Some of my successes have been very simple. In one case, merely picking up the phone and calling a first cousin of my mother's that no one spoke with for 20 years was quite fruitful. Marvin knew all the information my mother and her sister did not, because he was closer to their mutual Grandmother than they were. He remembered, right off the top of his head, what the ages and dates of birth and death were for all our mutual relations. He remembered the names of all three of his Grandma's husbands. Then, quite sadly, just as we were forging a bond, he died suddenly of a heart attack in his home. I was glad that he and my mother and aunt got to see each other again before he passed away.
He was extremely generous and giving with me when I was investigating our mutual family history. Considering the lack of communication, I was quite pleased with the results. The lesson here is that the worst thing that can happen is that someone will say no to your request for information, but once they're gone, a West African saying that Alex Haley (author of Roots) related becomes quite true. "The death of an old person is like the library burning down.
Another set of successes comes via Switchboard, as it eliminates the need for knowing a city when you want to find a lost relative or friend.
In some cases, the surnames of people I have tried to find were unusual, and Switchboard helped me locate all of the listed people with those names. So, with telephone in hand and armed with patience, I found a lot of the people I had only heard of and who were "lost." Having only a few pertinent details on hand made all the difference. For example, I knew that my mother's cousin was married to an educator of some sort who lived in Sea Gate, Brooklyn. That was enough to establish the link. So, seemingly unimportant information is essential.
The Bookey family originated in northwest Poland and many of the poorer ones left--my great-grandfather and his two brothers and sister. They all wound up in England for a time, and three of the four wound up in New York. As of the beginning of 1995, all I knew was that his brother Joseph stayed in London.
In 1990, at a family wedding, Cecilia, one of my grandfather's few remaining cousins mentioned that she knew of English cousins, and that she recalled being contacted by one of them a long time ago. When I started gearing up and doing my family history, I gave her a call. Cecilia had been doing a lot of cleaning up and had found a business card with the name of the cousin from England she met years ago.
I called up the company, ICI, in England, and asked the Human Resources Department to forward my name, address and phone number to him, and I explained the situation. I figured if he worked there for any length of time he must have a pension. He did, and he called me the following day. He took a trip top the cemetery and discovered that the name on his grandfather's tombstone confirmed our relationship, since Hebrew names include the father's name. Tovye Leb Buki was the name of our common ancestor, and the name ont he tombstone.
Beyond the evidence at the gravesite, he also had letters dated from 1972, when he visited New York. He had written to Aunt Theresa, who was born in London and had maintained correspondence with her English cousins until World War II. The war interrupted many lives in England in the form of evacuations. So, they lost touch. But, Aunt Theresa's old letters also confirmed the relationships.
Bernard first contacted me in June 1995, and we started a fax correspondence. He also sent copies of old photos as well as new ones. It seems I got him interested in genealogy as well, and he sent me a GEDCOM file with the 54+ members of the Bookey family generated by his grandfather Joseph.
In January 1996 I visited the Bookeys in Radlett, Hertsfordshire, England, and I met not only with Bernard and his wife but with his children and grandchildren, and many of his first cousins and their children. There must have been at least twenty people there that Sunday afternoon. It really was a once in a lifetime thing. Of course I plan to return, but that first meeting with so many unknown relatives was fascinating.
The day following the party, Bernard and I went to some cemeteries and made a serendipitous discovery. We went to the grave of a Sarah Bookey, but when we found the tombstone--which we overlooked the first time--it was entirely in Hebrew alphabet. It was quite weatherbeaten, since it was made in 1906 and not of a good material. But it was clear from the inscription that Sarah was just a name used for English purposes. In Yiddish/Hebrew her name was Tsiril Goldberg Buki, listing both her father's full name and her husband's name. This conformed to information I had in New York from her son's death certificate. We never knew, until then, that this woman ever left Poland. This also made sense in terms of the women named for her. Two Cecelias, a Cynthia, and a Cissie are named for her, all of who were born within a decade after her 1906 death. This conforms with a familiar Jewish naming pattern.
For many years I had heard stories of our Canadian cousins--Tillie and Lina. Tillie was close to my grandmother and was supposed to come to New York with her when she lost all her money for the ticket. She used to swing her pocketbook, and as the family mythology goes, the pocketbook went flying into a body of water en route to the ticket office. So my grandmother came over on the Lusitania by herself. Tillie made her way over about six months later on her own. Her sister Lina was up ion Nova Scotia, and reconnected with Tillie via an personal-style ad in Yiddish-language newspaper in New York.
We even had pictures of them, but no one had had any contact with them for at least two decades. The last person to have seen them was my cousin Rhonda, who met them on cross-country summer trip in 1976. She only remembered their last name. However, she did remember that they lived in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and that they ran grocery store. So, using Alta Vista, I got the number of the public library in Sydney. So I called the library and the librarian was kind enough to actually read me the numbers of all the people with that surname in the town. I called a few of them, and on the third try, I reached a woman who was the widow of the man my cousin met twenty years earlier. She gave me her sister-in-law's phone number in Montreal.
As it turns out, Florence in Montreal is Tillie's daughter, and was able to identify a lot of the photos I had, some of which she had hanging on her wall. I saw them during a visit there in August 1996. Florence also ended another mystery for me. I had a record of a woman named Sylvia who was a cousin of my grandmother's but no one knew how they were related. It turns out that Tillie's mother, my grandmother's aunt, was twice married, and Sylvia was her half sister. So, calling Florence helped solve two parts of the family tree for me that had been unclear.
I had heard stories of cousins in Israel--the descendents of Baba's brother who moved to Palestine in the 1890s from the Lomza gubernia district of Poland. My Aunt Elaine told me that my great-aunt Rose used to send the family there packages, and that her first cousin Milton had looked them up when he was in Israel, but he had passed away. So I asked Milton's wife, Gina, and his son, Greg, if they knew anything about these cousins. Gina did not remember anything. Greg recalled going to a wedding in Israel in the 1970s. He remembered none of the names, but he recalled that the father was a musician, and that the groom, his son, was an air force helicopter pilot. Further, he heard that after the wedding, a few weeks later, he was involved in a nonfatal helicopter crash. The crash happened during the Independence Day celebrations.
All I knew was this information and the common ancestor. I left a note on the Jewish Genealogy newsgroup on the Internet detailing what I knew. Some people wrote back and told me exactly when the incident occurred, with newspaper accounts. But one man who had some connection to the IDF was able to call them up, and found my cousin for me. He even called him up and emailed me his telephone number.
So I called them up. My cousin's wife answered the phone and said she remembered our mutual cousins, from a visit to their then-home in Geneva, Switzerland. They were not sure of the relationship, though. They also changed their surname from an English-style name to one with traditional Hebrew overtones--with "Ben" as part of the name. Gina later confirmed this by looking it up in an old address book of hers. In February 1997, my Israeli cousin wrote to say that his father looked in an old book of his own and confirmed the common ancestor, Nissan Tucker, and even had Baba's married name listed.
The helicopter accident that helped me identify my cousin took place on Yom Ha Atzma'ut (7 May 1973) accident. These accounts appeared the following day in Israeli newspapers.
According to Ha-aretz:
An Air Force helicopter made an emergency landing yesterday around 1 in the afternoon in the area of August Victoria in Jerusalem. Some of the soldiers in the helicopter were wounded and transferred to Hadassah hospital according to the IIDS spokesman.
The number of wounded was nine. Eight of them were lightly wounded and one was in moderate condition.
The spokeman noted that at the end of the parade the helicopter which was on a security petrol made an emergency landing on the road that passes by Victoria August hospital. The incident occurred because of engine problems. The passengers were lightly wounded during the landing.
According to the Jerusalem Post:
According to an eyewitness report, the helicopter, which was on a security petrol was flying low when it hit a tree and strated trailing smoke. Some 300 meters later it smashed into a radio antenna.
The helicopter's propellar reportedly flew off the machine and the party hit a low store wall several meter from the antenna.
This probably isn't very helpful except for one thing. The accident took place very close to the Mount Scopus branch of Hadassah hospital. It's almost certain that the injured were taken there. Maybe, Hadassah will be more willing to provide you the information than the Israeli army. I would suggest you write to Hadassah Hospital, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem and explain why you need the information. If they have records for 1973, it should be a pretty simple thing to look up the relevant names. You also might try the Israeli military attache in Washington.
Seth J. Bookey's Family History Website
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