WHAT DO PEOPLE TALK ABOUT?

We live, we die. Whenever I receive a photograph such as the one above, which came from the younger daughter of our cousin Florence, my question is always, what the heck happened in the in-between years?

Florence was a cousin we were in contact with and had gotten together with to celebrate many family milestones. Why did Florence's daughter Barbara, who is around my age, write that she didn’t know who was in the photo? Why didn't she know her mother's aunts and her cousins? 

What did the parents talk about with their children? Did they not tell them the reason they weren’t home various times was that they were in New Jersey for my wedding, for example, or my son’s bris, my in-law’s 50th-anniversary celebration, or at another cousin’s apartment in Manhattan for a family reunion? Did her parents not mention all the fun we had?

What an exciting find for a rabid genealogist like me to come upon this picture. My husband is seated front right, with his elder brother Jeffrey front left. Next to my husband sits his mother. My husband is the youngest of the first cousins on this side of the family. Several of my mother-in-law’s sisters and their spouses are also pictured, but none of their children. 

With a sizable contingency of the New Jersey family represented at Florence's home in Connecticut, who did Florence's children think all the people were? Did anyone ask? What was the occasion? My husband figured it was the bar mitzvah celebration of his cousin Florence’s son (Barbara’s brother Mark).

Where was my husband’s other brother? Was he away at college? Where was their father? How about my husband’s eldest aunt from the clan, Ida, and her family? Who snapped the shot (long before the advent of auto-snap or selfies)?

The children of cousin Florence could not even identify their maternal grandfather, even though, admittedly, he was gone before they were born. He’s in a photo I sent to them showing their great-grandfather (my husband’s maternal grandfather) with his two sons, one each from two prior marriages. (See photo below).

What brings these questions to light, after the older generations are deceased? Why do we care more as we get older? While growing up, didn’t anyone go through old photos from time to time? Didn’t anyone ask?

One of my favorite pastimes was and still is flipping through old photo albums. I can recall countless hours spent looking through the family albums of my parents, aunt, and mother-in-law with them. We thoroughly enjoyed reminiscing about all the relatives, and the events at the time the pictures were taken.

More than twenty years ago, I charted the compilation of our family tree. I've followed up with a family newsletter, in which I requested copies of treasured family photos like the ones above and below but received very few.

Now, with the older generation gone, we have these two precious pictures left with their belongings to try and determine the cast of characters. This particular exchange of photos all started with me sending Barbara the photo of her grandfather and great-grandfather. She responded by sending the photo of the unidentified New Jersey family, along with several other pictures of her mother, aunts, and grandmother.

She not only questioned about those photographed, but she also asked for a family medical history for their family to keep on file with their doctors. I replied in stark detail with as much as I knew, which was remarkably quite a bit.

As an in-law, I knew more details about their family than Barbara or her siblings. Thus, I revert to the title of this blog post, “What Do People Talk About?” For more on our connection with Barbara’s family, see “I Can’t Believe You Saved Our Thank You Note,” dated July 28, 2020.

On a final and most important note, my mother and my mother-in-law each had a brother serving in the military in WWI. On this side of the family, it was Sam. Visiting his grave uncovered more information. See the photograph below, which I took at the gravesite.

Simply based on his height listed on his military records, I’m giving an educated guess that Sam Pollack (Zayda’s firstborn) is the man in the center standing between his brother Dovid on the left and brother-in-law Abe Gordon on the right. Pictured sitting in front are Zayda (Morris Pollack) and his third wife (my husband’s maternal grandmother) Jennie Bloom Pollack. Their daughter Ruth Pollack Gordon Schneider Tunkel is seated on right with her children Herbie and Adley Gordon (Joyce was not yet born). I received this treasured photo from Joyce’s son Jack, which he found among the photos left by his mother and grandmother. Sam and Dovid were Zayda’s sons, born in Eastern Europe, one from each of Zayda’s two prior wives). The photograph was taken in Linden, New Jersey circa 1927. Jennie’s grandson from her prior marriage, born in 1933, confirmed the identities of his grandmother, her second husband, and the others in the picture.

Tombstone of Samuel Benjamin Pollack Buried in Cedar Park Cemetery Paramus, NJ - Hirsch and Sons Section, Block 1, Line 1, Grave 1 - Photo credit: Sharon Mark Cohen 11-29-2010