Family Story Finder

The sweep of family history across the generations

Ed Eilertsen tribute puzzle
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Ed loved crosswords, so Dan Ruby created a tribute puzzle for his memorial. Kate and Twyla were the clue crew.

Eilertsen roots in Farsund, Norway
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Farmers and seafarers from the south Norway coast

Eilertsens at sea
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Members of a farming family took to the sea both as an occupational calling and a means of emigration

Eilertsens by the lake
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Ed was the rector at Saint Martin's By the Lake in Minnetonka Beach, Minn. The family was raised in towns around the lake region west of Minneapolis, including in the church rectory

Filming of "The Heartbreak Kid"
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Ed officiates at a movie wedding

First grandchild
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Twyla Ariel Eilertsen Ruby was born on August 7, 1985

Fourth Generation Rubys
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Just a bit about Twyla, Gene, Zach and Lani.

From Rezitsa to Rostov
  • 1875 - 1892

Sholom and Sophie Tulbowitz left their ancestral town in the 1870s to settle for 20 years in Russia near Rostov-on-Don.

Ratner family in Albany
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Rearing eight children in Albany’s Third Ward

Ratner family passage to America
  • July 1890 -

Abe Blokh became Abe Ratner to avoid conscription and get out of Russia. With his young wife and her mother, they voyaged from Bremen to Leeds to New York

Rose Ratner's scar—the 1881 pogrom in Rostov
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The Tulbowitz tavern in Novocherkassk was overrun by Cossacks during the Rostov pogrom of 1881

Shtetl life in Russian Rezhitsa
  • 1790 - 1875

Today it is Rezekne in Latvia. In the 19th century, it was the village in Vitebsk Province where our Tulbowitz clan lived in the old Yiddish way

The Eilertsens in Brooklyn
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From Red Hook to Gerritsen Beach to Bay Ridge, Jack and Camilla Eilertsen lived the Norwegian immigrant experience in Brooklyn

Third Generation Rubys
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First came Walter, then Danny and Joanne. They would carry on the Ruby-Ringel genes.

Tulbowitz in the USSR—an alternative history
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If Sholom Tulbowitz had gone to Dvinsk instead of Rostov, as his cousin did, his Ratner descendants might have grown up in Perm instead of Albany.

Twyla's childhood
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Outlooks of a pre-millennial