Searching for My Roots - A Long Unfinished Journey

 

I’ve often watched “Finding Your Roots” on TV in amazement and some disbelief as Henry Louis 

Gates told the current celebrity that his 20^th great-grandfather fought in the crusades, invented the 

wheel, or fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill. How could he do that and why didn’t he look for my 

family? I could have used the help.

My family search began in 2013. While I knew many of my mother’s family members, the only paternal relatives who I knew were my grandparents and my uncle. The names of other relatives were never even mentioned to me. When I was 10 years old, I asked my father why he had no cousins. He told me that my grandparents had engaged in so many feuds with their siblings he had never gotten to know his cousins and had no adult relationships with them as a result. I never doubted this answer and thus hadn’t thought about it for years.

In 2013, that changed when my husband and I planned a trip to Eastern Europe including four days in Budapest where my grandmother’s parents were from. Did I have any distant relatives there, I wondered. I began the search on Ancestry.com and Family Search. My grandmother Jeanette Klein always lived in New York City. Later, I would find out how common the name Klein was. In the meantime, I accessed Census records, boat manifests, marriage certificates, and some birth records. By the time we got to Hungary, I knew my great-grandparents’ names and knew that my great-grandfather was born in Kisvarda. Nonetheless, this did not enable me to find much else. If I have any relatives in Hungary, I will never know.

The search to find relatives in Hungary, triggered my curiosity about those cousins in America whose names I’d never heard. My father had at least 20 first cousins, but he only knew about three of them. At least some of them must have had children. What were their names? What did they look like?

            Over the years, people would occasionally meet me for the first time and tell me that I looked like someone they knew. I began to wonder if the person they referred to was one of my unknown relatives. I started asking them where this person was from and what her background was in the hopes that I'd find a long-unknown relative.

            My sister and I got our DNA tested by different sites hoping to find more missing relatives. In the years since, we’ve met several people from our mother’s side of the family. We still haven’t encountered anyone in our father’s family. Maybe if we wait long enough, Henry Louis Gates will help us out.