Lately, I’ve had two questions that I couldn’t answer: 1) when and where Helene’s father Adolf Löwy was born and died, and 2) when and where Helene’s brother Max died. My mother thought Adolf had died when Helene was 12 or 13. However, I have a story by Helene where she talks about when she was 15 and her father was still alive. My mother thought my grandmother and her mother had gone to Vienna before WWI because Max was living there and practicing medicine. My mother didn’t remember meeting him and thought he might have died in 1920 or 1922 and that he may have had a son named Karl who might have come to the US.
In August I attended a virtual conference on Jewish genealogy. Many sessions were taped for later viewing and I have watched a number of workshops since then. Being fairly new to this subject, each session gives me new skills to do family history research. I am in awe of the number of amateur genealogists out there who volunteer thousands of hours of their time documenting and cataloging towns, families, birth and death records, etc. to save unrelated familes from being lost to history forever.
As with any research activity, after I stumble on some new tidbit of information, I often find that I cannot recreate the steps that got me there. Like Hansel and Gretel, I’m lost in the woods. Here I try to recreate one pathway while it’s still fresh in my memory.
There is an organization called JewishGen that is an incredible resource for research into Jewish genealogy. For example, they have a Jewish burial database that has information on burial records all over the world. I’m pretty sure I found information about the death of two of Helene’s sisters. But I couldn’t find an Adolf Löwy who fit the place and age that my great-grandfather would have been. I found 2 different burial records in Vienna for a Max Löwy who could have fit age and possible death date, and was pretty sure one of them was my Max. JewishGen also has records of doctors in Vienna but I couldn’t find a listing for Max Löwy.
This week I watched a session on “Czech Torah Scrolls Journey and its relevancy to family history research”. I didn’t have a lot of hope that I would learn much, but since my grandmother came from that area and the handout included Bilin, I decided to listen. The main presenter was Julius Müller (http://www.toledot.org/), a Czech genealogist who was mentioned in a number of other sessions - clearly he is someone I need to contact!
Something he said led me to https://www.geni.com/, which other conference speakers had mentioned several times. One speaker said that this was a site that is trying to create a “family tree of the world”. It is pretty public so people have to be comfortable sharing freely their information.
On Geni, I typed in either Adolf’s or Max’s name and actually came up with a mini family tree that had been created in 2018. It included Adolf and Rosa, Max and his wife and children (!) including Karl and Karl’s wife, and two of my grandmother’s sisters who had died in Bilin. Nothing about my grandmother though. Unfortunately, the tree did not have the answers to my questions. But I thought I must have discovered a relative who had created the tree and contacted him. No, it was created by a man in Israel who I guess along with many others (volunteer or paid, I don’t know) is gathering information from vital records to create these trees.
Family tree found on Geni.com. Note that most of the family members I know and care about aren’t listed! Click on image to enlarge
Interestingly, Max’s oldest child is listed as Otto and included a birthdate in 1902. but there was no further info. Karl was listed as being born in 1904 as Karl Otto. I thought it was odd that both children would have Otto in their names. I went back to the Jewish burial database and found that an Otto Löwy had died in Vienna in 1903 at the age of 10 months. I assume Karl’s middle name was in his honor. And that Karl was named after Max’s mother’s beloved brother Karl Kraus who had died in 1889 and had been very kind to the family (something I recently learned when transcribing a story by my grandmother about the 1889 flu epidemic).
Having more names in Max’s family, I went to Ancestry.com (which during these days of Covid can be accessed from home through your local public library) and found a NY draft card for Karl where he lists Max as next of kin and shows Max’s home address and the address of his medical practice! Then I found Max’s intent to apply for citizenship as well as a ship manifest that show that he and his wife arrived in NY in March 1940 on a ship coming from Caracas, Venezuela! Nothing about when Karl arrived - before, after, who knows? I’m sure I could find more info out and perhaps some day I’ll look.
Learning all this has made me rethink the story of my grandmother’s life that I’ve created from all the documents I had and it has raised so many more questions. My grandmother wrote lovingly of her brother Max in her stories about her childhood. My mother thought he had died when she was a baby or before, so clearly they did not spend time together in Vienna. Did Max leave Vienna as early as 1922? Had there been a falling out? Did he go somewhere else in Europe? When did he go to Venezuela? Why did he not stay in contact with my grandmother? It’s surprising to me that my grandmother had to rely on more distant cousins for assistance to get to America. They were Max’s cousins too! Of course, I don’t know the story of Max’s journey and whether he would have had resources to help. But couldn’t he have written?!