I’ve wanted since August to give you a little more detail on how within a matter of days we were able to place Eitan Shimko’s family squarely into the Strauber-Strober-Struber family tree.
I’d like to say it was a snap for me, but a) it wasn’t a snap and b) it wasn’t me.
All of the credit for this one goes to Kristie Weiland Cohen, who has turned out to be the dogged researcher in the Jazlowiec genealogy group. All of us on the email list kept pressing Eitan for more and more details. Eitan would consult his grandmother and return to the list with what answers he could provide.
One difficulty was that the Yad Vashem records showed that Herzl Naftali Strauber had died in the Shoah. A woman identifying herself as a cousin filled out the form a decade later. Eitan could confirm with his grandmother that Herman had been born Herzl, but that his parents changed his name. But how to resolve the issue of a man “dying” in the Holocaust and then dying again in New York years later? Kristie was able to explain that to everyone’s satisfaction by saying the Yad Vashem report was in error. Perhaps it was another Herzl Strauber.
But where did Herman fit into the family tree? How was he related? That’s where Kristie came up with an incredible solution.
Kristie remembered a document we’d been given three and a half years earlier. It was a typescript of a man’s recollection of life in the shtetl of Piotrow, which was near Potok Zloty and Jazlowiec (the two primary villages in what is now the western part of Ukraine that we’ve been able to trace our ancestors to). The typescript remembrance was written by Benjamin Schweber for students at the Yeshiva of Hudson County. (I’m guessing it was Hudson County, New Jersey.)
The document came to us in 2008 from Stanley Strober, who lives in Tucson, Arizona. We don’t know how he got it, but he did say at the time that his ancestors were from Piotrow as well.
One of the first rules of genealogical research is to hold on to everything you get, because things that may not fit in now could very well come into clearer focus down the road.
Kristie remembered a reference—one line in a 37-page document. And it was a off-hand reference at that to a fire that had ravaged the town and how the sacred documents were taken to the home of a learned man for safe-keeping.
That learned man was named Berel Strauber in the document, was is, genealogically speaking, a direct hit for Berl Strauber on our family tree. And it said he had a grandson named Jacob Strauber. The Berl Strauber on our family tree had a grandson named Jacob.
There was a small leap of logic we still needed to make. Herman’s tombstone, in giving his Hebrew name and his father’s Hebrew name, indicated his father Shimon was a rabbi. The leap was in assuming that a known Strauber in Piotrow, which Schweber said had twenty Jewish families in it, would be related to another Strauber we believe to have been a rabbi.
So we took the leap and put Herman in the tree as a brother of the grandson Jacob, and another grandson of Berl.
I am linking Schweber’s entire 37-page remembrance of life in Piotrow, entitled Chanuka Gift to Yeshiva of Hudson County in Memory of My Parents and Grandparents. We know nothing about Schweber, have no idea when he wrote this, have no idea (other than a contextual one from things like mentions of a motor vehicle, something he had never seen before) of when he lived in Piotrow.
But Kristie certainly did exemplify (again) how to remember that every clue, no matter how seemingly extraneous at the time, may in the future come to center stage.
