Link to Family Tree to understand family relationships.

Today we have a letter to Helene’s daughter Eva from Jon Eidelson, the husband of a distant relative on my grandmother’s side.

November 22, 1996

Dear Eva,

As you know, I have been helping my father-in-law, David Levy, piece together a family tree for his mother’s side of the family. David’s mother was Elsie, the daughter of Bernhard Fulda (from Hitdorf, Germany) and Bertha Levy (from Litomerice in Bohemia, now the northern part of Czechoslovakia).

I am including a copy of the portion of this family tree that relates to your family. Hopefully you will find it interesting. I would greatly appreciate any corrections, additional information, or comments, and any photocopies of old documents you may have, and have included an envelope for your reply.

Thanks again for all your help.

Fall 1996 was the early days of email and Google did not yet exist. Research was done in libraries and by traveling to small towns in Europe to look for vital records.

In later correspondence, Jon asked some specific questions, most of which my mother couldn’t answer. I can answer many of the questions now, 25 years later, and the names and locations mean something. For example, in the November 18th post, Paul Zerzawy’s first postcard as a soldier was sent from Litomerice. 

After finding Harry’s papers, I contacted the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society and joined JewishGen, an invaluable online resource. One of the first things I looked for on JewishGen was information on the Zerzawy family. By that time, I had found the Zerzawy family tree dating back to 1740 and the World War I letters from the Zerzawy brothers. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I didn’t think this branch of the family was important to the family story I wanted to tell, so I was hoping to find Zerzawy descendants who would find these papers interesting and useful. On JewishGen, I only found one link, and it was to the family tree made by Jon! I do not know whether there are descendants left from that family

We learned about both family trees in the February 13th post. Helene wrote about “Uncle Fulda” in a few letters although I haven’t deciphered the exact connection. As Helene and Vitali were trying to leave Vienna, she wrote to her children asking them to only ask him for financial assistance if it became absolutely necessary. I believe this is a photo of Erwin or his father Bernhard Fulda and Helene during a visit to Vienna in 1929:

This letter highlights a recurring challenge when doing genealogical research – the repetition of names, both first and last. In today’s letter, Jon talks about his father-in-law David Levy, which would lead one to believe that David was a blood relative of my grandmother Helene, whose maiden name was Löwy, which relatives changed to Levy when they came to the United States. However, Jon explains that David was related to the family on his mother’s side – David’s mother’s maiden name was Fulda; his grandmother’s maiden name was Levy.

Earlier this year, I hired a genealogist in Prague to find information about my grandmother’s parents and grandparents. According to his research, Helene’s father Adolf’s parents were both born with the surname Löwy, and in fact, both his maternal and paternal grandfathers were named Jakob Löwy!

In addition to answering Jon’s questions, my mother shared memories of the stories Helene had told her as a child. For example, she explained that her grandfather Adolf had tutored Goethe’s girlfriend. However, as we saw in the September 4th post, according to Helene, the possible Goethe connection was with Adolf’s mother-in-law who had been Ulrike von Levetzow’s milliner. As people steeped in genealogy advise, it’s always important to validate even information that seems incontrovertible by finding for additional references and evidence. As I’ve gone through my grandmother’s papers over the past few years, I have come to trust what she says and recalls. I can almost always find a newspaper article or other reference that corroborates the story she tells.