Family History by Sid

  Louis Rubin      This post is about my wife’s uncle Louis Rubin. Louis married Arlene’s aunt Fran Snyder. Louis is the first person of interest in my blog that is not a blood relative to either me or Arlene.       Louis Rubin was born in Dinwiddie, VA. on February 8th 1922. He was the oldest child of Jake and Rose Rubin and most likely was named after Jake’s father Louis. Jake and Rose owned and operated a small grocery store in Petersburg, Virginia. Lou was born shortly after Jake and Rose entered the USA and they had a daughter Syllvia who was about two and a half years younger than Lou. Jake and Rose eked out a living with their small market but Lou claimed he never knew they were poor. He had a roof over his head and never went hungry. He had clothes on his back and friends to play with. He was very content with his portion in life.        Lou went to high school in Petersburg and after he graduated attended...

       All Jews would list Israel as their ancestral home. However, when the Hebrews were expelled from their native country they settled all over the world. Most of them settled in eastern Europe and or Russia (Ashkenazie) while others made their homes in the Iberian Peninsula and north Africa (Sfardic). There also groups in Egypt, Iran, and Turkey. Centuries of being displaced makes it impossible to trace roots back to those original ancestors in the Holy Land and we now consider ourselves as descendants from these varied regions.       My family traces its roots back to Lithuania and Belarus on my father’s side and to Poland on my mother’s side. My wife’s family hailed from Eastern Europe/Russia on her mother’s side and her father’s family came from Germany and Eastern Europe.       I don’t have the names of the home cities for all of my ancestors but I do have some and will give some insight of each of these towns....

     Manuel Morse Rogoff          Manuel Morse Rogoff was born February 12, 1917 in Mount Pleasant, PA. He was the son of Jacob and Edith Rogoff. Edith was my grandfather’s first cousin. Manny was the third of four children having two brothers and a sister. Jacob died when Manny was a teenager and Manny and his brothers took over and ran the family auto wrecking business in Leetsdale, PA. The business was very successful mostly due to the hard work and excellent management skills of Manny. As World War Two approached Manny, like many other young men, enlisted in the Army to fight the Germans.        His WWII experience was far from typical. He served in the Army Air Corps as a bombardier on a B-24 Liberator and was stationed in England. Their crew flew several missions over Europe. One time during a mission over Norway, bad weather caused them to lose visual contact with the rest of their squadron. However, being ...

       Passover is the time of year that we appreciate our freedoms and strive to afford those freedoms to all people everywhere. The story of Passover is an ancient one that we have repeated over the years, assembling as families, teaching our children, and establishing new traditions that our descendants will relish and repeat with joy and fond recollection of their elders.       Each family’s seder is different. One will be traditional with all prayers in hebrew and not a page in the hagadah that is not read. Another will be filled with song and music while still another is more modern and centered on the child’s eye view. The seder may be one of the oldest continually celebrated religious traditions in the world but surprisingly it has a very modern component. It is multifunctional. It is a religious service complete with prayers, psalms, and hymns. It is a history lesson. There are moral and ethical themes discussed and there is even ...

       Every family has their own famous iconic photograph. The ones that every aunt, uncle and cousin has hanging on their wall or at least in a photo album that is stacked on a shelf in the den. My Levine side is represented by this picture of my grandfather, Louis Levine with his four sons. This picture was taken in the late 1930s or early 1940s and was reprieved in 1974 when we gathered in Erie for my grandparent’s 60th wedding anniversary. These pictures revive memories and stories of those who have passed.        We all have those shoeboxes of old family pictures that have been handed down to us from a parent or grandparent. They sit forgotten for many years and then one day when we are cleaning out a closet we run across this box and look through the old photos. Sometimes we hit a goldmine, unveiling pictures of cousins that we have never met and possibly pictures of people from different parts of our families that were thrown to...

       There is an unfair stereotype of extremely intelligent people. Many times they are portrayed as socially inept, and singularly focused on their research. They are referred to as nerds or geeks with boring lifestyles and almost childlike interests. Television and movies cashed in on this representation and created characters that their audiences made light of. My uncle Herman Levine meets the description of an extremely intelligent scientist. He was,however, the antithesis of the nerdy geeky wallflower. He was no Sheldon Cooper.       Herman Saul Levine was born on February 11th, 1922 in Jeannette,PA just moments before his twin brother, Henry Samuel Levine (affectionately known as uncle Sam.) Even though Herman was born first Sam always claimed that he was older because he crossed the international dateline from west to east and therefore lived the same day twice. The twins were the fourth and fifth children of my grandparents Louis...

       Everything in the world can be reduced to numbers. Our age is a number, our heights and weights are numbers. Your bank balance is a number. Our favorite sports teams have wins and losses recorded in numbers. There are statistics available on everything imaginable. We are warned by doctors if our blood pressure numbers are too high or blood iron level is too low. Genealogy is no different.       Researching our family history is more of an empirical exercise than an objective observation of what happened. It relies too much on older documents where mistakes in spelling, dates, and places can be wrong. Much of what we use is word of mouth evidence with no documents attached. That leads to making assumptions and speculation about who is related to whom. But numbers are important.       I have 1611 people on my family tree. The tree starts with my two children and traces their ancestry back through both parents a...