Yesterday I gave a prompt in my Writing Family History workshop based on a poem, “Tapestry,” by Suzanne van Endeert. One line that stood out to me was, “The past is not a one-way conversation.” Though I’ve always wanted to converse with my dead ancestors to find out how we were related to others, because they would know, they never respond to my queries. I’ve dreamt of flying Chagall-like with my paternal grandfather over our town’s main street, and specifically over the branch library, asking him questions. But I know from his own paper trail that he’s not the most reliable of narrators.
A direct conversation, then, may not be possible, although early in my family history pursuit a volunteer at my local Latter Day Saints stake told me that our ancestors want us to find them. Henry Z Jones wrote books about Psychic Roots, cementing that our ancestors place clues in our path. It’s up to us to find them. I was able, for instance, to determine the real surname for the Kean family of New Jersey and elsewhere just by thinking about how Kean could be the last syllable of my great-grandmother’s Dvorkin family. Indeed, it was.
Still, there exist other ways to engage in conversation. One way is to engage with living relatives, starting with the oldest or the ones you’re told carry the family history. Ask for stories and not just names, dates, and places. Record the conversations and take photos of any artifacts or photos. Yes, take photos of photos.
Another way for me was to find others researching the same town. In 1996, members of the Ostrow Mazowiecka Research Family sat around a conference table in Stanley Diamond’s (executive director of Jewish Records Indexing—Poland) suite, and I remarked that one hundred years before, our ancestors would have been sitting there, all knowing each other, and many of them related to each other.
I volunteer as a Jewish Records Indexing – Poland Co-Town Leader for two communities, Brok and Zaręby Koscielne. Contributors to the records extraction projects receive Excel files with their requested surnames. I contributed to other communities such as Wyszkow and Zambrow once I see that surname lists include some of mine. I have spent weeks and months combing these data files, happy that I can use find and sort functions instead of battering my thumb on microfilm machines trying to decipher Polish and Russian (I am grateful I studied Russian for six years in high school and college).
DNA testing has opened up the past. In the last week, through AncestryDNA and MyHeritage, I’ve come into contact with descendants of my great-grandfather’s brother, not even knowing that Mordechai Krasner had a brother. It turns out Chaim Krasner’s son, Joseph, immigrated to Canada and changed the name to Crosner. Now we might be related to Crosners in California. Constant emails go back and forth as we engage in dialogue and exchange record data and photographs.
The conversation with the past begins with you, the researcher. It’s up to you to shape the dialogue.
Barbara Krasner has been researching her family's history since 1989. She is the author of Discovering Your Jewish Heritage (Heritage Quest, 2001) and leads workshops in writing family history. She writes frequently about her family in creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. She will be presenting at the 2022 International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies in August on Writing Family History and Seven Things You Didn't Know about Yizkor Books. To learn more about Barbara, her work, and her workshops, please visit her website, www.barbarakrasner.com.