WHO WAS GRANDMA BECKIE FROM ROMANIA?

My maternal grandmother died on February 11, 1935. She was the young age of 49. Thus, she was born about 1886, but no one knows her exact date of birth. 

My grandmother Beckie emigrated from Romania and prepared Romanian dinner dishes, such as mamaliga, a corn meal mush, which my mother, age 19 at the time of her mother’s demise, savored from her childhood memories. Grandma Beckie had four children we knew of, including my mother, the eldest among them. Additionally, she helped raise her seven step-children from my grandfather’s first marriage. 

All the accounts that my mother relayed, along with her sister and her brother who lived to adulthood, made it obvious that Grandma Beckie was a devoted wife and mother and an all-around hardworking and well-loved woman. Whenever I think of her, I picture her busy in the kitchen, cooking, cleaning, sewing, and ironing. My mother claimed that ironing was her balabusta mother’s forte. 

My motto is that everyone deserves a legacy. I’m trying my darndest to give my grandmother the legacy she so deserves. This morning, at breakfast, I mentioned to my husband that probably no one alive today remembers my grandmother. Over the years, I met very few people who knew her, other than her immediate family, who didn’t know her story.

One of those who knew my grandmother was Ethel, my mother’s little sister Annie’s friend. Annie died prematurely at age 11 on May 12, 1934, from a congenital heart disease. My grandmother followed her to her grave nine months later. 

When my father passed away in 1997, Ethel paid a sympathy visit at our home. That day, she “painted a picture” of dear Annie and my grandmother. I sopped up the information she so poetically told and entered it as part of a chapter in my family saga, yet to be published, Kitchen Talk.

In my multiple decades of family tree research, I remain stumped trying to find records of my husband’s paternal grandmother coming to America from Pinsk and my maternal grandmother’s records from Darabani, Romania. They each lived in America and were buried in cemeteries in New Jersey. I visited their graves many times. Yet, their records of arrival in this country are nowhere to be found. 

Only recently have I acquired the records of my husband’s maternal grandfather and great-grandfather entering America through Canada. Before my mother left this world, I retrieved the documents showing my maternal grandfather’s ship’s arrival through Boston, his Declaration papers, and more telling records. 

None of my great-grandparents were ever in America. On the other hand, five of my husband’s eight great-grandparents immigrated to America, and we have visited all of their graves; four are in New York, and one is in New Jersey. 

The 1914 marriage records of my maternal grandparents show that it was a second marriage for each of them. That was a shock to my mother, who never heard that her mother was married prior or had any children. My aunts and uncle were not alive to verify the records, but something else did. Read on.  

With each of the four births to my grandparents, an additional live birth is posted. In other words, when my mother was born, the records show it was my grandmother’s 5th live birth, and so on until the youngest, my Aunt Beattie’s birth records show that she was my grandmother’s 8th live birth. 

How could it be? What happened to my aunts/uncles from my grandmother’s previous marriage, and what happened to her first husband? 

Note that in the water-stained picture, the only picture we have of my grandmother, the young girl, and my grandmother are wearing matching lockets. I know that photography studios would lend jewelry for clients to use in photos, but I also was told that my grandmother owned a locket, which my mother bemoaned that her brother took. 

Staring at the picture, I see that some of my older son’s features came from my grandmother. Marveling at the beautiful little girl with the fancy bowed hairband, I wonder if my grandmother would have put a similar bow in my hair. Most importantly, I wonder who the little girl was…what was her story? Maybe someday I’ll find the answer. I know for sure that I will never give up the search.

Portrait of an unknown young girl with my maternal grandmother — was the girl my aunt?