Every Thanksgiving my family sat around the dinner table and repeated exactly the same questions as the previous year: Where did our family come from and when? We believed that our great-grandparents immigrated to the United States in the 1890s, that all our grandparents were born in the United States, and that our family had come from Hungary and Germany. As it turns out, most of what we knew was not quite accurate.
In December 2006, I embarked on a triumphal genealogical journey. Beyond my wildest expectations, I now know the names of all of my great-grandparents, the names of some great-great-grandparents, what areas most of them came from, and when. My family immigrated to the United States between the 1870s and 1890s. One set of great-greats also immigrated, and one grandmother was born in Europe. We are from present-day Hungary, Romania, and the Ukraine. Most importantly, I now have photographs of all four sets of great-grandparents.
When I started my quest, the only photographs my family had were of my mother’s maternal grandparents. I searched my aunt’s and my uncle’s photograph albums and obtained a photograph of Mom’s paternal grandfather, but was still missing her paternal grandmother. This summer, a cousin invited me to help him sort through old photographs. It was a win-win situation. I could help him identify the people in the photographs—and I was able to make copies.
Sifting through suitcases of “stuff,” my cousin cried, “I can’t believe it!” at least a dozen times. When he finally showed me what he was looking at, it was a photograph of our grandfather, in a business suit, in a boxing ring, with the Three Stooges, an American vaudeville and comedy act of the early to mid-20th century. Not what I was looking for, but quite a conversation piece. In the same suitcase, we found previously unseen photographs of all my mother’s grandparents.
I was excited to receive old photographs from my eldest first cousin on my father’s side, but when I asked her who was in them, she had no idea. Turning to the JewishGen Family Finder, <www.jewishgen.org/jgff>, I found two people registered with our family name from the town where I now knew my ancestors had lived. They both descend from the same brother of my grandmother, but did not know each other until I put them in touch with one another. One newly found second cousin sent me the same photograph that my first cousin had sent, but he knew who was in the picture. It turned out to be my great-grandparents and all their children. Besides it being the only known photograph of my great-grandparents, it is the only photograph we have of my grandmother as a child.
Hardest of all was finding photographs of my father’s father’s family. It was the great tragedy of my father’s life that his father, Harry Morrowitz, died in 1917, in Philadelphia, at the age of 29. My father was two years old, and my 21-year-old, pregnant grandmother was now a widow. My grandmother moved back home to St. Louis where my aunt was born and named after her father. Because of financial hardship and with no father to help support them, both my father and aunt were raised in an orphanage, where they lived until they were teenagers.
No contact had taken place with my grandfather’s family since my father was bar mitzvahed in 1928, but we knew that my grandfather had a sister. Out of seemingly hundreds of steps, these were the most fruitful in helping me find my family. After calling the cemetery where my grandfather was buried and learning that two people unknown to me with our last name are buried there, my sister and I traveled to Philadelphia to visit the “family home,” the Romanian synagogue where we guessed they may have attended, and the cemetery. When I received translations of the cemetery headstones, I realized that one of the unknowns was my grandfather Harry’s eldest brother, Morris. Although the cemetery had given me Morris’s name as a Morrowitz, what either their paper records didn’t show or they didn’t mention, was that his last name on the tombstone was not spelled Morrowitz, but Morovitz. This new spelling allowed me to find more records, including census records, marriage licenses, U.S. Social Security death records, and obituaries for some of my grandfather’s four sisters and two brothers. These clues finally led to my grandfather’s youngest brother’s family, whose last name was now Morrow, the same as mine.
My newly found cousins, including my father’s first cousin who was named after my grandfather, were as happy to be found as I was to find them. Almost two years after my journey started, they sent me a photograph of my great-grandparents, which arrived on my November 2008 birthday. This Thanksgiving, instead of the usual, repeated conversation, I had the enormous satisfaction of giving out photographs of all four sets of our great-grandparents and discussing our family tree. My family gave thanks that our ancestors had the courage to leave their homes and immigrate to the United States, where their families thrive and honor them.
Peggy Morrow is a marketing consultant in the Chicago area and editor of the newsletter of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Illinois. She is researching the surnames Brettschneider, Geller, Morovitz, Goldstein, Kornfield, Edelman, Newman, and Kramer.
