In the Genes

Every family has its "family secrets" and ours is no exception. We have talked about some of them in the past and won't rehash them here. Suffice it to say that honesty may well have meant a major difference to the life and death of members of the family but ego apparently got in the way  as it often does.

At this point in time the genealogy project, a never ending journey if there ever was one, continues unabated. Attended the IAJGS Conference in Chicago in August which brought together genealogists from around the world for five days of meetings and seminars. Information on our Great Great Great Grandparents marriage at the Great Synagogue in Lond in 1830 is available both as part of a Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain project and in a published book of records in the JGSGB library. A friend from the UK (and leader of the UK society is going to make a photcopy of the relevant entry and send it to me. 

Recently in asking for information on the Jewish Gen German SIG we received, within hours of publishing, information of particular interest with respect to the Fauerbachs of Frankfurt Germany (Dick's great grandparents on his mother's side). included in the the e-mails was one from Israel enclosing a page of Testimny from Yad Vashem including a photgraph. Comparing the the photos of a cousin with one of Dick's mother was not only startling but almost scary. It was so remarkable that Dick, without commetn asked Caryn to look at both photos - printed next to each other and all she could do was gasp at the resemblence. The other response on the same question was from Caracas and had some suggesstions on where to obtain more information on the Fauerbach's. Now, we are following up and have a list of potential relatives in the United States provided by a gentleman from Yad Vashem for which we are most grateful.

The family tree data base now includes all of Caryn's family going back to Bessarabia for the Moss side and Riga for the Brodie side and a huge collection of documetns as well as photos - including some from Bessarabia on the Moss side.

Latest discovery was of a group of Ribeiros - related through Rose Ribeiro who married Barnet Benjamin, Dick's third cousin - that arrived in the Savannah, Georgia in 1733, earliest of the family members to reach the "New World" - Judah Benjamin and his family arrived from the British Virgin islands in 1821 and Philip and Yetta Goodman in the early 1840's with PhillipBenjamin arriving in New York from London 1856 along with Mariah Isaacs, who would drop the" h" and marry Philip in the Wooster Street Synagogue in 1857. Philip and Maria's grandson Jacob married Glady's Fauerbach in 1911 and they had two children Betty and Miriam (known as Marion and Dick's mother) before Jacob died in 1914 of a kidney problem now recognized as a side effect of diabetes. 

Thanks to the 1851 Project of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Great Britain  a good deal more information has been developed on both the Isaacs andDavis families in Portsea and Portsmouth England as well as Moses and Sarah Cohen, at least their later life in Norwich England (many actual records of the Synagogue were destroyed during the  World War II but  a local member of the JGSGB is looking for records that may have survied the Blitz).

The total family database now exceeds 50,000 individuals, goes back to 1410 and has over 23,000 individual families with connections though some life cycle event to over 100 countries. There is a PDF file of the family history available on line and if requested as a CD, but it is over 300 megs long and 22,000 pages of detail  in two volumes - one narrative and one family trees.

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