Turning Folklore to Fact

“I often get thrown out of archives and museums at closing time,” I remarked. I was at the local Family History Library with a genealogy client as we watched closing time quickly approach, too quickly.

“Most people say that about bars,” he quipped. 

I burst into laughter. Yes, I thirst for information and art! The places we don't want to leave are indeed telling.

We had come to the local Family History Library (FHL), a small room with computers housed in a Church of Latter-day Saints, a satellite library to the mothership in Utah. I had begun my own genealogy research almost twenty years ago in a similar room at one of the local churches, venturing hesitantly into what felt like a foreign environment. Then it was filled with microfilm readers. That part at least had felt familiar.  I had once distributed microfilm reels in my job at the college library research room. Many years had passed between that early job and that first visit to the FHL and not much had changed.There has, however, been a sea change since I began my genealogy quest twenty years ago, most of it as more records become available on-line.

I recalled an early visit when I curiously studied a microfilm reel of Polish vital records, trying to make sense of the language. It took me yet further back to a childhood memory of studying a book before I could read, the letters just curious marks that I desperately wanted to decipher. I’ve been trying to break codes and solve mysteries ever since.

Soon I had taken the next step of going out to the Utah Family History Library with a group of Jewish genealogists. The library is a large multi-story building across a wide avenue from the Mormon Tabernacle. There I would spend a week happily glued to a microfilm reader from early morning until dusk when they ushered me to the door.  I cranked through the records of the Polish town of my grandfather, no longer intimidated by those foreign records. 

That first visit felt both foreign and familiar.  Looking back, it was when I first re-entered the Jewish community. I had grown up in a Jewish home but done little in that community since. Married to a non-Jewish spouse and without children, I had little to connect me to my Jewish heritage. Family history drew me back in and ironically to the place of my birth, Salt Lake City. My father had been the only non-Mormon professor in his department at the university. My parents spoke fondly of their time there and of the Jewish community. I had no memories of it having left as a toddler. Years later, genealogy took me back to the town of my birth, a Jewish kid born at Holy Cross Hospital in Mormon country. How fitting that I should be exploring my roots where I began. The group of Jewish genealogists felt oddly familiar, like I knew them from somewhere. Many became good friends over time. Less familiar were the people who staffed the library, helpful Mormons who called each other brother and sister. 

Twenty years later the library and its satellites have changed dramatically as they are scanning all those films and moving to digital. No longer do they send microfilm to church libraries across the country. The tradeoff is that many records are indexed by name and the original records are often available on-line at their site familysearch.org. The transcription is more complete than what you’ll find on Ancestry.com. For example, marriage records will often also provide the additional information of parents’ names, a particularly valuable piece of data.

My client’s family folklore was that family had been part of agricultural communities established by Baron de Hirsch. Baron de Hirsch was an important figure in Jewish history. An extremely wealthy man, he established a fund in 1891 to help settle Jewish immigrants in the US and Canada through agricultural colonies and trade schools. We had found a newspaper mention of a family member as an early settler so we were optimistic in our search.

Most people go to familysearch.com and click on the first item in the dropdown, Records. This allows them to search by a family member’s name.  But not all the records are indexed and listed by name so they are only finding a portion of what is available. I wondered if I could access a broader universe by another door. I recalled how I used to access information in those long-ago visits at the Utah library. As it wasn’t then available by an individual’s name, I had searched for the original source by town and then sought an index within the document to lead me to the record.

I went to Search and then to Catalog. There I could search by place. I put in the town and up popped land records. When I pulled it up, an icon came up.

A reel icon means microfilm which is generally not accessible outside of large libraries or the the main one in Utah. If you are lucky, a camera image appears which allows you to search a series of images taken from the film. Sometimes a key shows up over the camera. That means you can only access the record at the FHL. 

The land records were among them and we were there that day in search of those records. An alphabetical index was available. We could barely contain our excitement when those familiar names appeared in the index. We moved to the actual record where we found that they had a wide variety of spellings even within the same record. Vs and Bs and Ws were all interchangeable. We found the first purchases in 1893 by his great-grandfather, just two years after the fund began. The actual record showed the buyer and seller, a description of the land, the purchase price and who was present. 

But there was a surprise. Family folklore was that his great-great grandmother had also come to America and later gone to Israel. She flitted ghost-like through story, but we had found nothing to verify her existence. There her name was listed along with his great-grandfather as the first buyer of property in the family. We know she was there because the record indicates that she was present. And to tie it with a bow, one of the purchases was actually from the Baron de Hirsch fund. 

Validating Instincts

As a genealogist, I have learned to trust my instincts. They often lead me to pursue what might seem like a tenuous link to some, perhaps merely a coincidental confluence of facts, but for some reason they call to me. My challenge is to validate the connection through records to confirm that it is more than a coincidence, to prove or disprove my hypothesis.

In my latest project I was asked to identify the towns of origin for both sides of my client's family. My starting point is what I know which in this case was very little except for grandparents' names. This is a fairly typical beginning point. This client reached out to other family members who offered some rumored ports of arrival, all helpful information if applied wisely. While I use this in my search, I am always careful not to let it blind me to other possibilities. Often family members immigrate separately or in small groups so while I assumed at least one family member followed the route of family folklore, I also explored alternate routes.

As always I began by searching for census records on ancestry.com which tell me at least the approximate year of arrival so I can narrow my focus. With that information, I turned to stevemorse.org which allows me to search for immigration records on many variables. After a number of searches I found some immigration records for each family which revealed the towns of origin. Mystery solved, but wait a minute. One record noted Warsaw as the town of origin. I've learned that many immigrants will note a nearby large city rather than the smaller town in which they live. My grandfather's marriage record notes he was from Warsaw when in fact he came from a town an hour away. I wondered if this might also be true in this case.

I did a search on JRI-Poland.org with the given names of both husband and wife along with the married name. I was searching for Leon and Bella, but first I converted Leon to Leib and Bella to Bayla, the non-Americanized versions that they went by in Poland. Only a few index entries came up and the most promising was a marriage record for a town about 80 miles from Warsaw. The entry had the correct surname and the given names of Szija Leib and Bayla Brandel. Close, but no certainty, still very much in the realm of hunch.

This was just the index and I wanted the actual record. Records can be located in one of three ways. Some records are held at the Family History Library in Utah. The JRI-Poland site will often tell you the film number or you can search the FHL catalog on-line to learn whether they have the film for the year or town in question. You can order a film to review at one of their church libraries or if it is an isolated record for which you know the precise coordinates you may ask them to send it digitally.

If not at the FHL you can contact the appropriate arm of the Polish Archives to order the record, sending them a wire for the cost involved. Needless to say this is the most cumbersome means with potential language barriers to navigate.

The third way is fairly new. The Polish Archives are beginning to digitize records and in this case the index advised me that this specific record was on-line and provided a link. It took a while to navigate the all-Polish site, but with the year and record number I was able to ultimately locate it.

The record was in Russian so I deciphered enough to believe it was still a possibility. I decided to cross-check my translation by posting it on Jewishgen's Viewmate translation site in hopes that a kind and fluent researcher might translate it for me. After a few days I had received my translation.

To verify this record I needed to know one more detail, what was on their tombstones. Jewish tombstones have the Hebrew names of the individual and that of their father, the same information that is in a marriage record. I circled back to my client who sent me photos of the tombstones. Then I began to see how the information matched up.

So what did I find? The record showed Szija Leib's father as Mechil and Bella's father as Izak. Their tombstones showed Menachem and Yitzhak, a pretty close match in the art of tombstone matching. I then looked at the Hebrew tombstone names. Leib's appeared to be Joshua Arieh and Bayla's was Bayla Brina. I knew that Szija is derived from Isaiah which comes from the same root as Joshua. I soon learned from baby naming sites that they all translate to God is salvation or God saves. Similarly Areih and Leib both mean lion. Bayla's name in the marriage record was Bayla Brandel, not far from Bayla Brina.

My hypothesis has strengthened, but still reliant on comparable names, not a perfectly clean match. How else can I prove this out? I decide to return to immigration records, but this time using the town's name from the marriage record I had discovered. Searching with this new piece of information I found the immigration record of Bayla and several of their children. There are two pieces of data on which I focus, nearest relative in Europe and who were they going to. In this case I had a perfect match as she named her destination with her husband's name and town. Even better she gave her mother's name as nearest European relative, a perfect match of both given name, surname and town to the marriage record.

So what's next? With a firm foundation, we can begin to look for related records. On JRI-Poland I find indices for birth records for both Leib and Bayla, a marriage record for Bayla's parents and a death record of a Leib with the correct last name just one year before the younger Szija Leib's birth. Given the time proximity it may well be his grandfather after whom he is named. I need only order the records from the Family History Library and settle in to await further discoveries.

And there we have it, puzzle solved.

Ordering Films from the Family History Library

I’ve been doing some genealogy work for others and recently ordered some films from the Family History Library in Utah.  When I first began doing family history I went to the local Church of the Latter Day Saints where they had a small library with microfilm readers that was connected with the Family History Library in Utah.  At first I was a bit intimidated by the fact that it was in a church.  The very helpful volunteers were a close knit group who referred to each other as brother and sister.  I used to listen to the hum of their background conversation while immersing myself in an equally foreign world.  Before I worked up the courage to order a film, I looked at Polish films that were in the files.  I remember studying the records written in this strange language and script trying to make sense of them.  I have always retained a memory from when I was a child.  I recall studying a page in a book, a picture of a deer in the upper left corner and typeface that I so wanted to decipher, a moment when I could not yet read.   This was not too dissimilar an experience.

Over time I got bolder and ordered films from the Family History Library in Utah and later began to go to Utah directly.  I poured over those films, gradually finding the birth, marriage and death records of my family.  Polish began to seem like an old friend as I learned the key words to look for as markers.  Then when I hit the mid 1860s the records suddenly changed to Cyrillic Russian and I panicked at this strange language.  A few community ed classes later and Russian too began to feel more familiar. It now seems quite long ago and in fact the library process has changed quite a bit.

On my early visits I used to have flashbacks to my job in college when I worked in the research department of the university library.  Surrounded by microfilm readers, not much had changed many decades later. But change is beginning to happen.  When I wanted to order records this time I discovered that I could only order on-line.  The site required me to register and select a library.  The small one near my home that I had begun with was no longer on the list.  It appeared that they had consolidated resources, perhaps to have a larger presence and more hours at the available libraries.  One of the challenges when I first began my research was that there were quite limited hours as it was staffed by volunteers.  I was pleased to see that the hours had been greatly expanded.  The fee for the films had increased to $7.50 and when I arrived at the library I noted that they now had a scanner similar to what I had used in Utah, although in Utah scanning had been free.  Here they charged the same for a scan as for a hardcopy, still a bargain when weighed against airfare to Utah.

I was accustom to searching the online Family History Library Catalog. In the past I had searched for a country and city and then gone to the category of Jewish records.  From there I had ordered the relevant films and carefully studied them, looking for family names in that ancient script. While that is still available, you will want to first do a name search in hopes that the records you are looking for have been indexed.

The research I was doing was for a Catholic German family. I knew that family came from Mehren, Germany so first I tried the old method.   I went to the catalog and I input Mehren, Germany.  I came up with two categories, a book on Genealogy and a some films of vital records, one of baptisms in particular.  In the old days I would have proceeded to look at each record on that baptismal film looking for family names.  If I was fortunate there might be an index. Now there is a much easier path, to the same information.  At familysearch.org, I entered the names I was searching.  Up popped census records as, well as baptismal records by name, each accompanied by the film number.    When I went to the film, I was able to quickly locate the correct record because the indexed record had revealed the year plus I had the certainty that the record would be there.

JRI-Poland has previously indexed many of the Jewish records so I’ve had the benefit of some indexing, but for the most part my past research still required painstaking searching through foreign records.  Now that process was greatly simplified, at least if you are one of the fortunate ones whose family has been indexed.

I pulled the 1800s baptismal records and turned my attention to the other film, a family history that someone else had invested the time in creating.  As this was a family that came to the US in the mid-1800s the research was primarily US based.  The research in Germany included the baptismal records and a marriage record, but had not gone further back. My client had a suspicion that there might be Jewish history in her tree and was interested in exploring that further.  If so, I concluded it was not in the US branch which had a healthy number of priests and nuns in the tree.  One of the things I was looking for to test her theory was naming.  Ashkenazic Jews name children after a deceased grandparent or great-grandparent and I thought the naming pattern might have persisted.  Nothing in that vein as of yet.

If you are considering a search for your family records I would encourage you to first try your luck at familysearch.org and if films exist venture out to one of the local church family history libraries.  They are open to the public and you need not be affiliated with the church to make use of their resources.  It was my first step many years ago and set me on a fascinating journey.

Recommended Reading II: Family Searches and Unexpected Places

This is Round II of recommended reading.  Many of these books I’ve stumbled over by accident, others have been recommended by others.  If you are aware of other books that you would recommend, please don’t hesitate to share them.

In the course of my reading I’ve read several books on the search that others have pursued for their family roots.  In the case of Jewish roots that often takes you headlong into the Holocaust.  Perhaps the best known book of this genre is The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn who launched an extensive and well documented search into the fate of relatives from the town of Bolechow, Ukraine.  I feel a certain kinship as his guide on this effort was Alex Dunai, who also accompanied me to the Ukraine. 

Where She Came From: A Daughter’s Search for her Mother’s History by Helen Epstein chronicles three generations of Czech women.  It presents the impact of the Holocaust on the Czechs, but is also an interesting story from the standpoint of the lives of the women it chronicles.  

The Pages in Between by Erin Einhorn relates the story of her mother, hidden as a child in Poland in exchange for the family’s property.  Erin’s grandmother dies in the Holocaust, but her grandfather survives, reclaims his daughter and moves with her to the US.  Einhorn, a journalist, goes back to Poland to find the people who hid her mother and finds that a property transaction lies unresolved raising many of the sensitive issues that remain between Jews and Poles.

A family history written from a very unique angle is the recently released The Hare With the Amber Eyes by Eduard de Waal.  This book tells the story of the Ephrussi family, a wealthy banking family, through the lens of netsuke that were collected and then gifted within the family.  Originally from Russia, he traces the family through Paris and Vienna.  This is not your typical family history.  These family members were written about by Proust and were friendly with and collected artists such as Moreau, Renoir, Whistler and Monet.  The author’s grandmother corresponded with Rilke.  They lived in a rarefied world, but were ultimately driven from their home and property by the Nazis. Today the netsuke that have made this arduous journey through time reside with the author and his children play with them.

There are also a cluster of books about the families of those with Jewish heritage from regions quite outside the typical Eastern European roots.   The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit by Lucette Lagnado  chronicles the move of her family from Egypt to the United States reminding me of the mass exodus of Jews from Arab lands after the creation of Israel.   From comfortable and settled lives, they became immigrants, not always ready to embrace this new world so different from what they had known.  Often they struggle with living at an economic and social level much lower than their prior status.

My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel  Sabar  looks at his father’s prior life in Iraq.   His father is now a preeminent Aramaic scholar and part of the story is about the son learning to appreciate the color and texture of his father’s life.  His father came from a Kurdish enclave in Iraq where Jews had lived for 3000 years.  Jews were expelled from Iraq in 1951 and his father moves to Israel.  Here he experiences the low regard in which Kurdish Jews are held, considered to be rather backward and at the bottom rung of the society. Ultimately working his way into Yale, he becomes the expert in Aramaic, the language spoken by those who lived in Kurdish Iraq.   This book is in part a family roots search, but in the framework of an unexpected region.  It also is a story of a son coming to an understanding of his father’s life experiences.   

In the same vein is a fictionalized story, Septembers of Shiraz by Dalia Sofer.  The story tells the harrowing tale of a Jewish family in Iran in 1981.  The author’s family escaped from Iran in 1982 after her own father was imprisoned so one gets the sense that this is semi-autobiographical.

The Girl From Foreign by Sadia Shepard is a journey into a Jewish family’s past in India and Pakistan. At her grandmother’s deathbed the author learns that her grandmother was born as a Jew in India and moved to Pakistan after becoming the third wife of a Muslim businessman.  The book is as much about the search as the discoveries and takes the reader along on the journey into a world that is both foreign and fascinating.

I am struck by the fact that several of these books were written by authors who were not raised as Jews and come from mixed marriages.  The search into their Jewish heritage was often a search to better understand an aspect of themselves.  Virtually all of the non-fiction memoirs were written by journalists or in one case a documentary maker.  All were very accustom to finding and telling a story.  The one exception to this rule is de Waal who is actually a very accomplished potter.  He too succeeds in crafting a compelling story.  And for most the story is as much about the search as the discoveries, a lesson all genealogists know well.