Growing up, I was very familiar with Dad’s two uncles and their families and his one aunt from his mother’s family but knew almost nothing about his father’s.
Regarding Mom’s family, I knew almost nothing about either her father’s or her mother’s families.
Many years later when I started to look up genealogical information, I began to learn much more about both sides of my family.
A great discovery for me was learning about Dad’s family. It turned out that his father, Ferdinand Stern, was the next to youngest of nine children of Levi Stern and Fanny Sarah Hess, both born in parts of what is now modern Germany.
Levi and Fanny met in Baltimore, both immigrants, married there and raised their family. Many years later they and most of the family moved to New York.
Although my Dad had four uncles and four aunts on his father’s side, I never heard him speak of any of them except one well-to-do aunt, Caroline, and her husband Harry Kitzinger.
My discovery was that the others existed, that several of them were socially prominent, synagogue-attending Jews in New York, and that some of them, along with their parents, were buried in a family cemetery plot in Queens, New York City.
It seemed that my Dad’s father was a sort of poor kid brother who had little adult contact with his siblings.
Dad’s mother, Jeanette Bloch, was the oldest of the four children of Morris Bloch and Augusta Behrman, both New Yorkers by birth but the children of German Jewish immigrants.
Another discovery concerned my mother’s family. Her father, William Henry Lawless, was one of the five children of John Palmer Lawless and Elizabeth Corrigan, Irish immigrants, who met and wed in New York City.
I was 75 when I first met the descendants of his brother John, learned that they knew of the existence of William Lawless, and that “we don’t talk to that part of the family”.
I also learned from two of these newly discovered second cousins that they grew up in the same Bronx neighborhood that I did, only a few blocks away, and went to the same public school and parish church. Till then, I never knew they existed!
My Mom’s mother, Mary Bridget Kirk, was one of the seven New York born children of Patrick William Kirk and Catherine Trainor, both Irish immigrants.
Although Mary had one brother and five sisters, most died in early childhood. My mother spoke lovingly of her aunt Katherine, but I never knew her nor her large family, whose existence I learned of many years later.
I thought that family tree research, especially through the resources of Ancestry.com was astoundingly revealing, but the advent of DNA testing and publishing was even more so.
The testing provided the solution to several mysteries and unanswerable questions, besides creating new challenges.
For example, I learned of the existence and details about hundreds of Lawless descendants in Australia and Canada, a total surprise. DNA matches also revealed some surprising parental and marital relationships that contradicted family history.
I final found out where in Ireland and Germany was my family rooted and a lot of information about ancestors there.
It satisfies an intellectual curiosity, but the only thing that really matters are the loving people that I knew and who shaped my life.
24 May 2021