Cheerful Curmudgeon

I published my family tree on-line so that other family members and genealogists would have easy access. I never imagined that it would turn into a way to find long lost friends. I just received this email message:

A friend of mine from college was looking for me.  So, he googled my family name and saw me on your family tree.  So he got my married name and saw me on my work site and then he sent an email to them and they forwarded it to me.  It is truly amazing how the internet works….

Too fun!

Genealogy research has led me to connections with distant cousins that I never knew existed. Yes, I know that many purists consider genealogy to be the study of (primarily dead) ancestors but I rapidly hit dead-ends in that realm since I am of Jewish, eastern European and Russian descent. Between the pogroms and the Nazis, there is not much left for me to find. Since I have not been able to focus on my ancestors, I defocused my attention and have been actively documenting the living branches of my family tree.

Last month, I wrote to Harold Zemon, my first cousin once removed, and asked for information about his branch of the Zemons. He replied with a wealth of data which I did not have. Most exciting was this brief note about Moses Zemon, Harold’s father:

Moses Zemon… was very close with his brother Isaac a/k/a Joe a/k/a Uncle Ike…. My father & Uncle Ike were wonderful sons to our grandmother Rose Zemon.

This is the first first-hand information that I have about Isaac, my grandfather. I never met him since he passed away when my father was a child. For reasons that my father never explained, he never told me anything at all about Isaac.

I have also swapped a bunch of email with my second cousin once removed, Wayne Zemon. He filled in his branch of the Zemon tree, all the way down to Robert and Alison Wiseman. My son, David, noticed that Robert and Alison are about his age and zipped right over to Facebook to contact everybody by those names. He was able to, in surprisingly short order, talk on the phone with the right Robert who was tickled pink to find any connection to the Zemon name. Until I began corresponding with Wayne, my branch of the Zemon’s had had no contact whatsoever with Wayne and his sister Ruth (Robert and Alison’s grandmother). In case you are wondering, Robert and Alison are David’s fourth cousins.

Jule Turnoy, another second cousin once removed, has been sharing her knowledge of the Freiler line. Believe it or not, she and I were introduced by the Steve and Laura Stroud of Elgin, Illinois, who live in (and have beautifully restored) Philip Freiler’s home.

A lot of my genealogy research amounts to little more than adding names and dates to a computer database. It can be hard to understand why I bother. Every so often, though, I have one of those woo hoo! moments which keep me going. Last Saturday brought not one, but two, woo hoo’s.

Isaac Mayer Wise

First, I discovered that I have a distant connection to Isaac Mayer Wise, the man who founded Reform Judaism here in the United States, as well as the Hebrew Union College/Jewish Institute of Religion. My great granduncle, Robert S. Herzog, married Wise’s granddaughter, Elsie Wise May. Robert was quite a man. He earned his medical degree from Harvard Medical School, researched the effects of cholesterol (thank you, Robert!), and researched space medicine and climatology. Elsie, in turn, had a very distinguished career in interior design.

Second, I learned that I have cousins living right here in St. Louis. After being here for 18 years, I had no idea that these people even existed, let alone that they were local. How did it happen? I wrote to Carolyn Serby Weinstein who gave the letter to her daughter Sarah Weinstein Windman who has since been corresponding with me via email. Sarah told me about our mutual cousins Jeffrey Mormol and Julie Mormol Stern. To cap it all off, Sarah will be in town for a bat mitzvah next month which will give several of us a chance to meet each other.

I also had a good chuckle when I noticed that my cousin Andrew’s wife’s mother’s maiden name was “Winkler” and that my step-mother’s mother’s maiden name was also “Winkler” and that the two women lived close enough to one and other that they could be related. They almost certainly are not but won’t it be funny if they do turn out to be?

GRAMPS (my genealogy software) version 3.0.2 just came out and I upgraded. It has lots of bug fixes and tweaks, including to several things which had annoyed me about 3.0.1. Unfortunately, they did not fix one of the things which bothered me: the pages of living individuals still do not include the persons’ pictures. Those are considered “private” data and hidden along with birth dates and places and other identifying information.

Fortunately, one of the nice things about open source software, such as GRAMPS, is that you can fix it if you do not like it. I took a bit of time and tweaked one file and, voila!, my genealogy web site now includes the pictures of living people. See, for instance, Candy’s page.

Finally, I contributed my code back to the project where it will (hopefully) be useful to other people.

I am very happy that 3.0.2 fixed one bug which I found incredibly annoying. The scanned images of my source material had not been making it onto my web site. Now, the images are neatly published. For instance, you can see my great grandfather, Nathan Herzog, and his father, Salomon Herzog, in the 1870 US census. Look at lines 16 and 13, respectively. (Click on the thumbnail to see a larger image. Then click on the larger image to get a full-sized scan which is readily readable.)

Genealogy has been a large part of my life for better than ten years yet I have never blogged about it. I have always assumed that you would not be interested because my genealogy is only about my family and not about yours. On the other hand, I have made several exciting discoveries lately which are (I hope) generally interesting so, with a little nudge from Candy, I am beginning to blog about this little pastime of mine. I’ll begin with a tiny bit of navel gazing so please indulge me (or just quietly skip onto the next article in your blogroll and spare me the pain of knowing that, truly, no one cares about my navel).

Like almost everyone else, my genealogy research began as a child as my mother told me stories about our family. Like almost every other child, I did not care one whit about the vast majority of the stories she told: the people where old or dead; I had not met them and would not meet them. BFD.

Somewhere around my late 30s, I got seriously interested in chasing down some of my genealogy. (Yes, my mom was pleased with me.) I spent time at the local Family History Center and the local public library crawling through spools of microfilm of census index cards. It was slow and tedious but the process grudgingly yielded up tantalizing connections to people and places that I had heard about but previously ignored. I bought a copy of Family Tree Maker and made a pretty serious attempt to organize what I learned and print it out in ways which were meaningful to other people. My mom loved it and my sons politely asked me if I would keep the printed booklets and charts for them “so they wouldn’t lose them.” It’s true: what goes around, comes around.

Disaster struck in the spring of 2001. Thieves stole my laptop and, though I had backups, through an error on my part, the genealogy files were not included in the backups. I lost almost everything. I was able to retrieve the public information from a web site where I had published my family tree. Gone were all of the scanned photos and all of the private information associated with living people (birth dates and places, marriage dates and places, etc.). Thoroughly disgusted, I gave up genealogy for about eight years.

Last June, at my mother’s funeral, Melanie and Dorr rather pointedly asked me why I had not delivered genealogical reports to them, as promised back before my laptop had been stolen. My hat will be eternally off to the two of them for giving me the incentive I needed to pick this hobby up again.

Since I now run Ubuntu Linux on my laptop, I decided to switch from the Windows-based Family Tree Maker to GRAMPS, which runs natively on Linux. This has been a wonderful decision. GRAMPS works beautifully and produces some very nice reports and, even better, a fantastic web site. Here is one screen snapshot.

The on-line genealogy research world has improved amazingly over the last few years. What used to take weeks and involved trips to the Family History Center, pawing through microfilm of index cards, ordering (and paying for) microfilm of the actual census, waiting for the census microfilm, and a second trip to the FHC to read and print the census image; can now be done on-line instantly. Ancestry.com has all of the census data and a myriad of other data indexed and searchable and viewable for a subscription fee which, though not cheap, is certainly reasonable. Add to that tools like JewishGen and GenealogyBank.com and Facebook and Google and email and I can now accomplish in days what would have taken months previously. As an impatient computer geek, I’m in heaven.

I have built my family tree out to encompass 577 individuals, over 80 of them with photographs. I have found history that I never imagined being able to find and living relatives who I never knew existed. More on that in upcoming posts.