Dear Reader,
As with any good story, a genealogy needs a beginning, and that beginning is me.
Well, really, it's my high school history teacher assigning a genealogy project that spurred my original interest in the subject. Before then, I'd known that my dad's side of the family had come from Germany before and during the Holocaust, but that knowledge was as abstract as my notion of the enormity of the universe. I still remember clearly, though, the day that my father brought out a hand-drawn family tree that he'd done in grammar school, and for the first time seeing a name with "d. 194?, Auschwitz" written underneath. This wasn't abstract. This was tangible evidence of a particular human being who lived and was murdered and who has an actual connection to me beyond being a tragic photograph in a text book.
Since that project in high school I've collected more information from my father and my Aunt Helen and my... cousin twice removed, I think? Well, my cousin Shlomo. And then I took a good long break from all of that, because I was in college (during which time I was diagnosed with a chronic illness that took away more time and energy than I had to spare) and then out in the Real World doing Important Research. Which is very unfortunate, both because momentum such as I had, once lost, is hard to regain, and because both of my grandparents passed away during that time, depriving me of a wealth of information.
What I'm posting here is my family tree using the information I gathered in high school. I've obtained more information since then, but I've not yet had a chance to add it to my software. I'm also not thrilled with said software that I currently have (Reunion, which I got for free when I bought my laptop five years ago), but I don't have $300 to shell out on annual subscription to Ancestry.com membership and I'm not familiar with anything else. If you have any recommendations, dear reader, I am all ears.
That said, here are the family trees I'm working on right now. I had to break it up into three pieces (grandfather's family, grandmother's maternal family, grandmother's paternal family) to fit better on the pages. Also, I've edited out information about current generations to respect the privacy of my relatives who are alive and omitted certain dates or parts of dates for similar reasons. Some spellings of names have changed over time (most notably on the Peltesohn line) as well as rather suddenly when people emigrated to the United States and wished to Americanize their names in different ways - I have cousins whose name spellings are different than mine.
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| Grischmann Tree |
This is the tree for my grandfather's family background. I have some more information about the descendants of my great-grandparents' generation as well of lots of wonderful stories, but for now I shall just post this initial framework.
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| Maass Tree |
The background on the Maass side of my grandmother's background. Technically it would have been spelled as Maaß, but Maass is easier to write on American keyboards. I've also seen it spelled as Maas in many references; I'll need to do more research and see which spelling is the correct one.
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| Peltesohn Tree |
The Peltesohn tree. Yes, it stretches out quite a bit... And you see that section I coloured a darker purple (Bernhart Pelter and Emma Bergheimer)? Yeah, an uncle married his niece. I really don't want to think about that too much. Moving on...
Lots of information to fill in! I'm really excited to be embarking on this journey. I'm hoping that I feel well enough to go to the library this week, as they have free access to Ancestry.com in their main branch, but that is yet to be seen.
Be excellent to one another, dear readers.
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