WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE--FINDING COUSINS CAN TAKE YEARS

When my father was in his eighties, he remembered seeing Joe Klein off at Penn Station in Newark, New Jersey. At that time, when Joe moved to California, my father was about ten years old.

The problem for me, the family historian, was that while my father said that Joe was "some sort of relative," I had no Kleins listed in our extensive family tree charts. For years, Sheindl Reshko was listed on my charts as a deceased daughter of my Grandaunt Gitl.

Gitl was my father’s aunt (born about 1869 in Chudnov, Ukraine). Grandaunt Gitl, who died in Chudnov before 1934 according to a reference in a letter from one of her children written to my grandparents, was the mother of six, three of whom survived WWII.

Along with a few of Sheindl’s siblings, the relatives surmised her death was part of the 1941 massacre of innocent Jewish souls in the shtetl of my paternal ancestry, Chudnov, Ukraine, or nearby in Berditchev.

Sheindl, I now know, was the mysterious Jennie Klein, who wrote to my grandparents from her home in Los Angeles on November 24, 1923. In the letter from the aftermath of the horrifying pogroms of 1919, she pleaded for money to help get her siblings out of Chudnov.

Jennie’s husband was Joe Klein, whose family name was originally Kleiner. Interestingly, I had no record of Jennie being married or reference to a Klein or Kleiner in my charts.

The stories of meeting two of the grandsons of Jennie’s sister Basha (born 1893 in Chudnov, died about 1935 in Chudnov) and one of two sons of their sister Esther (born 1903 in Chudnov and died December 13, 1970, in Chudnov) are discussed in prior blog posts at sharonmarkcohen.com. A more detailed discussion of Basha is planned for a future blog post.

Not until shortly over a year ago did I make an unexpected find from my Grandaunt Gitl’s clan. That’s when I discovered more living cousins on my father's side, those of Jennie’s descendants.

Mistakenly, I thought Grandaunt Gitl lost her remaining children, Leah (married abt 1882 and divorced abt 1885, with a daughter Gitl), Sima, Motl, and Sura Sheindl (Jennie), in the Holocaust. Over 80 years later, in 2022, I found that the eldest child of Grandaunt Gitl survived. Known by her family as Sheindl, Grandaunt Gitl’s firstborn daughter came to the United States in 1906 where she became known as Jennie. Born Sura Sheindl on December 30, 1889, in Chudnov, Jennie died on January 4, 1949, in Los Angeles.

Leah and her daughter were killed in Berditchev in 1941, along with Sima. According to our cousin Raya, Grandaunt Gitl’s son, Motl, met his fate in Chudnov in 1941. The dates of birth of Leah, Sima, and Motl are unknown.

With the generous help of members of a Facebook Group researching stored archives, a long-standing family mystery unraveled on April 5, 2022. That allowed me to begin a correspondence with the descendants of my father’s 1st cousin Jennie.

To think, my father was the same age as his cousin Jennie Klein’s son, Morris, and for about ten years, they both lived in Newark, New Jersey. Jennie’s son was born in Newark in 1911, about a year and a half before my father, also born in 1911, arrived from Chudnov.

Why did my father say Joe Klein was "some sort of relative?" Didn’t his parents tell him that he was a cousin? Since he saw him off at Penn Station railway in Newark in the early 1920s, it's likely that the cousins exchanged niceties. Fortunately, we have a letter from Jennie written in English, which my aunt saved and one written in Yiddish by Joe. Both letters, penned in the early 1920s, were sent from California.

How has the family grown in the past 100 years? My search continues, and I’m continually filling in the gaps. First, after finding his address online, in April 2022, I made contact, via email, with Phillip Greenberg, a great-grandson of Jennie and Joe. He forwarded my email to his brother Marc who had done an extensive family tree sans the family of their great-grandmother Jennie. Jennie died before Marc and Phillip were born, and their mother didn’t have much to tell them about the family history of her maternal grandmother, Jennie.

Marc and I communicated via email, and he offered me access to his ancestry files. He supplied an outline of his mother’s family, including telling me about her first cousin Gail. I reached out but received no reply after leaving a message on a “cold call” to Gail.

As tenacious as I am, I eventually went back to find clues to that branch of our family, almost immediately finding the Facebook page of Gail’s younger daughter, Stacie. That night, we communicated via Facebook Messenger for about five hours, even though Stacie, a former actress and professional dancer, admitted she had no particular interest in the past family history. Still, she appeared to be intrigued.

Stacie told me that her sister was the one who had an interest in genealogy, so I asked that she refer my questions to her sister Jamie. By the way, the same day I “met” Stacie on January 14, 2023, I found a picture I knew to be in my files. That picture captured Sheindl’s sister Basha, who died in Chudnov about 1935, the mother of five, two of whom were killed in 1941.

About two weeks after my lengthy virtual communication with Stacie, on January 29, 2023, a welcome introductory email came from her sister Jamie. That was while my husband and I were in San Diego at a cousin’s bat mitzvah. Unbeknownst to Jamie, the function we were attending was for a mutual cousin of ours. Since then, we have been sharing information and adding to facts we find online.

With a shared hankering for family tree details, Marc, Jamie, and I are working together to fill in the blanks of our family puzzle. Taking a step at a time, we’re closing the gaps.

Switching to my husband’s family, why did Cousin Nita think she could pick whatever she wanted for her dowry from Bloom and Krupp appliance store in Brooklyn? Didn’t her father tell her that a co-owner of the bustling appliance store in Brooklyn when Nita married in the 1940s was a cousin, Phil Bloom?

Nita’s father, Irving, my mother-in-law’s 1st cousin, was a tax attorney/CPA who handled the books for cousins, including their mutual first cousin, Phil. The others included several cousins who owned businesses in the tri-state area.

Notes in my family tree reveal that Bloom and Krup first opened in 1928, the year Phil married. Phil was a salesman when Louis Krup took him into the business. The Krup name in Europe was Krupinski.

Yes, family mysteries are universal. Expect future blog posts at sharonmarkcohen.com, such as It’s Sad, You’re Basically My Family Google, She Never Left Chudnov, and How Many People Have A Cousin Who Owns A Tree Farm? Dead or alive, one story is more interesting than the next.

Jennie and Joe Klein’s granddaughters, Gail Urbach and Suzanne Greenberg - 1st cousins

Gail and Suzanne are my 2nd cousins 1x removed

After finding Gail’s daughters and Suzanne’s sons, I have a more complete “picture” of their branch of the family

Sheindl (Jennie) Klein

Letter from Joe Klein dated July 6, 1924, penned in Yiddish. A translation can be found in a blog post dated April 12, 2022, at sharonmarkcohen.com, “What Was Their Story of Survival?”

Almost like a miracle, this photo of the scene at Penn Station in Newark from 1911, the year my father and his cousin Morris Klein were born, showed up on Facebook on July 10, 2023. Morris was born in Newark, and my father, born in Chudnov, Ukraine, settled with his family in Newark in 1912. My father remembered seeing Joe Klein off at Penn Station in Newark when the cousins moved to California in the early 1920s.