Perhaps you noticed that it's been two weeks since I last posted? I am slowly catching up  with things including some of the blogs I follow, but we just got home Monday night after 12 days away in Berlin and Paris. We were motivated to visit Berlin because our daughter Maddy was going there to run her tenth marathon! And her fifth of the six "major" marathons: Boston, New York, London, Chicago, and now Berlin.

By the end of July 1938, only two of the eight Baer siblings were left in Germany: Arthur and Eugen. Five (Klara, Selma, Jenny, Paula, and Meyer) were in the US, and Julius was in France. This post will tell more about what I’ve learned about Arthur Baer and a correction to what I once thought. As I wrote earlier here…

To learn what next happened to Julius Baer and his family after Julius was released from the Osthofen prison camp in March 1934, I relied on a combination of a biography written by his son Arnold in 2005 that I obtained from the archives in Darmstadt,  a residence registration I received from the archives in Butzbach, and a collection of documents I obtained from the Swiss archives detailing the family’s experiences in Switzerland.

Here we are once again at the end of one year and the beginning of a new one on the Jewish calendar. It's time to hear the shofar and wake up once again to the world around us and its beauty and its challenges. It's time once again to consider our own actions during the past year and to consider how we want to live in the year ahead.

It's been several weeks since I last posted about my Baer cousins, the children of Therese Spier and Eisenmann Adolf Baer and great-great-grandchildren of Sprintz Blumenfeld, the sister of my three-times great-grandmother, Breine Blumenfeld. I had an incredible couple of weeks with my own children and grandchildren and a chance to re-energize myself for more genealogy research. Discussing my latest novel, …

I accidentally pushed publish instead of save draft. Please disregard...that post is not yet finished and won't be for weeks! Just my week for mistakes....

By the end of July 1938, only two of the eight Baer siblings were left in Germany: Arthur and Eugen. Five (Klara, Selma, Jenny, Paula, and Meyer) were in the US, and Julius was in France. As I wrote earlier here, Arthur was eventually able to escape from Germany to England, but I was wrong when I wrote that he had been arrested after Kristallnacht.

As we saw in the last post, the four daughters and one of the sons of Therese Spier Baer escaped from Germany before Kristallnacht and ended up in the United States. Klara was in Baltimore as was Paula while Jenny and Selma were living in New York. Their brother Meyer/Manfred settled in Baltimore. Another son, Arthur Baer, escaped with his family to England.

Therese Spier Baer, the first child of Samuel Spier, died on July 26, 1935, in Griedel, Germany, at the age of 64, leaving behind all eight of her children and all of her grandchildren. By that time the Nazis had come to power. What was the fate of those eight children and all of their children? Even before Therese died, her youngest daughter Klara and her husband Hermann Fuld and their two-year-old daughter Helga had left Germany.

Thank you to Phyllis Karas, New York Times best selling author of the book  Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger’s Irish Mob and over ten other books as well as a journalist and professor of journalism. She who wrote this wonderful review of The Women Before Us: How wonderful to read a historically accurate female driven story that is also charming and intriguing.

We saw last time that Therese Spier and her husband Eisemann Adolf Baer (hereinafter just referred to as Adolf, the name he seems to have been known as) had eight children, four girls and four boys, born between 1893 and 1909. By 1919, those children began to marry and have families of their own. Paula, the oldest child, married Julius Steinberg on September 13, 1919, in Griedel.

My cousin Therese Spier Baer, the first child of Samuel Spier, had eight children with her husband Eisemann Adolf Baer between 1893 and 1909, and amazingly all eight survived to adulthood, and they all survived the Holocaust as did their children. Almost all of them then lived remarkably long lives. Therese's first child was her daughter Paula, born on June 14, 1893, in Griedel, Germany.

I have received two more five star reviews on Amazon for The Women Before Us. Here are excerpts from the reviews by the authors of two wonderful family history books: From Joy Neal Kidney, author of Leora's Letters: The Story of Love and Loss for an Iowa Family During World War II: "This is a compelling historical novel based on the lives of women in the author's life, Jewish women who immigrated to the US.

The article below was written by my fifth cousin, Richard Bloomfield, who recently visited our mutual ancestral town, Momberg, Germany, with his first cousins (and my fifth cousins) Jim and Steven Bloomfield. Momberg is where our mutual four-times great-grandparents Abraham Blumenfeld I and Geitel Katz lived and raised their children, including my three-times great-grandmother Breine Blumenfeld Katzenstein and Richard, Jim, and Steven's three-times great-grandfather…

The first born child of Sarchen Frank and Isaac Spier was their son Samuel, born as we saw on December 18, 1842, in Schrecksbach, Germany. On March 1, 1870, in Langendiebach, Germany, Samuel married Amalie (Malchen) Adler, the daughter of Markus Adler and Dolce Rosenstrauch; she was born in Hintersteinau, Germany, in about 1849. 1 Samuel and Amalie had at least five children.

Thank you so much to Luanne Castle for her wonderful review of The Women Before Us.  Luanne is an amazing award-winning poet and author (as well as a genealogy blogger at The Family Kalamazoo), so her words of praise mean a great deal to me. I recently reviewed her latest book, Scrap, one of the best books I've ever read.

Happy Fourth of July! I remember when I was growing up how much I enjoyed celebrating the Fourth of July. The fireworks, wearing red, white, and blue, ice cream that was red, white, and blue, celebrations at camp, singing patriotic songs. Parades and flags. It was all so innocent. I was so innocent. In 2026 as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I am no longer innocent, and the holiday is tinged with nostalgia, sadness, and gratitude.

Another five star review of The Women Before Us! This one is from Helen Joyce, the acclaimed author of the wonderful book, Good for a Single Journey. I am so pleased that she enjoyed my book! She wrote: A thoughtful and moving story of three generations of diverse women from one Jewish family. Spanning a period from the late 19th century to post-WWII, the tale moves between Philadelphia, Denver and Santa Fe.

The first-born child of Sprintz Blumenfeld and Samuel Frank was their daughter Sarchen (Sarah) Frank, born in Momberg, Germany, in about 1816, as determined by her age of 78 on her 1894 death record (see below). Sarchen married Isaac Spier in Momberg on May 25, 1842. Isaac was the son of Samuel Spier and Telsa Katz, and he was born in Schrecksbach, Germany, in about 1812, according to his age of 30 on their marriage record.

In August 2021, I began writing about my Blumenfeld family, starting with my four-times great-grandparents Abraham (Katz) and Geitel (Katz) Blumenfeld and then their oldest child, Moses Blumenfeld. Since then, I have been writing about the children and later descendants of Moses Blumenfeld. That has taken more than four and a half years, and Moses Blumenfeld had only three children. Having now finished writing about the youngest child of the youngest child of the youngest child of Moses’ daughter Gelle Blumenfeld Rothschild, I am finally ready to move on to the second child of Abraham and Geitel Blumenfeld, their daughter Sprintz.

The youngest child of Meier Rothschild and Bertha Lorge was their daughter Anna. And unlike with her older siblings, I was able to learn where she and her family were in the 1930s and 1940s. I found the Palestine immigration files for Anna, her husband (and my cousin) Julius Hamberg, and for two of their three children, Alice and Ernst, on the Israel State Archives website.

After several weeks focused on updates on Berthold Rothschild and other topics, I now will return to the other children of Meier Rothschild and Bertha Lorge. As with the three oldest children of Meier Rothschild and Bertha Lorge, Berthold, Theodor, and Gertrud, I struggled to learn more about what happened to their fourth child Siegfried Friedrich Rothschild and his family during and after the Holocaust.

My cousin Adelheid Rothschild survived the Holocaust, as did her father Berthold and sister Helene/Hana, as we have seen,  but unlike her father and sister, Adelheid spent time in a concentration camp. She was deported from Amsterdam to the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen. She survived the war and at some point immigrated to Palestine/Israel, where she lived near her sister for the rest of her life.

Coming in a few weeks! My latest family history novel, The Women Before Us, will be available in paperback and e-book format on Amazon! The Women Before Us was inspired by the stories of my female ancestors and relatives, women who had little power in the outside world and often little power over their own lives. Many of them married and then moved far from their families and friends to start a life with a man they probably hardly knew and in many cases didn't even choose.

As I mentioned in my prior post, I received some additional documents and photographs from my cousin Meir, grandson of Berthold Rothschild and Selma/Sarah Adler. Last time I shared a postcard from 1918 that Berthold wrote to Selma from his post in World War I just a month before the war ended. Here is a second postcard, as translated by…

Today I want to share a fascinating postcard that my cousin Meir shared with me. It was written by his Berthold Rothschild to his grandmother Selma Adler before they were married. Berthold was serving in the German army during World War I and stationed at the front in Berdowka, a town now located in Belarus, and Selma was back home in Frankfurt.

Recently my cousin Debrah posted some memories of her grandparents, Julius Goldfarb and Ida Hecht, on Facebook. I was so touched by what she wrote that I asked if I could share it on my blog, and she happily agreed. Julius Goldfarb was my grandmother Gussie Brotman Goldschlager's first cousin. His mother Sarah Brod was the older sister of my great-grandmother Bessie Brod.

Have you ever picked up a book, not knowing what to expect, and become so wrapped up in the story and the writing that you just don’t want to put it down? That was my experience  reading Luanne Castle’s newest book Scrap: Salvaging a Family. From the first page until I finished it, I was spellbound. Luanne has published four volumes of poetry and many poems and flash prose pieces…

Two weeks ago I posted an update about my relative Berthold Rothschild after receiving information about his family from his grandson in Israel, Meir. Now Meir has shared a collection of photographs and given me permission to share them on the blog. Answers to any questions about the background of this family can be found in my two earlier posts about Berthold, …

Today I am sharing another update, this time with additional information about Gertrud Neuhahn Rothschild, whose family I wrote about just three weeks ago. I had many questions left even after I wrote that post, including how this family survived the Holocaust. My cousin and fellow family history researcher Richard Bloomfield left a comment on that blog post, saying, “Did you know that Gustav was first missing and then a POW in WWI?

On March 11, 2026, just a little over a month ago, I wrote about the family of Berthold Rothschild and his family, including his wife Sarah Adler and their daughter Adelheid. As I wrote in that blog post, I did not know very much about how Berthold survived the Holocaust but knew he ended up in South Africa. I also knew that Adelheid had been in Amsterdam and sent to Bergen-Belsen with her husband Manfred Samson and that they both survived and possibly ended up in Israel after the war.

Finally, after a few weeks without a post, I return to the children of Meier Rothschild and Bertha Lorge. Meier was the youngest child of Gelle Blumenfeld and my second cousin, three times removed. I am up to his third child, Gertrud. As with her brothers Berthold and Theodor, I have also struggled to find reliable information about the third child of Meier Rothschild and Bertha Lorge, their daughter Gertrud Rothschild, her husband Gustav Neuhahn, and their daughter Ruth.

To all my readers, family, and friends, I didn't post this past week because we were away celebrating with our family in St Martin. It was a truly wonderful time--being on the beach with our children and grandchildren, snorkeling, swimming, watching them on standup paddleboards, playing Marco Polo, and eating fabulous meals together. We are so grateful that everyone was able to make this happen to mark our 50th anniversary coming up in June.

Although it was hard to find much about the life of Berthold Rothschild and his family after the Nazis came to power in Germany, I was able to scratch together some basics: the death of his ex-wife in a Nazi-run hospital in Herborn, his death in South Africa, his profession (photographer), the marriage of his daughter Adelheid to Manson Samson at Westerbork, and the young couple’s survival of their time in Nazi concentration camps.

Although I had a fairly easy time locating the names, birth dates, marriages, and children of the five children of Meier Rothschild and Bertha Lorge and I knew that all five lived beyond World War II, I have had a much harder time finding information about how they survived the Holocaust—did they leave in time or did they get sent to the camps?

Returning to the Blumenfeld saga, I am now up to the youngest child of Gelle Blumenfeld and Simon Rothschild, their son Meier, born in Zimmersrode, Germany, on May 9, 1861. On January 6, 1889, Meier married Bertha Lorge, the daughter of Salomon Lorge and Hannchen Eichenberg in Harmuthsachsen, Germany, where Bertha was born on April 14, 1863. Meier and Bertha had five children, all of whom not only survived to adulthood but survived the Holocaust, just as their first cousins, the…

It is with great sadness that I share that my cousin Henry Katz passed away this week on February 7, 2026, at the age of 93. Henry was my third cousin, once removed, and we shared Scholem Katzenstein as our mutual ancestor. But more importantly, Henry was someone I had the great pleasure of talking to and emailing with about his distinguished family history.

I hit a solid brick wall over thirteen years ago trying to find ancestors earlier than my great-grandparents on the Brotman/Brod branch of my tree. I still continued to find cousins, like my Goldfarb cousins, but even that had seemed to end. But recently another new Brotman/Brod cousin and I connected, thanks to the DNA Geek, Leah Larkin, the nationally known expert on genetic genealogy who has been helping me for years in my efforts to learn more about my Brotman/Brod family.

As we saw, by 1940 all of the eight surviving children of Sara Rothschild and Moses Adler were out of Germany and living in the US, the five youngest all living in Chicago: Grete Caroline, Malchen, Emmi, David Theodore, and Betti Jenny. And all of Sara and Moses' grandchildren were also safely out of Germany---except the children of David Theodore and their mother Emma Suss.

As of 1940, the five youngest of the eight surviving children of Sara Rothschild and Moses Adler—Caroline Grete, Malchen, Emmi, Betty Jennie, and David Theodore— were all living in Chicago. The 1940s saw them become US citizens and saw many of their children marry. Grete’s son Kurt Mandelstein registered for the US draft on October 16, 1940, before he was even a US citizen.

We have seen that the oldest three children of Sara Rothschild and Moses Adler—Louis, Sigmund, and Julius—all came to the US around the turn of the century as teenagers. But what about their younger siblings? And their parents? Back in Germany, Caroline Grete Rothschild, the second oldest daughter, married Albert Abraham Mandelstein on October 23, 1911, in Grebenstein. Albert was born in Grebenstein on June 2, 1855, to Berr Mandelstein and Sarchen Katzenstein.

As of 1933 when Hitler came to power in Germany, five of Sara Rothschild and Moses Adler’s surviving children were still living in Germany: Caroline (Grete), Malchen, Emmi, David Theodore, and Betty. Their oldest three children—Louis, Sigmund, and Julius—had long ago emigrated to the United States. Fortunately, all five of those still in Germany were able to leave in time.

As we saw in the last post, the 1940s saw all the children of Julius Adler married except for one, Julius' second child with his first wife Edith, his daughter Chrystal. Chrystal married Oliver Kenneth Boyd on October 20, 1955, according to one tree on Ancestry, and they had one child.1 While Chrystal was beginning married life, her brother Roland’s marriage to Verna Pataky seems to have ended sometime after 1957.

We saw at the end of the last blog post that in 1940 Julius Adler and his wife Minnie were living almost 300 miles apart—-Julius on a farm in Leavenworth, Kansas, and Minnie in St. Louis with their three children. Two of Julius’ children from his first marriage—Roland and Irene—were married and living with their spouses, also in St. Louis. I could not locate Chrystal, the third child from Julius’ first marriage on the 1940 census or anywhere else between 1930 and 1940.

Relying on the assumption that Julius Adler was in fact the brother of Louis and Sigmund Adler and was born Joseph Adler, I will now continue to tell the story of his life from 1920 to 1940. We know that in 1920 Julius was living in Leavenworth, Kansas, with his older brother Louis, that he was a widower, and that he had three young children, Roland, Chrystal, and Irene.

The third son of Sara Rothschild and Moses Adler, Joseph, was born on July 28, 1887, in Niedermeiser, Germany, and as I mentioned in my first post about Sara’s family, I could not find any further documentation of the existence of this son other than his birth record: I searched for a Joseph Adler in US and German records but failed to come up with anyone who was a definite or even a likely match.

Compared to the rather tumultuous life of his older brother Louis, the life of Sara Rothschild and Moses Adler’s second child Sigmund seems relatively uneventful, but not without its own drama. And it started even earlier in Sigmund’s life. He was sent off at the age of twelve to live with an uncle in the United States; he arrived even earlier than his older brother Louis.

My last post before Thanksgiving about Louis Adler stirred a lot of interest. Many wondered why he got into so much legal trouble: was it discrimination? Was it economic desperation? Was it just his nature? We don't know. Two readers went above and beyond and did their own research, looking for answers. Linda Stufflebean, a fellow genealogy blogger who writes the blog…

Sara Rothschild Adler’s first child was her son Louis, born on December 4, 1884, in Niedermeier, Germany. Louis was just a teenager when he left home and immigrated to the United States. I could not find a passenger ship manifest for Louis despite hours of searching, but according to the 1910 census1 he arrived in 1900 when he was going on sixteen years old.