Something Old is Something New

The Journey Begins

I grew up with two loving parents and two older brothers, but little to no extended family.  Neither of my parents had siblings.  My Mom grew up without a father, and her Mom, Alma, was deaf and mute, which left her Aunt and Grandma Annie to raise her.  My Dad's father, Charles, died years before I was born, and his mother, Isabelle, died when I was a year old.   I grew up with nearly no family role models outside of my immediate family.  I felt a starvation of knowledge about my roots.  Neither of my parents were forthcoming with information.  Oh, they'd answer my questions with brief answers.  There were never stories, or very few.  When my Great Aunt Alice died in 1965, my Mom and I flew to Phoenix to see her family for a week.  That was only the first of two times I have seen anyone in her family.

Our own family, well really it was just me an my brothers, were carving a path forward without knowing anything of our roots.  For us, everything old - information, pictures, stories, family - was new to us.  Everything  would be new, once we had uncovered the traces, followed the trail.  Our parents kept their past in the past, and that was that.

Then I began seeking answers in the 1980's, before the internet was the Internet. (Yes, there was an internet then, but there were no "browsers," as they have come to be called.)  I attended some Santa Barbara Genealogy Club meetings, got a bit of training, but the tools at hand were difficult and cumbersome.  I did locate Grandma Isabelle's grave, in Salinas, CA., my Grandpa's niche at the Pajaro Valley Cemetery, and visited the San Francisco public library to find the address where my grandparents and father lived in the 1930's.  But, my interest waned for a few years as more useful information was difficult to locate - namely, who was my Grandfather?  Why did he change his name?  Where did he come from and what kind of family did he have?

Baby John held by his mother Isabelle Heller - 1922 (far-right)

Then, at some time during this period, my parents decided to give me all of Grandpa Heller's papers. These included all manner of his correspondence, letters of recommendation, award letters, customer lists (he was an insurance salesman), and two documents that were in old Romanian.  These  papers turned out to be his own birth certificate from 1891, and his father's death certificate from 1890. At this time I was on staff at UC Santa Barbara, and we had an associate professor who was from Israel.  When I showed him the papers, he could not decipher them, but he did say that it was interesting that at birth, my grandfather was named Haim, for his father.  He told me that this would not happen had his father been alive.  We surmised that the Romanian words, "de morte," rooted in Latin, "mortem," meant death.  A clue!  I finally had a piece of Heller history that no one knew anything about.  Also during this time, I was fortunate to have been acquainted with an engineering student at UCSB who was from Romania.  She told me that her mother and grandmother were living with her.  It took both of the older women to translate the document because it was in very old Romanian.  This was fortuitous, since the student couldn't translate it all.  The following document is, what we would today call his birth certificate (following the English translation).  It was actually a legal copy made from the register in his community of Valea Seaca.  This fascinates me to this day.  I am so grateful that these documents have survived for over one hundred years.  In a family that has few, to no heirlooms, they are precious!