Jenifer Novik promised she’d send me photos of her family, and I must admit I was stunned when the FedEx envelope arrived with almost 90 prints of four generations of her family.
It has taken me a couple of months to scan all the shots and then to re-touch them and re-size them for posting here. You’ll have to admit, it’s quite a display.
Jenifer descends from Berl Strober #100—as he’s listed on our genealogy chart. This was a branch that Scott Strober, in our GoogleGroup conversations with a man in Tucson he’d been in touch with, Stanley Strober, kept insisting had to be related—same surname, from a shtetl not far from Jazlowiec, where the families we then knew about were from. I wasn’t so sure.
It’s clear today from genetic testing and Kristie Weiland Cohen’s laborious efforts that the families are related, but we still don’t know the precise link between Abraham Aaron Strober, my great-great-great grandfather, and Berl Strober, Jenifer’s great-great-great-grandfather. Were they brothers? Father and son? Uncle and nephew? We still don’t know enough to answer that.
What do we do know is that Jenifer has provided us with photos that chronicle seven decades in the history of her immediate family—of her grandparennts, Ralph and Pauline (Strober) Novik; of her father, Jack Novik, who died in 1988 at the age of 42 and whose New York Times obituary details a stellar career as a public-interest attorney and legal scholar; her mother, Sallie Isaacson, who is a member of our GoogleGroup discussion; her uncle, Neil Novik, and his children; and of her own son, Jacob, who became a few months ago a member at of the GoogleGroup discussion group in his own right—our first participating teen.
Enjoy Jenifer’s photos.
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Many, many thanks, Jenifer, and Paul, for all of your hard work assembling this treasure trove. It so well chronicles the growth–literally–of the Novik family, but helps to tell the story of many individuals’ lives over the course of decades. This is important, for it says far much more about people than lines connecting names ever could.