| Reading
the Omens
Barbara
Krasner-Khait examines a key to genealogical breakthroughs.
|
| This
ad, which probably appeared in the Montreal Star, was
run to announce Lance Corporal Stanford's return from
service and to advertise the store's expansion and renovation. |
It’s
2am. You toss and turn in bed, trying to sort out all the
little bits of information about that family line you’re
researching. Beads of cold sweat trickle down your face. Conflicting
thoughts course through your mind. You ask yourself, what
are the known facts? Do I have enough evidence to support
them as facts? What don’t I know? How can I find out?
Then, suddenly it hits you. Why didn’t I consider this
source? Why didn’t I consider this possibility? The
clues were right there and I didn’t see them!
Sound familiar?
Paulo Coelho wrote in his parable, The Alchemist, “When
you want something, all the world conspires in helping you to
achieve it.” All you have to do is read the omens.
When you’re facing a brick wall in your genealogical
research, it feels like the entire world conspires against
you. Time, day jobs, and other commitments get in the way
of the creative and analytical space you need to read the
omens. I’ve been a victim of this situation many, many
times.
A few years ago, I was frustrated because I couldn’t
identify Max Kean’s relationship to my Krasner/Dvorkin
line. I had been looking for this connection for six years
— without results. Sitting around with fellow genealogists
at an annual conference, I mapped out what I knew. I then
jokingly said that since Kean is pronounced “Keen”
and Dvorkin is pronounced in Russian with a “keen”
ending, perhaps Kean was originally Dvorkin and the “Dvor”
was dropped. After the conference, I asked Max’s daughter-in-law
(it took me six years to piece together the information to
find her) about the original family name, she confirmed the
name had been Dvorkin. Apparently, Max Dvorkin left Russia
and stopped in England, working there for a while. His boss
told him he needed a name the customers could pronounce. Max
saw the name Edmund Kean on a Piccadilly Circus marquee (so
the story goes) and he adopted the name.
All the clues were there. His name was penciled in at the
bottom of the Dvorkin family tree. Harry Dvorkin’s signature
appeared on his naturalization papers. But it took a clear
head and creative “what if” scenarios to create
working hypotheses and to achieve a breakthrough.
Both analytical and creative approaches can uncover those
omens we so desperately seek. Whether you find them, read
them, hypothesize them or create them, you may find omens
to be a useful tool. Here’s how some others have put
their omens to use.
 |
Petitions
for Naturalization are a treasure house of information
for genealogists searching for clues. |
Review All The Pieces For Omens
Marcia Meyers from Connecticut gathered and reviewed correspondence,
finding clues that led to her breakthrough. She says, “For
years I’ve been researching my grandfather Simon Solomon
Indianer. I have several letters and postcards he wrote during
World War I while in Galicia to his daughter Sara in the United
States. One card written on October 1915 was a mystery. Grandfather
had written a postcard to Vienna to an Isak Leib Roth. The
postcard asked Roth to ask his daughter Anna why Sara wasn’t
writing from the U.S. I guess the daughter passed the postcard
on to Sara. Who was Isak Leib Roth and how did Grandfather
know him?
“Last year a woman from Brooklyn also named Marcia was
in touch. Her grandfather was from the same town as my grandfather.
We decided to meet for lunch. I showed Marcia the booklet
I had put together of my grandfather’s correspondence.
I had an extra copy so I told her to keep it.”
Meyers’ drive home later that day gave her the creative
space to put all the pieces together. “As I was driving
home it occurred to me that Marcia had mentioned her grandfather’s
name was Roth. I e-mailed her as soon as I got home and told
her to look on the page where the postcard from Roth was —
perhaps it was a relative. Immediately she e-mailed me that
Isak Leib Roth was her grandfather whom my grandfather had
written! Her grandfather had left his home and was staying
with his daughter in Vienna! It was obvious that our grandfathers
were good friends and my Aunt Sara and her Aunt Anna also
were good friends.”
| Create
Your Own Omens
Make it easy for the world to find you by creating your
own family web pages, using and contributing to CD and
web-based family finders and databases, and participating
in online discussion groups. Such approaches paved the
way for the following researchers to achieve a breakthrough.
Web
Pages
Researcher Arlene Parnes of Orlando, Florida knew she
had a breakthrough when her town-based web page helped
a relative find her. She says, “I have a copy
of my paternal grandfather’s memoir, written in
1954 when he was already elderly. I copied the information
he put into the book about his childhood home and created
a web page focused on his ancestral town of Vishnevets.
Through that page, his half-sister’s descendants
found me and we have been in constant touch every since
— and now the family is back together again. Without
that page, we never would have connected.”
Family
Finders and Databases
When Velma Vinton Onstott of Visalia, California began
to research her family, she had few clues. She knew
the name of her great-great-grandfather, Jacob Brown
Vinton, and that he had come from New York to Texas.
This information was in the 1870 Census Records for
Frio County, Texas. Using this information, she searched
Family Tree Maker’s Family Finder for Jacob’s
name in New York and Texas. She found the name of a
D.H. Vinton who also appeared in New York and in the
1860 Census Records for Texas. She says, “I felt
a strong feeling in my heart that I had finally found
a connection, but I still had no proof, because I did
not know the names of Jacob’s parents.”
She sent letters to about 40 Vintons in Texas and hit
pay dirt. One response was from a descendant of Jacob
Brown Vinton. Another was from someone who sent her
pages from the Vinton Memorial with information on Jacob
and his parents, David Hammond Vinton and Pamela Brown.
Pamela Brown turned out to the daughter of the famous
General Jacob Jennings Brown, for whom her great-great-grandfather
was named. “If it had not been for my research
on Family Finder, I would still be looking for that
missing link,” says Onstott. “When I started
my research, I had only my immediate family, cousins,
aunts and uncles on my descendancy chart — about
64 names. Now after using Family Tree Maker, Family
Finder and Genealogy.com as my research tools, my family
tree has grown to over 6,700 names. By following my
heart, I have found my Vinton family.”
Online
Discussion Groups
Jayne Cartier of Kew Gardens Hill, New York, placed
her omens well. “A few months ago, I posted a
message on JewishGen looking for family members. I was
able to locate a cousin of mine who lived in Arizona.
My cousin was not a subscriber to JewishGen, but a friend
of his saw my post, and since the surname was the same
as my cousin’s, he sent him my message to see
if there was a match. And the rest is history. It’s
nice to know that there are people out there who actually
read the messages and are willing to help.”
|
Bruce Walkup’s analytical approach helped him continually
question assumptions and develop a very creative set of hypotheses
about his family’s surname evolution. He says, “It
all goes back to an opening statement in our Wauchope history
about it being said that the first Wauchope was a French knight
serving under Scottish King Malcolm Canmore in 1062. None of
the documents I had seen elaborated on that statement, which
really bugged me. I decided to find out where this 1062 reference
came from and who were these supposed Normans? It took a while
but I finally tracked down the book that included the reference.
It was from George MacKenzie’s The Lives and Characters
of the Most Eminent Writers of the Scots Nation, published
in New York in 1708. The article was about Robert Wauchope,
who died in 1551 and was the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh
and Primate of all Ireland. According to the article, the Wauchopes,
among others, were thought to have come up from England where
they had been supporting English King Edward the Confessor along
the Welsh border in about 1055.
“While I was searching for the 1062 reference, I was
also looking for books about
Normans who came over to Great Britain about this time. Early
on I had run across The Norman People and their Existing
Descendants in the British Dominions and the United States of
America, published in 1874. There I found a chapter discussing
Norman names and how they changed over time. It listed Baugh
and Waugh as being the same name.
This seemed odd at first but later clicked. The name Waugh is
thought to be an abbreviation of Wauchope. There have been instances
of this suffix drop at different times in the family. My theory
is that Wauchope is ultimately a territorial style of the name
Baa. This is when I began to try to reconcile these seemingly
different names through use of online Gaelic dictionaries and
Webster’s. After I had contemplated this all
for awhile, a question popped into my head one day. If Wauchope
did indeed come from Baugh, then what about the name Bauchope?
It seemed natural then that it should exist too.
“My first thought was to check Black’s Surnames
of Scotland. I remember the moment was just like in the
movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory when Charlie
slowly opens up the chocolate bar looking for the gold certificate
to win the big prize. I slowly paged through the book to the
“B” section, not really expecting to find anything,
and lo and behold, there was the name Bauchope. Not only did
I find the name, I found one of the spellings in history was
Bauk — just as it should be. That moment was the icing
on the cake. Since then I have also found a confirming listing
in the family Edmiston history that their estate in Midlothian
was sold to the Bauchape family in 1671. Our Wauchope history
says this same estate went to the Wauchope family by marriage
in 1671.”
Time
Uncovers Hidden Omens
“Not only was I frustrated by ‘twigs’ that
I couldn’t connect to the family tree, but also what
appeared to be double relationships,” says Stacy Harris
of Nashville, Tennessee. “When I called my mother’s
elderly first cousin — though still of sound mind —
she couldn’t remember anything about various relatives
and how they were related to each other. I thought I had made
a mistake until my mother explained that her cousin’s
‘forgetfulness’ stemmed from what she wanted to
keep as a family secret: that all of the double relationships
resulted from the fact that her parents were not only husband
and wife but also half first-cousins! My mother’s elderly
cousin is of a generation where such marriages between cousins
were looked upon as scandalous, though no one would blink
an eye about it today.”
Others
Can Help You Find The Omens
Linda Morzillo of Saratoga Springs, New York found going directly
to the local source her key to a breakthrough. She says, “My
husband’s maternal grandfather’s family had the
story that they were from French Canada and someone had married
a Mohawk Indian woman. The family lived in Montgomery County,
NY — about an hour ride west of where I live. One day
in April 1999, I drove to the old courthouse in Fonda, NY
where there is a historical library to do some research. The
people who work there are very helpful and quickly had me
look at the 1855 census. I was able to find the names of some
of my husband’s ancestors — the name Montanye
and its variants are very common in that geographic area.
“When the woman who was helping me realized what name
I was looking for, she pulled a green hard covered book from
the shelf and told me to look at it. I sat down and found
my husband’s great grandparents listed on page 136!
This was a find! We discovered that the family is descended
from Johannes De la Montagne (1595-1670) and Rachel de Forest,
the daughter of Jesse de Forest whose name is on a plaque
in Battery Park, Manhattan. The plaque commemorates the landing
of Jesse’s group of the first permanent settlers in
the New Netherlands, where only a trading post had been previously.
The book was written in 1982 by Lois Stewart, another descendant
and very distant relative, after much research of old French
and Dutch documents and histories.
“I have been in contact with Lois Stewart who had the
same family stories concerning Mohawks and French Canada.
It is clear from the research that they are unsubstantiated
rumors, now laid to rest. Lois and other professional genealogists
have traced the family a dozen generations back from my husband.
We’ve since become members of the Society of Descendants
of Johannes de la Montagne.”
The
Sixth Sense
Every time I looked at the photo of Aron Anschelewitz and his
wife, Fanny, I wondered how it was that I was supposed to be
related to him on my Krasner/Dvorkin side. He looked nothing
like my family. The left side of my brain told me there was
something about this wife, something that suggested I had a
connection to her somehow. To satisfy the right side of my brain,
I was determined to find Aron and Fanny’s 1908 New York
City marriage record while visiting the Family History Library
in Salt Lake City. After three days, I still couldn’t
find it. Remembering the availability of the Bride Index for
Manhattan, I called their 80-year-old daughter in Florida and
asked for her mother’s maiden name. She gave me the name
and I explained, regretfully, that I had no idea how we were
related. A successful search in the Bride Index led me to the
marriage record. Aron’s information didn’t provide
any revelations — I still didn’t see a connection
to my Krasner family. I glanced to the right to check out Fanny’s
information — and literally stood up. There it was —
her mother was Doba Krasner, my grandfather’s eldest sibling.
Fanny was my grandfather’s niece, and the woman in Florida
was my second cousin. Our families had not been in contact with
each other since 1912 when Aron and Fanny and their children
returned to Europe. The world conspired to help me, inspiring
me to use both sides of my brain.
At the end of The Alchemist, the main character does
indeed find what he was looking for. The road wasn’t easy
— it was filled with challenges. But doesn’t that
make the results that much more meaningful? And, as the former
librarian of my local Family History Center once told me, it
is our ancestors who put those clues there for us to find.
This
article originally appeared in the November/December 2000
issue of Family Chronicle.
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