Alice in Wonderland
My father used to be the family genealogist. He did most of his research in Mormon libraries, where he told me they kept careful lists of Jewish people to baptize us after we died. How odd, I thought. Then I decided once I was already dead, it didn’t matter.
So, my father discovered that the Hungarian Stained glass artist Miksa Jozsef Róth (1865–1944) was my great-granduncle. My father was the first in my immediate family to visit Budapest, where he met Roth’s daughters as older women, Erzsebet and Amália Róth. The Róths were Catholic; I assume they converted.
Erzsebet and Amália gave my father three small pieces of Róth’s stained glass. They were displayed at my parents’ house in State College, PA. My sister and I have plans to return them to the Miksa Róth Memorial House in Budapest if it remains open. I’m concerned that the Orbán regime may close it as he ascribes to “replacement theory.”
They also gave him a portrait of Mika’s father, Zsigmond Róth. My second cousin, Marlene Stoffers, came up with a photo of Zsigmond. I’m not sure that the portrait does him justice.
My father, Robert Morris Stern, a distinguished professor and chair of psychology at Penn State, died of Parkinson’s in 2020. First, I brought some of his female relatives and my mother and sister together on a Zoom call. My aunt Janice Stern Victor, who’s 91, is great at double-checking everything I do with the family tree and has great stories. She was a Freudian Analyst with an LCSW and NCPsyA.
Janice still lectures at something mysterious she refers to as “The Institute.” I looked it up, and it’s the New Jersey Institute for Training in Psychoanalysis, which sounds less intimidating than I had imagined.
As the pandemic started to retreat, I had a health issue of a different sort. After a long time, I decided I didn’t have to worry about teenage plans for a life of crime and sent my DNA to Ancestory.com. I plugged in the information I had from my father. My cousin Martha Betsy Katz-Hyman had also done a lot of research on our great-grandparents. I should note here I didn’t understand why Matha’s hyphenated last name was amusing until I was a teenager.
Our great grandfather, Max Israel Mordecai Olch, died of suicide over a small debt in 1903 after immigrating to the U.S. from Russia in 1892. I admired his wife, Deborah (Dora) Shushansky, who picked up the pieces and ran their shop while raising four children, including my grandfather. Deborah came from Odesa Bessarabia Vinnytsia in Southwestern Ukraine under Romanian rule. When I got my hands on the Ancestry results and started getting hints from distant relatives, I found what I had assumed was true. I was 100% Ashkenazi Jewish with relatives from all over Europe.
My mother is now 83 years old. Since her father’s side of the family was a bit depressing, and her mother died when she was eight years old, I decided she might like hearing more about her mother’s side. Here, I found my mother’s Aunt Alice Adelman, whom I knew she had admired.
My mother was pregnant with my sister Alison while I read Lewis Carrol’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I was deep into the book and started lobbying my parents to name my future sister Alice. When she was named Alison, I figured it was close enough. Jewish families tend to name children after a beloved relative who has passed away. Since my mother and sister had no interest in my genealogy habit, which was starting to get out of hand, I thought featuring Alice might gain some interest.
Alice was born May 17, 1904, in Providence, RI.
Here we see her riding in a dog-drawn carriage!!!
As you can imagine, I was delighted to find these. I thought I was the only dog lover in the family.
Before the dog shenanigans, Alice married Carl Hyman in 1925 in Rhode Island.
Alice had a son named Lester Samuel Hyman on July 14, 1931. He was famous in the Kennedy administration. Since he’s outlived anyone with a direct memory of the time, he tells fantastic stories. I've linked to an interview here.
I found his phone number and started chatting. He asked me if this was for publication. I explained that I was his first cousin once removed, and then he returned to entertaining his guests. I am in touch with his son, who could have given me some good advice BEFORE I went to law school.
So, back to Alice, she was a volunteer teacher at the Meeting Street School. She was an accomplished pianist and a member of the Chopin Club. She was a member of Temple Emanu-El and its sisterhood. She was also a member of the Jewish Home for the Aged and the Providence Council of Jewish Women. She lived in Providence until the last year of her life. She was buried in Warwick, RI. When Carl died, he was buried next to her. I believe my father was buried at the same cemetery.
And I was successful in getting my mother interested in the world of genealogy, or at least ONE person.
Now it’s April 2024. I’m 54 years old and ready to return to work full-time, but I’ll have my tree with 1,058 people to remember this time. Not to mention the mild anxiety of asking someone if their mother had been married three times or someone else if perhaps their father, I didn’t know the relationship at the time, was bisexual. Ask me anything.
