A Deep Dive into My Family’s History

Over winter break, I had the opportunity to look at a family tree on my dad’s side of the family. It didn’t go back super far, just about four generations, but I did learn some cool things. One, my great-grandfather Kermit E. Hale was the mayor of Stuttgart, Arkansas in the 1950s. Two, the name Kermit and nickname “Dan” have been passed down through the males of the family. While my dad’s name is not Kermit, it was interesting to see how the name had been preserved throughout the generations. And three, my grandmother actually has my great-great-great grandfather Dan’s steamer trunk that he used when traveling. She had it restored to its former glory a long time ago, and serves as a reminder of times when train travel was most common and steamer trunks were the preferred, if not more cumbersome, method of transporting personal items.

Looking at this family tree led me to thinking about my mom’s side of the family. Coming from a family of Jewish immigrants, my maternal ancestry can be hard to trace once you go back far enough to the pre-immigration generations due to the recordkeeping systems in the small Eastern European towns they lived in. However, a quick call with one of my aunts and a visit to her account on the Ancestry.com website opened up a wealth of family knowledge I had previously known nothing about. Up until that point, the most I knew about the older generations of my mom’s family was that my great-grandparents had come to the United States from Poland in the early 1900s.

After some deep searching, I was able to find some information about my mother’s paternal grandparents, including that her grandfather had actually immigrated from Austria, not Poland as I had assumed. The real treasure was on her maternal side, where I went back seven generations from myself and found my great-great-great grandparents. It felt like I was discovering a whole new family I never knew existed. This information centered around my mother’s maternal grandmother, Pauline Notkoff (née Rogowska). Finding Pauline’s maiden name was central to my search, and from there I was able to find her parents and grandparents. Pauline immigrated to the US from Bialystok, Poland (Russia at the time) in 1917, and married my great-grandpa Jack a few years later. Jack was also from Bialystok and actually followed Pauline to the US to marry her. One cool piece of information I found in a US Census record from 1940 listed the Notkoff’s primary language as Yiddish, which they had spoken while living in Poland/Russia. Once they immigrated to the US, they kept speaking Yiddish at home in the Bronx, and my grandmother also grew up speaking it. I then understood why my mother’s speech is speckled with Yiddish words, as she often exclaims that she doesn’t want to “schlep” over to somewhere or that some “meshuggeneh” cut her off while driving.

Using Pauline’s maiden name, Rogowska, I was able to find information about her parents, Michel Rogowska and Feijga Chaja Wasilkowski. Seeing those names, which are so different from the ones in my family today, really made me feel connected to a side of the family I had never known about before. I even found a photograph taken of the Rogowska family when Pauline was still a girl. All of her siblings (Rachel, Paul, Jean, and Shirley), as well as her parents, are in

The Rogowska Family. My great-grandma Pauline is in the top right.

 the photo. It was so cool to me to see the faces of people in my family who lived so long ago, in a different world, really.

Through more searching, I found Pauline’s maternal grandparents, Pesach Yudel Wasilkowski and Sora Merjam Sokolska. Her grandfather was born around 1846, and although I could not find a birth year for Pauline’s grandmother, I assume it was around the same time. 

Although this was the last generation I was able to trace, it was so cool to find records dating to almost 200 years ago for people who lived on a different continent. Seeing naturalization records, marriage licenses, and even just data from different years of the US Census, where I saw the family grow as new children were born, was fascinating. Tracing my family back to my third great-grandparents may not seem super impressive to families who can trace their lineage back 500 or more years, but this isn’t feasible for many Jewish families whose records have been lost or destroyed due to various events in history. Thinking about my ancestors and their relatives, I wondered if I have distantly related family still in Europe. I mean, it’s very likely that I do, but I’m not sure I would ever be able to track them down at this point. 

The moral of the story, my family’s story, is that heritage is important. Tracing my lineage as far back as I could made me feel more connected to who I am, and I would definitely encourage anyone who is able to take a look at their ancestry and find out more about their heritage.