Tag Archives: Family

Playing detective: Searching for Gold(schlagers)

Posted on by
3

My first genealogical search efforts about a year and half ago related to my grandfather’s family, the Goldschlagers.  I started there because I figured (somewhat incorrectly) that Goldschlager was an uncommon name and thus would be an easier family to research, unlike Cohen, Brotman, Schoenthal, Seligman—my other family lines.  I also was very curious about my grandfather’s life because I had always heard about how he had walked out of Romania.  It also helped that we knew where he had lived in Romania, the city of Iasi (sometimes spelled Jassy, sometimes Yassy) and that we knew the names of his parents and siblings.

I started by focusing on finding other descendants of the Goldschlager clan.  We knew that Isadore had a brother David and a sister Betty.  My brother had already found some of the relevant records from Ellis Island.  We also knew that David had had two sons, Murray and Sidney, and that Betty had had two daughters, Frieda and Estelle. I figured that I would start with Murray and Sidney since I assumed (again incorrectly) that since they were men, their names would be Goldschlager and they would be easy to find.

I was not very experienced in my research techniques back then and did not get very far.  Since the US Census records are only available up through the 1940 census, I could not get too far using ancestry.com at that point.  I was lucky, however, to find Sidney Goldschlager’s obituary by googling his name.  From that obituary, I learned that his brother Murray had changed his last name to Leonard and was living with his wife Edna in Tucson, Arizona.  (Murray and Edna were listed as survivors of Sidney along with his wife Nora; there were no others mentioned, so I assumed (this time correctly) that Sidney and Nora had not had children.)

Once I knew that Murray was using the name Murray Leonard, I searched for him online by googling his name and Tucson and found a news article about the closing of a chain of women’s clothing stores called Vicky Wayne in the Tuscon area owned by Murray and Edna Leonard.  After that, however, I hit a wall.  Although I could find a telephone listing for Murray Leonard, I was not comfortable making a telephone call blindly. At that point I gave up and turned to searching for Frieda and Estelle, but because I had no idea what their married names were, that ended up as a dead end also.  That was, as I said, about a year and half ago.  I figured I had done all I could do to find the Goldschlagers.

Then this past summer I got an email from a man who was also searching for Goldschlagers.  He had seen my family tree on ancestry.com and was interested in sharing information.  Although we were not able to find any connection between our trees, he did inspire me to start looking again.  He gave me the name of a researcher he had found in Iasi, Romania, and I contacted him to look for records for my Goldschlager ancestors.  As I wrote in my prior post about the Goldschlagers, he was able to obtain several records about my grandfather, about my great-grandparents, and about David, my great-uncle.

Those findings were what really lit a fire for me and inspired me to start my research again.  Although I did not get any further with finding Goldschlagers, it was at that point that I turned to the Brotman line and became fully immersed in learning how to do genealogical research.

With the benefit of this new knowledge and the tools I now knew how to use, I returned to researching my Goldschlager relatives.  This time I knew to dig deeper in order to find other descendants. First, I was able to find some records for Betty and her daughters.  I found a census report for Betty Feuerstein living with her husband Isadore, her mother (listed as Gussie Gold), and her two daughters in Bayshore, Long Island.

Betty Feuerstein and family 1940 census

Betty Feuerstein and family 1940 census

By researching the Feuerstein family, I was able to link with a descendant of that family, who sent me pictures of Frieda and of Betty.  He also knew their married names; Frieda married Abe Adler, and Estelle married I. Kenner, known as Kenny. I found a listing for an Estelle Kenner in Florida, but that’s as far as I have gotten.  My contact did not know whether they had had children or where Frieda had lived.

Last week I returned to the search for David’s descendants. I re-read the article about the Vicky Wayne stores and saw that the stores had been named for a niece of Murray and Edna Leonard.  I googled Vicky Wayne and found many references to a mail order clothing store and then ultimately a reference to the name in an obituary for a woman named Anne Steinberg.  I read the obituary and saw that Anna was survived by two sisters, Faye and Edna.  I thought that perhaps Edna Leonard was Anne’s sister, and so I searched for a record on ancestry that would have listed three sisters on a census named Anne, Edna and Faye.  I found one, the daughters of Ben and Sarah Kaufman living in NYC.

Kaufman family 1930 census

Kaufman family 1930 census

From there I looked at the names of Anne’s children in the obituary and googled them and searched for them on Facebook.  Once I found a few of them on Facebook, I looked to see if they had any friends with the last name Leonard, figuring that Murray and Edna’s children would be cousins of Anna’s children and grandchildren.  Sure enough, Anne’s daughter had a “friend” named Richard Leonard from Tucson, now living in Australia.  I contacted Richard through Facebook and LinkedIn, and within an hour I’d heard back from him, confirming that he is Murray and Edna’s son, David Goldschlager’s grandson, and my second cousin. I had indeed found another Goldschlager descendant.

Richard and I spoke at length by Skype (despite a 13 hour time difference) the other night, and he filled me in on his parents and his grandparents.  His father, though born in Scranton, PA, had grown up in the Bronx and is a loyal Yankee fan (sigh…), as is Richard.  His parents had moved to Tucson in 1958  shortly after marrying in NYC.  Edna’s sister Anna had moved there, and they all worked in the business together, eventually dividing it into two parts, the mail order business and the retail stores.  Sometime in the early 1970s, Murray moved his parents, David and Rebecca Goldschlager, to Tucson as well, where they lived nearby and where Richard was able to see them often.

Richard said that his grandfather did not talk to him about his life in Romania or his family, but was more focused on the present and enjoyed spending time with Richard as he was growing up.  I’ve asked Richard to see if his father, now 92, knows any more about David’s life and family, and he said that he will do so and let me know what he learns.  I also asked Richard if he knew anything about our great-aunt Betty or her daughters Frieda and Estelle, but unfortunately he did not.

Once again, I am amazed by how much you can find in public sources if you are persistent and thorough enough.  I will continue to look for Frieda and Estelle and their descendants, if any.  Now I am expanding the search, looking for other possible relatives of the Goldschlager family.  I believe I have found my great-grandmother’s sister and her family, but that’s a post for another day.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Hyman and Sophie’s marriage certificate

Posted on by
4

Finally, after almost two months, the Family History Library is back in service. I’ve received a couple of documents that I will post about. First, I received Hyman and Sophie Brotman’s marriage certificate. Although it provides no new information, it is nevertheless an interesting document. Hyman (who was using Herman by this time on official documents) was only 22 when he was married in 1904; Sophie was only 18. Sometimes I am amazed by the fact that people who married so young were able to have such long marriages. Sophie and Hyman were married 64 years.

Herman and Sophie Brotman

Herman and Sophie Brotman

What I found particularly interesting about this document is that Hyman used his father’s middle name, Jacob, on the certificate. I have never seen Joseph referred to on any document as anything other than Joseph. But, as you may recall, Hyman also referred to his mother as Fanny, her middle name, on his Social Security application, a reference no one else ever used. Here he uses Pesel Broht as his mother’s name, not Fanny. Perhaps he was being somewhat secretive, or perhaps there was some family use of those middle names. After all, Hyman was Herman and Chaim, so he had a flexible attitude towards names. (I’ve also never seen Broht spelled with an H.)

Edit:  I just realized that the front of the form has the groom’s name as Haimy!

The other thing that I find interesting about the marriage certificate is the spelling of “white” as “weit” and the spelling of Manhattan as Manahten. It looks like the rabbi might have filled out the entire form since it seems to match the handwriting of his signature. I also think the rabbi filled out the form because Weiss is spelled with one S on the front of the form, but Sophie spelled it Weiss in her signature. Whoever filled out the form also did not understand the box that asks for number of marriages, as the blank area is filled with an address, not a number. I have no idea what that address refers to, as it is not the address of the bride, the groom or the rabbi. At any rate it does indicate that this was someone who was still learning English.

Also of interest is that we now have a record of Sophie’s father’s name, listed as Moses, later changed to Morris, and her mother’s maiden name. It looks like Linz or Livy Gabler? Does that sound right to any of her grandchildren? Can anyone help decipher the handwriting? Later records have her name as Lena, so Liny or Linz might make sense.

Finally, the one thing I cannot decipher at all is Hyman’s occupation. Can someone please help me read what that says? On the 1900 US Census his occupation was reported to be a button hole maker, but this looks like something different. If you can read it, please leave your response in the comments below.

Edited:  The prize goes to my brother Ira, who deciphered the occupation to be a phonetic spelling of “operator.”  Often those who worked in the sweatshops on the Lower East Side were referred to as operators (i.e., machine operators).  Since Hyman had been working as a button hole maker, it makes sense that this was what he was doing when he married Sophie in 1904.  It also makes sense that someone who spelled white “weit” and Manhattan as Manahten would spell operator phonetically as well.

Hyman and Sophie's marriage certificate 1904

Hyman and Sophie’s marriage certificate 1904

reverse

reverse

Enhanced by Zemanta

The Goldschlagers

Posted on by
9

Having reached (for now) a dead end on my research of the Brotman family, I have decided to turn to, or rather return to, my research of my grandfather’s family, my Goldschlager relatives.  I had previously done a fair amount of research on the Goldschlager line, but had put it aside when I found my Brotman cousins. For some of you, the Goldschlager story will be perhaps of less interest, although it is itself a wonderful story of American Jewish immigration.  For others, in particular my first cousins and siblings and my mother, the Goldschlager story will be of great interest.  And for those who are interested in genealogy generally and/or the history of Jews in Europe and America, this story should also be a great interest.

So although this blog is called the Brotmanblog (and will continue to be so titled), I have created a new page for my Goldschlager ancestors and relatives.  If you are interested, please check it out.  I also will be writing some posts to describe the research I’ve done to uncover the story of my grandfather, his siblings and his parents and grandparents.

In this first Goldschlager post, I want to tell the story of my grandfather Isadore.  Isadore was born in Iasi (or Jassy), Romania.  He was the oldest child of Moritz (Moses, Moshe, or Morris)and Gitla (Gittel or Gussie) Goldschlager.  He was born in August, 1888; his younger brother David was born the following year, and their younger sister Betty was born in 1896.  Isadore was named for his grandfather, Ira Goldschlager.  I was very fortunate to find a researcher in Iasi who located and translated several documents relating to these relatives, including birth records and marriage records for Moritz and Gitla, my great-grandparents.

Moritz and Gittel's marriage certificate

Moritz and Gittel’s marriage certificate

He even took a photograph of the house were my grandfather and his parents and siblings lived in Iasi.

The Goldschlager House in Iasi

The Goldschlager House in Iasi

When my grandfather was 16 years old, he left Iasi and walked through Romania to escape the tzar’s army and persecution.  Romania was one of the most anti-Semitic and oppressive countries in Europe at the time, and many Jewish residents decided to escape in the early years of the 20th century. In a subsequent post, I will write more about the conditions in Romania and the history of the Fusgeyers—the “foot goers” who left Romania on foot.  My mother said that she does not remember her father talking about Romania very much, except to talk about the horses and the music, two things that he loved very much.

My teenaged grandfather arrived in New York City in 1904 without any relatives and under his brother’s name.  In 1905 he had a job as a storekeeper in a grocery store and lived in what is now East Harlem at 113th Street, apparently alone or perhaps in a boarding house.  His father Moritz arrived in 1909, and his mother Gittel, brother David, and sister Betty in 1910.  Sadly, it appears that Gittel, David and Betty arrived shortly after Moritz had died.

By 1915, Isadore and his mother and siblings were living together in East Harlem.  David was working at a hat maker, Betty as a dressmaker.  Isadore’s occupation unfortunately is not legible on the 1915 census form.  Edit:  On closer examination, I believe it says “Driver Milk,” which is consistent with what he was doing for the rest of his working life.

1905 NY census

1905 NY census

1915 NY Census for the Goldschlagers

1915 NY Census for the Goldschlagers

By 1917, when Isadore registered for the draft, he was working as a driver for a dairy company and married to my grandmother Gussie and living in Brooklyn.

Isadore's World War I draft registration

Isadore’s World War I draft registration

He continued working for dairy companies and eventually became a foreman.  He and my grandmother had three children. As a milkman, my grandfather worked at night to deliver the milk by morning.  When he delivered milk to people in the poor communities, they all loved him so much that they would bring him food.

My grandparents moved to Parkchester in the 1940s with my mother, who was only twelve at the time.  When I was born ten years later, my parents also lived in Parkchester, just a few buildings away from my grandparents, so I spent my first four and half years living right near my grandparents.

My grandparents and me 1956

My grandparents and me 1956

Although my grandfather died before I was five years old and thus my memories of him are vague, I do have a memory of him as a loving grandfather.  Perhaps it is the stories I’ve heard all my life about him rather than my own memories—it’s hard to know.  I know that my mother and her siblings loved him a great deal, that he was a big tease with a great sense of humor, and that although he left Romania at fifteen and never received a high school education, he spoke several languages and was a very smart and witty man.  He must have been an incredibly strong person to have left his family at such a young age; most likely he helped the rest of his family come to the United States once he got here.

I wish I had known him longer, and I wish I knew more about his life both in Romania and in New York.  Perhaps as I pursue this line of research I will learn more.  I have just located one of David’s grandsons, Richard, and David’s son Murray is 92 and living in Arizona.  I am hoping that Murray may know more about David’s life in Romania and the relationship between the two brothers, David and Isadore.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Happy New Year!

Posted on by
Reply

Happy New Year to all my family and friends and followers and readers from all over! I can’t believe I’ve had readers from not only the United States, but Canada, Great Britain, Germany, New Zealand, Bulgaria, Sweden, Turkey, Ireland, Greece, Australia, Russia, Poland, and Israel.  Thanks to all of you for stopping by, whether you have been here once or many times.  May 2014 bring everyone peace, happiness, and good health.

I am grateful to you all for your support and your readership, and I look forward to making new discoveries and new connections in the year ahead.  I hope to learn more both from my relatives and from my fellow genealogy bloggers and others about genealogy, my family, and myself.

Amy

Joseph and Bessie’s newest great-great-great granddaughter

Posted on by
1

I am delighted to report that we have a new little girl in the family.  Janis, daughter of Darren and Sara, granddaughter of Peter and Shelley, great-granddaughter of Leo and Mildred, great-great granddaughter of Tillie and Aaron, and great-great-great granddaughter of Bessie and Joseph Brotman, was born two weeks ago.  I don’t have any other details or any pictures, but thought I would share the happy news with the family.

Mazel tov to Darren, Sara, Peter and Shelley, and to Noah and Leo, the big brothers!

Update: Janis was born on December 6, 2013.  How about a picture, Peter? 🙂

Can anyone identify these men?

Posted on by
2

Judy sent me the photo below (THANK YOU!) and asked whether anyone could help her identify the men in the picture.  We think the man to the far left is Max, but are not sure.   Does anyone recognize the other two men? Can you confirm that that is Max?  You may need to enlarge the page view on your browser to see the photo clearly as it is rather small.

Image

 

Judy thinks the picture might have been taken near Wingdale, New York.  It would have been some time before 1946.

Can you help?

Posted on by
Reply

I know that I have asked for help before, and many of you have responded by sending some pictures and other documents.  Those contributions have really been helpful in learning about our family and the various personalities and relationships.  For example, one wedding picture helped us figure out that Judy and I were both talking about the same Uncle Sam.  One bar mitzvah picture showed that as of 1957,  Gussie’s children and Hyman’s children were still connected.  One hand-written family tree helped to confirm that Abraham’s children and Max’s children had met.

But now I am asking you all to try and find pictures, letters, journals, any documents that may also shed light on our grandparents and great-grandparents as well as our parents and ourselves.  I know that somewhere some of you must have old family pictures like I had.  Maybe you have a wedding album or bar mitzvah album, a box of random old photos or letters.  Maybe someone even has a photo of Frieda or Joseph or another relative, but you had no idea who they were.  Maybe there’s an old newspaper clipping or a birth certificate or draft card or some other document buried in your attic or basement.

I know that you are all busy, and I know that the thought of digging through dusty, musty boxes and albums is not that pleasant.  I just am asking that you perhaps make a resolution for 2014 that you will spend one or two hours seeing if you can find anything.  If you don’t have a scanner, you can mail whatever you have to me, and I will scan it.  I promise to return all the originals once I have scanned them.  If you can scan documents, that would be wonderful also.

No one likes a nag, and I don’t want to be one, but we will all benefit from your efforts.  I hope you will consider spending a little time engaged in a hunt for these things.  From my own experience, I can tell you that I have found great joy and satisfaction in looking at the faces of our relatives in those old pictures.  I hope you will also.

Looking forward: Skiing on the Blue Trails

Posted on by
4

Having looked back to see what I have learned, I have also gained some insight into to what I still want to learn and what I need to do to get there.

There are a number of unresolved questions.  For me, the most important issue remains determining where our family lived in Galicia.  I am currently assuming that our family came from Dzikow Tarnobrzeg, but it’s only based on two forms completed by Hyman, one referring to Jeekief as his birthplace, the other referring to Giga as his birthplace.  Hyman’s forms had so many inconsistencies in terms of birth date and other facts that I do not want to rely too heavily on it being Dzikow Tarnobrzeg since, as my last post said, forms are not necessarily reliable.  Plus I am speculating that Jeekief/Giga is a phonetic spelling of Dzikow.  Plus there was another Dzikow in Galicia.  But I have to start somewhere, so that’s my current focus.

I am just starting to work with the sources available for documents from Galicia, and I need to devote a lot more time to learning how to search and how to interpret those forms.  I am networking with some other researchers who are also searching in that region or who are also searching for the surname Brotman.  So far nothing relevant has turned up.  I plan to take an online course in May that may help me become a better researcher with respect to these resources and documents.

The second goal I have for my research is trying to locate any other children or siblings of Joseph and/or Bessie.  My brother recalls that my aunt thought that Joseph had four older children in the United States—that is, four who were older than the five children he had with Bessie.  We have found two of those four—Abraham and Max.  There is another Brotman family from Passaic, New Jersey, that I am trying to learn more about.  From what I can tell, it seems there were two brothers, Jacob and Benjamin, who could possibly be sons of Joseph, born after Abraham but before Max.  I have been in touch with relatives of theirs, but as with the Brotmanville Brotmans, I can’t seem to find anything that links their family to ours.  I need to learn the name of the Passaic brothers’ parents before I can begin to determine if there is a connection.  I have the same goal with Brotmanville Brotmans, but without more research of European records for Moses Brotman, I cannot get any further.

So those are my two research goals: go further back in time to learn more about Joseph and Bessie’s families and to find links to other possible families in the United States or elsewhere.

I think that this process has a learning curve similar to learning many other new skills.  It reminds me of learning to ski.  At first it goes very slowly; you don’t know what you are doing and figure that you never will.  You find yourself on the ground as much as you are moving on the skis.  It seems like you will never make progress.  Then suddenly you figure it out—you know how to get down a novice trail pretty easily.  You even start to look like you are skiing, and you think, “Wow, I am actually making progress.  I am skiing.”

But then you decide to try a steeper trail, a blue trail.  If you are a skier like I was, you suddenly find you are stuck somewhere on that trail, staring down and thinking, “Whoa! That’s really scary.  I can’t do that!” And you feel like a beginner all over again.  You start falling, your turns get more awkward, and you look like a klutz compared to everyone else.  You start to think that maybe you will never get off those easy green trails.[1]

That’s what I feel like now.  I am standing at the top of a steeper trail, knowing that getting to the bottom will take a lot longer than it did with the green trail.   I don’t expect to find as many pieces of evidence as quickly as I did while looking for US documents.  But I have to start down this trail—I can’t just stay at the top or return to the green trails.  I need to jump off and start the next part of the adventure.  The rewards may not come as quickly, but when they do, I will once again have that feeling of accomplishment.

I hope you will follow me as I go.  I am not sure what I will find or whether I will find anything, but I am ready to try.

[1][1] I have to admit that as a skier, I never actually made much progress getting off the green trails.  I am hoping that I can get further in my genealogy skills than I ever got with skiing.  At least I won’t have to worry about breaking any bones.

Related articles

Looking back on the first six months: Seven lessons learned by doing genealogy

Posted on by
2

As my semester has drawn to an end, as the year draws to an end, I want to take some time to reflect on what I have learned in the last six months or so since I began this project in earnest and what I still want to learn and to accomplish as we start a new year.

So first, what have I learned?

1.  I’ve learned that I had two great-uncles whom I’d never known about.  For at least two months of my research, I was sure that Joseph and Bessie had only had five children: Hyman, Tillie, Gussie, Frieda and Sam.  When I kept running into a Max Brotman married to Sophie with children named Rosalie and Renee, I just figured Hyman had changed his name to Max.  My mother didn’t know about her cousins Joseph, Saul and Manny, but she had met Rosalie and Renee, and I was sure they were Hyman’s daughters.  My mother knew that Hyman’s wife’s name was Sophie.  So instead of looking harder, I just assumed Max was Hyman and that the other Hyman Brotman married to a Sophie was not my relative.  Only when I was able to find Max’s granddaughter Judy and Hyman’s grandson Bruce did I learn that Max and Hyman were BOTH my great-uncles, that both had married women named Sophie, and that Rosalie and Renee were the daughters of Max, not Hyman.  That was a HUGE turning point for me and a big lesson.  Lesson learned? Don’t trust memory alone, and don’t assume that documents are wrong just because family memories conflict with those documents.

Herman and Sophie with sons 1920

Herman and Sophie with sons 1920

2. The second new great-uncle was Abraham, and finding him was also somewhat of a lucky break.  I ran across many Brotmans in my research, but most I assumed were not our relatives because I could not find any document linking them to our relatives and because no one in our family had ever heard of them.  I can’t even remember all the details, but I recall that it was my brother Ira who found Abraham’s naturalization papers—I think (I am sure he will remember and correct me if I am wrong) it was in the course of looking into the Brotmanville Brotmans.  When I saw Max’s name on those papers, I did not assume it was the same Max.  (There were many Max Brotmans living in NYC at that time.)  Once I checked the address for the Max on Abraham’s card against the address I had for Max on the census form from that same time period, I knew it was in fact “our” Max.  That led me on the search that brought me to Abraham’s headstone and death certificate, indicating that his father was also Joseph Jacob Brotman.  Lesson learned? Don’t dismiss any clue.  You never know where one document may lead you, even if in a direction you never expected.

Naturalization of Abraham Brotman Max as Witness

Naturalization of Abraham Brotman
Max as Witness

3.  Contrary to Lesson #1 and Lesson #2, I have also learned that often you cannot trust documents.  Documents lie.  People lie.  People give bad information, and bureaucrats transcribe information inaccurately.  People who transcribe handwritten documents for indexing purposes make errors.  In particular, our relatives were entirely inconsistent when it came to birth dates and birth places.  I now know why one relative found it so easy to lie about her age.  It was family tradition.  So lesson #3: Don’t assume that because it is written on some “official document” that it is reliable in any way.

Sam's Birth Certificate Joseph was NOT 42!

Sam’s Birth Certificate
Joseph was NOT 46!

4. One of my most rewarding accomplishments was finding out what happened to Frieda Brotman. Now we know who she married and how she died and even the name of her infant son Max, who only lived one day.    We even know what happened to her husband Harry Coopersmith after she died.  I never thought I’d be able to track down her story.  That experience is what will keep me going as I continue to look for the answers to more questions.  Lesson #4: Do not give up.  Do not give up. Do NOT give up!

Frieda Brotman Coopersmith death certificate

5. There are more helpful and supportive people in the world than there are mean or evil people.  I know we hear all the time about all the evil in the world, and there is far too much of it.  And even if not evil, there are also many people who are rude, incompetent and unhelpful.  We all know that.  But we often forget that there are also many, many more people who are kind, helpful and competent.  In my six months of doing this research, I have gotten help from many strangers—government employees who patiently helped me find a document, FHL volunteers who helped me track down a document request I had made, JewishGen and GesherGalicia members and other genealogists who have gone far out of their way to teach me how to find documents and how to connect with other researchers, who have photographed gravestones and given me directions to gravestones, who have translated documents for me, who have helped me find a clue when I was sure I had hit a brick wall.  I cannot tell you how much these people have touched me and changed my views on human nature.

I want to express special thanks and deep appreciation to Renee Steinig, who contacted me many months ago in response to my cry for help on GesherGalicia and who has truly been my teacher and is now my friend as I have gone from being a total newbie to a fairly competent novice with her guidance. She is the one who found the obituary of Renee that led to me finding Judy.  She is the one who suggested I post an inquiry on a bulletin board that led me to Bruce.  When I look back, in fact, I know it was Renee who got me to where I am today.  Thank you, Renee, for everything.

Lesson #5: If you ask for help, there will be generous and kind people who will reach out and help you.  Don’t do this alone.

6. I have also learned that I have many second cousins and second cousins once and twice removed—people I would never have discovered if I had not started down this path.  This has been probably the biggest gift of all from doing this research.  What a wonderful and interesting group of people I have gotten to know—by email, by phone, by pictures and stories.  When I look at the pictures and see the distinctive Brotman cheekbones shared by so many of you and your parents and your children, it gives me such a great sense of connection.  This may be the best lesson I’ve learned: everyone is looking for connections, everyone is looking to find their place in time and in the world.  I am so glad to have made these connections with so many of you, people who never even knew my name until this fall but whom I now consider not just cousins, but friends.

7. Finally, and in some ways the point of this whole adventure, I have really learned more than I ever could have hoped about my great-grandparents and their children and how they lived in the United States.  Joseph and Bessie were nothing but names to me six months ago; now they are flesh and blood people, my flesh and blood.  Their drive and courage is an inspiration to me, as it must have been to their own children.  After all, Abraham, Hyman and Tillie all named a son for their father Joseph, and perhaps some of the great-grandchildren were named for him as well.  I was so blessed to have been named for Bessie, as were some of you.  Bessie and Joseph—they are the real heroes of this story.  That’s the real lesson.

Joseph's headstone

Joseph’s headstone

Bessie Brotman

Bessie Brotman

Next post: Looking forward to the next six months

Related articles

Blog Stuff

Posted on by
2

I have made a change in the privacy settings on the blog.  As you know, the blog is a public blog.  When we first started the blog, I did not know whether anyone would ever read it at all, inside or outside of the family, but over the last few months, I have found that I am seeing some visits from people outside of the family.  For me, this is a good thing. Most of these other readers are also doing genealogy work.  I want feedback, I want interaction with others who are doing genealogy research so that I can do a better job, and I want to be able to share my experiences and what I’ve learned about doing this research with others doing similar work.  So I am happy to have as many readers as are interested in checking in.

On the other hand, I have always been and will continue to be careful about protecting the privacy of the members of my family.  For that reason, I have not included birth dates or any other information about living individuals aside from occasional references to a name, usually by first name only.  All the information I have about deceased individuals is available from public records (and a frightening amount of information is also publicly available about living individuals).  In today’s internet environment, our ideas about privacy have had to shift (and that’s without even considering whether or not the NSA is reading our email or listening to our phone calls).  Nevertheless, I do want to respect the privacy interests of my relatives as best I can.

In order to ensure that I continue to protect the privacy of my relatives, I’ve made one new adjustment to the blog.  The family trees are no longer publicly available. The trees do not have much personal information anyway, but I decided that no one outside the family needs to have access to that information.  In order to access those trees, you will now need a password.  I am happy to share that password with anyone who is on the family tree.  If you want the password, please email me directly.  In the future, if I have a post that I consider to be directed only to family members, I will also protect it with that same password.

It’s sad that we cannot be more trusting, but I guess better safe than sorry.

Thank you.