The first link

I have never wanted a soapbox of my own. As much as I enjoy reading the blogs of my friends and colleagues, putting my personal or professional opinions out for the world to see has never appealed. Starting this blog is therefore a departure, and a daunting one. For me, this blog is a low-overhead method to record odd and interesting finds and challenges as I dig into family history so that others could, conceivably, find them. Writing a sprawling family narrative seems unlikely. This will have to do.

My mother’s grandparents all came through Ellis Island. We get back to the Old Country fast on that side. The Sadaks and Krutzes were farmers, worked hard and raised large families. My mom’s relatives were those I knew best growing up. They lived close to each other, saw each other frequently, talked to and about each other. And the Krutz side of the family is long-lived; I was almost nine when great-grandpa Krutz died.

My father, on the other hand, was a generation older than my mother, his parents died long before I was born, and his siblings were scattered and saw one another rarely. A frail, crotchety step-grandmother lived in a gloomy Arts and Crafts house surrounded by dusty old things belonging to dead people I never knew. As a child I paid little attention to that house, and my father’s family was a mystery without me even realizing it.

Unfortunately I did not get the genealogy bug until too late: the long-lived Krutzes were gone, my father and siblings deceased. I am left to piece together their histories almost as a stranger would, gleeful at unearthing facts they could have told me had I simply asked.