52 Ancestors - #5 - In the Census- Who Was Dong May? (Why I Couldn't Find My Mother in the 1940 Census)

The most recent U.S. Census (1940) was released in 2012. Due to privacy concerns, censuses are not released to the public until after 72 years have passed. (Other countries wait 100 years.) So, it was with great excitement that I sat down to glean facts about my grandparents from the newly released images. I don't know why I was so excited - I already knew their names, where they lived, where they came from and many other pertinent facts. But, there is something about seeing your family's vitals splashed across a webpage for all to see.

Maybe they (the genealogy websites responsible for gathering, transcribing, and posting the information) should have taken a little more time. In the rush to get the most images indexed and posted, many errors were made. Don't get me wrong. I really appreciate the effort. I have participated in indexing projects and do understand the intricacies involved. Some handwriting is almost impossible to read. Some images are poorly scanned. But - seriously, use some common sense!

What do you see on the top line of this image?

If you're anything like the persons transcribing for Ancestry.com, you said, "Dong May."

How about now? Still see "Dong May" or something else?

How about now? Read the entire line.

You may still see "Dong May." But stop and think about it for a second. Put it in some context. Does "Dong May" make any sense? 

According to this entry, "Dong" is an 8-year-old white girl from Vienna, Austria. Now, it was 1940, not 2017, when anything goes for names! Maybe it's just me, but I highly doubt any white girl from Vienna would be named "Dong." These transcribers were just in too much of hurry to get the job done.

In fact, "Dong" is actually "Doris." If you look again at the image, you can clearly see the dot of the letter 'i'. The 's' is slightly obscured by the 'h' from the name "Sophie" below. 

How did I find her in the 1940 census, despite her name being mangled by the transcribers? These tips might help you in your search:

1. Search for family members. This is what I did. It's probably the easiest method. A search using the names of my mother's parents brought up the correct record right away.

2. Try a different website. Perhaps image was transcribed differently.  A search for my mother's name on familysearch.org brought up the correct image. 

3. Search by address. If you know where the person lived, but can't locate them in the census, try searching the images. You could search EVERY image of the particular census, but that would be hugely time-consuming! Instead, use the Unified ED Finder (ED means "enumeration district") at www.stevemorse.org. Following the instructions, you will be able to narrow down the census pages to the ones close in address to the person you are searching for.

4. Consider and try various spellings. As in my example, errors are made in transcribing records. In this case, however, I never would have tried "Dong"!

5. Search without first/last name. Searching in this manner might return an overwhelming number of results, You can reduce those if you know the approximate city and/or state. Including a birthdate will help as well.

Still can't find them? Consider these ideas:

1. Perhaps your ancestor was away the day the census taker came to the door. 

2. They simply didn't respond to the "knock on the door."

3. They lied. There are many reasons someone might give incorrect information to a census taker - fear of government, participation in illegal activities.

4. Language barrier - perhaps the enumerator simply couldn't understand what your ancestor was saying, and as such, did the best he/she could taking down the information.

5.  Uninformed. Census takers assumed that the informant was giving correct information. Perhaps the informant was simply a boarder, who had no real knowledge about the other occupants of the home. The 1940 census was the first census to identify who the informant was. Knowing who provided the information can help researchers evaluate the accuracy of the responses.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 

The lives of my mother and her family were changed forever one day in March 1938. On that day, the Nazis appropriated my great-grandfather's business. As he (Sigmund Lichtenthal) explained in a letter written years later, 

"The firm, Lital, came to a natural end when Austria was occupied by the Nazis in March 1938, since I am Jewish and, as such, subject to the Germans' exceptional legislation for Jews. No sooner had the Anschluss been closed than three "gentlemen" appeared in my office, bearing a letter from the district leadership of the NDAP, stating that Lital had been taken over by the party in the interest of its 60 employees and would in the future be led by the party."

Two months later, my grandfather, Paul Lichtenthal, was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp. From Dachau, he was sent to Buchenwald, where he remained until his release was secured in May 1939.

Letters written by my grandfather while in Dachau and Buchenwald.

Our family was luckier than many. Although my grandfather lost his livelihood and his good health, the lives of his immediate family were spared and they were able to forge a new life in the United States.  One of the most important projects on my to-do list is to write the story of my great-grandfather's business and his life-long effort to obtain reparations for the wrongs inflicted upon him and millions of other Jews. 

For today, "We Remember."

52 Ancestors #4: (Don't) Invite to Dinner - Why Our Mother Never Ate With Us—and You Wouldn't Either!

The topic for this week's 52 Ancestor's in 52 Weeks is "Invite to Dinner." This year, I am trying to focus on the stories of my generation.

Honestly, I don't remember too much about dinners before my brother, Dean was born in 1964. I suspect that is because things got way more interesting when my three sisters and I finally had a brother we could gang up on. Maybe it's because I was 9 when he was born!! Or maybe that's when Mom started eating dinner later after we kids were gone from the table.

I do have some poignant dinner-time stories. Most of these will be familiar to my siblings, but I thought it prudent to memorialize them for eternity in cyberspace. The stories are not sequential. Nor are they dated. I have no idea when most of these events occurred, though they were certainly between 1964 and 1975 when I moved out of the family home into my own apartment.

Dean (maybe 2 years old) and my Omi .
You can see the kitchen divider in the background.

I-Spy
How do you keep five kids engaged at the table without them fighting? Play a game! We occasionally played "I-Spy" during dinner time. We had a shelf unit in our kitchen that served to divide the eating area from the cooking area. Our mom placed all kinds of knick-knacks in the various cubbies, which provided much fodder for our vicious games of I-Spy. My sister, Jeanne, sixteen months my junior, played particularly seriously. I don't remember what specific clues she gave, but after several frustrating minutes we all gave up guessing. She pointed to an item on the shelf. "I guessed that already!", I exclaimed out of frustration. Her snide reply: "That's not a glass. It's a cup."




The Day We Learned to Close the Basement Door

We grew up in a typical 1950s ranch house. The dining area had just enough room for the table and

A really unattractive view of the basement stairs.

the necessary chairs. For some reason, Mom always kept a small table (for her cookbooks) next to the basement door which opened into the kitchen. This made it difficult to negotiate around those seated at the table in order to open the door and go down the 12 steps to the basement. Maybe that's why the door was often left open. Now you have a picture of the setup. We were all sitting at the table eating. Mom had an affinity for ladder-back chairs, so I know, for a fact, we were all seated in some version of that style chair. Dean, our brother (almost ten years younger than me) was rocking back and forth in his chair.

Several of us warned him to stop rocking. Nope. Why should a little brother take safety advice from his older sisters? "Dean, stop rocking in your chair!!" Next thing you know - he was gone!! Down the stairs he went. Chair and all! We all looked at each other, stunned. This was bad. There was no sound from the basement. We got up from our seats and gingerly peered in the open doorway, terrified of what we might see. There was Dean. Happy as a clam, at the bottom of the stairs, sitting squarely on the ladderback of the chair!!

I just like this picture of the dining area.
Ok. I also like it because it was my birthday.
L-to-R: sister Jeanne, friend Debby Wells, sister Kathy, Mom,
me (maybe 1960)

Why Spaghetti is Fun!
Five children can be quite inventive. Especially when left to their own devices because there were no adults at the table. I have no recollection of who came up with this brilliant game but it did keep us busy for quite some time. Spaghetti was introduced into our home as a frequent dinner item after my mother started dating the wonderful man who would become her second husband. I imagine that was because it was fairly inexpensive (as it still is today!)

The challenge was to see who could form letters using their strands of spaghetti. Now, most children would settle for forming the letters on their dinner plates. Maybe on the tabletop if they were a little more daring. Not us. Actually, neither of those choices even occurred to us. No - we attempted to form the letters by tossing the pasta onto the white kitchen ceiling. If I recall correctly, we successfully formed the letter "B."



Final Lesson for Any Parent Considering Not Eating with Their Children
For a (very) short time, our mother sat with us and read stories to us during dinner. And then, she was gone. After cooking the meal, she would serve the five of us (each one of us having our very own special melamine plate) and then retreat to her bedroom at the far end of the house. Five kids. Four girls. One boy. Bad idea.

Dean - maybe age 10 - eating his favorite food in.....
a ladderback chair, of course!

When we weren't throwing pasta on the ceiling, arguing about specifically colored items during an I-Spy game, or otherwise being disagreeable to each other, we girls would gang up on our poor little brother. "Dean, stop kicking me!," someone would yell out. "Quit it, Dean!," another would scream. If we were in rare form, one of us might actually pretend to cry. Then would come the yell, from the nether regions of the house. My mother screaming, "Dean, leave your sisters alone!" You do realize, of course, the poor boy never had done a thing. Sorry, Dean.

The cover of Omi's Kitchen. Our fabulous blended family!!!
I'm the short one, straining to see over Dean's Magic Hat!

Reading this, you might think we had no appreciation for our mother and the work she did to keep us all alive. Nothing could be further from the truth! In fact, the kitchen and our mother's command of it, was so incredibly important to us that we created a family cookbook as a Christmas gift to her in 2010. (Sadly, she passed less than a year later on Dec. 2, 2011.)

In addition to Mom's classic recipes, we included some of our own specialties along with some memories of our home and our childhood.

I'll close this post by sharing some of our "least favorite" dinners. If the stories above don't convince you eating with us was no joy, these meals should do the trick:

• Frozen Chicken Potpie: 10 for  $1.00
• Sanalac Powdered milk - I can still smell it like it was yesterday!
• Butter and meat sandwiches
• Ice Cream Sundaes - with a stale "surprise" at the bottom, courtesy of the Entenmann's Bakery Outlet
• My personal favorite -the poor man's Shepherd's Pie. We called it "Mo-Pea-Po."
• Spoon cooked ground beef on top of cooked mashed potatoes (from a box, of course.)
• Add canned peas, cooked until they are olive drab.
• Moosh together.
• Eat. or not.....

Dinner "recipe" from the book, Omi's Kitchen.

In case you are wondering, we (all 8 of us!) grew up to be fairly well-behaved adults who possess acceptable table manners. Invite us to dinner anytime! (Well, maybe you should just invite a few at a time!)

52 Ancestors #3 - Longevity: My "Oldest" Friend - Doreen Bernabucci Brown

 I spend a good deal of time making sure the stories of our ancestors don't get forgotten.It is sometimes easy to forget that my stories are important also. For that reason, I have decided to focus on my generation for this year's 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge. This is the (long) story of my 48-year-old friendship with my best friend, Doreen Bernabucci Brown.

This plate, a gift from Doreen, hangs in my dining room.

52 Ancestors - #2 - Favorite Photo

My first thought was, "This will be easy! There are so many pictures I can choose from."

• The 1930s picture depicting 4 generations of my father's family.
• The 1960s Christmas photograph of me and my sibs in which one sister is ironing and my brother is picking his nose.
• The 1970s photo of me and my sibs in our kitchen - a rare shot of all 8 of us!
• One of the last photographs of my mom - wearing a huge smile as she sits in the car after a visit to our favorite seafood restaurant.

I turned on my computer to get started on this post. And there it was. The picture I have used for my lock screen since 2012. My eldest daughter on her wedding day. You may think I love this picture because it captures a special day in our family. That is, of course, true. But it's more than that. It's probably the reason I have yet to swap out the lock screen photo for one more current.

In her open palm, my daughter Caitlin is holding a small silver box. It likely belonged my great-grandmother, Sophie Weiss Spiegel. I did some research on little silver boxes and found this may be a "vinaigrette", possibly from the late 1800s. Vinaigrettes are small boxes used by women during the Victorian Era as a more practical method to carry perfume while traveling. A small sponge inside the box would be soaked in the scent. But that's not why I love this photo.

I found two of these boxes in my mother's effects after her passing. Sadly, Mom died just a few months before Caitlin's wedding. On the day we choose her wedding dress, actually. I could think of no more fitting way to have my mother "attend" the wedding than to place a few of her ashes in the little silver box. Caitlin carried her grandmother with her the entire day. (Our youngest daughter did the same a few years later on her wedding day with the second box.) But that's not why I love this photo.

Caitlin is my first-born child. She lives almost 2000 miles away. I miss spending time with her. When things are good, I wish I could be with her to celebrate. When things are tough, I worry. I'm her mom. How can I make things better when I'm so far away? Then I see this picture.

I look at the delicate flowers. The wedding ring symbolizing a new beginning. The silver box connecting one generation to those gone by. She is, and always will be, connected to me, to those who came before us and to those coming after. I look at Caitlin's hand grasping her bridal bouquet. Her hand looks strong. And I realize - she is strong. I don't need to worry about every little thing. Miles don't erase our connection. She is always with me. That's why I love this picture.

Photo credit: the fabulous Nathan W. Armes of Armes Photography

52 Weeks of Genealogy for 2018

As I type this, I am enjoying 80 degree weather in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico. Scott and I have been here almost a week, having come down to spend some post-Christmas time with our daughter, Caitlin, her two boys, her husband and his family. Tuesday, it’s back to Connecticut where the temperature has been hovering between 5 and 10 degrees.

It’s been a great, relaxing, and fairly technology-free week. I must admit to having a small degree of  genealogy withdrawal. I haven’t done any writing since leaving CT on Tuesday. Grammarly, my online grammar checker, even scolded me - sending me an email that I haven’t made any writing progress this past week - geez!


So, I guess it’s back to business as usual.  This year, I plan to attempt another go at the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks writing challenge, sponsored by Amy Johnson Crow. This first week, the topic is “Start.”

I actually do have a new venture that I am starting. Thanks to the encouragement of my friend Cheryl, I will be teaching four genealogy classes for our local Adult Education Enrichment program. I have no idea if I will have any students, but I think it’s time to dip my toe into the world of semi- professional genealogy. Following in the footsteps of Thomas MacEntee (of Abundant Genealogy) and many others too numerous to name, I do believe it is important to share what we have learned. Hopefully, there will be a few people who will find value in what I present.

2018 looks to be a productive year for me genealologically speaking. In addition to teaching the Enrichment classes, I am attending Rootstech for the first time ever. As it is possibly the biggest genealogy conference in the world, I am quite sure it will be amazing! I won a pass to the conference courtesy of Devon Noel Lee (of Family History Fanatics) so I invited Cheryl to join me.

Cheryl has been instrumental in assisting me with a project that “should” be completed in 2018. After more than 2 years of research, I have finished the draft of “Opulent in Aliases  - Who was Catherine C. Fitzallen?” (working title) Researching and writing about the life of my husband’s great-grandmother has been an eye-opening experience. Not exactly a typical woman of the late 1890s, Catherine was divorced from her husband in 1889 and went on to spend the next 10 years running con games, breaking into homes, and, occasionally, spending a bit of time in local jail cells. Cheryl is convinced the story has all the makings of a Netflix movie, but I’ll settle for sharing the story in book form!

In July, Scott and I will be joining my sister and her SO on a river cruise. We added three days at the end to explore Vienna, Austria, the birthplace of our mom. We plan to visit sites important to our family’s history. That should prove to be a fabulous heritage trip.

Looks like I’m off to a good “Start” in 2018! See you next week,