Family Story Finder
The sweep of family history across the generations
Bilingual blogging—my French collaborator
Historical blogging makes strange bedfellows. A French jewelry critic and I were both interested in the history of the Clerc jewelry business during the Nazi era
Ratner family passage to America
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
The early history of the Wohlgemuth family
In 1812 in Preußisch Stargardt, an elderly Jew Moses and his sons Salomon and Herz took the surname Wohlgemuth in exchange for Prussian citizenship rights. Our family, descended from Herz Wohlgemuth, stayed in Stargardt for the next three generations