I named my blog for Siegmund Kornmehl because he had the luck to open one of his three butcher shops in the same building where Sigmund Freud lived and practiced, but I actually know a bit more about Siegmund's brother Rudolph. Like Siegmund, he owned and operated three butcher shops in Vienna. There were other butchers in the family, but I'll leave them for later. One of My
Gigi Michaels
In Memory of a Twice-Lost Cousin, Gigi Michaels
Once upon a time -- a little more than a year ago -- I believed I had far more friends than I had family members. My parents are both long gone, and I thought my sister and my nieces were my only blood relatives. No paternal or maternal cousins were on my radar. I regretted that a bit, but never thought much about it. I figured that's how it is when you're from a family that
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