Well, what do you know about that?

 The things you can find on Ancestry.com.  It’s a treasure trove.

All four of my grandparents were immigrants to this country.  Three of my grandparents died before I was born, but my maternal grandmother Dora… well, I grew up listening to her stories.  Stories about growing up in Eastern Europe, stories about immigrating to America, stories about her life in this country. 

 I learned that she grew up in a region called Galicia, which was then part of Austria-Hungary and is now part of Poland.  She told me that her family spoke Yiddish at home, Polish to their non Jewish neighbors, and German in school.  

She told me that her father immigrated to the US and settled in NYC before World War I.  When the war came and there was no money coming from America, she as the oldest child had to quit school and find a job to support the family.  She was 12 years old.  She didn’t talk about the war, except for an occasional reference to the Russian soldiers who had taken over her town.  

After the war, her father began to send for members of his family.  Dora and her sister traveled with their aunt and uncle, sailing from Rotterdam, and landing at Ellis Island. When I took a tour of Ellis Island, I could hear her voice in my head.

Her mother and youngest sister never joined the rest of the family here in the US.  My grandmother always said that “they were killed in the Hitler war.”

And tonight I saw confirmation of most of her history on Ancestry.

But I also found a lot about Dora’s husband Harry.  Harry died in 1943, when my mother and her sisters were very young, so I never knew much about him.  I found a lot of Harry’s records on Ancestry.  He came from a city called Radom, which was then part of Russia but is now part of Poland.  He came to the US as an adult, but not through Ellis Island,  my mother jokingly referred to her father as a [derogatory term for a Mexican who illegally crosses the border into US].  I found records for Harry — he left Radom and went to Mexico City, then crossed a bridge at Juarez to enter the US at El Paso, Texas.

And then there were my paternal grandparents, Phillip and Dora.  She died in 1956 and he died in 1958.  They came from the same village.  Phillip came to the US in 1908, Dora arrived in 1911, and they were married in 1912.

I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of information I found on the site.  Like the name of the village they came from — Sklow Moh.  They listed the village as being in “Russia”.      I thought the village was in Belarus, which was then part of the Russian Empire.

After all, the Empire encompassed many places that are now independent countries,

SKLOW MOH WAS IN UKRAINE.

Yeah,  I really do have roots in the Jewish community of Ukraine. 

The only thing I didn’t see on Ancestry… in the 1920’s, before my father was born … my grandfather went to court and officially changed his family name.  The name was long and Russian; he changed his name to something identifiably Jewish, something easier to pronounce and certainly much easier to spell. He didn’t want a surname that “some Cossack gave my grandfather.”  The court papers are in my mother’s closet.  

I’m wondering if I should pay the fee to join Ancestry, to see what other treasures I can find …