Family Story Finder

The sweep of family history across the generations

Action at a distance
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Stan's Mathematica notebooks document his later work and speculations

Family History Machine is reborn in 2020
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Machinist Dan Ruby and his team members envision a new future for Family History Machine

Grad-student life in a packet of letters
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Stan maintained correspondence with his closest high school and Army buddies, several of whom went on to prominent careers.

Helga at the Theodor Herzl School
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Amid the chaos of the Nazi period, the Zionist school in Charlottenburg taught skills and values that lasted a lifetime

Mel Brenner
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Mel accomplished many things in life, but his life’s greatest moments happened during the Battle of the Bulge

Mössbauer man—Stan makes his mark in physics
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Stan's innovations in Mossbauer spectroscopy.

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

Sputnik in the backyard
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Watching Sputnik at night from our back yard in a suburb of Pittsburgh is one of my earliest memories.

The Kauflers of Krakow
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Our best documented family line is Feige Kaufler's ancestry among the Jewish families of Krakow.

The physics experiment that went wrong
  • 1951 - 1958

How and why did Stan Ruby's important post-graduate research go wrong, and what impact did it have on his career in physics?

The problem with anti-ballistic missiles
  • October 6 1968 - March 10 1969

Stanley Ruby entered the public debate over nuclear missile technology in 1968-69.

The Rabinowitz family in Jewish Harlem
  • 1875 - 1917

Joseph and Lena Rabinowitz were Russian immigrants who ran a corner grocery in Jewish Harlem. Their nine children were native Americans

The Rabinowitz girls
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Meta, Blossom and Sadie

The Rubys in Israel—1961 sabbatical
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Our family’s amazing year of discovery and connection

The Yeserskys of Volkovysk
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Joseph Rabinowitz’s mother was Bertha Yesersky. Was she related to Sora Yesersky, the wife of Rabbi Elchanon Spektor?

When Ed Eilertsen "crossed the bridge"
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In a dramatic moment while crossing the Mississippi River, he broke with his parents' austere Lutheranism for a more ecumenical approach