How it All Started

My first photograph of my great-grandmother Hudia.

This picture is never going to win a photography competition, but it‘s one of my favorites.

When I was a teenager, my mother decided that she and I needed to visit her cousins in Philadelphia, the first and only time the two us took a trip together. We travelled by train and stayed with a cousin in her traditional northeast Philadelphia home.

Best of all, from across Philadelphia, cousins that I had never met dropped in to visit.

One afternoon over coffee and a buttery homemade coffee cake, we sat down to look at a photo album filled with family pictures.

I was leafing through the album when I first saw this photograph. “That’s my grandmother, your great-grandmother Hudia,” a cousin said, looking directly at me. My excitement was clear to everyone in the room.

At that very moment, she took this photograph out of her album and told me that she wanted me to have it. At first I refused. I couldn’t believe that anyone would part with such a treasure, but she insisted. It was a thrilling moment. Just 17, and I was hooked.

Over the years, more pictures and treasured documents followed. As my collection grew, so did my curiosity. But there was no one alive who could answer my questions. My mother and her brothers weren’t much help. The past was a painful place to travel, their parents never went there. Their lives in the old country remained a mystery, even to their children.

Grandma Fannie died when I was just eight-years-old. I was far too young to ask about her sister Dora, their life in Mariampol and their early years in America. Now, I wanted all the details of how Grandma travelled across Europe to Hamburg, and if she remembered what it was like to see the ocean for the first time. Was she scared, and was she seasick crossing the Atlantic in steerage?

And I needed to know about Dora. Did Dora really work in a brothel, or was she just an unruly daughter labeled unfairly? I wished that my gentle Grandma Fannie could help me understand how two women, she and her rebellious older sister Dora, could grow up in the same household yet turn out so completely different.

Even after all these years of researching my family, there’s still so much that remains a mystery. We may never know who fathered Dora’s daughter. And I’ve found so little about my great-grandmother Hudia. Who were her people and where was she from? If Grandma had lived to be 100, she still wouldn’t have had time to answer all my questions.

Our story isn’t complete. I’m still searching, thrilled with every new discovery. But this is where it all started, with a single photograph and a long list of questions.