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.
When 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.
It 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.