Randy over at Genea-Musings has another great Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge for us tonight:
- Who is your MRUA - your Most Recent Unknown Ancestor? This is the person with the lowest number in your Pedigree Chart or Ahnentafel List that you have not identified a last name for, or a first name if you know a surname but not a first name.
- Have you looked at your research files for this unknown person recently? Why don't you scan it again just to see if there's something you have missed?
- What online or offline resources might you search that might help identify your MRUA?
- Tell us about him or her, and your answers to 2) and 3) above, in a blog post, in a comment to this post, or a comment on Facebook or some other social networking site.
My MRUAs are half of my eight 2nd-great-grandmothers (no maiden names):
21. Hanna Minka Smorgonski
23. Ita Segalchik
29. Sarah Zinberg
31. Miriam Benditovich
For the first two, on my father's side, I only have my sister's roots project family tree as well as Yad-Vashem pages of testimony for their children, listing them as the mothers. I have not been able to track down any other information from JewishGen or family members about these two women.
The other two are on my mother's side and all I have for them is oral history from my grandmother. Both of them were her grandmothers, but she can not recall their maiden names. I suppose I could try my grandmother's brother, but since he is younger I don't think he will be able to help me either.
On my wife's side, I was surprised to find that her MRUA is also her 2nd-great-grandmother, Maria Kearney (also number 31 with maiden name unknown). This is obviously due to me not doing enough research on this branch. Here's what I know about her:
She was born in Ireland in January 1843 and immigrated to the US in 1847 at the age of 4. She married Thomas Kearney (born 1840, Ireland) about 1868 and had 4 they had at least 4 children: Thomas Jr. (born April 1876), James (born July 1878), Mary (born May 1880) and Margaret T. (born 27 Dec 1882). Most of this basic information was found in an interview done in 2000 with Agnes Auth, who was her granddaughter. I also found some of the family in the US Census, but it's obvious to me that with a little digging I will be able to find a lot more information about Maria.
The difference in information about my side versus my wife's is staggering. Especially because my wife's ancestors have been in the US for centuries and almost every line is well documented. I mean, if I pull up my pedigree chart, I have only 9 out of 32 people in my 6 generation chart and most of those are unconfirmed first name only ancestors. My wife, on the other hand, is only missing 8. I have done some basic research on some of her branches and they easily go back to early the 1600's colonial settlements. I also know she is descended of several Revolutionary War patriots. The next challenge is documenting all this properly and citing all sources correctly. That will take a very long time.
As usual Randy Seaver comes up with great genea-challenges. This time we're finding descendants of one of our great-grandparents:1) Pick one of your four great-grandparents - if possible, the one with the most descendants.
So I chose the only great-grandparents who have a big list of descendants, Moshe Zinberg (died about 1960) and Elka Benditovich (holy cow, I don't have any dates for her - adding to my to do list right now):
2) Create a descendants list for those great-grandparents either by hand or in your software program.
3) Tell us how many descendants, living or dead, are in each generation from those great-grandparents.
4) How many are still living? Of those, how many have you met and exchanged family information with? Are there any that you should make contact with ASAP? Please don't use last names of living people for this - respect their privacy.
5) Write about it in your own blog post, in comments to this post, or in comments or a Note on Facebook.
- Children - 6 (3 deceased, 3 living) - I met all but two.
- Grandchildren - 11 that I know of, there may have been more. I have met 8 of them.
- Great-grandchildren - 20 that I know of. I believe I have met 11 of them. Obviously I need to fill in some gaps because I don't even know the names of some of them. I have to call my grandma, she'll know.
- Great-great-grandchildren - I only know of 4 of which 2 are my own children. I am sure there are more out there, but I need to research that more.
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?
Moshe Zinberg was my maternal great-grandfather and pretty much the only grandfather either of my parents had. My father's grandparents perished in the Holocaust as were my mother's paternal grandparents. So Moshe and Elka Zinberg were pretty much it. My mother remembers how after the war nobody really knew what grandparents were and whenever they came to visit, people would come by just to get a glimpse of them.
Moshe and Elka lived in Beltsi (Balti in today's Moldova), had 6 children and were planning to immigrate to Israel around 1933. Moshe sold everything they had, including their house and all their possessions to purchase tickets and travel documents only to find out he'd been scammed and left with nothing. The family went thorough a very hard time but eventually managed to rebuild and prosper. Then when WW2 started their house was destroyed in a Nazi air raid and they fled over the Russian border. Traveling hundreds of kilometers on foot, the family eventually settled in Tashkent, in what today is Uzbekistan:
After the war, because of his deteriorating health, Moshe moved the family back to Beltsi, where he died in 1960.
The truth is, I haven't done much research on Moshe yet. Most of what I know is from my sister's roots project and family conversations. But one of my favorite photographs is of Moshe, probably around 20 years old, in Red Army uniform during his service in WW1. It's a small photo that is badly deteriorated, that I have shared here before.
And this is where Landailyn comes in. Janine Smith, who writes the terrific Janinealogy blog has taken this photograph:
and restored it to this:
Can you believe it? And she did it in no time at all.
My mother showed the restored version to her mother and she confirmed that this is in fact her father in uniform. Now, before all this we didn't even know that he served in the Red Army during WW1, so now I get to talk to my grandmother about this new revelation and find out much more.
My grandmother became very emotional when she saw the restored image. So thank you, Janine, you made my grandma cry.
This is my submission to the 9th edition of Smile for the Camera: Who are you? I really want to know!
Well this should be easy. I have boxes of photographs that I haven't even started scanning, where many of the subjects are complete unknowns. I have a hunch or two and some clues to get me started, but getting to the actual person is going to take a whole lot of digging. The hardest part about this challenge was trying to narrow down the photo selection. Let's get started shall we?
First up are two photos from a box I believe belonged to my wife's grandmother, Emily Anne. It's full of photographs of her and her family as well as many photos of and by her mother, Pattie Stone Tuggle who was a photographer herself (there are many photos stamped on the back with "Pattie T. Wiley"). These photos may be of Pattie's wedding and of her with two of her children:
The woman in both photos is obviously the same and since they were in the same photo binder I am going to conclude this as a fact. The binder also had the studio name (for the second photo): Leonard & Co. 57 1/2 Whitehall St. Atlanta, GA. I seem to remember that while going through the Atlanta City Directories I saw several entries for Whitehall St. so if I go through those again I may find out who this family is.
The next one is a complete unknown. It is also from Emily Anne's box and was in a glass frame, so it has some importance. It looks like a photo of a photo. I guess that by analyzing the pose and attire I can narrow down the range of years this was taken in, but I currently don't posses such knowledge. Handsome guy, whoever he is:
And here's the last one. This one is from my side of the family. It's one of the photos my mother brought with her on their most recent visit. According to my grandmother (who gave her the photo) this is possibly either one of her brothers or on of her uncles from Russia (location could be any one of several in East Europe). The large man in the center of the photo is the mystery. The way everyone is posed around him suggests he is the VIP in the photo. The woman on the bottom-right who is kneeling is holding his left hand tightly. And what's up with all those little flower bouquets on the floor? Is he wearing some sort of uniform? He's obviously not a golfer, but his facial tan line suggests he spends a lot of time outside and wears some sort of protective head gear. I would love to find out who this is:
Any ideas?
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:
I have not posted anything new for a while not because I had nothing new to report but rather because there was too much going on. My parents arrived for a visit and we had a great time together. One of the things I had asked my mother to do was to bring as many old photos as she could. She did not disappoint!
I started scanning and cataloging all these terrific pictures and it's going to take a long time to get through everything. The method I've been using is to place as many photos as I can on the scanner and scan them as an entire page:
I scan them at a high DPI on the A4 paper setting so that I can use the entire scanner. Then I flip them over and scan the backs:
The next step in the process is to start cropping and aligning the images correctly and then saving them in the proper directories in my photo filing system. That's a lot of work, but I really look forward to it.
Last week I received Maureen Taylor's (the photo detective) book "Uncovering Your Ancestry through Family Photograph" from Amazon (where's my second book Bezos?) and started reading through that. Even though my photos are not very old I have been learning some research methodology and a few helpful tips about how to catalog and record what is on them.
Here's one of my favorite photos so far:
It's a photo of my great-grandfather Moshe Zinberg's grave site in Beltsy, Moldova (previously Romania and also Russia). I don't know who took it. I don't know when it was taken. I don't know how it ended up in my hands (I will have to ask my grandmother but my guess is her mother brought it with her on her visit to Israel many years ago). I don't know who the two men in the picture are but my best guess is that they are cemetery workers. I don't even know if the grave is still there!
What I do know is the following:
1) The plot is very large and fenced, which is not common.
2) The name in Hebrew would be pronounced "Tzimbarg". What does it say in Russian?
3) From what I could tell he was a VIP (Ish Ha'Tov) and a Cohen. It says he is Moshe, son of Aaron the Cohen.
4) There is a small picture of Moshe at the top of the tombstone.
5) There is a bunch of stuff in Russian which I couldn't read.
6) I couldn't figure out his date of death either (too fuzzy when I zoom in - I will try with a magnifying glass on the original).
I also scanned the back and sent it to two of Moshe's grandchildren to see if they could read it and translate it for me:.jpg)
Does anyone know what it says?
I can't wait to get into all the other photos. Some are complete mysteries...
One of my favorite Genea-Blogs is Shades of the Departed. The level of detail that fM and the guests put into analyzing a photograph is jaw dropping. I wanted to participate in the latest Smile for the Camera - Crowing Glory carnival, but I was away on a family vacation and having a fantastic time that I just never made it. It's kind of hard to put together a post after chasing three year-olds on the beach all day long.
But I do have two amazing photos that I would have loved to share in the carnival. One is a picture of Edith May Conley (Rightmire), b. 1858 in West Virgina. Edith is my wife's 2nd great grandmother. I recently got a batch of photos from Uncle Glenn and this was one of them:
I have absolutely no idea how to analyze the photo, but what I can tell you is that it is made out of some 2 layered cardboard and was taken in West Virginia around the year 1900. How do I know this? Well it says so on the back. Some one wrote all that in pencil including who Edith is and who her daughter and granddaughter are.
Now that is a seriously stunning piece of headgear, don't you think? I especially like the black veil with the white pearls on it. Very nice. When I eventually learn to analyze photos I will have to redo this one. But until then, anyone out there want to take a crack at it?
And oh, famous relative alert: Edith was the first cousin of William Gustavus Conley, who was the 18th Governor of West Virginia.
On to the next crown. This is one of my favorite pictures ever taken. It's Moshe Zinberg, my great grandfather. This is actually a photo I took of my sister's roots project, so the quality is horrible. But I will get the original soon and all will be corrected. Check out the baby sheep:.jpg)
This picture was taken in Russia when the Zinberg family fled their home during WW2. The family had gone through a lot of ups and downs before the war. In 1933 Moshe sold everything the family owned in order to arrange for documentation and safe passage to Israel. But it turned out he was conned and lost everything. He had to start his whole life over and rebuild from nothing. When the war started the family fled to middle Asia and ended up in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. That's where my grandparents met.
And that's a story for another time.
