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The Vic files, part 2

Another surprise in the genealogy files Vic Struber mailed me this week—Vic and his second cousin, Bennett Strober, started to organize a family reunion in 1983!

19830100 reunion draft letterThere are a couple of great insights here. One is that they have largely been unable to track those who descended from female members of the Strauber/Strober/Struber family. This was a considerable problem at the dawn of the computer age, when the essential information for charting a family was on paper or in the heads of those members of the family. But what it meant is that the reunion would have included only people with the family surname—so the descendants of a woman (like me, perhaps, the great-grandson of Surah Henya (Strober) Schkolnick), or of multiple women, wouldn’t be included.

To this day, it’s difficult to track family members over multiple name-changes. We sometimes hear from people sharing information with us things like, “Oh, she married a guy named Gordon, and they had a couple of kids.” Maybe it’s all the information that person can offer at the moment, but it’s pretty obvious that it doesn’t help an investigator hunt down and contact that woman’s descendants.

Vic and Bennett also intended to add a little market research.

19830100 reunion questionnaireAs these were apparently draft documents that were never distributed, we don’t know the results of how many wished to be in contact and how many didn’t.

What we do know is that there was once a great gathering of the far-flung members of the Strauber/Strober/Struber clan. It was on May 4, 1941 in Brooklyn, NY, where the bulk of the family lived, and it was a big to-do.

SSS reunion 19410504This was billed as the “1st Anniversary Dinner” of the Strober Family Circle. And to the best of anyone’s knowledge, there was no “2nd Anniversary Dinner.” Seven months after the family gathered, World War II broke out. And whatever momentum had been established before the war, it was apparently gone after the war.

But the memories of that evening together were not lost on two of those in attendance, Vic Struber and Bennett Strober. More than forty years later, they were working on bringing everyone back together.

strober reunion bennett and vic id'dThose who have been part of the Jazlowiec discussion group on Google know that there have been calls there for a huge family reunion. Those calls have all come from Scott Strober, who is (not surprisingly) Bennett’s son.

So far, there are no plans for a family get-together. But the digital equivalent is taking place here, on a Facebook group, and on the Google group. If you’re part of the family, be a part of the discussion!

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • Sheldon Strober August 7, 2014, 3:13 am

    Could not have been more pleased with an opportunity to see and know the faces of blood relatives that I had never met in the 1941 picture of the Strober family circle. Living on a farm in west Hunterdon County NJ with parents and 8 siblings gave me an intense sense of family, yet cloistered and separated from the broader base of relatives who remained in Brooklyn or who eventually moved
    to other locations. Baba Strober rarely visited and I never knew my father’s father. I squint to see there faces in the reunion picture trying see some resemblance. Advanced age has produced my filters over the images of the past. Would love to be refreshed by the present , and join in a family circle reunion.

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