Press

These excerpts are were taken from Michael Olesker's article entitled "Family histories help us discover ourselves." This article was published in The Baltimore Sun.

"This is about the hunger of memory, the human desire to know how families start out in faraway villiages no longer located on maps and wind up in America, in cities such as Baltimore."

"It's about a woman named Lynn Weisberg, who seems to have contacts everywhere on the planet."

"There are two family albums now in my possession, and more ghosts than I could have imagined. They haunt me the way memory haunts each of us who ever wondered where we come from, and who were the people who helped make us who we are."

"(For all of this, I thank Weisberg - the Baltimore genealogist who discovered these facts - and my wife Suzy who discovered Weisberg and presented me with a genealogy study over the holidays.)"

"I now have a photograph of this Asher Lobman, sitting with his wife, Fiege, whom he married in the 1860's. They are my great-great-grand-parents. They are posed, rather formally, in a place called Bolekhov, a small shtetl in Galicia, by the Carpathian Mountains, in what is now the western Ukraine. The picture was taken a hundred years ago."

"And I notice something about this great-great-grandfather of mine, Asher Lobman: We share a face. We have the same cheekbones, which are also my son's."

"This knowledge alone is a gift. In these simple genetic vestiges, there is proof: We have come from something. We have verifiable history. In a world that moves so quickly, and so confusingly, and so rarely leaves traces, here is evidence that connects us to something else. We are not alone."

"The albums also offer a larger history: birth records, citizenship papers, census reports."

"The other day I called Lynn Weisberg to thank her for all the albums, and ask her how she put them together. She has connections around the globe: people who dig into birth and death records, houses of worship and hospitals, ships' passenger lists, baptismal records, military records."

"And they find photos."

"They connect us to something: family histories. And ourselves."