I'm in a scary place. Anyone who has embarked on a large project, especially one that involves a lot of research, knows the place I mean. It's the terra incognita where you wander, trying to find your bearings. Figuring out how to navigate this land, determining the best tools to use and where to find them, can be paralyzing. I've already learned more than I could have
Genealogy
A Labor Day Tribute to My Mother
I often think of my mother, who died more than 20 years ago, sometimes in ways I didn't anticipate. I was always irritated at having to call her on Sunday at 10am, no matter where I was and with whom. Now I'd love to check in with her. No one is as interested as she was in the boring, mundane details of my life (granted, I withheld a lot of the good stuff from her, so she had
The Last of the Kornmehl Butchers (Maybe)
I’m excited to welcome as my first guest poster one of my newly discovered relatives. Jill Leibman Kornmehl is the daughter-in-law of Nathan Kornmehl, at 96 years old the patriarch of the Kornmehl family. At least as far as I know. New branches of the family keep cropping up. I'm not ready to say anything definitive -- thus the title I gave this post. The more genealogical
My Mother and the Governator
My mother couldn't stand Arnold Schwarzenegger. She wasn't a spitter but if she had been the type to expectorate over her shoulder, peasant style, she would have spat at Arnold. If she hadn't been Jewish she would have made the sign of the cross whenever she heard his voice or saw his image. She was appalled to see her fellow Austrian become an American hero, a movie
A Family Goat Farm
I recently discovered a slew of relatives I didn't know I had, members of the extended -- and far-flung -- Kornmehl clan. That my newfound family includes doctors, bankers and even a retired butcher is no huge surprise. But the goat farmers in Israel... them, I didn't expect. According to the Kornmehl Goat Farm website:* Anat and Daniel Kornmehl, both graduates of the
Genealogy: I See Live People
I'm new to genealogy. I'd always thought it was a discipline that dealt strictly with dead people, with the goal of bringing them back to life. I knew that my particular quest, exploring the lives of the members of a Jewish family in pre-World World II Vienna, would be filled with emotional land mines: the unnatural (to put it mildly) disruption of those lives that would be