More on Family & Rootlessness

[abbzug]

This new FB connection of my brother's is turning out to be a key first step in solving some of the family mysteries I wrote about in my last entry. The family of the Austrian woman who friended him has a couple of family-tree-type documents. And we've just discovered that her father's great-great-grandfather is none other than our own great-great-

Comments

[calypso72]

Have you tried ancestry.com at all? David has been reconstructing his (and to some extent mine) family tree and even with whole branches destroyed in the Holocaust and bizarre name changes at Ellis Island, he has managed to find a LOT of relatives.

[abbzug]

I know that my father and my cousin (who passed away last year) have both tried a lot of those sites and message boards (i.e. if I Google the old last name, I can find both their old posting queries), with little luck. It seems that because only the very immediate family is here in the US, the search keeps becoming a dead-end. I guess my paternal grandfather also did not tell anyone, including his wife and kids, anything at all about his parents, siblings, etc. But this has renewed my interest in finding out about my family, so maybe I should start looking more myself!

[eve_prime]

That is so cool