Immigration

I'm finally putting significant time and effort into tracing my genealogy, which is something I've always wanted to do. Not necessarily the significant time and effort part, but the learning about the ancestry part. About three weeks ago, still unemployed, still in a rented house without most of our worldly belongings, and somewhat at loose ends, I decided I might as well take advantage of all this free time to buckle down and start some serious genealogical research. So I bit the proverbial bullet and shelled out the $29.95 for a one-month world membership to ancestry.com, where I had already begun a paltry family tree with the little information previously gathered from family members and from free online searches.

The process had been fascinating, surprising, informative, tedious, and strangely addictive. It has given me glimpses into bits and pieces of an entirely different world, to cultures and culture clash, and to the nightmares of pre-computer age record keeping. I often dream about it at night, my mind processing the overwhelming amount of data, the clues, the false leads, the electronic databases, the partial stories about family members I can construct from pieced-together minutiae. Labor intensive as it has been, the research that has taken me three weeks so far would doubtless have taken literally months, at least, not long ago, not to mention quite a bit of travel and expense. I wish I had started recording the process and my thoughts about it from the start. Now that it's finally occurred to me that I should do so, I'll try capture both where I've been and where I'm going.

At the moment, I'm working primarily on locating immigration documents, and the irony of it finally hit me. Like all Americans (yes, even the "native" Americans), my ancestors were immigrants. Perpetual immigrants, in a sense, since they were all Jewish, and apparently moved, or were moved, from one country to another over the generations. No matter where they lived they spoke Yiddish, moved into Jewish communities, and married other Jews from the same country or shtetl or street. Luckily for themselves and their descendants, they managed to escape pogroms, survive extreme anti-semitism and poverty, and get to the U.S. before World War II. And here I am, an immigrant back to the Old World, after all they went through. But it is a different world, after all.