Ancestry Magazine

Welcome to Found, a new feature of Ancestry Magazine in which I take up the hunt to track down the rightful owners of items submitted by you, the readers. You tell me what you have, I go into detective mode to find the home of the first owner or family, and you get to return it. Everyone else gets to read about the sleuthing trail I followed to locate the happy recipient. Who knows, with a bit of luck, you’ll learn some tricks for rescuing a few orphan heirlooms yourself, should you feel so inspired. And the best part? These little tricks are handy for conventional genealogy as well.

1940s Photo Album
I’ll start this inaugural Found with one of the most contemporary and far-flung orphan heirloom rescues I’ve ever done—a photo album from the 1940s. Even if there weren’t some dates scattered throughout the album, the images themselves would have made the t ime period easy to deduce. I don’t often tackle such young objects, but this album was especially intriguing because of the story behind it.

Chana Saadia wrote that her mother had come across the album on a street in Jerusalem about nine years ago. Chana, who lives in Jerusalem, came in possession of the album after her mother passed away.

The album owner’s name was clearly displayed, but no one around Chana had ever heard of the fellow. Captions on some of the photos suggested a connection to Brooklyn, New York, at one time, so Chana contacted me wondering if perhaps I could locate the original owner. How could I resist such a tempting invitation? The hunt was on.

A Good Start
I was fortunate to have more clues than I usually start with. I had a name (which I won’t share here in the interest of privacy), and while the surname was not especially uncommon, the first name was somewhat unusual. I also had a location. In fact, I had several locations. A link to Brooklyn was apparent, but it appeared that the owner had also lived in Washington, D.C. and traveled elsewhere.

And I had a relationship and a half. By this I mean that I could tell that the owner had a brother named Howard, but, while I had a photo of his mother, I didn’t know her name. I could, however, tell that she had lived in America at some point, so it was likely that there was a paper trail somewhere in the United States, even though the album was found in Israel. And finally, I had a time frame—I guesstimated that the original owner would now be in his eighties.

To the Internet
My first instinct was to jump online to search the 1930 census. The owner would have been a youngster at the time, and I hoped that by focusing on New York and using the owner’s unusual first name, I might be able to surface him quickly. Luck was with me, and I quickly found my subject, along with his brother Howard. I now knew I was loo king for a gentleman who should be about eighty-two.

I also discovered that Howard was a few years older and that the brothers’ parents had been born in Russia and Argentina. And, of course, I now had the parents’ names and rough years of birth—a solid jump forward.

What Next?
I had a good fix on the owner’s birth family, but I was doubtful that I would still find anyone in Brooklyn today. After all, the album had wandered, as had the owner, so where was everyone today?

I decided to focus on Howard first. Unfortunately, I quickly located him in both the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) and the California Death Index. He had passed away about twenty years ago, but the California index provided another helpful clue—the mother’s maiden name, a highly unusual name I had never encountered before. On the down side, I was now dealing with a family that I knew had connections to Israel, New York, California, Russia, and Argentina.

I also checked the SSDI for the album owner himself, and was relieved to find no likely entry. But was that because he was hale and hearty or because he had moved overseas at some point? Was I wasting my time focusing on the United States?

The Benefits of an Unusual Name
I decided to play a long shot and search on the mother’s unusual maiden name to see if anyone had uploaded a tree for this family. For families with deep, colonial roots, there are usually multiple trees, if only due to the sheer number of descendants, but those of us with more recent immigrant roots are not as well represented in such databases yet. Still, it was worth a try.

Nothing popped up in the Ancestry World Tree, but there was a hit in OneWorldTreesm. It referred me back to an Ancestry World Tree entry I had missed because I had entered “Hettie” for the mother’s first name, while this submitted lineage had her as “Hattie.” But the other details showed that I definitely had the right family.

Back to Basics
Armed with this correction to the mother’s first name, I did another general search and quickly found her in the SSDI. She had died in Brooklyn several decades ago, so apparently not everyone in the family had dispersed far and wide. Maybe the album owner was in the United States—and not even as far removed as California.

At this point, I searched phone and address directories at Ancestry.com. Several candidates popped up, but one person in particular caught my eye. He was in New Jersey, not all that far from Brooklyn and, as it happened, not far from where I live. Could my “prey” have been in my backyard all along?

Cold Calling
Usually, I prefer that submitters make the first contact with a potential recipient, as they’re the one returning the item and I want to be sure that they get the credit. But in this case, Chana lived in Israel and the possible owner lived just a few miles from me.

I picked up the phone, reached the possible owner, and explained the peculiar reason for my call. As sometimes happens, he was doubtful. He didn’t really remember such a photo album, and a call from a stranger spouting family details was certainly reason for a degree of caution. But even his limited answers assured me that I had the right fellow. Since Chana had sent the album to me, I asked for his e-mail address and sent some scanned photos.

At this point, curiosity overcame his incredulity and he agreed to meet. The result? I received flowers of thanks the next day. And no, he has no clue how his photo album wound up on the streets of Jerusalem, but he’s grateful to Chana for sending a piece of his past back home.

Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak is co-author (with Ann Turner) of Trace Your Roots with DNA: Using Genetic Tests to Explore Your Family Tree and other books. She can b e reached at www.honoringourancestors.com.