≡ Menu
0121

Clara (Skolnick) Rosenblum, with husband Jacob Rosenblum, in the “old country,” probably Buchach, Galicia, Austria-Hungary, sometime around 1912. (Collection of Jim Ostroff)

Sometimes documents create questions rather than answer them. That’s the case with this set of papers from 1943-44. They concern the naturalization of my great-aunt, Tante Clara (Skolnick) Rosenblum.

Here’s what’s so curious: her application for U.S. citizenship came 29 years after she arrived in New York aboard the SS George Washington.

Why the delay?

Clara was the youngest child of Chaim Shulem Schkolnik and Surah Henya (Strober) Schkolnik. That makes her my grandfather’s younger sister. But the connectedness gets a little more complicated. Through her marriage to Jacob Rosenblum, she was a  sister-in-law to Bobscha (Tepper) Rosenblum. She became close friends with one of Bobscha’s younger sisters, Esther Tepper—such close friends, in fact, that she introduced Esther to Clara’s brother Paul. Esther and Paul married. That made Clara and Esther sisters-in-law through my grandfather Paul and sisters-in-law through Esther’s sister Bobscha. And besides that double connection, Clara and Esther remained best friends for the rest of their lives.

Because of their closeness, it’s not at all surprising that Clara and Esther would be witnesses at each other’s naturalization. Who better to vouch for you than your best friend/sister-in-law?

My best guess about why it took almost three decades after Clara arrived at Ellis Island to become a citizen is that there really wasn’t a reason to… until her husband died in 1943. And while the application of Social Security laws in the mid-40s is a complete mystery to me, I’m guessing that the naturalization was necessary for Clara to collect her husband Jacob’s benefits after his death.

It’s the only thing that makes any sense.

Jacob Rosenblum, Clara’s husband, died in August 1943. It’s the only event I can think of that could have prompted the rush toward naturalization. A month later, Clara obtained documentation that she had arrived in the United States on April 14, 1913 aboard the SS George Washington sailing from Bremen, Germany.

rosenblum klara cert of arrival 19430928The Certificate of Arrival, issued under the European spelling of her name, would have been a necessary document for naturalization. It showed that she had been in the country as a permanent resident for the requisite time to be naturalized.

But if collecting her late husband’s benefits was the goal, why wait a month? I suspect Clara didn’t. I think the gap was the result of how long things took in those days, especially in the middle of World War II. Getting the Certificate of Arrival would have taken time for the request to be transmitted to immigration authorities, for a search of the ship’s manifest and the immigration documents, which had to have taken time to retrieve, and for the the certificate itself to be prepared, signed and delivered to her.

rosenblum clara natural pet 19430000

(Click to enlarge)

The Petition for Naturalization is not dated, but my guess is that it came hard on the heels of the Certificate of Arrival being issued. And with the Petition is the Affidavit of Witnesses.

rosenblum clara affidavit of witnesses

The Affidavit of Witnesses is dated November 10, 1943. Virginia Altman, the first witness, was Clara’s oldest daughter. Esther Skolnick, the second witness, is my grandmother and Clara’s best friend/sister-in-law.

rosenblum clara nat card 19440202Even with the great push to get it done, it took three more months before the Naturalization was finalized. That happened on February 2, 1944.

All of these documents were retrieved a few years ago by researcher extraordinaire and cousin Kristie Weiland Cohen, when she went digging through uncatalogued paperwork in a storeroom archive in a government basement in Manhattan. It’s four pretty simple pieces of paper that no one in the family had ever seen before. But those four pieces of paper tell a remarkable story of a new widow trying to work her way through the bureaucracy to find a way to support her family.

{ 0 comments }

grab_skewedYup, it’s been four years since I launched this blog. Just about this time of day on Halloween 2010, I finished four weeks of programming, uploading and coding—things which were then foreign to me—and thought that it worked. Well, it mostly all worked. The truth is, some of it worked. But throwing caution to the wind, I pulled down the construction page and let the world in.

The first post, in which I set some lofty goals, is still here. I’ve achieved some of the goals. Others I’m keeping up with. And then there are those that are still on the to-do list.

Gauging the subjects I’ve written about from the cloud in the right sidebar, the most common one is Rebecca. She’s tagged in 17 posts. And that is as it should be. My daughter is close to my heart. And to be completely candid, she drives the traffic. There are a few visitors when I post something here, and hundreds of visitors when I post something about Rebecca.

Since the construction page came down, there have been 31,362 pageviews, which averages out to more than 650 per month, or just over 20 a day. Inasmuch as I tend to post in bursts—from a height of 12 in November 2010 to lows in many months where I didn’t post at all—I’m fine with the averages. Another stat from Google Analytics: there have been 9,190 users, which is Google’s word for unique visitors. That works out to 6.38 per day. That sounds low, until you consider that if I met more than 6 new people a day in person, it would be beyond belief. Nearly 200 new and different people each month have read my musings, sloshed through some of the genealogy archives that are posted here, looked at my photos, or otherwise engaged with what’s here.

I’m not going anywhere, and neither is the site. I re-upped the subscription with the service provider and plan to stick around for a long, long time. I hope you’ve enjoyed the site—and that you’ll continue to enjoy it.

{ 0 comments }

I got a chance Sunday to snap a few pictures. My pal Bryan Frank had asked if I wanted to shoot this weekend. He proposed a late-night excursion to Hollywood. I declined on the grounds that I’m a lot older than Bryan and less interested in wandering those mean streets til the wee hours. I countered with a visit to Recreation Park in El Segundo. I won, primarily because it seemed so low-impact, even to a dynamo like Bryan.

DSC_0076I’ve written quite a bit about El Segundo. Forget for a moment (as everybody who lives there seems to) that it is surrounded by a sewage treatment plant, an international airport, an oil refinery, and a freeway. When you’re in El Segundo, you’re essentially in a small town in the middle of one of the world’s biggest urban areas. I was hoping to see what photographic vestiges we’d find of that small-town life on a warm weekend afternoon at the end of summer.

DSC_0051I guess you can’t go wrong with lacrosse, especially since the best vantage point of the game was about ten paces from where I’d snapped the water tower. Some might call it laziness. I prefer to call it economy of motion.

DSC_0080About ten more paces down the trial was a pick-up basketball game. Two on one. These guys had a whole lot more energy than I did that afternoon. And they seemed to be having fun.

DSC_0146We switched into street-photography mode when we saw this little guy with his mom. They were headed for the sandbox. The mom kept trying to carry the kid’s sand toys, but the kid was having none of it. He insisted on carrying the bucket himself.

DSC_0176But these were without a doubt the busiest guys we saw at the park. They were working away like there was no tomorrow.

{ 1 comment }

For David Schendlinger, a great-grandson of Nellie (Becker) Struber, here are the other photos I have of her in the database.

The Strubers, handwritten note on the photo indicates it was taken in Oct. 1891.  L to R: Mendel "Max" Struber, his sons Bill Struber, Sam Struber, his wife Nellie (Becker) Struber, his son Jack Struber, his daughter Annie Struber, and his brother Sruel "Israel" Strauber. (Collection of Victor R. Struber)

The Strubers, handwritten note on the photo indicates it was taken in Oct. 1891. L to R: Mendel “Max” Struber, his sons Bill Struber, Sam Struber, his wife Nellie (Becker) Struber, his son Jack Struber, his daughter Annie Struber, and his brother Sruel “Israel” Strauber. (Collection of Victor R. Struber)

Nellie (Becker) Struber, note on back indicates photo taken in 1912, unknown place. (Collection of Victor R. Struber)

Nellie (Becker) Struber, note on back indicates photo taken in 1912, unknown place. (Collection of Victor R. Struber)

And that’s why these photos are so valuable. Each of us holds a piece of the family history. It could be that others in disparate branches of the family tree have never seen a particular piece. So let’s share them here.

{ 0 comments }

I’d hardly hit the publish button on yesterday’s post about building a comprehensive photographic database of my genealogy project when Vic Struber emailed a photo I’d never before seen.

The Struber family at the beach, probably sometime in 1914, probably at Brighton Beach or Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY. (Collection of Victor R. Struber)

The Struber family at the beach, probably sometime in 1914, probably at Brighton Beach or Coney Island, Brooklyn, NY. (Collection of Victor R. Struber)

From left to right, the people in the picture are: (unidentified woman in bow hat, Michael “Mike” Struber, Mike’s sister Libbie Struber holding her niece Frieda Schendlinger, Annie (Struber) Schedlinger (sister of Libbie and Mike and mother of Frieda), and Nellie (Becker) Struber (mother of Mike, Libbie, and Annie; grandmother of Frieda).

This is exactly the kind of picture that tells us much about the lives of our ancestors. It’s not a dramatic moment in a family, and yet it gives us a window into what people’s lives were like. Their smiles speak volumes. The setting—a day at the beach—speaks volumes. Everyone, with the possible exception of Mike, who appears to have on a tank top that was standard beach-wear in those days, is in street clothes (which may well have been standard beach-wear for women in those days).

The database is growing, and with it our understanding of how our ancestors lived.

{ 2 comments }

photo_mosaicFor as long as I’ve been keeping track of genealogy, I’ve been building a database of family photos. The idea was that the genealogy factoids would become the text, and the photos would be the pictures of this centuries-long family saga.

I have done okay. Several family members have taken me up on my offer to pay the freight on any pictures they cared to send me. Some sent hundreds of pictures that took weeks for me to scan.

The goal was to have a repository of family photos that we could display online. That way, everyone in the family would have equal access to the family history. It could be an online scrapbook that everyone can share.

Now, with more than a thousand images in the database, I’m set to begin the work of getting the whole thing online. It won’t be immediate because of how much technical effort is involved.

Step 1 is to migrate the photo database—the list of each image that includes a description of the picture, who contributed it, when it was taken, who is in it—to the photos themselves. It seems a whole lot more sensible to store all of the information in one file than to have it spread across multiple files with some tricky proprietary formats. This process requires some tricky computer scripting that is at the moment a little beyond my skillset, but I’ve learned that if I don’t push, I don’t make progress.

Step 2 is to find an online utility capable of reading the embedded information directly from the photo files and displaying it online. That may be a lot easier than Step 1, but it’s still not without complexities.

So the whole thing is underway. I’m hoping to have something for you to look at soon.

{ 2 comments }

Over the decade or so that I’ve been actively interested in genealogy, I’ve had the opportunity to meet a number of my Strauber/Strober/Struber relatives and have spoken to a good many more by telephone. Generally, they seem to be people of good cheer during these contacts. Often during these exchanges, there will be a quick joke, a chortle here and there, perhaps even a pun.

So imagine my surprise in reviewing the files Vic Struber sent me to find included a handbill for a Struber descendant who’s actually a professional at laughing, or at least getting others to.

schendlinger_david_flyerWhen I emailed the flyer from Vic’s files to David, who now lives in Madison, Wisconsin, he acknowledged what an artifact it is. He guessed the flyer was about 30 years old, from the mid-1980s, when he’d moved from Vancouver, BC to Los Angeles.

He’d previously given me permission to use his Facebook profile picture.

david schendlinger at mikeIt shows, among other things, that, mike in hand, he’s still up there working for laughs.

David hails from the Mendel “Max Struber line of the family. The lineage goes Mendel “Max” Struber > Annie (Struber) Schendlinger > Sidney Schendlinger > David Schendlinger. The lineage continues another two generations in that line.

I’d originally “found” David on Facebook almost four years ago, in one of my irregular searches of the common surnames in our family tree, and we’d had a few back-and-forth exchanges by Facebook and email where he was kind enough to provide me with the names and dates on his branch of the family tree.

There’s a recurrent dream in our genealogy discussions to one day have a huge family meet-up, much like the 1941 gathering in Brooklyn, where we can all meet and get to know each other as our ancestors knew each other in the shtetl.

It’s a nice dream. I don’t know if it will ever happen, which is why at this point it’s a dream. But it is astonishing to learn how, from a single collection of DNA somewhere back there in eastern Europe a couple centuries ago, we are now an incredibly diverse group of thousands of men, women, and children literally scattered all over the world.

And it’s nice to know that among us, somebody is looking after the laughter.

{ 0 comments }

This is a primer in the value of primary documents in genealogy research. And it’s also a lesson in sticking to it.

Chaim “Heiman” Strober was a son of Schmeel Hirsch Strober, and a grandson of Yoinus Folic Strober. That makes him the nephew of my great-grandmother Surah Henya (Schkolnik) Strober. And except for one tiny picture from the 1940s, that’s all I knew about him.

But my cousin Kristie Weiland, who threw herself headlong into genealogy research some years ago, helped us to learn a lot more about him. Kristie went digging in the (largely unindexed) archives of the New York courts some years ago and came up with three documents that tell us much more about this ancestor. All three documents involve his path to American citizenship in the 1920s.

19210604 Strober Chaim Heiman first Declaration of IntentionThe first of the documents was filed in New York Supreme Court (which had jurisdiction over immigration matters at that time) on June 4, 1921. It is called a Declaration of Intention, and it began Heiman’s journey from a resident alien to citizenship.

Why a 44-year-old man who had lived in Brooklyn for almost two decades would decide in 1921 that he needed to suddenly become a citizen isn’t clear. Those were years when the Red scare swept America. The previous year, in a series of actions undertaken by U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, more than 500 immigrants were rounded up and tagged for deportation because of suspected Communist, Socialist, or anarchist political views. Note that the Declaration of Intention form requires the applicant to affirm that he or she is not an anarchist, bigamist or polygamist, and to swear it before God. Perhaps people who had immigrated to the U.S., as Heiman had, were worried their immigration status was in jeopardy unless they became citizens.

19251000 chaim heiman strober natrualization petitition (2)

(click to enlarge)

A little over four years later, on October 9, 1925, Heiman was back in court in Brooklyn to get his petition for naturalization. By then, control of immigration had shifted from State Court to Federal Court, and typewriters had become the standard way to file government forms. Heiman listed the names and birthdates of his five children, and we’re able to see the signatures of his witnesses, his uncle, Israel Strauber, and his brother in law, Isidor Mosberg. Israel listed his occupation as “fixtures” and Isidor listed his as “candy.” Heiman also indicated that he left Europe from Rotterdam, Holland in 1903 aboard the vessel Marion, had arrived in Philadelphia two weeks later, and had come to New York City three days after arriving. He listed his occupation as tinsmith and roofer.

He listed his wife as Ida (though she was known in the family by her Yiddish name Hudel) and gave her birthdate as June 5, 1879. Her gave her birthplace as something the clerk heard as “Gazlowitz, Austria” but which is almost certainly Jazlowiec (pronounced YAHZ’-lu-vitz), the same shtetl so many other members of this part of the family are from. He listed his own birthdate as May 3, 1877 and his place of birth as “Bucharch, Austria,” which is almost certainly Buczacz (pronounced boo-CHATCH’ in Polish, Ukrainian, and German, and bu-CHOOCH’ in Yiddish), which was the equivalent of the county seat.

19260112 chaim heiman strober oath of allegiance

(Click to enlarge.)

Three months later, Heiman’s Petition for Naturalization was granted, he took an Oath of Allegiance to the United States, and became a U. S. citizen. He had 20 grandchildren, scores of great-grandchildren, and the lineage has now reached into the next generation, great-great-grandchildren.

{ 1 comment }

The tropical weather that washed over southern California last weekend drew me out to the water just before dusk. It was humid (something we seldom say in Los Angeles) and there were broken clouds (something else we seldom say here). That’s often a recipe for a pretty good sunset.

IMG_1774The view from Burton Chace Park in Marina del Rey toward the west was one I hadn’t photographed before. That’s a little disingenuous. I’ve been several times to the two other basins just to the north, Basins F and G, but this was a maiden voyage on Basin H.

IMG_1780So you go to the Marina, and you get lots of boats. That’s just the way the world works. And I was content with that. It’s been at least a few weeks since the last time I took pictures of boats at sunset.

IMG_1782I moved toward the east, away from the point of the basin and alongside the Santa Monica Windjammers Yacht Club to see if I’d have any luck at something different than the last time I took pictures of the boats at the Marina at sunset. The shot looked a little cluttered with sailboat masts, and then it dawned on me that I’d never tried to use the obstructions in the basin so much as I’d tried to avoid them.

So I looked for something without an obstruction.

IMG_1799Now there’s one thing about sunset shooting. It’s on its own schedule, not on yours. If you want the sun, you wait for the sun. I had nowhere else to be, so I waited.

And then I framed up the obstruction.

IMG_1808I guess obstruction does have its beauty, doesn’t it?

{ 1 comment }

I’m a week late in getting these posted, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t show pictorial proof that Rebecca is in place at UC Berkeley.

IMG_1759This is Foothill dormitory on the northeast side of the Berkeley campus. It’s about 90 seconds after the four of us—Rebecca, her mom, Chris, and I—got the bed heater over the mattress, the sheets on, and the bedspread on top.

It’s also about eight hours after a 6.0 earthquake rocked Napa, about 40 miles northeast of Berkeley.

It was an auspicious start to the day, to college, and to the new chapter in Rebecca’s life.

IMG_1760I had been through the parents’ orientation earlier in the summer, and had heard the many stories about the overwhelming emotion this moment would bring. Many of my friends, even the stoic ones like me, told me they had to use tissues when they went through this.

I had some emotions, to be sure, but none of them were of the kind likely to bring tears to my eyes. I’d wondered about this moment from Rebecca’s birth, maybe even from her conception. I’d wondered if I’d be able to convey to any kid the importance of working hard and staying focused in high school, of having high aspirations, and of figuring out a way to fulfill them. I guess I did convey those things.

Tears? Nah. I’m thrilled Rebecca is getting to live her dream, just as a lifetime ago I was able to live mine. I’m ecstatic she, alone, made the choice of where to go and what to study. I’m happiest that Rebecca is getting to be Rebecca.

It doesn’t get any better than that.

{ 2 comments }

Here are some more treasures from the files Vic Struber sent me. These are the death certificates of Vic’s grandfather, Mendel “Max” Struber, and my great-grandmother, Surah Henya (Strober) Schkolnik. They were siblings.

VRS Doc 010Death certificates are treasure-troves of important information for genealogy researchers, but they can also be stores of misinformation. Note that Max’s surname is misspelled on his death certificate. It shows up, and in consistent ways, as “Struder.” That’s the kind of error that could have caused it to be lost in the files forever. Max’s father is listed as Philip. In fact, his father was Folic. It’s a simple matter of translation, but inasmuch as Yoinus Folic, or Yoinatan Folic, never came to the United States, his name was never pronounced in English.

His mother’s name is listed on the death certificate as Pesice. In fact, it was Pesha. And her maiden name is listed on Max’s death certificate as Struder, but was actually Cohen.

Max died on April 3, 1931, though the death certificate is stamped “1930.” Bureaucratic error? Probably. Mis-set date stamp? Could have been. Source of confusion for years to come? Possibly.

Max’s death was caused, according to the autopsy mentioned on the death certificate, by diabetes mellitus and a fractured rib (accidental), though what these two things may have had to do with each other isn’t made clear. The death certificate says he was 60 years old, though we suspect from other information, such as immigration documents, that he was more than a decade older than that, either 72 or 73 years old.

VRS Doc 009

Surah Henya (Strober) Schkolnik, listed on her death certificate as “Sarah Skolnick,” died three and a half years before her brother, on September 11, 1928. Her death certificate lists her as 75 years old, but we think (again based on other records, such as immigration documents) she was actually 76 or 77. The cause of her death was listed as broncho pneumonia. Her father’s name is listed as Felix, though (as with Max) it was actually Folic. Her mother is listed as “unknown,” which may have been a momentary lapse in memory by a family member at a very trying time, the immediate wake of her death. The address listed as her former residence, 796 Lenox Road in Brooklyn, was the home of her middle child, my grandfather Paul.

Genealogists call these kinds of documents “primary sources” and understand there may be discrepancies with other kinds of official documents and records. They’re vital documents in studying the history of a person or, in our case, a family, but they’re not infallible.

Still, when they reach back 80 or 90 years, they are fascinating.

{ 2 comments }

In one of the files Vic Struber sent me, there was an envelope within an envelope. The outer envelope had Vic’s handwritten note that Taube (Held) Strober had posed for the picture. The inner envelope had a picture, a stamp, and a postmark—the kind of thing philatelists collect.

VRS Doc 8

The only picture is the one on the envelope, showing a woman covering her eyes while lighting the shabbat candles. This is clearly the one Vic’s note indicates Taube posed for.

I wish I could tell you how all of this came to pass, but I can’t even come close to confirming it. What I can tell you is that the Touro Synagogue, in Newport, RI, is the oldest existing synagogue in the United States. It was built in 1763, more than a decade before the country declared its independence from England. The stamp was issued, as the postmark indicates, in 1982, after decades of wrangling. The government commission that approves stamps first felt that a stamp commemorating a synagogue violated the First Amendment’s prohibition against an established government religion. The stamp’s proponents suggested that other religious buildings of historical significance in other parts of the country be similarly celebrated. Then the commissioners said the Touro Synagogue wasn’t really of architectural significance. It was easy enough for the proponents to provide documents that it, indeed, was signifcant.

But the fight over the stamp doesn’t tell us anything about the envelope, and how Taube (Held) Strober got to be on it. In fact, doing some checking, it seems she was not on the official issue of what stamp collectors call the “cover.” George Washington was on it. In fact, on various websites which show many more of the envelope covers, none even come close to looking like the one of the woman lighting the candles.

What’s included in Vic’s file isn’t a copy of the commemorative. It’s the real thing. It would have been much more difficult to alter a picture on the actual envelope than it would be on a copy.

0136This is a photo of Chaim Groinem and Taube (Held) Strober, probably taken sometime around 1910 in Brooklyn. Taube lived from about 1857 until 1940. She bore her husband, who was a roofing contractor in Brooklyn, ten children.

Groinem, as he was known in the family, was one of five children of Yoinatan Folic Strober.

20140821_YOINATAN_FOLIC_STROBER_descendants_VERTHow a woman who lived in Brooklyn got on the cover of a commemorative stamp issued more than forty years after her death for a synagogue in Newport, RI doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

Maybe it’s not really her on the cover. Maybe it’s another woman who resembles her, an ancestor of a prominent family who were actually members of that shul. Perhaps one of Taube’s descendants became a driving force at the Touro Synagogue. Maybe there’s some other explanation that hasn’t yet presented itself.

Those are the maddening mysteries of genealogy.

{ 0 comments }

I asked Rebecca to write a little something about her backpacking trip last week in Yosemite. She chose not to reduce what she calls a “life-changing event” to a short blog post. But she did give me some photos from the trip, three taken by one of the other students and two she took herself.

backpack1

(Photo by Emily Benjamin at emilybenjamin.com.)

 

Processed with VSCOcam with f2 preset

(Photo by Emily Benjamin at emilybenjamin.com.)

 

(Photo by Emily Benjamin at emilybenjamin.com.)

(Photo by Emily Benjamin at emilybenjamin.com.)

 

(Photo by Rebecca Skolnick.)

(Photo by Rebecca Skolnick.)

 

(Photo by Rebecca Skolnick.)

(Photo by Rebecca Skolnick.)

{ 3 comments }

I’d had about enough of Interstate 5 the other morning, and I decided to get off the road and stretch my legs for a few minutes. I was near a place in Tulare County called Alpaugh, which was pretty much in the middle of nowhere. The exit had what the highway signs like to refer to as “no services”—no gas station, no fast food, no sign of humanity.

IMG_1726

I don’t want to make it seem as if I’d traveled to the other side of the moon. It was just the San Joaquin Valley, a place I’d lived several decades ago for almost five years, a place I was familiar with. In fact, I’m among the small number of north-south commuters who can see some beauty in these wide-open spaces. In this shot, for instance, there’s the moon itself, straight above the double-yellow lines. It was much more prominent to the naked eye than it was to the lens.

IMG_1727

Directly across the road from where I’d stopped on the shoulder, there were some wild sunflowers growing. They were growing tall, in fact, so I made part of my stretching exercise capturing the flowers with the moon in the background. Once again, the moon was much more prominent to my naked eye than it was to the lens.

IMG_1728

So even in the desolation of a hot San Joaquin Valley morning, it was possible to stretch my limbs and grab a few shots before getting back on the interstate.

{ 2 comments }

IMG_1753Yup, she came down from the mountain Friday afternoon. And from everything she’s told me about the six-day trip through the high country in the Ten Lakes area of Yosemite National Park, it was an absolutely spectacular time.

Rebecca took two disposable film cameras on the trip, and had the pictures printed yesterday. I’ll prevail on her to post some of them here, because this was not your standard sightseeing drive through the Yosemite Valley. This was a hump-it-up-the-mountain and then hump-it-back-down-again trek into the wilderness.

{ 0 comments }

Doing genealogy takes being in touch with a lot of people. That human contact is easier (and certainly cheaper) now with email and social media. But even before computers, some people were good at communicating. Vic Struber, who has turned over his genealogy files to me, was one of them. Sometimes he made contact with people he’d tracked down. And sometimes, as with his second cousin, Raymond “Ray” Strauber, the connection came from a happy coincidence.

VRS Doc 6

VRS Doc 7Ray’s letter to Vic is undated, but I’m guessing it is from the early 2000s. The first thing to notice is how the connection came about at all. Vic’s older son Frank works in customer service at an airline at McCarran Field, the Las Vegas airport. And Ray’s son Alan, about whom I posted last month, happened to be passing through there. It’s not all that odd that they would have bumped into each other. But it’s extremely odd that they recognized in each other’s names a potential relative, managed to exchange information about it, and then got the information to their fathers who could then act on it.

I believe Ray and Vic ultimately got together. Ray died in 2007. However, we’re still mining the fruits of their collaboration.

{ 0 comments }

The tension was getting pretty thick as Rebecca and I drove up Interstate 5 on Saturday. She has had a number of very exciting experiences this summer, but none seemed to carry with it the expectations and enthusiasm she had for her six-day backpacking trip in Yosemite’s high country. It was a special event put together by the recreation department at UC Berkeley.

Rebecca after we parked the car and walked next door to the backpack trip rendezvous point in Berkeley.

Rebecca after we parked the car and walked next door to the backpack trip rendezvous point in Berkeley.

The whole thing is fraught with significance, especially for dad. It’s Rebecca’s first backpacking excursion, and it comes just before a huge academic excursion called college. The structure where we parked is on the site of the rooming house my father lived in when he was a graduate student at UC Berkeley in 1946-48. And the street is one I walked daily forty years ago. Yeah, there was lots of history happening between the car and the meeting spot, which was about a hundred yards.

But the big thing I had to contend with was being sure not to embarrass my daughter. I thoughtfully snapped this picture (with Rebecca’s permission) right outside the garage, so none of the other backpackers would see us. And when she met up with the group, I waited only long enough for her to get her pack off so I could hug her and then be on my way.

Yeah, who needs parents anyway?

{ 3 comments }

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!

{ 1 comment }

IMG_1716Rebecca’s plane had touched down only 90 minutes before she asked if we could go to Tito’s Tacos to celebrate her arrival.

Tito’s, of course, is another of those iconic Los Angeles eateries I’ve been drawn to all of my life, and that I’ve succeeded in teaching my kid how to be drawn to. There are, to be sure, more authentic tacos in Los Angeles. There are better tasting tacos. There are bigger tacos. But there aren’t any that have a stronger emotional attachment for us than that stand in the shadow of the 405 in Culver City.

And this wasn’t just any old arrival. This was Rebecca’s first meal as a real Californian. She took the test and obtained her California driver’s license in June. She registered to vote here. She has a bank account here.

And now, to cement the deal, she has eaten her first meal here. Welcome to the newest Californian!

{ 2 comments }

The parcel landed with a thud, all 2 pounds 3.4 ounces of it. I hadn’t been expecting a package, so out of a habit developed more than a decade ago, when it was a good idea to look for a sender’s name, I checked for a return address. It was from Vic Struber.

I know Vic Struber. He’s a cousin. He is one of the pioneers of researching the Strauber/Strober/Struber line of my family, that huge intertwined tree that now includes more than 1,500 names. I attach to that tree through my great-grandmother, Surah Henya (Schkolnik) Strober, who was the sister of Vic’s grandfather, Mendel “Max” Struber.

That makes Vic and me second cousins, once removed. And that, I figured, is hardly enough reason to spend $15 postage sending something.

IMG_1331

The “mystery file” that Vic Struber sent.

Vic started working on genealogy in the 1970s. He was trained as an engineer and worked in the field for decades, which means he notates items with terse comments, the relevance of which are immediately obvious. He also does it legibly.

Inside the package, a bundle of correspondence and documents relating (primarily) to the Strauber branch of the family.

A quick word of clarification: there was one family that lived in a couple of villages in what is now the western part of Ukraine. Their name, probably adopted by edict of the Emperor Franz Josef of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the late 18th Century, was Strober. But in the alphabet soup of history, as different countries took over the area my ancestors came from and those countries had different languages and, in the case of Ukrainians and Russians, whole different alphabets, the spelling of the family name developed variants.

They probably would have pronounced the name SHTRAW’-burr, and today, it is variously spelled Strauber, Strober, and Struber. In records at Yad Vashem in Israel, the surname of family members lost in the Holocaust is frequently spelled Sztrauber. And that doesn’t even bring into consideration what they did to the name at Ellis Island!

The treasure trove of correspondence, documents, and notes that Vic Struber developed over decades of genealogical research.

The treasure trove of correspondence, documents, and notes that Vic Struber developed over decades of genealogical research.

But what to do with all of this information? Vic invited me to toss it, but I knew it had taken hard work to accumulate it and it was of great value in understanding this group of people from whom I (and Vic) descend. I could have placed it into one of the milk crates I use for filing papers. But it struck me that the best use of these documents was to share with other family members, so they could learn, as Vic had and as I have, exactly who the family members are.

susan strober letter

Susan Strober’s letter to Vic Struber, undated, conveying a few family documents.

I had to do a little research, but Vic’s notation that Susan Strober was somehow related to George Strober makes me think she is a great-granddaughter of Chaim Groinem Strober (person #50 on our family tree), a granddaughter of Morris Strober (person #395), and a daughter of George Strober (person #401). Interestingly, Susan Strober does not appear on the family tree. She’s one of the many generations we have yet to file in.

Stapled to Susan’s letter were three New York City death certificates, reproduced below. They are for her great-grandfather, Chaim Groinem Strober, her great-grandmother Taube (Held) Strober, and her grandfather, Morris Strober.

Death certificate of Chaim Groinem Strober, identified as Hyman Strober.

Death certificate of Chaim Groinem Strober, identified as Hyman Strober.

 

Death certificate of Taube (Held) Strober.

Death certificate of Taube (Held) Strober.

Death certificate of Morris Strober.

Death certificate of Morris Strober.

When I emailed Vic to thank him for keeping the file alive, he told me he has two more headed for me. So look at this as the beginning of an online repository of Strauber-Strober-Struber family documents.

{ 4 comments }