I kept adding names…

Names of relatives, or relatives of relatives, or relatives of relatives of relatives, some on Barbara’s side, some on mine. That’s how my Family Tree blossomed from 200 ‘leaves,’ to 1800. But I wasn’t just adding names. I was unraveling mysteries, making sense of self-created urban legends. One thing I never understood was how and why Samuel and Mascha Jacobson, indisputably German-speaking Jews, assumedly already united in matrimony, wound up in Riga before coming to The States. What were they doing hanging out in Latvia? Answer: That’s where the family, the whole kit and kaboodle had been living since at least (documented) the middle of the 18th century. Oh. And no, Tante Mascha’s brothers, Willie and Lazer – the ones I’m told would hang out and play pinochle with my grandfather – did not arrive in America one step ahead of the jackboots, as I had assumed They had all arrived by 1900. And no, my grandparents only got married in 1894 – in NYC.

Continue reading →