She was born January 3, 1892 in a small village in Austria. She used to tell me stories about her life but I was only a little kid then and not interested in history yet. I do know that she had some interesting stories: she was attacked by a dog on the way to a dance as a teenager. Terrified, she went to a rabbi who gave her a charm to ward off evil. Even so, she remained afraid of all animals…even my pet rabbit…the rest of her life. She came to the US in 1920 with her husband and 2 year old daughter. She was pregnant at the time. She lived on fruit on the ship. When her son (my great uncle) was born, his name on the birth certificate said Bertha, which was hers. She didnt name him Bertha, but her English was so bad at the time that when they asked for the baby’s name she thought they meant hers. Of course since she was a poor foreigner, noone bothered to explain so that his actual name could be recorded. Apparently, it was two of her older brothers who persuaded her and her husband to come to the US, because the economy was so bad after WW1. In the end, the rest of her family…her parents and other sisters and brothers…stayed in Austria and eventually were killed in the holocaust.
She was my mother’s mother’s mother. There is a picture of her, my grandmother, my mother, and me when I was a baby, to show 4 generations of females of the family. She lived until she was 98, in 1990. I used to visit her at the nursing home where she lived, but I was always scared that she’s die while I was there because she was so OLD. I was 10 when she died. I wish I knew more about her life now. My grandmother knows all about it of course, but I’m afraid to ask her because even 14 years later she doesnt like talking about her mother.
But yeah. It sounds like a novel or movie now but it’s intriguing to me, this person from my family who I actually knew who came from the 19th century, from a tiny village, from a place and time that have vanished now into history.
That is really something! Can you ask your mother how to approach your grandmother, to get an oral history? Some years ago I was living in Michigan and my grandmother visited me. I audio cassette taped “interviews” with her, over a period of three days, and have preserved a lot of the family stories that way. Grandma is still with us, at 99, and I still love to hear her talk. She was born December 17, 1904, one year to the day after Orville and Wilbur Wright made their historic flight at Kitty Hawk.
You’ll regret it if you don’t at least try to talk to your grandmother about her mother. There must be a gentle and sensitive way to broach the subject.
Yeah, I remember when I was a kid realizing that tv didn’t exist when she was a kid. In fact the idea of tv, to someone in her village, may have been viewed as witchcraft or something. When I was 7 my grandfather got a camcorder and shot a home video of me dancing around for members of my family. My great grandmother was there in it, calling me a “silky princess” (she always called me that, I remember.) I wonder what she thought of things like camcorders, someone who came to the US on a ship living off of fruit?!
Yeah, I should ask my grandmother. I don’t talk to my mother but I do talk to her. Stories like these shouldn’t die. My father’s father’s father also came from Europe in the 19th century but it seems nothing is known about him at all, even from my grandfather, because he apparently never talked about his past. So that stuff is completely lost.
I love the old family stories. My mother’s mother wrote me a letter when I turned 21 about what her life was like at 21. She was born in 1890 and grew up on a farm in Nebraska, where she had to drop out of school and go to work at age 9 to help support the family after lightning struck their house and it burned to the ground; she wrote me about working as the all-purpose maid for a family with 4 kids, doing all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, etc. in long-sleeved, high-necked dresses with several petticoats and wool stockings in the Nebraska summer heat. And she ended the letter with, “And they call it the good old days!” The man she married, my grandfather, was an indentured orphan; his indenture papers are a family treasure. She didn’t see an automobile until she was 19 years old. It’s hard to imagine a world that different, and yet so close to my world.
My father’s father told me stories about his father, who came to Fort Worth as a young man and rode the Chisholm Trail while his brother rode the Pony Express between Fort Worth and Weatherford. And who met a family with a 12-year-old girl when he got to Texas and announced that he was going to wait till she grew up and marry her – and did. (Can you imagine a young man doing that today and not getting run out of town with a shotgun??)
And then there’s the tales of my kids’ great-grandmother on the other side, who immigrated to the U.S. from a little shtetl between Minsk and Pinsk to avoid the Russian Revolusion. Who taught herself to read and write as an adult in the U.S., and who spelled with a Yiddish accent.
We have videotapes of both of my grandmothers telling stories of their youth. Talk to your mother about how to approach your grandmother; it’s important to learn as much as we can to share with future generations, about how our lives are so different, but we can still feel that connection with the past!!
It sure is frustrating when you finally find yourself interesting in things like this only to look back and realize how much there was just a few years ago that is now lost. I had two great-grandmothers when I was young. One born 1903 in Šaštin in present day Slovakia and the other born 1902 Temple, TX. They both scared the hell out of me when I was little and the only things I can remember are that Maria liked to smoke and in the nursing home even though they wouldn’t let her but my Dad snuck her in some stuff and that Lora’s house looked like some sort of haunted house.
Sometimes people from that generation aren’t very open verbally such things but they feel better and more open writing about it. I know that my Grandmother isn’t the warmest person when talking directly but she really opens up when I write her letters and she writes back.
In 2005 my maternal grandfather will be 100 – or would be, had he not died several years ago. He was born in 1905, one of seven children (six boys, one girl). My aunt has the letters he wrote to my grandmother while serving in the Pacific Theater in World War II – he only made it to the 2nd grade, but had the most elegant handwriting imaginable.
The man she married, my grandfather, was an indentured orphan; his indenture papers are a family treasure. She didn’t see an automobile until she was 19 years old. It’s hard to imagine a world that different, and yet so close to my world.