Example – Journey to Places Important to the Family History

We originally "met" Mrs. Edie Abrams on the internet site jewishgen ,where she had made a general request for information about her grandmother murdered in Auschwitz. After sending her all the information about her family we had already gathered and after conducting further research, we received a note with the following from her: "You are giving me a family. I will never be able to repay you".    In September 2003 we organized a one week trip for Mrs. Abrams and her husband Saul from New York State to places important to her family history throughout Germany. We not only organized the whole journey, booked the rooms in the guesthouses or hotels and planned the whole itinerary. We also looked for local specialists in Jewish history at each location and organized meetings with them. In the District of Kronach, Northern Bavaria, we visited the town of Oberlangenstadt, where Mrs. Abrams' great grandmother was brought up. In 1894 she had married a man in the Westerwald, a forested area in the western part of Germany. In the Westerwald we visited the towns of Mehren, Altenkirchen and Puderbach. It was in Mehren that Mrs. Abrams' grandmother Elsa Isaak and her brothers Richard and Walter, twins, had been born. The local experts showed us around sites of Jewish history such as cemeteries or memorials dedicated to destroyed temples. In Nordrach, Black Forest, Elsa Isaak had worked in a Jewish retirement home as a manager and was deported from there in 1942 to Auschwitz with all of her colleagues and patients. Thus it was in Nordrach that she had spent the last months of her life before being murdered. A visit to this place was not easy for the Abrams, but nonetheless very important.    We were able to use a rainy day to analyze photos and postcards, brought along by Mrs. Abrams, which where written in old German script during the first decades of the 20th century. We brought these cards into chronological order by deciphering the dates and postmarks. This provided a detailed image of the life of the family. By analyzing the photos according to family resamblances and using our own databases, we could trace branches of the family leading to Kronach, Cologne, Aschaffenburg and Hannover. In this way the drawing of the family tree expanded. Before this trip Mrs. Abrams could never have imagined travelling to the country of the Shoa. She appreciated the trip so much that she returned again only one year later and we visited more sites pertaining to her family history.