Always proud of Grandma Rose!

I'm always proud of my Grandmother, pictured above courtesy of the NJ Jewish News. At 92 years old she has good days and bad - but she retains her spark! She was quoted in a recent article about high school students coming to learn about history from those who have lived it. The article even gives her a quote:

The Daughters of Israel residents were all smiles, full of stories about their lives. Rose Shoshana Telles described to her interviewers how she moved from Russia to Canada and eventually to Brooklyn.

“I was a teacher,” she told a reporter, “and these students are very bright. They’re brighter than I was.”

Now you see where I got my love of history! You can read the entire article here.

Iasi Pogrom - 1941

My paternal grandmother's family immigrated from Bivolari, Romania - a little village north of Iasi, Romania, on the eastern border with Moldova. My great-grandfather left around 1911, but his parents and several of his brother's families remained. Those left behind eventually moved to Iasi itself, and many remained there through WWII.

Lazar Leibovic wrote an account of the Iasi Pogrom of June 29, 1941 that captures the horror of those days. It is all the more powerful given that my cousins were there experiencing the mindless terror themselves. An English translation has been generously provided by Anca Dumitru-Sapuna of Bucharest, Romania.

How many ancestors do you have?

The Eastman newsletter had an interesting post on the numbers of ancestors we each have. You can find it here. Ten generations back and you have over 1000 direct genetic ancestors (e.g., parents, grandparents, great-grandparents). Twenty generations back and you have over 1 million. Thirty generations and you have over 1 billion. Of course it doubles at each generation.

It made me wonder a few things:

• These numbers assume that each ancestor is unique. In any one generation, the same direct ancestor might appear multiple times. The larger the size of the generation, the more prevalent it is going to be.
• How do these numbers compare to the total population size at the time? Clearly, these number cross, with world population rising (exponentially?) as time goes forward and the size of the generation getting smaller by half. According to one account, the world's population in 1800 was one billion. That was approximately ten generations back (where there would have been about 1000 ancestors). But if you go farther back, you'll have more ancestors than people?
• If your ancestry comes from one cultural group or geographic area to the exclusion of others, how much more prevalent is amount of duplication of ancestors?
• Can genetic testing give us any insights into the numbers of ancestors that are duplicated? At which generation those duplications exist?
• Are there more sophisticated ways to measure or estimate these things mathematically? What other information do you need?

I'd love any insights or pointers to existing scholarly work.

Our Town Bivolari

In the aftermath of WWII, residents of the displaced Jewish communities of Europe often came together to remember the world they had known. Yizkor books were written by these community groups--books which enumerated the names of those they had lost and the way of life they had endured. When I started studying my family's history, I was fortunate enough to be working next to a world class university library with an extensive collection of these books. In particular, the Yizkor book for Bivolari, the town in Romania where my paternal grandmother's family is from, provided a wealth of information. I also found the books for several other towns in Europe important to my family, Khotyn and Tarnobrzeg chief among them. Unfortunately for me, these books are typically in Yiddish and Hebrew, and I speak neither.

JewishGen has be posting translations of these Yizkor books, and I found out today that Bivolari is now among them! Our Town Bivolari is written in Hebrew with a Romanian summary, and I may have an extract of the Romanian section courtesy of a professor in The Ohio State University Department of Slavic and East European Languages and Literature. The JewishGen page currently has a translation of the "List of Martyrs," which includes several members of my extended family. With time--and donations--perhaps the entirety of the book could be translated. That would really help give me and my contemporaries more insight into the world of our ancestors.