The core data was collected between 1980 and 2008 from family knowledge and consulting extended family known to us. Gravestones of grandparents gave us a little more information and parental names going back a further generation, but not in very great detail.
For the family in London, nothing to very little was known about where the family came from, only the name of the town. Cousin Milton in New York knew a lot more. He left in 1925 so even had a photograph of the synagogue but even his knowledge was limited and outdated.
The earliest family data was recorded on paper, but from 1987 onwards it was computerised using APL. In 2003 it was upgraded to run on the Internet using an Oracle database and simple application generator. Interfam was born.
Around this time Brzezin data appeared on JewishGen but I found it impossible to create an accurate tree as names were frequently reused and it was impossible to work out how most individuals were related.
Our major data breakthrough however took place in 2008.
At this time the English translation of the Brzezin Yizkor Book appeared online. (There are links to it on the Bzezin index page). The original Yiddish Yizkor Book was compiled in 1961 and I was intrigued that Brzeziners all round the world were listed but not our family in London.
Revisiting omission this in 2008 led me to email the editor of the Yizkor Book translation and ask about this, and I also enquired if she happened to know of any other Breziners in London.
She mentioned a relative in Scotland but also gave me a name and email address of someone in France who had previously lived in London, but what gave me much excitement was the surname – Rozenberg. I knew that my paternal grandmother was born a Rozenberg. I think Milton must have given me this information.
And so it turned out that the internet finally delivered a authentic family connection to a real lost relative who turned out to be my 3rd cousin.
It further turned out that Brzeziny was fortunate in the sense that all its population records had survived the war and were still accessible to researchers.
Rosette had already employed a professional genealogist to research her Rozenberg family and she was able to confirm that my great grandmother was her great-great-aunt. I was completely astonished that Rosette’s tree went back to close to 1700 and her earliest ancestor was also my ancestor.
From barely being able to go back 100 years I could now trace my lineage to nearly 1700!
So I spoke the the genealogist and the UK family jointly funded research to list our branch of the family.
However we had to wait a bit because Petje the researcher was researching Jerry Springer’s family history for the BBC’s program *Who do you think you are?”
Eventually we received the detailed tree later and loaded it into Interfam together with Rosette’s branch.
At the same time Malcolm made enquiries with a different genealogist who was able to suggest some people in Israel to whom we may be related and this led us to discover much new family. Having our antecedents in detail made it so much easier to determine if people were related and how.
Also Rosette knew much family in France and we were able to make new connections there as well. Relatives further afield in USA, Argentina and Switzerland were also located.
More bizarrely we even found family living less than a mile from us in London that we had lost contact with 70 years earlier.
As a result we had two major family gatherings in 2009. One in Paris and one in Herzliya where we were all able to meet up. Those meetings are documented elsewhere on this website.
