Not long ago, I finally got bitten by the genealogy bug. All of the relatives who could have helped me with this were gone by the time I started with this. But there are also lots of resources available today on the Internet, and that got me hooked. So over the past 5 months or so, I’ve been doing a lot of web surfing, looking for various clues about the lives of my ancestors and the world that they lived in. In some cases, the search engines have led me to buy a book or contact a government agency, but they have also led to some web sites where I’ve found direct reference to family members (e.g., the Ellis Island web site search, and the 1920 and 1930 Census info available for a fee on ancestry.com). Overall, it’s been much like any other form of academic research, all dry and crisp and precise. As a geek-like eternal student, that kind of thing appeals to me. So it’s been enjoyable.

But it has also made me stop and think: what about the human factor here? Back when I was a kid, I was pretty close to a lot of the stuff that I’m now looking down at from “on high”. I was actually around the kind of people that I’m now reading about, i.e. the immigrants and their immediate offspring. I actually saw and heard and otherwise sensed a bit of the “older world” that I now seek to rediscover from a digital perspective. E.g., meat markets and other ratty little stores, tenement buildings and people raising pigeons for food, women cooking cabbage soup. And to be honest, I didn’t always like that world. I wanted to be a regular suburban American kid, and the old “pollock” stuff seemed very un-cool. Those people were locked into the past, inferior to me and my friends.

So I feel a bit schizoid about the whole project. In some ways I am sorry for once being so uncharitable and dismissive about “the old world” that had still been a part of my mother and fathers’ lives. But in another way, I still harbor some negative feelings about that world. I generally don’t look back at it nostalgically, longing to recapture something of the way that they lived.

But actually, I have differences in feeling about my mother’s “old world” versus my father’s “old world”. I was (and still am) more sympathetic to my mother’s relatives and the experiences that I had as a child with them (in the Dundee neighborhood of Passaic). I remember that the people involved on my mother’s side seemed “nicer”. I still looked down at them for the most part (except for my Uncle Bruno, who was always pretty cool). But today, it seems much easier for me to have good feelings about “Mom’s old world”.

My dad came from Wallington, which was a early on the suburb of Dundee, the place where factory workers went to buy a home with a little bit of a backyard once they could save some money. I’d need a shrink and a lot of time and money to ferret out all of my memories regarding my father and then analyze them; but the bottom line is that I didn’t like his world too much. They didn’t seem as nice as the Dundee crowd. They seemed more “Americanized”, but in the worst ways. E.g., mindlessly materialistic, concerned about status without a sense of style, locked in a continuing sense of dissatisfaction. Dundee somehow seemed to retain some “old world charm” to balance off the old-world poverty. By contrast, Wallington seemed to have ditched the poverty, to a greater extent, but also lost the charm, to be replaced by a bastardized Polish-American sense of reality.

I’m probably being unfair to my father and his Wallington world in many ways. And my present exercise in genealogy will hopefully be a good way for me to come to grips with my own prejudices. But there is one thing that I remember that I still believe needed rejection. And that was the attitude about other ethnic groups and races that I picked up around my father’s friends and associates.

Not that my mother’s “Dundee world” was utterly innocent in that regard. They were quite afraid of the black and Puerto Rican families who started moving in during the late 50’s. I also recall my mother telling me and my brother that we shouldn’t get too involved with Italian families — read, don’t bring an Italian girl home to be your bride. But on the other side of the coin, they maintained some humility about other kinds of people; the “n-word” for blacks and the “s-word” for Puerto Ricans was not used (sensibly enough, given that the “p-word” could easily be used against them). And actually, my Uncle Bruno (who was still living in Dundee with my grandparents) told us that as future world travelers, we should be ready to meet different people. He even told us of some good experiences he had with blacks in his travels.

OK, so my Uncle wasn’t exactly a freedom marcher in Mississippi, and the rest of my mother’s relatives had their fears. But compared with what I heard from the Wallington crowd, this was positively enlightened. Let’s just say that my father’s people weren’t terribly circumspect about using insults against other races. I still remember those guys in their T-shirts with cigarettes and beer guts, talking about how “they” just don’t want to work and “they” expect others to take care of them and “they” behave like pigs. There was a certain viciousness in their words, which I just don’t remember from the Dundee crowd. Well, maybe that’s just a phase that people coming out of poverty need to go through. The Dundee folk were content to keep renting their little cold-water tenement apartments; the Wallington folk were now land-owners, and thus had more to lose (and not much more income to keep it with). Their pride mixed with their heightened fears of losing what they had achieved, and spawned some very uncharitable attitudes about all that remained “outside the boundaries”.

That’s the human factor that the research doesn’t immediately reveal. In a lot of ways, I probably was wrong in overlooking what was good about the good old days. I purposely stayed away from the people who could have told me directly what I’m now trying to discover via the Internet. I had my uppity attitudes, and that was wrong. HOWEVER, there were indeed things about the good old days that were not so good. I hope that I’ve at least done a little bit better in terms of being open to all people, to overcoming the tribalism that ultimately dooms humanity to war without end. I’m not free of bigotry and bad attitudes, but at least it concerns me. I think the same goes for my brother and all of my cousins. Hopefully, there was some generational progress in that regard after all.

I’ve been doing some ancestral research of late, trying to cobble together whatever factoids that I can gather about my relatives. I was able to put a basic picture together on my mother’s side, going back to my great-grandparents. After that the trail goes cold, given that they were all in Poland and I have no practical access to any trace they may have left behind over there. Even if I were rich and could go to Poland for a few months on a fact-finding mission, there might not be many facts left to find, given the mess that was made of eastern Europe during WW1, WW2 and Soviet Communist rule. But still, I know a good bit more now about my grandparents, and I can better appreciate what they went through. They seem like real people to me, much more so than when they were alive. The language, age and cultural barriers between them and us (i.e., my grandparents versus my brother and my cousins) kept us apart; but now I can almost enter their bubble and see that our lives weren’t all that different, on the most important levels anyway. My little genealogy project has been quite satisfying in that regard.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to do much with my father’s side. At least I had a small cache of family papers and pictures that my mother’s brother had saved, which we inherited when he died eight years ago. But I have almost nothing to go on regarding my father’s family. He died almost 35 years ago, and his surviving brother died back in 2001. We hardly saw my uncle at all after my father died, but I had a chance to speak with him briefly in 1999 at his late wife’s wake. He wanted me to stop by his house for a longer visit. But of course I didn’t. Back then I had “bigger fish to fry”. Only now do I realize the golden opportunity that I passed up there.

If my maternal grandparents were “on another planet” back when I was a kid, my paternal grandparents were off in another galaxy. I never even knew my father’s father, as he died shortly before WW2. I somewhat remember my paternal grandmother, as she lived upstairs from us. But she only spoke Polish and didn’t always get along with my mother, so my brother and I mostly stayed away from her. She died when we were around 10 or 11. So there ain’t much that I remember about her, other than the little musical “glockenspiel” she had with the mechanical boy and girl coming out of the doorways during the song, along with the smell of mothballs up in her apartment. And the fights that she used to have with my mother in Polish. I remember my father saying that they ran a “dry goods” store in Wallington, NJ, and that he had good memories of occasionally taking the train to New York City with his dad to order stuff. And that they were all good Roman Catholics of Polish origin. But really, that’s about all I know.

Up to now I haven’t mentioned my last name on this blog; that gives me more leeway to talk candidly about my employer, a county law enforcement agency. But if you knew my last name and did a Google on it, you’d think that my grandparents (or grandfather, anyway) were Russian Jews. It’s one of those “strongly” Jewish names. In fact, many people in the past have assumed that I’m a Jew (and that actually may have helped me to land a job or two). Also, I’ve heard that being a dry goods merchant was a rather Jewish thing to do back in the early 20th Century. So what was the story with my grandfather? My father was a more-or-less devout Catholic, and never expressed any interest in Judaism; he was perfectly at ease eating pork sausage (kelbasa) and other non-Kosher stuff. Also, I don’t remember any signs of Judaism in my grandmother’s apartment; no Stars of David or even a candle set. My grandfather is buried in a Roman Catholic cemetery, so I assume that he had an official Catholic burial. And yet, I also remember that my father had a certain Jewish sensitivity, somewhat rare for a Catholic son of Poland (although he was born in the USA). If he even thought that my brother and I were making fun of Jews (easy to do in the all-white, all-Christian neighborhood where I grew up; all the kids were little bigots), he would yell at us. By contrast, he left us alone when we got down on blacks.

I recently came across a little tidbit of info on my paternal grandfather on ancestry.com. I paid the $20 for a month’s access and then managed to drag up my grandfather’s WW1 draft registration card (from 1917), along with an entry in the 1930 Census for my father’s family. The registration card did confirm one thing: my grandfather was a “Rusky”, born in Minsk (actually that’s in Belarus, so I guess that he was a Belarusky). But he was also living in a very Polish Catholic section of Passaic at the time, and worked in the Botany woolen mill as an elevator man. He was already married by then, and would have his first son (the uncle who died a few years back) in another year. So he was living the same life as my authentic Polish-Catholic maternal grandparents, who at the time were only two blocks away and working at the same mills.

And yet, in 1930, something of a Jewish trend could be seen. In the Census, he is listed as the proprietor of a dry goods store and has three kids. Also, they own a house in suburban Wallington. My maternal grandparents were still renting, and never did leave their tenement in Passaic. But my paternal grandparents had obviously stepped up an economic notch or two during the 1920s. My father’s family might have been relatively well-off had my grandfather lived into the 1960’s.

Well, no need for me to ponder what might have been, in that regard. But it is interesting to consider what a unique individual my granddad must have been. He was a bit of a “black swan”, in the sense of that interesting book by Nassim Taleb. He went against the averages, deviated from the trends, and was an unpredictable phenomenon. Most Russians families with his last name (and mine) came over from Russia in the 1880s, and clustered in one of two urban regions: one in southern New Jersey, and one on the other side of the Hudson River. (The New York clan actually had a rubbish carting business; I remember once being in a car with some friends next to a garbage truck with my name on it – obviously I took a ribbing for that!). Yet there was my grandfather in Passaic, where there was no one else with his last name. There certainly was a Jewish section of Passaic, but my grandfather was firmly entrenched in the Polish Catholic zone, living and working (and arguably praying) just as any other Pole would. And yet he pulled off some kind of Jewish connections to become a successful local merchant, something that very few of the typical Polish immigrants would do (other than a candy store here and a meat market there).

Back when I was in law school, one of the profs asked me if I were related to the southern NJ clan, as they had produced a number of attorneys who had gained local fame. All I could tell Professor Cohen was “no”. But now I’d tell him, quite proudly, that I’m with the black-swan branch of the family!