{"id":22,"date":"2005-05-03T23:53:59","date_gmt":"2005-05-03T20:53:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/drsavta.com\/wordpress\/2005\/05\/03\/my-cousin-diane-or-the-internet-as-a-human-lost-and-found\/"},"modified":"2005-05-03T23:53:59","modified_gmt":"2005-05-03T20:53:59","slug":"my-cousin-diane-or-the-internet-as-a-human-lost-and-found","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drsavta.com\/wordpress\/2005\/05\/03\/my-cousin-diane-or-the-internet-as-a-human-lost-and-found\/","title":{"rendered":"My cousin Diane or The internet as a human lost and found"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years ago I was living in Jerusalem while my husband was living in the US. The nights stretched out long and I had difficulty sleeping. It was then I began my hobby of genealogy. <\/p>\n

I am an armchair genealogist. Anything that I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to get out of my chair for is something worth exploring, but it if involves any real effort\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 well\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6<\/p>\n

When my husband and I decided to get married, I went to meet my prospective in-laws. My mother-in-law told me about their family. They had some impressive relatives. She asked about my family. I knew of no one who was particularly noteworthy. When I came home and asked my father, he said, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Tell her you come from a long line of horse thieves.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Well, there really weren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t any horse thieves that we knew of, but we certainly had no famous scholars, inventors, writers, artists, composers, and certainly no rabbis, so why would I make the effort to do any real digging? What I really wanted to know was what life was like for those people I did know about\u00e2\u20ac\u201dmy grandparents and my great-grandparents. Although I was born after the death of all of my great-grandparents, I was still eager to know as much as I could about them.<\/p>\n

By the time I started searching, my parents had already passed away. I questioned my uncles, but they didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t give me very much information. <\/p>\n

One day I was sitting and thinking about where I could find additional information and I remembered that when my husband and I had lived in Pittsburgh, we had gotten in touch with cousins of my maternal grandmother. Perhaps they had information about my great-grandmother. I wondered if I could find them.<\/p>\n

Here is what I remembered: We met them sometime in the 1970-1972 timeframe. My grandmother\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s cousin\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name was Clara. She had a daughter named Sandy. Sandy had a daughter who had her \u00e2\u20ac\u0153bas torah\u00e2\u20ac\u009d at Rabbi Chinn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s synagogue in McKeesport, PA. That was it. That was everything. And, one of the facts was wrong.<\/p>\n

I posted this information to the Jewish Genealogy <\/a>newsgroup and within a day, I received a letter from a girl named Lara (who, coincidentally, had been in camp with my daughter Leah a couple of years earlier). Lara told me that her grandmother was a member of that synagogue and that her grandmother would be able to look at the plaques in the synagogue that list the Bas Torah girls and look at the 1970-1972 timeframe and she would know who had a mother named Sandy. Lara was living in Baltimore. She wrote again that day and told me that she had decided to go back to McKeesport to visit her grandparents that weekend and that she would be back in touch with me.<\/p>\n

On that Sunday or Monday, I received a note from her telling me that my cousin would be contacting me and within a very few hours, I got a note from her. <\/p>\n

But it wasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t Sandy who wrote; it was Diane, the little girl I met all those years ago. She was grown up and my age now\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 OK, so I exaggerate a bit\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6 <\/p>\n

Diane called me from the US to talk and it was amazing. As we talked, it seemed to me that we were more like sisters than distant cousins. She remembered having visited our home in Pittsburgh and having studied with my husband. She had wanted to find us for 30 years and here we were, reunited through the internet through the kindness of Lara and her grandmother who cared enough to help.<\/p>\n

Diane and her husband came to Israel to visit. We enjoyed touring with them, traveling to the Sea of Galilee and eating fish at a lovely restaurant at the water’s edge. We had a wonderful day taking them to Masada, to the Dead Sea at Ein Gedi, and to dinner at Mitzpe Yericho, a community overlooking Jericho, and watching the sun set over the Judean desert. We loved having them with us and have remained close. <\/p>\n

As to genealogy: Although we are distant cousins (her great-grandmother and my great-grandfather were sister and brother), it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s amazing the physical traits and the character traits we have in common. We have the same warped sense of humor and we share the same values and lifestyle.<\/p>\n

And my world is a much nicer place because of my cousin Diane.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few years ago I was living in Jerusalem while my husband was living in the US. The nights stretched out long and I had difficulty sleeping. It was then I began my hobby of genealogy. I am an armchair genealogist. Anything that I don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have to get out of my chair for is something […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-family-life","entry"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsavta.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsavta.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsavta.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsavta.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsavta.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drsavta.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drsavta.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsavta.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drsavta.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}