This is Day 19 of The Family History Writing Challenge. I’ll pick up where Day 18 left off, with Helene and Siegmund Kornmehl fleeing Vienna to Palestine. The context: I was describing the mystery of the late-life adoption of Erika by the subject of this challenge, Adolf and Bertha Schweizer, and went off on the… Continue Reading »
Category Archives: Genealogy
Adoption Musings, Part 2: What Happened to Helene Kornmehl?
On Days 18 of the Family History Writing Challenge, I turn again to a topic that I’ve touched on before: Nazi record keeping. In “Emigration Questionnaire Raises More Questions,” I discussed the agency created to “accelerate the forced emigration of the Austrian Jews and (starting in October 1939) to organize and carry out their deportation.” But it wasn’t… Continue Reading »
Late Life Adoptions, Part 1
This is Day 17 of the Family History Writing Challenge, the first of two about family adoptions. The second story is odd on the surface — two adults adopting another adult who already has living parents –but I have a great deal of detail about it; that’s for tomorrow. This first is more traditional, but… Continue Reading »
A Meaty Heritage
It’s day 16 of the Family History Writing Challenge and I’m feeling grateful that I’m not a vegetarian. It’s bad enough to have to face the dire fates of various family members while exploring the past; I’m not sure I could cope with feeling guilty about the fact that they were butchers. My ambivalence –nay,… Continue Reading »
The Gift of Gab
This is day 15 of the Family History Writing Challenge — the one where I do a little backtracking, a lot of mea culping, and some not-so-gentle admonishing. The Family Picture Once upon a time, a mysterious picture hung in my mother’s apartment in Atlanta. The people pictured in it, those featured at the top… Continue Reading »
Family History Writing Challenge: Ponderings at the Halfway Mark
Today is Day 14 of the Family History Writing Challenge, 2018 — which means tomorrow I’ll be in the home stretch. Yesterday I hit a brick wall in my research, so today I thought I’d take a breather and consider the process. As I said at the start, I took the challenge because I need… Continue Reading »
Struggling with Sponsorship: Who’s That Nephew?
This is day 13 of the Family History Writing Challenge and I’ve hit a brick wall — to use a common genealogical term for encountering seemingly insurmountable problems that make you want to bang your head against one (this last is just my interpretation). I’m still poring over the emigration questionnaire of Adolf Schweizer: Emigration document… Continue Reading »
Adolf or Adolph, Schweizer or Schweitzer: Entering Spelling Hell
This is day 12 or the Family History Writing Challenge, 2018 — and I’m getting a little slap happy. Let’s discuss spelling. When I read over what I posted yesterday about the various butcher shops in the Kornmehl family, I noticed something that annoyed me: I had misspelled my great uncle Rudolph Kornmehl’s first name.… Continue Reading »
Emigration Questionnaire Raises More Questions
This is Day 10 of the Family History Writing Challenge, 2018. The search for Adolph and Bertha Schweitzer continues with the introduction of a document that raises more questions than it answers. One thing you’ve got to say for the Nazis. They kept good records. In August 1938, the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in… Continue Reading »
Jewish Immigration, Part 2: Sponsorship & Family Rifts
This is Day 9 of the Family History Writing Challenge, 2018. In yesterday’s post, I described the restrictions against immigrants, especially Jews, coming to the U.S. from Nazi Austria (an accurate term, I decided, for a country that welcomed Hitler and that was instrumental to putting his Final Solution into place–claims of being occupied notwithstanding). … Continue Reading »
