Showing posts with label Dombek. Show all posts

I haven't submitted a post to a carnival in a while, but this one is too good to pass. I actually have three stories, but have photos for two so far (I know the third exists but I don't know where it's hiding). This is my submission to the 78th Edition of the Carnival of Genealogy: Pony Pictures.

1. The Ponies in Los Angeles

This is a funny one because it is one of my daughter's favorite bedtime stories. On our second family trip to the US in 1982, we did the west coast tour and also visited Mexico. When we were in LA, my mom's cousin took us pony riding. I am not sure where it was exactly.
The ponies rode around an elliptical track and every 5 minutes or so they would be corralled back and new riders would get their turn. While standing in line, my sister and I started eying the ponies we wanted to ride. My sister wanted the slow, mellow pony, who calmly strolled around the track. I obviously wanted the fastest one.
So we get our turn and get on the ponies we wanted. But as soon as the ponies were released, my sister's shot out of the gate like he was at the derby. Mine on the other hand decided to take a bit if a break:



Yes, those are real tears on my poor sister's face. For 5 minutes she yelled and screamed for that pony to stop, which he didn't.
I just found out that we have an old home video that my parents converted to VHS, so now I am waiting for my copy on DVD.

2. The Mule in West Virginia

I love this photo. According to my wife's uncle, Glenn:

This was taken in Parsons, WV, Summer of 1950 at a family reunion at a second cousin's house. Jackie (left) and Lois (right) standing, Bunny (back) and I (front) on the mule. Grandma was there too, but she got her hand caught in the door of my dad's new 1950 Mercury just before this picture was taken. We were up near Black Water Falls. Somewhere out there is another photo with Jackie on the mule, taken at the same time.

Don't worry, I asked for more details and will share when I get them.

UPDATE: More from Uncle Glenn - This was at a Rightmire great-aunt's home. The Aunt we visited lived very basically in the country with a mule for a work, as a beast of burden and a hand pump well for water in the back of her home. She made us kids eat carrots and other things she grew in her garden. I know it was very near Black Water Falls because we went to the Falls that day and walked in the back water and did a swing bridge. This was just before we moved to Ft. Lauderdale later that year in Nov. 1950.

3. The Love Story

I've heard the following story in several variations, but this is the one that my sister wrote in her roots project:

This is the story about how my grandparents met. Grandpa managed a store in Tashkent and had a business relationship with Grandma's father. He would always tell him about his daughter but refused to let them meet because he said my grandfather was a punk. They met on accident when he spotted her walking with her father one day. Her father tried to avoid their introduction by trying to go down a small alley but because my Grandpa was riding his horse he quickly caught up to them and that's how they met. It was love at first sight and a year later they were married.

Somewhere, there's a photo of my grandmother on a horse, which I need to find and post. But I love this story and had to include it in this post.

I have to thank Randy Seaver for his challenging Saturday night fun posts that help me get out of my genea-blogging slumps. This time around he asks us to:

1) List your 16 great-great-grandparents in pedigree chart order. List their birth and death years and places.

2) Figure out the dominant ethnicity or nationality of each of them.

3) Calculate your ancestral ethnicity or nationality by adding them up for the 16 - 6.25% for each (obviously, this is approximate).

4) If you don't know all 16 of your great-great-grandparents, then do it for the last full generation you have.

5) Write your own blog post, or make a comment on Facebook or in this post.

I followed Randy's advice and grabbed my info from a RM4 Ahnentafel list:

1. Avraham Benjamin KIELCZEWSKI: b.? m.? died bef 1 Jun 1918. POLAND

2. Zywa Golda KRUG: b.? m.? died bef 1 Jun 1918. POLAND

3. Haim Shmuel KALMANIEWSKI: b.? m.? d.? POLAND

4. ???: b.? m.? d.? POLAND

5. Shlomo SMORGONSKI: born abt 1836. m.? d.? POLAND

6. Hanna Minka ?: b.? m.? d.? POLAND

7. Jacob SEGALCHIK: b.? m.? d.? POLAND

8. Ita ?: b.? m.? d.? POLAND

9. Jacob Yitzhak DOMBEK: b.? m.? d.? POLAND

10. Sarah Rachel KARPIK: born abt 1861 in Sterdyn, Sokolow, Lublin, Poland. m.? died abt 1941 in Sterdyn, Sokolow, Lublin, Poland. POLAND

11. Avram KREPLAK: b.? married 1874 in Kosow Lacki, Poland. d.? POLAND

12. Dobe JABLONKA: b.? married 1874 in Kosow Lacki, Poland. d.? POLAND

13. Aaron ZINBERG: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE

14. Sarah ?: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE

15. Joseph BENDITOVICH: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE

16. Miriam ?: b.? m.? d.? RUSSIAN EMPIRE

Hmmm. I have a lot of work to do. For starters, I know I have looked for all of these ancestors on JewishGen, but those databases are far from being complete. My next task should be to get some microfilm from the LDS, but how is that really going to help me? I can't read Russian or Polish or Latin or whatever language any of these records will be in. If they even exist.

At least I can pretty firmly say that I am 75%/25% Polish-Russian, which I have known pretty much all my life. And as I have written here before, the next generation after this one had a 75%/25% split for those who perished in the Holocaust. Yes, the entire Polish side. It's a good thing my grandfather fled to Russia.

So, does anyone have suggestions how I should go about filling in all these question marks?

I finally finished reading "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million" by Daniel Mendelsohn about a week ago. I've been kind of busy since then, so I haven't been able to post my thoughts about it yet. I have to say right away that it was a little hard getting started with the book. Mendelsohn has a very unique writing style and has taken the art of using commas to the extreme. Some of the sentences are so long that by the time you're done reading them, you may not remember where you started. But this is not a literary style review so I'll just leave it at that.

The other point I need to make is that the author goes through the first few stories in the bible and draws comparisons and contrasts from them to his stories about total annihilation, siblings rivalry and so on. He also analyzes the works of two famous biblical scholars and comes to his own conclusions. I found this part pretty annoying since, by his own admission, he has not studied the bible past these first few stories and I wasn't always sure I understand the repetitive nature of his analysis.

Speaking of repetition, there's a lot of that in the 500+ pages of this book. I could have done with less, but I guess it's one way of getting the reader to remember the characters and events.

All right, let's get to the actual story and why I found it so appealing. The book is focused on the authors quest to find information about his grand-uncle and his family who lived in Bolechow, Poland before the holocaust. He does this by detailing his early childhood memories and then his recent travels around the world to interview the few living Bolechowers who may or may not have known Uncle Shmiel Jager, his wife and 4 daughters.

Through this journey he goes into a lot of detail (some of it shockingly gory) of the fate of the Jewish community in Bolechow. I've heard similar stories before during history lessons in high-school and through reading holocaust survivor testimonies and interviews. Still, reading it again and getting the vivid descriptions made me think about a lot of things and try to draw similarities/contrasts to my own family's history:

1. For instance, whereas almost all of the author's family had immigrated to the US prior to the war and only one brother stayed behind with his family, my maternal grandfather was the sole survivor from his family.
2. Where Bolechow is a small village with several living survivors, my grandfather's family lived in Warsaw, the largest Jewish community in Poland and finding information about them is going to be next to impossible.
3. Mendelsohn started his research about 20 years ago and I am just getting started now.
4. The author's grandfather was a great story-teller and while he hid most of the family history from his grandson, at least he had a basis for his research as well as additional family members who remembered details. My grandfather never spoke about his family or the war. I was probably too young to ask and the holocaust seemed to be a taboo subject that was never really discussed.

Another recurring theme in the book is how lucky the author was in finding the right people at the right time. Several unlikely coincidences turned complete roadblocks into a wealth of information. This is very disheartening to someone like me who not only has no path to start with but nobody to really talk to. My only real link is my elderly grandmother who also claims that my grandfather didn't talk about his family.

The book's ending left me a little disappointed, but I won't spoil it for those who have not read it yet. It's not the research result, but more the methodology and reaction of the author. If you would like, we can discuss it in the comments.

So while reading a holocaust story about a now-not-so-anonymous family wasn't an uplifting endeavor to say the least, it did spark my interest in trying to research my grandfather's family again. I will have to figure out if there are any related Dombek family members who are somehow related. I will try to dig again in the archives for all the awkward spellings of this not-so-common Polish surname that is not necessarily Jewish. I will try to uncover whatever I can, but I won't keep my hopes up just yet.

I recommend this book to anyone who wants to re-live what it's like methodically going through a research project that involves a lot of travel and face to face interviews. I have started reading another holocaust memoir called "Defiance: The Bielski Partisans" about the Bielski Brothers that was recently made into a movie with Daniel Craig and Liev Schreiber. I'll have a review about that when I'm done.

Yesterday afternoon we were blessed with another beautiful baby girl. We decided to call her Bella Brannon Dekel which is a great combination of her ancestry and a very cool name. My wife's maiden name is Brannon and that lineage can be traced back 11 generations. The Dekel family name is relatively new and was changed from my father's Kilchevsky (Kielczewski) by his father. But the name Bella is a whole other story.

Bella "Beile" Kreplak was my great-grandmother. I have very little information about her and most of it is from oral interviews and a single page of testimony in the Yad Vashem Database. Here is what I know (treat this is unsourced information, but it's as good as I can get right now):

Bella was born in Warsaw about 1884 to Avram Kreplak and Dobe Jablonka. She was one of 8 children in her family (Moshe, Bella, Yossel, Rivka, Haya, Esther, Meir & Noeh). She married Hanoch Meir "Heynoch" Dombek probably in Warsaw before 1905 (when her first child was born). Heynoch and Beile had 9 children and lived at 16 Woloska Street in Warsaw before the Holocaust. Their children were Moshe Mordechai, Zipora "Feige", Tamar "Tana", Hava, Michael Haim "Misha" (my grandfather), Leah, Arieh "Leib", Haya & Rivka.

Bella, her husband and 8 of 9 children perished in the holocaust (the 9th child was my grandfather who escaped east to Russia). I don't know their exact fate, but from bits and pieces of what I remember hearing, they died of Typhus in the Warsaw Ghetto. I am sure that if I dig in the Polish Archives I will be able to find more information, but that will have to wait for now. It is assumed that Bella died in 1943.

The translated page of testimony about Bella from Yad Vashem reads as follows:

Detail text:
Bela Dombek was born in Warsaw in 1884. Prior to WWII she lived in Warsaw, Poland. During the war she was in Warsaw, Poland. Bela perished in 1943 in Warsaw, Poland. This information is based on a Page of Testimony (displayed on left) submitted on 26-Jun-1955 by Rivka Geiger.

Full Record Details for Dombek Bela

Source Pages of Testimony
Last Name DOMBEK
First Name* BELA
Sex Female
Date of Birth 1884
Place of Birth WARSAW,WARSZAWA,WARSZAWA,POLAND
Name of 1st Child LEIB
Date of Birth of 1st Child 1928
Name of 2nd Child* LEA
Date of Birth of 2nd Child 1926
Name of 3rd Child KHAIA
Date of Birth of 3rd Child 1930
Permanent residence WARSAW,WARSZAWA,WARSZAWA,POLAND
Place during the war WARSAW,WARSZAWA,WARSZAWA,POLAND
Place of Death WARSAW,WARSZAWA,WARSZAWA,POLAND
Date of Death 1943
Type of material Page of Testimony
Submitter's Last Name* GEIGER
Submitter's First Name RIVKA
Registration date 26/06/1955

* Indicates an automatic Translation From Hebrew

Detail comments:
http://www.yadvashem.org/wps/portal/!ut/p/_s.7_0_A/7_0_FL/.cmd/acd/.ar/sa.portlet.VictimDetailsSubmitAction/.c/6_0_9D/.ce/7_0_V9/.p/5_0_P1/.d/2?victim_details_id=1604044&victim_details_name=++Bela&q1=53EyGfyZ998%3D&q2=nCb0IKBT2lJyrAw9hs3KZKtWDxcmsb7P&q3=VlWlwPDAqiE%3D&q4=VlWlwPDAqiE%3D&q5=5%2BnqSfv9YJY%3D&q6=rFcgqeCcjDU%3D&q7=bxVfqQaN%2Ft%2BRpyXBct1qE2j6IQqmeLWD&frm1_npage=4#7_0_V9

Update: My mother read this post and pointed out that the dates above are incorrect. She is completely right about that, because these birth years do not make much sense. But you have to remember a few things about Yad Vashem Pages of Testimony - Most of them were filled out a decade or two after people left Europe and not always by very close relatives. These sources should be treated carefully because they may contain mistakes. For Example, the same submitter filled out a page (actually two) about my own grandfather, who was alive at the time. Still, for anyone researching Jewish Genealogy, the Yad Vashem database is a must. Thanks for the comment Mom!

Had it not been for my genealogy research and newly found obsession with family history we would probably never have come up with the name Bella. I am honored and proud to be able to name my youngest daughter after my great grandmother. Two Bellas - 5 generations apart.

When my parents came to visit last month, I asked my mother to bring as much family history material as she could fit in her luggage. At first she said it wasn't a problem but when she saw the amount of photos and albums she started to get worried. Eventually we agreed that she would bring the best of the best, including my sister's entire roots project.

So it's been some time since I scanned everything and I am finally starting to get around to sorting everything and getting organized. I thought I would share some of these treasures with my readers.

First is probably the oldest photograph I have from my mother's side of the family. The photo below is in very bad shape. It was printed on cardboard and is severely deteriorating. It is the picture of my great grandfather, Moshe Zinberg, probably in his 20's, which would date the photo back to around 1920:



On the back of the photo is something that I believe to be a Russian newspaper. I am not sure how the cardboard photograph ended up glued to a piece of newspaper. You can also see my grandmother's handwriting, where she wrote her father's name in Hebrew:



Next up is my father side of the family and once again, a very old photo. In this photo of the Smorgonski family you can see my great grandfather Avraham Smorgonski and his second wife, Henia Segalchik. Henia was the sister of Avraham's first wife, Esther Segalchik, who died between 1917-1918. You can also see 6 of Avraham's 7 children:



Top row (left to right): Zipora (my grandmother), Shlomo and Pesia
Bottom row (left to right): Ida (Ita), Joseph Haim and Haya

Everyone in the picture except for the top row of older siblings perished in the holocaust. They were murdered by the Polish villagers in their town of Dolhinov by being herded into a barn that was then set on fire.

Staying a while longer with my grandmother, Zipora, we have some truly incredible identity cards for her and her husband, my grandfather, Avraham Kilchevsky, from Israel in 1939-1940:



But who issued identity cards in Israel nine years prior to it gaining Independence? See below:



The Government of Palestine? But hold on one second before you jump to conclusions and we start another 5000 year war. Palestine at the time was not an independent country. It was a British Colony. Like half the world at the time.

Now back to my mother's parents. I have never seen these photos from their wedding before. These were taken in Beltz, USSR (now Beltsy, Moldova) on October 6th 1945:



Aren't they a beautiful couple? Here's a close-up:



I loved my grandfather very much. He was a cool guy and always fun to hang out with. He was always taking things apart, fixing them and putting them back together. He had a tool shed inside his apartment. He once made a guy sell him a toy that he bought for his son so that he could give it to me. It was an elliptical race track and had these little cars that had rechargeable batteries. They were always breaking down and we would take them apart and fix them.

I know this has been a long post full of big images, but I will leave you with two more. The first is a typical pose for my grandfather. I call it the "What's the Problem?" pose:



That's him on the beach at the Dead Sea in Israel where he and my grandmother used to vacation often with their friends. I remember going out there with them several times.

And here's how you relax on your Dead Sea vacation. You just get in the water and float your troubles away:

It's been a while since my last post, but boy have I been busy. I have been diving into some Polish geography and finding a lot of links to long lost relatives. I have found a lot of these people on Geni.com and it is proving to be a truly valuable resource.

As I have written here before about my grandfather's Dombek family, there are few leads to follow. But then I started to investigate his mother's side of the tree. Bella (Beile) Kreplak was born about 1884 in Poland (according to a page of testimony, she was born in Warsaw). So far I have not found any Kreplak's in Warsaw. So I started looking in other places. I found Bejla Kreplak, born in 1885 in the Kosow Lacki PSA BMD 1863-1904 in the Siedlce Gubernia / Warszawa Province database on JewishGen. You'll see why this is interesting in just a bit.

From speaking with my mother and grandmother, but also from personal acquaintance, I know we have Kreplak relatives in Paris. They are the children and grandchildren of Herschel Kreplak who is (supposed to be) my grandfather's first cousin. I need to verify who his parents were to confirm this, but I would say this is pretty certain. There is also another family in Paris that are descendants of a female Kreplak and they were also considered first cousins. Then there is a Ritz family in Israel.

Today I found out that Chaya Rydz (nee Kreplak) was the mother of Yehuda Rydz of Herzelia, Israel, and perished in Ciechanowiec, Bialystok, Poland, along with Yehuda's wife, Faiga Rydz (nee Plisky). All this is based on the Ciechanowiec Yizkor Book. You can read a chapter written by Yehuda here. So I have some research to do there, but I am pretty certain I can link them all back to the same family as well. I think Yehuda Rydz is the Idel Ritz in my tree?

There are two other Kreplak trees I am working on. They all lead back to families in Kosow Lacki, Poland. I found records of Kreplak families there and I need to see if I can find them at an LDS center and actually see who the parents were. I think I'm on the right track.

And then there are a few Dombek families that track back to Ostrow Mazowiecka.

One of the interesting things I found out is that all these villages are within a 20 mile radius. Check out this map:



By the way, I created this map by looking up the town Sterdyn on this site: http://mapy.eholiday.pl/. I guess you can also go through Google maps but this site actually does have a type-ahead feature that helps you if you have no idea how to spell in Polish, which I don't. Then I used a FireFox plug-in called FireShot that let's you grab either your current browser view or the entire page and add highlights and comments. There's a free version and it is extremely useful.

Last tech-tip for today. If you wind up in a foreign language site, like the one above, right click somewhere on the page and select the bottom option "Page Info". Then choose the "Translate to English" option at the bottom. It runs the entire page through Google Translate and does a pretty good job. This only works in FireFox (because you really should not use Internet Explorer), but doesn't work on Google's new Chrome browser. I'm certain it will be added very soon.

My maternal grandfather was Michael (Misha) Dombek (Domb is an oak tree in Polish). As far as I know, he is the only surviving Jewish Dombek from his family to have made it through the holocaust (There are other Dombek families, but so far I have not been able to find any that are Jewish). When WW2 started he left Warsaw and his disapproving family behind and fled to Russia, where he later met my grandmother. When he returned after the war, there was nobody left alive.

I will have many more posts about my grandfather, as he was one of my role models growing up and one of my favorite people in this world. But for the sake of this post I will focus on one single story. It's a sad story about the complete annihilation of his family in the holocaust and how a misunderstanding and a case of mistaken identity changed the future for many people.

Misha lived with his family in Warsaw in a big apartment at 16 Woloska Street. He was one of 9 children in the family and was about 19 years old when the war started. he felt that things were not going to end well and decided to leave. He tried to convince his father and the rest of the family to leave with him, but they wouldn't listen to his warnings. And so he set out on his own to the Russian border.

He moved around a lot in Russia during the war, joined and left the Red Army (twice) and eventually met my grandmother in Central Asia (near Tashkent, Uzbekistan). After they married in 1945, he made an unsuccessful attempt to find his family in Warsaw. A couple of years later they moved back to Poland, in 1947. At this point, he tried to go back to his family's apartment. Surprisingly, the building was still standing and the old Polish woman who worked there recognized him. She told him that one of his sisters, Tema, had come back after the war and sold the family apartment. Apparently Tema and another sister had survived, according to the old woman, and had moved to Israel.

Misha was encouraged by this new development and had tried to contact his sisters in Israel for several years without success. Eventually Misha and his new family (wife and two children) immigrated to Israel around 1957. One of the reasons was the chance that his sisters could be contacted somehow. At that time there was a radio show on Friday afternoons that tried to reconnect lost family members. Misha was reluctant, but his wife Riva decided to put his name on the show and they were soon contacted by Mrs. Rivka Geiger (Kramarz).

Rivka and her sister, Tema Fruchter (Kramarz), were the only two known survivors. When they finally met, Rivka took Misha to see her sister and that's when things got a little strange. Apparently Tema and her husband were acting in a weird way, avoiding eye-contact and being very distant. After the visit with his two cousins, Misha figured out what must have happened. It seemed that Tema came back to the family apartment in Warsaw, pretended to be Misha's sister (also called Tema) and sold it. Misha later confronted her with this conclusion and she admitted to it and apologized. Her reasoning was that since it seemed like everyone had perished in the holocaust, there was no reason to just let the apartment go to waste. It took some time but eventually all was forgiven.

So the case of the cousin who "stole" the apartment had led to several life changing events. Had she not sold the apartment, Misha would have had no idea that they were alive and living in Israel. Without the (false) hope of seeing his sisters he would not have moved his family to Israel. My parents would have never met and I would not be here to tell the story. I am constantly amazed at how little incidents in our past make a huge impact on our future (or present).

Rivka Geiger has been one of my biggest sources of information about my grandfather's family. She filled out dozens of 'Pages of Testimony' for Yad Vashem about her relatives who had perished in the holocaust. From reading these handwritten documents I have been able to piece together a family tree dating back to the mid 1850's in Poland. Below is a tree of descendants of my 2nd great grandparents:



I marked the only survivors in red, all who perished in black and myself in blue (bottom left). It is astounding how entire families were massacred and wiped from existence. This is just an example of only one branch in the tree. I have similar diagrams for the Kreplak family (my great-grandmother's side, of which a couple of second cousins were later located in Paris) and the Smorgonski family (my paternal grandmother, who were murdered in Dolhinov, Poland). And these were only the adults. Many of these families had children that aren't listed in the 'Pages of Testimony'. All gone.

I will slowly continue to add details and proper citations from this resource. I am currently at around 100 people combining both sides of my Polish ancestry. My next big leap would be to try to find out if there were any family members higher up in the tree that left Europe before the war or survived the holocaust in some other way. The problem there is that both my great grandfather and his father were only sons in families with many sisters. Another problem is getting through to the correct information for 19th century Polish Jews. This is one of the top goals of my research.

I am going to recap what I have done so far in the past few weeks since I have embarked on this journey.

First, I read through my sister's roots project and got all fired up. Some of the pages in the project were printouts from Beit Hatfutzot, which is also known as the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora. They had basic information about my paternal grandparents' villages in Poland. The two villages are Radzilow and Dolhinov (wow, I just found this site when doing a Google search. There is so much information I have to go through and I have already seen several familiar names!).

From there I jumped over to the Yad Vashem site which is The Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority. It is the largest and most impressive holocaust museum in the world and is located in Jerusalem. I remember going there when I was younger to do a research project about the Treblinka Concentration Camp. It was a project I did for school and the reason I chose that specific camp was the fact that it only had one purpose - kill as many people as fast as possible. We'll get back to this in a minute.


I sat at the computer with my mom and we started searching through The Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names and all of a sudden we both started getting chills. There, in front of our very eyes, were hand written documents (called pages of testimony) filled out by my grandfather's first cousin, Rivka Geiger. To the right you can see the page she filled out about my great-grandfather, Hanoch Meir (Heynoch) Dombek. Rivka and her sister Tamara (Tema) Fruchter were the only close family survivors that my grandfather was able to find in Israel after the war. That's a story I will have to tell in full in a later post.

Anyway, by using the easy functionality of the site I was able to find 58 pages that were filled by Rivka. We were just skimming through them, trying to figure out the names and dates. Most of the testimony is in Yiddish and hard to read, but we slowly figured out who was who. Last night I finally sat down and went through them all and I now have a chart of three generations of the Dombek family that perished in the Shoah (holocaust). I will have a full post about that soon as well. I promise.

I started a quick family tree with some free online software through a link I found on the Beit Hatfutzot site. I won't actually link it here because it has all the details of living relatives. If you want to see it please let me know. I will also figure out a way to post this tree somewhere else.

I spent a few hours with my parents, trying to map out as many relatives as we could think of. The next day my mother and I went to visit my grandmother and I grilled her for over two hours, trying to get as many details as I could.

On my return to the US, I told my wife about my new hobby and asked to see what her mother had put together a few years ago. That pretty much got me started with a big chunk of information on her side. I also found a few people through JewishGen's Family Finder (JGFF) and the Family Tree of the Jewish People (FTJP) who were nice enough to share some of their research and give me some tips moving forward. I joined Ancestry.com and found a distant relative of my wife's who has over 23K people in his tree. With his help and direction I decided to purchase the RootsMagic Genealogy Software tool. Through Ancestry.com I was able to piece together a lot of information from US Census data from 1840-1930 about the Auth, Wiley and Hytowitz families.

Well, this is becoming quite a long recap of the first few weeks and I already have several posts I promised to write. One of the things I will try to list at the bottom of each post is how many people I currently have in my family project.

7/29/08 - Current family members: 825 in 259 families.