RelativaTree

The first time I was in Georgia was around 1970. I was starting college at Valdosta State College, now University. During the three years I spent there, I did a little exploring, but never went too far from a well populated town or city. Back then, searching for the roots of a place didn’t occur to me. Today, however, it’s a different story. I’m interested in the settlements, the history of the people who lived in the area.

We all know that the Europeans who arrived in North America found inhabitants already occupying the land. The accounts I’ve read so far, about the Salzburger settlers who founded Ebenezer, Georgia don’t mention their dealings with the indigenous peoples who inhabited the area, but I plan to keep reading.

Visiting the 300-year-old place where the Salzburgers established their town was fascinating. The library and museum, located in the old church, are well maintained as are the grounds, and the volunteers who staff the Society’s holdings and maintain them are amazingly knowledgeable. The buildings on the property don’t date back to the original settlement, but are from the 19th century.

Behind the buildings and down a slope is the reason for the town’s location: the Savannah River.

In the library was a wealth of information. In addition to handwritten documents, there were typed compilations of the local news from the beginning of the settlement, vital records, and various historical accounts. Including multi-volume books about the immigrant families in Ebenezer, Georgia and a book that I am eager to read: “The Journal of the Earl of Egmont 1732-1738.”

There were also accounts in these books of enslaved people with the names of their enslavers – as researchers in my office continue their work for clients researching their enslaved ancestors, this may prove useful in their investigations. I was reminded by these accounts of my travels in Eastern Europe and how the beauty of the land disguises the horrors of what happened in these places.

Those incredible volunteers who maintain these libraries and work to preserve memories of ALL the things that happened are definitely to be commended. If your travels take you to Savannah, Georgia, I recommend that you look for some of the old small settlements, like Ebenezer, and take a few hours to investigate.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who has reached out to a close DNA cousin match or the owner of a tree that seems to include your family, and waited and waited for a response that never came. How about government records that take years to arrive? Sometimes patience pays off – the record arrives, someone answers an email. Definitely makes the wait worthwhile. About 10 (or more) years ago I posted a description about research I am (still) doing into the passengers of a particular sailing in 1949 of the SS Marine Jumper that landed in Boston. Occasionally I still receive notes about passengers.

In October 2020 my daughter-in-law asked me if I could find descendants of the owner of what looked like a family heirloom – not something that belonged to her family or mine. This was an object purchased in an antique store decades earlier, and its only identifier was an inscription – a woman’s name and the year – 1893. The antique store was in California, and after much searching I concluded that the family was originally in New York and perhaps Canada, and moved to California sometime in the 1920s. I identified the woman whose name was on the platter, found her maiden name, who she married, who her children were, and possibly some living descendants. I sent a message to several people, and when I didn’t hear anything, I forgot about it and moved on to the next mystery. Then, to my surprise, in July 2023 I received an answer to my message from 2 1/2 years earlier! The platter is now being reunited with its original family. Remember genealogy is sometimes a waiting game.

Over the last months of the pandemic, as I stay at home, surrounded by family and friends through social media and phone calls, I started working through my tree to tackle those brick walls that have been just sitting around and taunting me for ages.

When I first embarked on my genealogical quest about 40 years ago, it was all paper. In 1989 I got my first copy of Family Tree Maker and my dad and I started using it, each on our own computers and periodically merging information. Later on, we each uploaded our trees to Ancestry® – errors and duplications included.

This year, I’ve been making progress in two areas – I’ve been randomly picking people and families and looking at the information, deleting multiple copies of censuses that resulted from all the merging we did, and getting rid of alternate facts where documentation had been identified to prove which of the possibilities was true. So far, I’ve only gotten to clean this up for a fraction of the 18,000+ people on the tree so far, BECAUSE as I do this, I get distracted and want to answer questions I have about these people or because I want/need to develop a new branch to add ancestors of newly weds that joined the family.

In this way, I very slowly touch on many different branches. My father’s maternal family came from an area now in Ukraine – Ivano-Frankivsk. This was part of Galicia in the Austrian Empire when my grandmother left in 1920.

Some names while not completely unique are rare enough and every once in a while I indulge myself by focusing on a branch with one of these rare names. In Stanislau, Stanisławów, Galicia there are a number of names I don’t find occurring frequently elsewhere: Zwirn, Zweifler, Pistreich among others. By one of those “small Jewish world” coincidences, I finally made a connection between two otherwise unrelated branches.

I knew that Yossl Zwirn (1881-1937) married Rika Feil (1886-1967) probably before 1900 in Europe and that their oldest son was born prior to their emigration, and their other children were born in 1904 and 1905 in New York. Yossell was related to me in a convoluted way – grandnephew of husband of 2nd great aunt – hardly a relative at all. The Zwirn family, though, married into my direct family several times over many generations.

Rifka Feil was a daughter of Szepsel Grunschlag whose father was a Grunschlag and whose mother was a Feil. Szepsel’s parents probably didn’t register their marriage witt the civil authorities – children of such unions weren’t legally permitted to use their father’s name. Szepsel’s wife was Pessie Pistreich. One of Szepsel’s daughters, Sabina had a child, Regina Feil. This probably meant that Sabina also didn’t have her marriage registered. Sabina and her daughter, Regina came to the U.S. with one of Sabina’s sisters, also named Regina, about 10 years older than Sabina’s daughter. when the younger Sabina married, she gave the name Shapsel Feil as her father’s name – she possibly thought the question was asking for the name of her mother’s father. I thought from that record, without realizing that it was Sabina’s father who was Szepsel, that Sabina had been married twice and Feil was her married name.

Sabina married Morris Pistreich in 1914. Morris’ first wife, Fulia Mund died about 6 weeks before he married Sabina. Morris has a brother, Wolf, who in 1900 lived with Morris and his first wife. Wolf’s wife joined him a year or so after he arrived. Wolf and Morris had a sister, Freda Pestreich. She married a man named Abraham Reisberg. The Reisberg family was from one of two towns in the Ternopil province – that was between 50-80 miles away from Stanisławów. The Reisbergs were probably from Kozova or Skalat. My mother’s youngest sister, Iris, married Abraham Reisberg’s grandson, Mel.

This morning I found the connection between Freida Pestreich and the Feil family. Tonight is my uncle Mel’s 2nd yahrzeit – he died 14 January 2018. The connections of Jewish families is always striking to me. The coincidences of research to personal history is always emotional.

Family, after all is at the core of who we are and what we do. I’m speaking here about families, no matter how you define them – could be bio or adopted families, nuclear or extended, or community. Last night, I experienced something incredibly connecting during this period of social distancing.

Usually, our family has a couple of huge seders – 2 dozen generally forms the core and another dozen or so, rounds it off nicely. Obviously, this year there is going to be something different. It needs to be something very special though, to bring 4 generations of our extended family, scattered all over the U.S. together. We decided last night to do a trial run to make sure that our elders, my parents and my aunt, could all log into the platform we selected and that everyone had the equipment they would need so we could see and hear each other. Last year, to compensate for the absence due to illness, of my son and his family, we scanned our family haggadah and emailed it to him. That scan means that we can all be on the same page this year. Literally.

My sisters and I got on line and walked first my aunt and then my parents through setting up their connection. What we thought would be about half an hour took over 3 hours. Everyone connected, and while we were at it, chatted , laughed, and shared stories. It made each of us feel like we were, if not in the exact same place, then in different rooms in the same vicinity. It was extremely powerful. Tonight, we are going for take two of our set-up. My sisters and I connecting with our parents to make sure that the computer they are using, when set up in their dining room works as well as it did in my dad’s study. Their dining room, home to so many family gatherings for many years will be the perfect backdrop. Last night, we saw, behind my dad, the photos on the wall of many family celebrations, decades ago. We spoke of those and made comments about the wallpaper on my computer desktop – a 1924 family seder in Brooklyn. The photo appeared in the Daily Forward as a “typical American seder”. I gues after being in the U.S. since 1910, that family, my mom’s paternal family, was considered to be thoroughly integrated in American Jewish life!

The first arrival of my family from Eastern Europe was in the 1880s. They settled in New York, and as spread out as we are now, all over the U.S., I think New York is our base. The extended family has been gathering to celebrate Passover in the U.S. for over 130 years. This year will be no exception. Why is this year different?