When I asked my Uncle Frank about the places where his parents, my grandparents, had lived before they immigrated to the United States, he responded with a twinkle in his eye, “From Pinsk to Minsk.”

When I asked my Uncle Frank about the places where his parents, my grandparents, had lived before they immigrated to the United States, he responded with a twinkle in his eye, “From Pinsk to Minsk.” Based on this information, I set about to research my family. I learned that Pinsk and Minsk were both located in the modern country of Belarus, and I began to research the history of the area. I joined a JewishGen Special Interest Group (SIG) for Belarus and scoured records from Belarus for evidence that my Miller and Fraider families had lived in Minsk or Pinsk—all to no avail.

Eventually, through research of available U.S. records, including ship arrivals, naturalization records, census rec­ords, and World War I draft records, I learned that my paternal grandparents, rather than coming from Belarus, had come from areas that would be in modern-day Poland and Ukraine. This was a long process. At first, I did not even know the countries, let alone the towns; no one incident or “aha moment” revealed the towns. In addition, I was researching two different families, one from Ukraine (Fraider) and one from Poland (Mlynarz). The first documents obtained were death certificates for my grandparents; they provided the first clues that the story I had been told was fishy. Much later, after I understood that names may be indexed in strange ways, I discovered that of 14 Ellis Island passenger arrivals indexed as Freider, 7 can be identified as my family members who, according to the manifest, came from Starokonstantinov (or Konstantin). I later learned they actually came from the nearby town of Kuzmin. The joke was on me. Uncle Frank was using an age-old Jewish joke that translates loosely to, “who knows?”

About 11 years ago, when I first was bitten by the genealogy bug, I found some information about the arrival in New York of one of my family branches and was reaching out to other relatives to learn what I could about their branches. During this exploration, I have made every mistake in the book; biting at jokes, believing family stories, and trusting published information or information provided by fellow researchers. I have followed false trails off the cliff and spent countless hours researching unrelated individuals and places in Eastern Europe where no known relative ever lived.

I telephoned a cousin in Nevada and told her what I was doing. We exchanged some e-mails and she critiqued all of my findings, telling me I had things all wrong. At one point she said, “I know all the dirt about family members.” She called my Uncle Abe lazy and my grandfather unworthy. Another time she told me, “You need a new hobby.”

This reminded me of the story of two Polish Jewish merchants in Poland who bump into each other at the train station in Warsaw one morning. Both are competitors in the same trade, so they eye each other suspiciously. One of them asks, “So where are you traveling today?” ‘To Bialystok,” comes the cautious answer. “To Bialystok, eh?” the first says skeptically. “I know very well that you are only telling me that to make me think that you are actually going to Suwalki, but I happen to know that you really are going to Bialystok.” After a little pause he asks, “So, tell me; why are you trying to deceive me?”

Faced with my family members’ decided lack of enthusiasm for my project, I considered how else I might get information and decided to search Google for my grandmother’s surname, Fraider. There were about 12 hits, including a few with names and e-mail addresses. With no idea if any of these people were related to me, or even if any were Jewish, I composed a message and sent off a few e-mails. A few days later, I was delighted to receive one response. “Dear Cousin,” the message began. The message was sent by a Steve Fraider of Beverly Hills, California. Steve reported that his grandfather, Frank Fraider, had left New York early in the 1900s and went west, settling first in Chicago or in a town in nearby Indiana, then moving to Los Angeles, where he lived with his family for many years.

This Frank Fraider, my grandmother’s elder brother, was an elusive person to research. Since Steve and his cousins were pretty vague about their grandfather’s whereabouts before he arrived in the Los Angeles area, I first tried to find records from the years when I thought he had lived in New York. No luck. Then I tried to find records from his California years. I could find neither a Declaration of Intent nor a naturalization petition in either location. Ultimately I enlisted an experienced fellow genealogist to assist me. She found a Petition for Naturalization in Chicago, Illinois. Not having known that Frank had lived in Chicago (Cousin Steve thought he might have lived in Indiana instead), I had not even considered looking for records there. New to genealogy research, I was not even sure if I could do that without traveling there or knowing someone who lived there. I was pretty good at high school geography, but it turns out that genealogical geography is a whole different course.

As I came to know the descendants of Frank Fraider and his wife, Sadie Trachtenbroit, they shared considerable information about Sadie and her family, including family interviews. Sadie’s family had been close knit and social. Consequently, the family knew a great deal about their origins and family history.

Frank’s family was a completely different story. A major challenge was to discover where my Fraider family had lived in Eastern Europe. I researched exhaustively the towns in which Sadie’s family had lived, hoping that this might lead me to Frank’s town origins. At some point, I became so immersed in the research that I lost track of the possibility that the two had come from very different areas. According to the family stories and interviews, Sadie’s family had lived in towns called Beshun, Goretza, and Studenitza, near Yacci, on the Black Sea in what is now Moldova and then was part of Romania. Family members believed that Sadie had traveled to America with someone called Tante Liza (Aunt Liza), who I eventually learned was Frank Fraider’s younger sister.

Eventually, my tortuous study of the town names over many years led me to conclude that the towns identified by Sadie’s family were larger towns roughly in the vicinity of the places where Sadie’s family had lived, but were not the exact places where the family had lived. (This would be like my telling outsiders that I am “from Washington, DC” when I actually live in the suburb of Brookville, Maryland.) The towns mentioned appear to correlate with the towns of Babshin, Gorodeuts, and Studenitsa in southern Ukraine, part of Podolia guberniya during czarist times, and Iasi, Romania. However, the manifest of the ship that brought Sadie Trachtenbroit and her traveling companions (named Fraider and Studnitz) to the United States, states that family members came from the towns of Zhvanets (Zvanec) and Sokiryany (Sokyrjany) in Ukraine, not far from Kamenets-Podolskiy (Kamjanec-Podilskij).

Some confusion comes from an Ellis Island passenger arrival record dated August 8, 1906, of a ship from Liverpool that lists a Jankel Freider (Fraider) from Kischinoff or Kirschinoff (Kishinev). Two others on the same ship were listed as Efroim and Dine Trajder (Fraider). Efroim was Frank Fraider, age 19, listed as a cigarette maker from a town written as Furokow. His sister Dine, 22, listed as a milliner, was from a town that is listed as Dukajewitz. Most records and family information for the Fraiders and an autobiography written by a Sam Fraider record, however, that the family lived in Kuzmin, near Starokonstantinov, or Old Konstantin, in what was then Volhynia guberniya.

In 2001, I had the pleasure of traveling to California and meeting with my newfound cousin Steve and some of his relatives. He took me on a walking tour of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and to a Los Angeles Dodgers baseball game. As a lifelong Dodgers fan, having attended Brooklyn Dodgers games in my youth with my dad, I was thrilled. I have kept in close touch with Steve and other family members in the years since we met, have met Fraider relatives in New York and Chicago in recent years, and have exchanged e-mails with Fraider, Freider, and other researchers around the world.

Coming to know these relatives has been a source of joy to me and my sister, Sheila, who has shared in the pleasure of meeting some of these most intriguing people, with careers spanning diverse areas including music, education, and art. An aspect of interest and pleasure for me has been to hear the family stories of my new mishpacha (relatives)—even though I have followed some of these stories along numerous false trails. I have found this characteristic—my gullibility in believing family stories, my following false trails in search of the truth—continues to surface in other family members as well. On one branch I have heard that one of my maternal great-grandmother’s brothers was “the most famous rabbi in Russia.” Another cousin has said we are related to Rabbi Yitzhak Elchonan Spektor, who had been chief rabbi of Kovno. Needless to say, researching these stories has been both challenging and frustrating, but that has not stopped me from pursuing my genealogical passion.

Jeff Miller’s analytical, management, and consulting experience in the information technology industry taught him to conduct research while accomplishing ill-defined goals, perfect training for a future genealogist. Miller is president of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Greater Washington and fundraising chair for the 2011 IAJGS Conference. Documenting his family’s history for ten years, he’s visited ancestral towns and villages throughout Lithuania and conducted research in archives. Miller lives in Brookville, Maryland.