Finding Family

My husband, Evan, and I sat around the kitchen table. We were chatting with Claire and Artie, who came down from the Boston area for the weekend. Claire used to be married to Evan’s father,  but after many years, they got divorced. We still regard her as family. She is something akin to a combined mother/mother-in-law/step-mother/friend, even though there is no exact word for our relationship. She is  a keeper. Artie is her companion.

They were talking about how difficult it is to trace family genealogy, especially if you are Jewish. They made it sound hard to get information, so hard  there’s no point trying. I want to show them otherwise.  

“I don’t know anything about my family,” Artie started. “My father never talked about his parents.”  Artie’s father was born in Russia.

“Let me show you,” I said, opening up the laptop as we sat around the kitchen table. I logged into my account at Ancestry.com.

“What is your father’s name?” I asked.

“Saul Fleishman.”

I went to the “search” bar at the top of the screen on Ancestry.com and clicked “search all records.” The search form appeared. I typed in the name.

“When was he born?” I asked.

Artie knew the date within a year.  I entered his father’s birth year and then “1” in the +/- dropdown menu to indicate that we were sure of the date plus or minus a year.

“Do you know when he died?”

Artie gave me the year of his father’s death. He knew this exactly. I entered the year into the search box and clicked “exact.” We added Artie and his siblings in the search box under “children.”

“Where did your dad live?”

Artie wasn’t sure of all the locations his father had lived in around the Boston area. We put the one location we were 100% sure of— Massachusetts. Then I pressed “search.”

 “You’re not going to believe this,” I said.

We watched as the screen immediately filled with document after document about Artie’s father. I saw Artie’s  mouth open wide. For the next hour, we scrolled through the search results—city directories, business listings, birth certificate,  census listings showing Saul as a young man, and naturalization papers, to name a few.  

“Look, here’s your dad.” I showed Artie the 1930 Census document. It showed that his grandfather owned the house his father grew up in. It was worth $14,000.

“There it is—the egg business,” Artie pointed to the occupation and industry column in the 1930 Census. His grandfather was in the egg business, as was his father, and then Artie himself. Artie recognized addresses, names of colleagues, names of nearby businesses, his father’s lawyer. He began to recall things his father had said about these people. There were names of business associates which Artie had heard his father mention. He hadn’t thought about these names in years. We were so engrossed that we ignored everyone else  for more than an hour.

 “I’ve never seen my father’s name so much in all my life,” said Artie. I promised to email him his father’s naturalization papers and other documents. Ancestry.com is addictive.  But there are worse addictions.