I have tracked my family back to the early 1700s in Keidan.
We suspect they came from Spain and before that France based on DNA testing. The family moved to Kaunas by the 1860s, By the 1890s, two of seven sons, including my grandfather Hillel, moved to the US by the 1890s. After that, the family seemed to have lost track of its members as the Russian Revolution, World Wars I and II and the Holocaust took their toll.
In 2007, I followed my grandfather's footsteps in Lithuania, visiting Keidan and Kaunas. With the advent of the Internet, a long-lost cousin Avi Lishower found me. He told me some but not all the family history. We knew nothing of family losses in the Holocaust, how two sisters on the run from Lithuania lost their 12-year-old brother in the train station in Moscow, how the sisters survived the war in the Ural Mountains/Siberia, how one sister died, the other married and came to the US and raised a family. This random photo revealed the story. On a rainy day in 2007 in Kaunas, I took a random photo of a woman walking toward St. Michael’s Cathedral. This one picture had a huge impact on our family. Avi saw my photo online and observed that his mother--who had immigrated to Palestine before the war, had grown up in the apartment building in the foreground. He sent me photos of his family inside the building. I suddenly learned about cousins who had survived and others who were exterminated. We met some cousins we didn't know existed who were living in LA. I heard the story from my cousin Ruth, who was close to 90 and called me her "little cousin'" Adam and I connected with her daughter. Adam and I would help find her own daughter whom she gave up for adoption more than 40 years ago. They were reunited.
What a difference a random photo can make.
We suspect they came from Spain and before that France based on DNA testing. The family moved to Kaunas by the 1860s, By the 1890s, two of seven sons, including my grandfather Hillel, moved to the US by the 1890s. After that, the family seemed to have lost track of its members as the Russian Revolution, World Wars I and II and the Holocaust took their toll.
In 2007, I followed my grandfather's footsteps in Lithuania, visiting Keidan and Kaunas. With the advent of the Internet, a long-lost cousin Avi Lishower found me. He told me some but not all the family history. We knew nothing of family losses in the Holocaust, how two sisters on the run from Lithuania lost their 12-year-old brother in the train station in Moscow, how the sisters survived the war in the Ural Mountains/Siberia, how one sister died, the other married and came to the US and raised a family. This random photo revealed the story. On a rainy day in 2007 in Kaunas, I took a random photo of a woman walking toward St. Michael’s Cathedral. This one picture had a huge impact on our family. Avi saw my photo online and observed that his mother--who had immigrated to Palestine before the war, had grown up in the apartment building in the foreground. He sent me photos of his family inside the building. I suddenly learned about cousins who had survived and others who were exterminated. We met some cousins we didn't know existed who were living in LA. I heard the story from my cousin Ruth, who was close to 90 and called me her "little cousin'" Adam and I connected with her daughter. Adam and I would help find her own daughter whom she gave up for adoption more than 40 years ago. They were reunited.
What a difference a random photo can make.