Getting Started.
The first page of the 19 page lineage chart Sid had on his office wall.
This the first time I have sat down to write about what I am trying to do with the time I have been given to do as I choose on my sabbatical, or as Emma rightly named it, my rabbatical. For a long time I have planned to dig into the family tree. It was important to me to set some goals. In retrospect I think I thought I could accomplish more than I can in four months and I am learning that this really is a life long pursuit. I am grateful for the time I have now to get organized for the work that will be ongoing. Most people don’t get such concentrated time. Not necessarily a goal, but one thing I hoped to figure out is why this is a passion for me. Why try to preserve this history? Is it like a collection…like collecting coins? Could it be an act of gratitude for those that came before me even though I never actually met them? Perhaps it is an act of kaddish - extending the memories of those people a bit longer into eternity. We’ll see. There is a Yom Kipur/Yizkor sermon in here somewhere for certain.
Grandpa (Sid Locketz) was an expert in our family tree. I am sure I had heard him talk about family stories sitting around the table on Shabbat or at the cabin, but I have a distinct memory of his office at Liberty Garment after the move to the building in Crystal. He was in the back in the south west corner. I was back there a lot. I can’t think of a time I would have walked into the building when I didn’t go find him to say hello. If I came in the public/Factory Rack entrance, Grammanette was often at the cash register. I’d start there, then cross through the chain link, from retail to wholesale, to find Dad. And I’d see Phyllis and Dick…I’d see everyone as I headed to the back, whoever was there. Maybe Susan. Maybe Seymour. In retrospect I must have been such a nuisance. I spent most of my time in the back by Grandpa because I got paid a nickel to either dismantle…or assemble boxes. Sometimes he or Dad would send me running to pull this or that for an order from the racks. And when I mowed the lawn, the mower was back there and I got to open the huge garage door. It was huge…the building used to house plow trucks.
Anyway, to my point, on Grandpa’s office wall was the family tree chart. In my memory, it covered the entire wall above his desk. I used to stand in front of it and he would tell me about this person or that one. It is extraordinary to me that there were 26 first cousins in his generation and 15 of them lived in Minneapolis. And he knew everything about them. Even into his 80’s he knew where they all were and details about their families. They were all the children of five Locketz siblings born in Europe, but by 1911 were all living on the other side of the globe having left the world of our ancestors behind. No one in the family who was still alive by the time I reached the age of curiosity knew much of that world. And so one of my goals is to try and reclaim part of that story. I am combining my interest in history, in particular Jewish history, and genealogy to learn what I can about our family in the context of the history in which they lived.
More recently, though I don’t remember exactly when, or what we were discussing, I do remember we were sitting at our dining room table…maybe it was when Mom’s first cousin Jody Jacobs died. I remember suddenly realizing that Mom’s family is enormous and I had never known it. Bubbie Mamie and Grandpa Harry were gone already when I was so young, it was always just Grandma Phyllis. I never did the family math. I remember Aunt Nat coming to see Grandma Phyllis every time she was in town. And I remember Grandma taking me to see various old ladies when we were in Des Moines. Or she would talk about Burrel who helped her out with her house. I never spent a single minute thinking about who they were. And suddenly at our dining room table, I realized there was a whole family out there that came through Iowa. Bubbie Mamie was the oldest of 9 siblings who lived to adulthood. (There were two more that died as children. On the 1900 census, Bessie Sparberg, Mamies mother listed five children, three of them living). All 11 of them were born in the United States. Four, maybe 5, of those siblings have descendants who are still alive today. And three of those siblings have descendants who would be their great-great grandchildren - in other words the family is still growing. Hundreds of people come from these 9. I want to know the names of those that came before me. And I want to document them with proof of their existence.
And I want to find their headstones and say kaddish.
And I want to preserve their photos and tell their stories in a way that can be appreciated by all those that carry their names and genes.
And I want to make it possible for others to add what they know and remember so that memories which are a blessing can continue to be so.
I want to reclaim their stories and tell them. And that is no easy thing. We can somewhat tell the stories of the generation that came to the United States, though the oldest generation still living as I write this in 2022 are the second generation down the tree from them. They are, for the most part, the grandchildren of the immigrant generation…many of whom are grandparents now themselves and are not long from being great grandparents. With their memories, photos that were passed down to them, and historical documents, we can piece together the lives of the immigrant generations.
Going back generations from them, we have a few family legends, but we can really only rely on historical documents of which there are not many. But more are being found and digitized all the time, and so as I said above, this will be a life-long pursuit of finding the puzzle pieces. Who knows…maybe over time we can trace ourselves back to the Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem and final expulsion and dispersion of the Israelites in 70 of the Common Era.
