I found a folder from my last big research push that has been missing since 1995. I searched and searched and thought that it had been accidentally thrown away. I swear that I looked in the drawer that it was in a dozen times. Lots of work that I thought was gone forever.
I found that some of my relatives acted very strangely when I first got interested in family history. "Why do you want to know? Let things lie...they cautioned me." There was plenty of sordid history in the family, a murder, an escape, a grandfather who trafficked in morphine across europe for his addicted mother, but I guess every family has its issues now, doesn't it?
Since I found the link with Stanley I have been madly cross checking names and databases, trying to find the familial thread. Paternal grandmother or maternal side, there are some matches on the mitochondrial DNA that would lead to that conclusion. Unless we are related on both sides, there is always that possibility.
I established a tree on GENI, an almost decent free program on line where I could at least sketch out the family tree again. The internet has brought so many of the difficult to find old records forward to my fingertips, in the old days I pawed through microfiche at the National Archives for things like ship manifests and trips to UCLA to look for Yiskor or holocaust memorial books.
Unfortunately, most of the family tribal histories of the last century ended up the same way. I found record after record of family members falling at places like this one; Uncle Mendel Szkarlat getting his ticket punched at the Majdeneck concentration camp.
J.O n° 276 du 29 novembre 2003 page 20432
Arrêté du 29 septembre 2003 portant apposition de la mention " Mort en déportation " sur les actes et jugements déclaratifs de décès
NOR: DEFS0302166A
Szkarlat (Jechiel, Mendel), né le 12 février 1914 à Varsovie (Pologne), décédé le 7 mars 1943 à Lublin-Maïdanek (Pologne) et non le 2 mars 1943 à Drancy (Seine).
There are plenty more, I won't bore you or torture you with them. I find my grandfather's birth record at the archives from Sierpc, near Warsaw.
We always heard of an older brother, killed in the war. Grandpa would never talk about it. Might have switched names with him. Grandma Pessa did, with her dead sister Pola, in order to enter the country. I have her passport. Makes me illegal, I bet. Maybe its one of these other guys...
Grandma Pessa had nine brothers and sisters. Only one or two made it out of Wyszkow, Malka and maybe Brana. The family had owned a lumber mill in Wyszkow, near the Vistula Forest.
I know it sounds strange but I wonder what it would be like to have been there. In the Warsaw ghetto, fighting with my ancestors for survival. Fighting the most existential battle in history, the fight to extinguish a whole people. Their are times in history when things start to really count. The good fight.
Discovering my lost relatives, doing everything I can to breathe some life into their horrible stories, paying homage to their suffering, it makes me feel very honored and full of respect, to look back, look back once again, at their soft flickering lights.
