Why I am doing this family history project...

• Genealogy is a journey of self discovery, at least it has been for me. In many respects, the person that you are is a reflection of the people who came before you. That is why know who came before you is important.
• In school, history sometimes left me feeling disconnected. Studying my own family's experiences has allowed me to see how we fit in the larger historical context.
• When I was younger, I asked my parents where our family was from. My father said "I don't know." So did my aunt and all of their cousins. I was never satisfied with that, and I reliezed that if I wanted better answers, I'd have to find them myself. And I've been trying...
• When my Grandmother, Marian Weil nee Goldner, passed away a few years ago, we found some brittle documents in Romanian. I had them translated, and they turned out to be my great-grandparent's dowry agreement, signed by my great-great-grandparents Leib Faibish and Shmuel Goldner! I regret not talking to my Grandmother about them before she passed away, and I never want to have similar regrets.
• I love detective work, and genealogical research is dectective work. You get clues from interviews and documents, and they lead you in different directions.
• Genealogy is a perfect hobby for a self-absorbed busybody like myself. :)

[Originally posted by me to the TangerineCrafts website in 2002.]

Florida's Place In My Family History Research

Somehow, we avoided the Wicked Blizzard of 2011. We got the last three seats on a plane for Fort Lauderdale the day before the storm and started our vacation/visit early. It hasn't quite been beach weather, but it sure beats the 24" that I'm told was filling my driveway!

I've been coming down to south Florida since I was a kid, first visiting my grandparents in Hallandale and then visiting my wife's grandparents in Boynton Beach. My parents have a place here now, doing the "snowbird" thing for a year or two before officially nesting here. Two of my aunts and uncles are here, a few of my father's cousins, and a good chunk of my parent's friends from New Jersey. This Jewish migration to Florida from the New York Tri-State region is as ingrained in my folk understanding of Judaism as eating Chinese food on Christmas, and it seems to be happening on schedule!

On this current trip, I started thinking of the affects of this resettlement from a genealogical perspective. In tracing my family tree, I've rarely done research on Florida because families were mostly born and raised in New York. My superficial internet research suggests that this aspect of the Jewish experience hasn't been studied too extensively (although perhaps I should read this book). But in many cases in the families I research, the latter decades of folks' lives took place in the state. If I'm really trying to understand their experience - and not just recording their names and vital records - I shouldn't ignore Florida.

I had a couple of thoughts...

• Who was here? My grandmother, Marian Goldner Weil, had three siblings with her in Florida (David, Morris, and Bessie) - four out of ten siblings who reached adulthood. My grandfather, Jacob Weil, was down in Florida with his older brother Harry. Plus a bunch of cousins, nieces and nephews. On my mother's side, my great-grandmother used to come down on vacation, and there are a few cousins still scattered about. There is still some extended family in Ft. Lauderdale and Miami. Coming down here is always a good time to reconnect.
• What was their experience? Going to 3G Deil, it is clear that there is still a significant Jewish population here. We always joke that we bring the average age down by a few decades when we walk into the room, although as the years go by it is clear that isn't always going to be true! Once there were a critical mass of Jews here, the cultural and religious supports became sustainable. That includes synagogues, newspapers, Yiddish and Hebrew language groups, Jewish philanthropic organizations, Kosher and faux-Kosher restaurants, etc. All of the aspects of life in New York were here, only warmer.
• Death certificates & Obits. I've ordered my share of Florida death certificates to get information about family member's birth dates, parent's names, and next of kin. My wife calls Florida "God's Waiting Room." I bet I could get more info from obits than I currently do if I knew where to look. All of these gated communities have their own newsletters, and I bet their remembrances are more personal.
• "Vacation" destinations. I'll be honest. If my wife's grandmother and my parents weren't down here, we wouldn't be here. This isn't where I'd go on vacation, Disney notwithstanding. But for more than a half century, south Florida has been the school-vacation week destination of tens of thousands of Northeastern Jews. What parts of the country are we missing out on because its time to go back to Boca to brunch with Bubbie and Zeydie? On the plus side, there are some wonderful things to do here, and I hope my kids have nothing but good memories. In fact, that is a major source of stories for my wife and me. I've spent a lot of hours hearing about my wife's family and getting the guided tour of 90 years of photo albums.

I'm going to try to make more, genealogically speaking, of my next trip to Florida. But on this trip, it was mostly about making sure that my kids spent a lot of quality time with their grandparents and great-grandmother.

Family Closer than I Thought

My grandmother's sister Anita was 12 years older than my grandmother, and so she remembered more about life in Ukraine than my grandmother (who was only 2 when they emigrated). Over the years, she told my Aunt Phyllis many stories, and I'm very lucky that my Aunt has a tremendous memory.

Anita was extremely petite. I only remember her at the very end of her life at the nursing home in Riverdale - nearly blind, nearly deaf, mind as sharp as a tack, and tiny compared to my 6' 2" adolescent body. As a child, Anita's size worried my great-grandfather Abram Broitman. He used to send her to his sister Riva's house because there were a lot of children there. He thought she would eat more with other kids around.

It got me thinking: what happened to all of these "kids"? We're still in contact with the descendants of one of those kids, who also immigrated to NY and lived very close to my mother's family. But what about the other siblings who stayed in Ukraine? On the heels of finding family on that side of the family searching through the pages of testimony at Yad Vashem, I thought I'd see if I could find any additional living family who had submitted records of family who perished in the Holocaust. So, a few nights ago I spent a little more time (literally 15 minutes) looking through the records at Yad Vashem. Eureka!

Based on my previous research (an interview with Anita before she died and a death certificate), I knew that the parent's names were Riva Broitman Krutoy and Jacob (Yakov) Krutoy. Riva was sister to Abram Broitman, my greatgrandfather. Entering "Krutoy" into the database, I was amazed to find an entry for “Abram, Krutoi,” of Odessa, Ukraine the son of Riva and Yakov Krutoi. A very likely match, given the names.

The page was submitted by Abram's son Konstantin. If alive, he'd be in his 80s. He'd be my grandmother's first-cousin once-removed. The page of testimony submission was originally in Russian, and the translations into English do not include the submitter's address. I asked a colleague who reads Russian to help me interpret the handwritten page to see if I could get more information. I assumed the address would be in Ukraine or Israel.

Nope. This cousin lives in Brooklyn! Coney Island, to be specific. One of the many older Russian Jewish immigrants in some very large apartment buildings. I wonder what his reaction will be when he receives the letter I'm writing?

Howdy! I've Moved (my blog)

Welcome to my new home!

I've grown too accustomed to Blogger to be happy at LiveJournal, so I've packed everything up and moved to Blogger. "MindfulMeanderings" wasn't available, so now I'm "MindfullMeandering." I'm sure all 4 of my regular readers will adjust!

http://mindfullmeandering.blogspot.com/

I'm going to blog more in 2011, mostly about genealogy. I've been looking for an outlet to capture the process and little successes in my family tree research, and this seems to be a great venue for that. Hope you stay around.

More Found Family!

Over the last year, I've been reconnected with cousins in Israel and Australia through JewishGen and through my family tree website. Now I've been connected with family through the kindness of strangers and Yad Vashem.

My great-grandfather, Abram Broitman, immigrated from Savran, Ukraine following the pogroms of 1918 and 1919. They fled to Bucharest Romania, then Toronto Canada, and finally to New York via a short stint in Philadelphia. We didn't have much extended family on that side of the family, and the family we knew we didn't quite know how to connect with our branch of the family. When I started my first family tree in 1985 as a fourth grader, I asked my Aunt to “interview” my grandmother's older sister, Anita about the family. Anita provided the names of all of Abram’s brothers and sisters as well as his parents names. I somehow saved that piece of paper and used it when I started researching our family’s history and experience as an adult. Over the years, this slip of paper has helped me piece together the branches we were in contact with. 

About five years ago, the database at Yad Vashem which documents those who perished in the holocaust became publicly available online. It included translations of all of the submitted names from the past decades. Looking for “Broitman” from Savran then, I found the name “Etel Broitman Erlikh” from Savran, the daughter of Shulum Broitman. That was a perfect match with the names that Aunt Anita had given years earlier - my great-grandfather's sister! I thought there was a good chance that she was related, and tried to contact the name of the person who submitted the page – a man living in Mariupol, Ukraine. I sent letters to every person by that name that  I could find in Ukrainian, Israeli, and US phone directories—in English, Hebrew, and Russian. No luck then. I got one phone call back from a kind woman in Brooklyn who explained that Erlikh was the “Smith” of Ukraine.

Last week I posted an question to a Jewish Genealogy mailing list about Savran. Although unrelated to my question, a helpful researcher in Israel suggested that I check Yad Vashem to see if there were any connections to relatives, and I told him about my fruitless search for the Erlikh family. That researcher decided to look again, and found that the submitter’s daughter had submitted additional pages – and that she lived in Israel. He called her up on my behalf, and I received an e-mail from her daughter a few hours later. While the connection isn’t definitive because of the passage of time and the lack of records, I’m pretty confident that we’re cousins because the names, dates, and locations we know all line up.

The family lives in central Israel. I’m in contact with folks who would be my second-cousin once removed and my third cousin. Etel Broitman Erlikh, her husband Abram Erlikh, and three of their four children perished in the holocaust. One child survived, although I do not yet know how. He stayed in Ukraine until he died in the 1990's. They've even sent me a photo from the 1930s (above).

I am incredibly grateful for the kindness of the Israeli researcher, the availability of the Yad Vashem database, and the power of the internet to reconnect families after over 90 years!

Let them come to you

When I started doing family history research fifteen years ago, there were certain mysteries that I wanted to solve.

• Where in Europe did my family come from?
• What were the names of my ancestors?
• How and when did they arrive? Is the story of [fill in the blank] true? But the most important and interesting part of it all was
• What happened to all of the descendants of my ancestors, especially those with whom we have lost contact long ago.

I never expected that they'd find me, though.That happened yesterday.

My great grandfather, Isadore Telles, was born Itzhak Telefus in Khotin, Ukraine. Following his sister Sheava Fisherman and her family, who immigrated around 1908 Itzak traveled on the S.S. Kroonland to the Ellis Island in 1909. Itzak had a brother Pesach who immigrated to Israel, and another sister Anna who came to the US. The name Telefus was changed to Telles soon after he immigrated. In the 1950s, Itzak traveled to Israel to visit his brother and his family. In fact, my mother still has a little doll that her grandfather had brought back from Greece - a stop on his return trip.

I had always wanted to find out what happened to Pesach's family, but Pesach only had daughters, and we did not know their married names. What to do? I tried to look through old Israeli phone directories several years ago and contact many "Telefus" families, but without luck. The best I could do is post the mystery to my genealogy website, to JewishGen's Family Finder, and to wait until there were new resources to try. I posted that in 2002 or so.

Yesterday I received an e-mail from Pesach's great-grandson. He had been bored and Googled his great-grandfather's name. Google took him right to my website. He e-mailed me immediately. Their family remembers my great-grandfather's visit and have letters from my great-grandfather still. He said his mother was crying at the idea of being reunited with the long-lost family. I was just stunned. In the end, they found me.

Presidential Library - suggestions requested.

I've been inspired by the recent election to read biographies of each of the presidents.  All of 'em.  Any suggestions?

Russian Basses

A comment by my asst. choir director last night piqued my curiosity, and I thought I'd post it for other folks. The comment was one part linguistic, one part acoustic, and one part ethnomusicological. 

We are singing a program of Russian choral music, and several of the selections have unusually low bass ranges (down to C#2, ~70Hz – 2 or 3 semitones lower than we typically sing). The low part writing may be due in part to the number of Russian basses who have lower vocal ranges (or, whose bottom range is lower) compared to other choral traditions. The asst. director, who is Russian, indicated that the vocal range is influenced by Russian phonology; that something about the placement of vowels in the language leads to an expanded range (she also implied that the phonology influenced the resonance of the voice as well).

 

This struck me as unlikely. There is clearly variation in what musicians call vocal range within populations (which is why we have tenors, baritones, and basses), and also differences in vocal timbre/resonance. The implication of the choir director was that there were also differences between populations, and that this difference was somehow due to phonological features of L1.

 

I could think of three reasons why Russian Choirs may have lower basses:

1. The male Russian population is not different from other populations in this regard. Instead, there is wide support for the choirs within the population, and thus more men with extremely low voices being trained and auditioning for the choirs we hear. In other cultures, men with these vocal characteristics are more likely to engage in other activities (e.g., athletics). This is a selection bias, pure and simple.
2. The male Russian population is different from other populations with respect to vocal range, but this difference reflects physical differences in vocal cord size and vocal tract proportions (leading to greater resonance). That is, physical characteristics relating to vocal range are genetic, and the relative homogeneity of the population leads to greater frequency of these traits.
3. As the choir director indicated, the difference reflects some phonological influence on vocal range. If this is the case, what is the mechanism for this? I'm not even sure what causes variations in vocal range. Sure, vocal cord length is a major determinant, but is it the only one? 

Any thoughts from the virtual peanut gallery?

Video: The Jewish Cemetery of Tarnobrzeg, Poland

One of the random things I do is volunteer as the website administrator for a "ShtetLinks" website. That's is a website--hosted by a Jewish Genealogical Organization (http://www.jewishgen.org) --about a particular European Jewish community. Tarnobrzeg, Poland was the town that the Weil family emigrated from in the early 1890s.  I've been the web admin for the site for 5 years or so.  A couple of hours a year keeps the site informative and interesting.

Some high school students in Tarnobrzeg decided to interview older townspeople about the Jewish community there, about the cemetery that is still in the town, and about the horrific end of a vibrant community during WWII.  Gayle Riley, the brains behind the website, had the vido subtitled into English. You can find it here: http://www.shtetlinks.jewishgen.org/Tarnobrzeg/index.htm

The music is a little mismatched, but the story is powerful, sad, and tragically typical. The nonchalance of the townspeople is particularly fascinating. The video is long - 18 minutes - but worthwhile to watch.

Netflix and the Queue of Remorse

Netflix announced this week that it is doing away with its "multiple profile" feature. You can read about here and here. This feature allowed for multiple lists of movies to be kept under the same account, and enabled account holders to determine how many movies from each separate queue were to be sent each month. This feature keeps Beren and me from killing each other, and we invested significant time in creating our own separate queues.

Needless to say, I think doing away with this feature is a terrible idea. And the way they are doing it—simply deleting the secondary queues and not offering descriptions of the “beneficial features” that are leading to this decision—seems unwise. But all day I've been trying to figure out Netflix's motivation for this decision. They claim that the feature is used by only 2% of their 8.5 million users (170,000 users), that it was confusing and cumbersome to folks, and that they'd rather focus their resources on other features that will be of interest to a larger proportion of users. Most of their answers rang hollow to me. The feature was so useful, why not fix the human factors impediments to wider adoption?

So, what is the business case for making this decision? This is clearly a very small risk for them; 98% of Netflix users won’t notice a change, and only a small minority of the remaining 2% will be so irked by this decision that they will cancel their account. Sure, they’ll have alienated a passionate bunch, but the loss is small – say .25% to be generous. Where else will these folks go? I can imagine the market researcher pointing out that there is a very large number of potential users who are scared by Netflix’s current interface and features, and that a proportion of these users would likely become members if the interface was simplified and pared down. So, a net gain of members.

But the message Beren and I received from Netflix today was “we don’t value your patronage, and we won’t be working to meet your needs.” We will be leaving Netflix come August 30^th, and if I worked for Blockbuster, I’d be trying to figure out how to woo disaffected Netflix members between now and then. 
 

Memorial Day

I played in a Memorial Day parade this morning.  I've been playing an old King 4-valve bell-front small-bore euphonium in the Natick American Legion Band for the past 4 years or so, in parades around eastern Massachusetts. Parades are an occupational hazard if you are a brass musician, but I welcome the infrequent exercise and the time outdoors. Upbeat marches played by 12 amateurs followed by a ceremony in which out of tune bagpipes played Amazing Grace and a pail of 15-year-olds played a tentative rendition of Taps.  

The more do I work with/for the military, the greater the importance Memorial Day has to me. Yesterday I took my sleeping son on a walk to a local cemetery and explained to him the importance of the observance. There among the graves of the Civil War veterans we talked about all of those men and women who died serving in the U.S. armed forces over the past 250 years. I spoke about his family members who died in armed conflict, both while in uniform and as non-combatants. I spoke about his family members and friends of the family who served in the military in WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and in Iraq. He slept through it all, but I hope it sets the stage for a respect for the solemnity of the observance in the future.  When he’s older, he’ll enjoy the parade in front of our house and the fun of the (now) traditional barbeques, but I also want him to realize why we have the long weekend.

Avocados

I missed avocados yesterday.

My darling wife fed my son avocados for the first time yesterday while I was businessing several hundred miles away. She offered to wait, so I could enjoy the experience with her.  I said no—why would I hold my baby from experiencing things just because I can’t be there to ogle and take photos. But it did give me pause (cue “Cats in the Cradle”). I’m going to have to travel for work. That is simply a given. I’m not alone, of course; many other people—moms and dads—have to leave their families for work travel. I even enjoy traveling, but I don’t have to like being away from them. It is just going to take an extra effort when I am home. 

This post seems pretty prosaic.  But it is true, and it is what I’m feeling while sitting on the last row of a tiny plane, adjacent to the bathroom, in a chair that doesn’t recline, about 25,000 feet above the state of Delaware.