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.