January 7, 1948

In April 2017, I attended a genealogy workshop at my local public library. By the end of the session, I had learned to maneuver through the library edition of Ancestry.com and found many documents, including the one below.

I was astounded by how quickly and easily I could learn a great deal about my family. As mentioned yesterday, it is worth looking often and in different ways to see if anything new has turned up. There are some documents I found that day in April that I have never stumbled upon again and I continue to find new ones.

Helene’s “Declaration of Intention” includes a wealth of information:

-Her address in San Francisco
-Her birthplace
-Her vital statistics
-Her husband’s name, birthdate, and date and place of their marriage
-Her children
-Her last place of residence
-The name of the ship and where it left from – in this case, the SS Vulcania from Alexandria Egypt
-Date of arrival in the US

It’s wonderful to get all of this information in a single document. It has helped me in other searches. It also is consistent with information my grandmother wrote in other letters and paperwork. One of the things that genealogists emphasize is the need to corroborate family stories and lore with official documentation. There are times when I’ve wondered whether my grandmother’s memories might have been faulty, as our memories often are. However, I continue to find articles and paperwork that prove that Helene’s memory was excellent and that she was reporting the truth as she remembered it. This gives me confidence at the times when I don’t have something official, that what she has written is likely true.

This journey has made me feel even closer to my grandmother, not simply because we share the same name. The timing of my research has been especially poignant. A few years ago as we began translating my grandmother’s letters during the war years, I realized that I was her age when she was writing them and then sent to Ravensbrück. Currently I am the same age that Helene was when she filled out this document. Thanks to her efforts to provide a better life for her children, what she went through is completely foreign to my own experience.

Aside: if you are curious about your own family history and have always wanted to try Ancestry.com and similar services, now is the perfect time to do so. It used to be that you could only access these services by paying or by researching in person in your public library. Since libraries have been closed, these companies and the libraries themselves have made many services available from the comfort of your own home. All you need is a library card!