Ancestry Magazine

The Senofskys, with a new daughter, Esther, but sans Willie, appear in the 1895 Portland census, but there was no trace of them after that. There was no record of any of the Senofskys, not in any census from 1900 to 1930, in Social Security death records, or in the Oregon Death Index, which began in 1903. I questioned whether the family had remained in Oregon.

It was heartbreaking—Willie’s story melted my insides. Forever eleven, he moved into my heart, in the space between my own eleven- and fifteen-year-old sons. But it seemed Willie could be out there somewhere in an unmarked grave, alone.

Stuart Harris was nine when his family moved to Portland into a house on a hill just outside of town. There was a detached garage, and behind it was a mock grave with Willie’s tombstone. “It was like some freshly dug stuff…maybe even bark dust, and the tombstone was underneath the eave of the garage there,” Stuart remembered.

The original homeowners said that their sons found the tombstone while fishing—one of the boys had snagged his line, went out to unsnag it and found it stuck on a big flat tombstone. The homeowners called around trying to find out where the tombstone belonged but with no luck. Meanwhile the sons who snagged the tombstone put it behind the garage and made it look like a grave.

But, said Stuart, the woods behind the house were scary enough, even without a fake grave. His mom eventually moved the tombstone to the garage.

It’s hard not to speculate how an eleven-year-old child might have died in 1892. Since the stone was discovered in the river and my research told me that the family had lived near the river, I imagined an accident—a drowning or a horse-and-buggy collision. Stuart imagined an illness like cholera.

The family appeared to have vanished most convincingly. Had they left the area? Were they wiped out in the flu epidemic? Did they change their name? A nationwide search revealed only a few Senofskys scattered around the country, and seemingly none with direct ties to this family.

Stuart’s parents sold their house and moved into a condo around 1997, and Stuart, his brothers, and sisters were summoned to winnow down thirty years of stuff. “My mother said someone needed to take Willie, and since I lived just three miles away, I took Willie—and a really nice dining table,” said Stuart. “We put Willie in our garage and there he’s been. We’d do projects; I’d be in the garage and see him and think, we really ought to do something. It’ s sitting here, and someone must care…where this tombstone is.”

Documentation of Willie’s death existed in the Oregon Historical Record Index in Salem, I discovered. The full record would list a burial site so I requested it. Willie could be going home very soon.

While I was awaiting my requested record, I took a walk through Ahavai Shalom cemetery, barely a mile from my home. A plot location book sits inside the cemetery chapel which is usually open, but for whatever reason on the day I visited, it wasn’t. I had the strong sensation of being stranded in a cliché: so close and yet so far.

My father is buried in this cemetery. He was the founder of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon and is the real catalyst in all of this. I never did any genealogical sleuthing while he was alive. There was no need; he was doing it. Such is the lot of the genealogist—one to a family.

I only speculated that Willie was here in this cemetery. If I was right, it could all end up being very serendipitous. I’m not a channeling sort of person, but on this day I felt it couldn’t hurt so I asked my father. In the 1980s, Dad researched a book on the history of the congregation, spending untold hours in this cemetery—he knew every headstone. “Is Willie here?” I asked silently, standing very still in the sun next to Dad’s grave. “Just tell me if he’s here somewhere.”

No response.

The State of Oregon returned my requested record via e-mail in less than four hours. Now I knew: not by accident or epidemic, Willie died of inflammatory endocarditis, a bacterial infection of the heart. Place of interment—“Hebrew cemetery.” That narrows the field of possibilities: there were only two Jewish cemeteries in Portland in 1892.

A few days later the chap el at Ahavai Shalom was open. It took me a minute or so of contemplating the plot book to realize that one of the families was identified as Senosky. Willie Senosky. No “f.” No typo.

I sent Stuart an e-mail:

“I am so happy to report that I’ve just come from visiting Willie and he has been practically in my backyard the whole time. Willie is buried at Ahavai Shalom cemetery in a marked grave alongside his father, mother, and brother. He is less than fifty yards from my father, so I have walked past him dozens of times…it is the happiest possible ending. Willie was never lost. He was with family all along, and he is with them now—his and mine!”

I realized I had been unable to locate family records after 1895 because the family dropped the “f” from their name. Willie’s original grave marker had probably been replaced to accommodate the spelling change.

Once the name change had been identified, further information about the family cascaded from census records, birth, marriage, cemetery records, and obituaries. Four of Willie’s five siblings and their spouses are also buried in the same cemetery in the spaces between his grave and my father’s. The family had remained in Portland for at least three more generations and had been prominent in the clothing trade, newspaper publishing, and music.

How the original stone ended up in the river remained a mystery. Now, however, the question was what to do with the stone in Stuart’s garage. It was an alabaster work of art, lovingly worded, beautifully embellished and in exceptional condition. Our rabbi allowed that it was a bit of a puzzler: “I never had such a situation. To my knowledge, there is no tradition about disposing of gravestones. A gravestone has no sanctity other than to simply mark the place where someone is buried. . . (but) it certainly should not go back in the river.

Our rabbi emeritus, however, was emphatic about the resolution: the stone belonged back in the cemetery.
It would close the circle. The final resting place of Willie’s stone should be Willie’s final resting place.

But the last word would have to be Stuart’s. “Terrific solution,” he declared. Any hard feelings about giving Willie up after all these years? “No. The stone is a great monument, but it’s not my monument. What more could I do other than give him a better place in the basement? No, for me it’s interesting enough to know about his life.”

So Willie’s original headstone was returned to Ahavai Shalom cemetery, and he became the rare person whose grave is marked by two stones. A rededication ceremony for Willie’s stone was held on 2 November 2003. Most of the people attending were meeting for the first time—their only connection was an ageless love and respect for a child who died long before he should have.

Willie’s gift to me was more profound—a greater understanding of my father than I ever had when Dad was alive. I started this search with a mother’s heart, but I came out a better daughter. During his years with JGSO, Dad tirelessly researched bits and pieces of local genealogy for far-flung strangers hoping for insights into their Oregon ancestors. I’d seldom felt closer to Dad than I did that day I walked through the cemetery because I finally understood with clarity why we help others connect with their forebears. We do it because every life matters. Especially one that ended too soon.

Her note reminded me again of why we take time to find long-passed ancestors. At about the same time as Willie’s original headstone was being replaced, the tomb of another long-obscure child was discovered—King Tut. The inscription on Tut’s tomb read: “To speak the name of the dead is to have them live again.” Willie Senofsky lives.