Following clues
For many years now, our family only meets up at the beach house on rare occasions. We are spread out across the Atlantic and Pacific, families are growing, there is a new generation emerging and the small beach house can’t accommodate all of us. Quite a few years passed until I reignited my interest in the photo album.
When the University of Victoria library offered to scan the photograph album, my mother brought the album to me in Canada. I remember walking into the huge library with my tiny mother, I had the album in a large bag and was instructed by the librarian to keep everything in the album intact. When exploring the album in preparation for scanning we turned over the photographs, and I discovered names, dates, and writing in Romanian on the backs of many of the photographs. The photographs were a kind of postcard, some of which were hand delivered perhaps, after my great-grandmother Paulina Weisman’s (Helen’s mother) 1923 visit to Romania. I wondered about my family members. Many of the photos have notes on the back sent to Marco and Paulina from their family. At that moment I realized that these were the postcards that held Paulina’s tears.
The notes in Romanian are from Beatrice and Jerry, sent to my great-grandparents. I found out later that Beatrice was the daughter of my great-grandmother's sister, Speranza. When I first encountered her photograph Beatrice was unknown to my immediate family.
Later, sitting at home in Victoria, British Columbia, I was still puzzling over the long-forgotten? Lost relatives? I started building a family tree and scoured the internet for information about Jews in Romania. My cousin Jeff, who had immigrated to Israel decades ago and now goes by his Hebrew name, “Yosi”, had done some preliminary research. Starting from Yosi’s work, I began my detailed investigation. Yosi explained to me, while talking on zoom from Israel, that he knew of Benedictina’s family (who were not interested in talking with me), and that there were cousins who were descendants of Paulina's brother Bernard. However, their name was “Weissman”, such a common name, Yosi thought, that finding them seemed virtually hopeless. Yosi did not know what happened to Paulina's six siblings, but did give me a family tree derived from his conversation with Benedictina's daughter before she passed away.
Link to the Family Tree (PDF)