I have been into my family genealogy for the past several weeks, using a popular online portal. I’ll get into some of the why’s and wherefores in a minute.
The portal is amazing at linking you to obscure family members using billions of records worldwide. And once you find one family member, that opens the door to dozens of others. Yesterday I was fooling around on the portal, found a new family member (a cousin of a cousin of a cousin), looked at his birth and death dates and thought “died in his 30s. Didn’t live too long.” Then I looked at cause of death. This isn’t filled out that often but sometimes you can see “cancer” or “heart attack” – the usual. But this time the cause of death field listed “Nazi Victim.” The year was 1940 and this obscure relative who lived in Poland was a holocaust victim. Before I was done I found several other holocaust victim relatives. I didn’t know how or what to think. Of course I had always known that I must have had distant relatives that died at the hands of the Nazis, but they were no one I knew or anyone in our American family knew.
This was not the reason I went down the genealogy rat hole.
Like many Americans with immigrant families just a couple generations old I knew nothing about my past. Relatives only talked about their American lives and American relatives. I knew that my maternal Grandfather was born in England and his family came to the US when he was a baby. For 50 years, when asked, I told people I was one quarter English, since that was all I knew.
Not many years ago I said this very fact to my Aunt, the last real keeper of the family history. She laughed and I bristled and said. “Well, he was born in England, so…” “Yes, David” she replied. “He was born in England. Do you know why?” I shook my head. “At the turn of the century Jews escaping Russia and Eastern Europe traveled West and England was the jumping off point to go to America.” There went my fantasy of being a descendant of an English Lord.
My Grandfathers Ain’t What I Thought They Were: I always liked my paternal grandfather’s name – Jack. It was short and sweet and kinda tough – just like he was. Janet and I talked often that if we ever had a boy, we’d name him Jack. Imagine my surprise to see the 1910 census (Jack was born in 1899) and see the family listed with 11 year old Jacob. Other documents of that era also listed him as Jacob. By the 1920 census he was Jack and would never again be referred to as anything else.
My maternal grandfather (the English Lord) was named Sol Criss. Even though I thought of Solomon, no one ever referred to him as anything but Sol. As a kid I speculated that it might have come from the Spanish word meaning sun. After all, he was an English Lord, why not have a cool Spanish name. In the 1910 US census, when he was 7, there it was – Solomon. Other early documents referred to Salomon. After all the family spoke Yiddish, so the English spelling wasn’t consistent. But just like Jack, by early adulthood he was Sol and never anything else. Jack and Sol were Americans, damn it – not Jacob and Solomon.
I found that many of those old relatives changed their names, no doubt to sound more American and less Jewish. We kids all barely knew but loved our Uncle Charlie. He was my Great Uncle and spent most of his adult life working with The Three Stooges. The adults in the family considered him the Black Sheep, but we kids loved the name, Uncle Charlie, and he flat out had the coolest job in the world. Imagine my disappointment at reading the 1900 and 1910 US census and seeing that his name was actually Meyer.
My Great Uncle on my maternal side – Sol Criss’s brother, was named Hyman Francis Criss; my mother called him Uncle Hymie. By the time he got to New York and became a fairly famous New York artist, he was Francis Criss. Not many famous artists named Uncle Hymie I guess.
So why did I go down this rat hole? I’m frankly not really sure. Like most kids I couldn’t have cared less about the past or relatives from far away places who were dead and gone. By the time I was a 20-something adult and kinda interested many of those adults had died, including my mother and grandparents. Once in a while I would travel across the country and see my aunt and uncle; the same aunt who schooled me on why I didn’t have an English Lord grandfather. She would show me pictures and throw out a million names but none of it stuck.
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I traced both sides of my family back to my great great grandparents. I found the 1901 English Census listing the Criss family (before Sol was born) waiting to go to America, which they would do two years later.
Other takeaways. All 8 of my great grandparents were born in Russia, or what was then called the Russian Empire. Apparently it wasn’t just little Sol who was trying to escape the pogroms.
People back then got married early – sometimes really early. And they had boatloads of kids. Grandfather Jack was one of 8 children and Grandfather Sol one of 7. In fact Sol’s father had a child fairly late in life; I guess it runs in the family. And BTW, he lived till 95- so I’ve got that to look forward to!
I also found some inlaws from the 19th century who I am guessing were Mormons since they lived in Utah and Idaho, and had a bunch of marriages and more children than you can count.
I’ve traced some branches of the family back to the 18th century and am still hopeful to find Weisbords (although it’s unlikely they were spelled that way) back to Russia.
So the upshot of this is I do have a family. And 100 years from now when descendants look me up and see my history they’ll wonder – how the hell did he end up in the Philippines!
