As Mother’s Day approaches, commercial genealogical sites will once again target the inboxes of Americans with special offers to delve electronically into their family history. Many will take the plunge, enticed by an online trove of information and the chance to learn a fascinating detail in the recesses of an unexplored past. But fair warning: prepare for the possibility of dramatic, even unwelcome finds in establishing the historical record.
My entry into census data unexpectedly bared my late mother’s real first name; a banished immigrant grandfather I was told had died before my birth but who lived until I was 14; and relatives from his second family I had no inkling existed, with stories heartening and heartbreaking.
Discovery of family secrets began with an innocent click on the Ancestry.com page for the 1930 census. My mother was listed as a 12-year old together with my grandmother as rooming-house boarders in a small south Kentucky town. The town’s name checked; ‘boarders’ seemed strange. Could my grandfather have died so young?
I moved backwards to the 1920 census. There he was, along with my grandmother, a 13-year old daughter (my aunt) and my infant mom, whose given name was Zenobia, after a third-century Palmyran ruler romanticized by 19th-century European writers smitten with the ancient Roman East. My sisters and I never knew.
Curiosity heightened, I returned to 1930 and, to my astonishment, located my grandfather living at another address in town with a second wife 18 years younger and a five-year-old daughter. In the 1940 census, he was again there with his second wife, and an additional daughter.
Despite a sense of looming sordidness, I determined to unravel the tale, mining a plethora of data available through the census, genealogy links and obscure Internet listings that harbored layers of tragedy. I concluded my mom had found “Zenobia” embarrassing; she substituted her middle name for the rest of her life in census, school, work and marriage records.
I located divorce proceedings from 1924, so ugly with accounts of my grandfather’s cruelty that the court partially sealed them in awarding custody of the children to my grandmother, with no visiting rights. No matter to him: 10 days later he remarried. A marriage license showed that he eloped with his 20-year-old store clerk across the nearby state line to a Tennessee justice of the peace because her father, a local farmer, disapproved.
As best I reconstructed, neither daughter ever spoke another word to him. My aunt soon graduated high school, earning a music scholarship, never to return. My mom avoided him until leaving after graduation a decade later, no easy task given his prominence as a hustling Jewish immigrant with a strong Russian accent in a small southern town owning clothing stores, oil wells and a gas station at various times.
Aware today of the lasting bitterness, I now understand their studied indifference, puzzling to me at the time, when in 1984 I mentioned driving through the town during a business trip. And their lie about my grandfather’s death. To them, he was dead.
Pairing census and city directory listings, I located the oldest daughter by his second wife. Though unaware of the contentious first marriage, she painted a similar picture of the second filled with household strife due to his horrific temper, culminating after 17 years in another bitter divorce, confirmed by equally stinging court records.
After high school graduation, the oldest daughter saw her father only once more, the following year, and attended his funeral two decades later only at her husband’s insistence. She became a college professor after earning the first chemistry masters degree by a woman from the University of Illinois.
The second wife consented to visiting rights for the youngest child, age eight at the time of the divorce. Daughter and father had a monthly Sunday lunch until her high school graduation; the 1950 census shows him living alone in an apartment above his clothing store. She later arranged for medical care during his final years, and now believes he was attempting to atone for familial failures by holding onto a relationship with her.
But he never mentioned his first family, never referenced his roots or his business, and never voiced regrets. She enjoyed a successful career teaching math. In retirement with her husband, a longtime corporation president, they have donated tens of millions of dollars to multiple colleges and universities to enhance learning.
My grandfather died in 1964. In death, he revealed unrepentant and unreconciled feelings during his life; the will bizarrely stipulated $10 checks to his three estranged daughters. Strangely, one local paper listed only my mom and aunt as survivors. Equally strange, the other paper listed only his daughters from the second marriage. Neither listed an estranged surviving brother who had emigrated to Chicago but ended contact with my grandfather after the first divorce.
All this unspooled from pursuing a single census entry, and the Pandora’s Box stayed open. The daughters by his second marriage knew nothing of his pre-Kentucky life that I assembled from Ellis Island debarkations, applications for citizenship and draft registration cards: marriage in Russia and birth in 1907 of his oldest daughter; escape from a dismal future there by solo passage in steerage to America in 1910 aboard the Lusitania; three itinerant years in New England, Chicago and West Virginia while anglicizing first and last names twice; settling into a retail niche in Kentucky and sending for his family in 1913.
There’s my grandfather’s nasty split in 1921 with his business partner and close family acquaintance, apparently after arguments over my grandfather’s philandering. Newspaper ads show that he then used ruthless price competition to force his former friend’s new business into bankruptcy and drive him out of town. And there’s the dismaying fact that, even as an immigrant who fled and never forgave Russia for discrimination and violence against Jews, he acquiesced fully to Jim Crow laws and barred Blacks from his various retail establishments though some local merchants allowed intermixing.
How stark a contrast to the disgust he had expressed, less than one month after arriving in New York City on June 10, 1910, at deadly nationwide riots by white mobs following Black boxing heavyweight champion Jack Johnson’s knockout of challenger Jack Jeffries (“The Great White Hope”) on Independence Day.
The record uncovered makes clear a life lived as an enigma: an often-nimble, image-conscious businessman whose advertising pitches spanning four decades boasted of honesty and integrity; yet a repugnant, mean-spirited competitor and a husband whom courts twice hammered for inflicting severe mental cruelty. Better to have let sleeping dogs lie? Many extended family members say yes, and certainly my mom and aunt thought so, hiding the shame they carried to the grave in believing that their offspring should be spared the knowledge. The oldest daughter from the second marriage reminisced only with great reluctance.
Some academics who have studied the proliferation of online genealogical quests assert that a search for roots today is subliminally an effort to link family history positively with status in economic, ethnic or clan-like terms. They’re wrong in my case and I suspect in those of others. I had no knowledge, agenda or expectation, only a simple curiosity about an immigrant past that the Internet facilitated. Such curiosity is integral to the human condition which longs for meaning in our brief time on a small planet in an ever-mysterious universe.
Once I began, I was driven to continue. That the revelations have been stunning, even hurtful, fails to diminish their necessity for building historical memory.
David Smollar is a former Los Angeles Times staff writer. He lives in Tierrasanta.