I’ve been seeing random shocks of gold in my neighborhood over the last couple weeks, the annual eruption of the California state flower, the golden poppy.

Poppies are seasonal things in these parts. They bloom in springtime—in great abundance if it has been a wet winter. But this has been a particularly dry winter. We’ve had about five inches of rain, roughly a third of our annual average.

The Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve, where the rolling hills often look like they’re carpeted in gold, is reporting a disappointing bloom.

And yet, there are random pockets of orange in several places in my neighborhood, including this one where the poppies just popped up amid what could politely be called unkempt landscaping.

It was too good not to stop and snap off a couple of shots.

I waited a few days to post these in the hopes the weather in the Midwest and Eastern Seaboard would improve a bit. I don’t want it to look like I’m gloating.

I had a few minutes last Sunday night and figured I’d dash down to the water’s edge at Playa del Rey to catch the last remnants of sunlight. Golden hour almost always delivers!

What could go wrong? A golden sunset, birds and water. All the elements were in place.

It occurred to me that, in all the times I’ve shot beach sunsets, I’d never gotten the iconic shot. Well, it’s so iconic it’s damn near a cliche by now. It’s the lifeguard tower with the golden orb behind it. You know, the “Endless Summer” shot. It was right there in front of me. But to make it just a little different, I used some software to play around with it a little in post-production.

It’s a great shot, even if everyone else in the world with a camera got to it before I did.

Here’s a result of a little more fiddling with the settings after the shot was taken. Another iconic seashore shot.

I was still at it even after the sun dropped below the horizon. That’s an (almost) full moon over a waterfront home and beside some palm trees. I think I need a little more practice chasing the moon.

I caught the color out of the corner of my eye on Sunday afternoon, as I drove through Los Alamitos. It wasn’t a lot—just a nicely planted yard in front of the Chamber of Commerce—but I popped into the parking lot to capture a couple images.

A few miles to the east, at the top of Signal Hill, I found a “scenic walk” around the rim of the hill and found a little more evidence that the season was changing.

Sometimes the best shots are right outside the door.

These are lemons. They’re growing on a tree right outside the front door of our home. Often times, I don’t even notice them. But the other day, I did.

This is an orange. It’s growing alongside the lemons. I didn’t really notice it until I started trying to find a good spot to get a shot of the lemons.

Sometimes I don’t notice the wonders of the southern California climate. The day I photographed the fruit trees in the front yard, there was a blizzard sweeping along huge swaths of the Midwest and the Eastern Seaboard. I figured it was cruel to post shots of the fruit growing in my front yard when so many were zipping up their jackets and cinching their scarves just a little tighter.

Not all the fruit in the front yard is forming yet. These are Babcock Peach blossoms. They’re just now being pollinated. The fruit won’t ripen until late summer, when it’s always a race to see if we can get to the peaches before the squirrels do.

The tangerine tree is blossoming as well. That’s odd, because at the bottom of the same tree, the fruit is close to being ripe. I guess this could correctly be called a “second-growth” tangerine blossom.

The plan was to see what’s in plain sight, and then photograph it. Who knew I’d spot an entire orchard ten days before the vernal equinox? But I guess the whole point is that there’s a whole universe where you least expect to see it.

Dina emailed me from Israel after I posted the last batch of her photos with some corrections. She was kind enough to send even more pictures of life for the Strauber-Strobers of Potok Zloty in the 1930s.

Among the errors I made in describing the last set of photos was in referring to a building as the home. It wasn’t, Dina said. The building in that set of photos was a warehouse, she said. The house was in fact a large, stately place. Baruch, Dina’s grandfather, was a prosperous horse-trader, and the family home in Potok Zloty was befitting a man of his wealth.

The family home in visible in the background on this photo from the early 1930s of Dina Strauber, Debora’s half-sister, and Avner, her half-brother and the youngest of Baruch’s children.

Another error I made is saying that Debora, Dina’s mother, survived the war in Potok Zloty. In fact, she left Potok Zloty in 1935 because she did not have a good relationship with Riva (Kengisberg) Strober, her step-mother, and went to Israel, where she had cousins. Her brother Getzel joined her in Israel in 1938.

This is a photo of Debora with her step-mother, with the family home in Potok Zloty in the background.

Dina said Debora and Getzel made an effort to get their younger brother Leib-Leon to come to Israel in 1939, but because the war had already pressed on Galicia, it wasn’t possible for him to leave.

Devora’s mother, who died of heart disease in 1923, was buried in Potok Zloty. This is Devora at her mother’s grave sometime before she left in 1935.

It has taken me a couple of days to process the latest burst of photos from Dina Shaket in Israel. This group of pictures continues to add depth to what we know of our ancestors lives in Potok Zloty, one of three shtetlach we know our ancestors lived in Galicia, which was once in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then in Poland, and now in the western part of Ukraine.

This is Dina’s mother, Debora Strauber, with her youngest brother Leib-Leon, in front of their home in Potok Zloty in 1932. Debora would have been 21 that year, and Leib-Leon 9. The home looks a little rustic by our 21st Century standards. The door is unsanded wood, and the stucco seeming to be uneven. But there are a few “modern conveniences” in this photo as well. Note, for instance, the piping on the roof, clearly a kind of rain-gutter system, and the clean and modern clothing they’re wearing.

This is Leib-Leon in the same year, apparently in their home woodshop. He’s holding what appears to be a parallel clamp, often used to steady wood parts that have been glued. There are also a hand plane and some wood shavings on the workbench. And that may well be a turned table leg in the parallel clamp, or possibly protruding from the work bench next to it. Debora Strauber survived the Holocaust, moved to Israel after the war, and died in 1969. Leib-Leon did not survive the Holocaust.

These are the half-siblings of Debora and Leib-Leon, the children of Riva (Kenigsberg) Strauber and Baruch Strober. Riva was his second wife. They married after Baruch’s first wife, Dina, died in 1923. From left to right, they are Dina Strauber, Avner Strauber, and Shmuel Strauber. If this picture was indeed taken in 1932, Dina would have been 7, Avner 2, and Shmuel 8. All three perished in the Holocaust.

Dina also forwarded some more recent photos.

This is Dina’s father, Joseph Glatzer, with Dina’s oldest son, Dvir, in Israel in 1972.

This is Getzel Strauber, the brother of Dina’s mother Devora, with Dvir in 1972 in Israel.

Dina Shaket also provided a lot of genealogy nuts and bolts about her branch of the family. I’ve been updating the family tree with that information, and will post an update as soon as possible.

The updated descendants of Baruch Strober, including photos. (Click on the graphic to enlarge it.)

I spent some time today trying to integrate all of the photos Dina Shaket was kind enough to contribute of her branch of the family, and to include quite a bit of updated information that came with the pictures. This graphic is a simple printout of what we think that branch of the family now looks like.

Of course, it’s a little bit more complicated than it looks. Baruch Strober and his first wife, Dina Strauber, were first cousins before their marriage. This wasn’t all that unusual among Eastern European Jews in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Still, it confuses early 21st Century genealogy software. Seen from the point of view of Baruch’s branch, this is what the family looked like. It’s similar when seen through Dina’s branch, but doesn’t include as many people.

Genealogy arithmetic is actually quite interesting. If we start with the brothers Lev Ari Strober and Elyakim Getzel Strober, presumably born sometime around 1850, we can at the moment count 227 descendants. Genealogical progress seems to trump geometric progression by a lot.

And this is a branch of the family that lost scores of its members in the Holocaust. Many of them, Dina mentioned in a comment on the post last Saturday, died in the Belzec Concentration Camp, which was about 100 miles northwest of where they lived. In the eight months that Belzec operated in 1942, the Nazis murdered more than a half-million Jews by carbon-monoxide poisoning. The pace and magnitude of the killing there weren’t fully known until the early 1990s, a half-century after the camp had been closed down because most of the region’s Jews were dead.

I was surprised overnight by an email from Dina Shaket in Israel. Dina is another member of the far-flung Strauber-Strober-Struber family. Her email came with three photographs of her direct ancestors in the Old Country, and the promise that there are more photos where these came from.

Dina Strauber, daughter of Lev Ari and Raichel Strauber. She was the first wife of Baruch Strober, the son of her uncle Elyakim Getzel Strober and his wife Hudel (Shapiro). Marriage between first cousins was not uncommon in the shtetl in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The photo appears to be a combination drawing and photo, a technique that in those days was thought to be better than pure photography. (Collection of Dina Shaket.)

The computer-drawn family tree of this branch of the family has not done it justice. The database does not do well with the marriage of first cousins, common as it may once have been, because it can’t figure out under which partner to put the descendants. The work-around for this problem, which is not entirely adequate, is to create a “ghost person,” a placeholder that duplicates an actual person containing a note of where the link should be. The result in this case is that it’s not only the computer getting confused. It’s also anyone who tries to follow the tree.

Baruch Strober with his second wife, Riva, and their children, probably sometime between 1925 and 1940, in Potok Zloty, the shtetl now in the western part of Ukraine. (Collection of Dina Shaket.)

It’s difficult to judge what life was like in the shtetl. Were these prosperous people or poor ones? Were they a part of the society in which they lived or were they separate from it? At first glance, this photo shows a building that would be rundown by 21st Century standards. But with its glass windows and stucco walls, it may have been state-of-the-art in 1925 in Eastern Europe. The unpaved street? Well, is it even a street, or was it the land surrounding the house in fall or spring, before the ground had sprouted vegetation?

The clothing they’re wearing is modern, which gives us a clue that Baruch and Riva were probably “modern Orthodox” Jews rather than Hasidim. Conflict between different brands of Judaism were rife at this time in Galicia, which is what this part of Ukraine was called. Many communities were split by theological identity. (Note that Baruch’s head is covered by a hat and he has a trimmed beard. However, his coat appears to be gray rather than the black common among the Hasidim. The boys do not have their heads covered. The girl is wearing a skirt to her knees and a sweater, and the vest may be an indication of attendance at a public school. This was, after all, a time before there was universal education for girls. Riva also appears to be not wearing a wig and her sleeves come to her elbows rather than all the way to her wrists. This would indicate a very liberal orthodox Jewish family.

The photograph gives us clues to how our ancestors lived in the shtetl, but it doesn’t give us answers.

The confused family tree we have so far indicates that Baruch Strober had six children—three with his first wife Dina and three with his second wife, Riva—but it’s entirely possible this information is not correct, or is at the very least incomplete. We’ll have to keep working with Dina and others in this line to figure out who’s who and what the birth order is.

Huddle (Shapiro) Strober, mother of Baruch Strober, in center with her head covered. She’s surrounded by her daughter-in-law Riva, and her grandchildren. (Collection of Dina Shaket.)

The fact that there are photographs at all indicate that the Strobers and Straubers of Potok Zloty were several notches above mere subsistence. It took money in those days to have a camera, to buy film, to have the film processed and printed. And it could very well be, given the symmetrical arrangements of the family, that these pictures were professionally taken at their home. That would have been quite an indulgence in those days.

The third photo in the group Dina sent is a gem of a genealogical link. It shows Huddle (Shapiro) Strober, Baruch’s mother. What makes it a gem is that she was probably born in the middle of the 19th century, which means she was very old by the age standards of that time and place. More than that, though, her photograph links us today back more than a century and a half, from her birth to our Internet-fueled age.

Before Dina’s photos, most of us could only try to imagine what our family looked like before it came to the big cities in so many places in the world. We had some historical photographs to go on, but those were pictures of other people. With these three photos from Dina, we can now look upon our family, our forebears, our ancestors. That makes a huge difference. These are no longer people like us. They are us.

Our understanding of those lines on the family tree is coming slowly—ploddingly, it seems sometimes. But it is coming. What were once just marks on a chart are gaining depth. And they’re also gaining the weight of family links.

Click on the photo to triple its size. (Collection of Terri Buchanan.)

I was lucky enough to attend a reunion last August of people I went to elementary and junior high school with. Among the great things to come of it was this panoramic photo of my graduating class (’68) at Whaley Junior High School in Compton.

Amazingly, I don’t even remember this photo being taken. Clearly, it was a big event—we were color-coordinated, and all the boys were wearing ties. That must have been a big deal in those days. But I sure don’t remember it.

Spending an afternoon in a park catching up with so many people with whom I shared so much for so long was a lot of fun. We were in many ways a crazy generation stuck in crazy times—not too many weeks before this picture was taken, Dr. Martin Luther King was gunned down on a motel balcony in Memphis, and not many weeks after this picture was taken, Sen. Robert Kennedy was shot to death in a hotel kitchen not far from where we lived.

It’s fascinating to gaze across these smiling faces now and see the promise of a generation, just as it was fascinating to sit in the park last summer and hear how it had turned out for so many of them.

I was hunting a few days ago for something to take pictures of that had the added advantage of being nearby. I didn’t get more than about 300 yards from home when I came upon something I’d never seen before.

Officially, it’s called the Dunleer Bridge because it connects Dunleer Drive to the Palms Recreation Center. In truth, it’s a short concrete footbridge across an old but soon-to-be-active-again railroad right-of-way.

I haven’t spent a lot of time there, but the bridge seems to get a fair amount of traffic. In addition to being scenic, it appears to serve as a neighborhood shortcut to the outside world—at least for those on the way to experience the outside world on foot.

Besides the people who use the bridge, there’s a sizable community of feral cats who make their way across the bridge.

A number of people stop by each day, often just before and just after sundown, to leave food for the cats, so the small bridge is a vital link in the neighborhood ecosystem.

There’s a lot of activity in the ditch these days, as workers and heavy earth-moving equipment labor to restore the roadbed of what was once the Pacific Electric Red Car line into an extension of the Metro Expo Line. Light-rail is—quite literally—right around the corner. Metro says the extension from Culver City to Santa Monica will be complete in 2015.