet my great-grandmother, who had arrived here in 1881and was pushing 100. She lay in a hospital-like bed, a tiny, toothless woman in a hospital gown, with thin strands of matted white hair. She spoke Yiddish to my dad and apparently asked if I was her sister. It was a memorable visit, though probably not what my father had hoped for.
But somehow it got me thinking about time. Bubbie Pearl, I realized, had been born when Abraham Lincoln was still alive. Shortly thereafter, Aunt Ruth gave me a book called George Washington’s World that described events taking place on the world scene. I was hooked.
Soon, however, I realized that people gathering information about the past had vastly varied reasons for doing so. For instance, the greatest collectors of family archives, the Mormons, produced their extensive and important work so that they can baptize relatives by proxy and reunite families in heaven.
My cousin Dick, who married my blood relative Betty, was the first Jew I knew who actively pursued genealogical research. After he retired as a psychology professor, he used his interest in untangling (theoretical) messes to try to trace his own biological family and ours. He did all his genealogy work before online databases were readily available, and most of my relatives were clearly bugged by his inquiries. Why did he care about that stuff? They weren’t even his relatives. “Look forward, not backward,” was what one told him.
I have come to realize that Dick was typical of a many users of Ancestry. I wish that he had lived to enjoy online searching. Family trees with literally thousands of entries are built by people who enjoy the hunt and like record-keeping. Of course, there are also the family historians looking for genetic gold: “My relatives came over on the Mayflower” or “I am a direct descendant of the Baal Shem Tov.”
The information provided by documentary evidence is scarce (birth, marriage and death dates, arrival and departure information), but for those like me with a bent toward social history, it is interesting to imagine what relatives did under specific circumstances, e.g., when a fire down burned the town they were living in. Does that explain their move? And what is a “box tax” that’s mentioned in records from Eastern Europe? What does the amount owed tell us about social circumstances?
Truth be told, my own interest was actually sparked by that early encounter with my father’s grandmother, Leah Golda Himmelblau Pearl. I named my daughter after her, in celebration of her long life and my father’s visit with me to Greensboro — during which, as I said, Bubbie Pearl had taken me for her sister. The records, however, showed nothing about her having a sister.
I looked and looked, and during the long days of Covid, I found it: On an old photo, Aunt Ruth, in her inimitable handwriting, had written “Bubbie Pearl’s sister, Mrs. Webber and her husband and daughter, Sarah Lopinsky.” Lopinsky was a name I could definitely dig my research chops into! I felt like an old gumshoe detective, proud and satisfied when I located Sarah’s mother, Rose, whose married name was Webbelosky and whose “maiden name” was Himmelblau — the same name as my great grandmother. What made the satisfaction still greater was that, against all odds, I had located a woman — sometimes unimaginably difficult task, given name changes from English to Yiddish and from birth name to married name.
Clearly, my reasons for doing genealogy work are complex — a stray childhood memory, a “natural” interest in social history, a commitment to feminism, i.e., documenting at least the names of the ladies, and finally, a desire to untangle and sort.
There’s more. One day, as a young mother, I read what I had “cleverly” called the “boring Biblical begats,” and I found myself suddenly moved by the record itself. People were identified not simply by their deeds also by their parents and their parents and their parents. So now I look for my own begats.
As I write this, I am reminded of a poem by Mark Strand from his book, Reasons for Moving published in 1968. “We all have reasons for moving” he writes. “I move to keep things whole.”
I spend time on family history, I suspect, to keep myself and perhaps my family, whole.
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Wendy Saul, an ALTE co-editor, has a new substack, Keep Track.
Please check out ALTE #14 on the theme, “Non-Human Beings.”