Connecting

A while back I posted a picture of three people, a young woman, a 40ish year old man, and a woman of about the same age. I wasn't sure exactly who they were. Or, I wasn't sure who the women were, but I thought I knew who the man was. This picture, which was posted on a web site I frequent, ancestry.com, connected me with some second and third cousins I didn't know existed, firstly because it was listed under a name I had listed in my own family tree, and secondly because it was a picture I remembered from my grandfather's family photo album. At first it was just the second cousin, Phyllis, her daughter Heather and Phyllis's second husband Pat who I corresponded with and talked with over the phone. It's Phyllis's photograph. Her mother Anna, Phyllis said,  told her it was a picture of her (Anna's) father, Benjamin, but Anna didn't know who the women were in the photo. This was very exciting, as no one in my immediate family knew who they were. We exchanged more photographs via e-mail. At some point Phyllis connected me with some of her closer cousins, so now there's all these second and third cousins sending e-mails back and forth, with stories and photographs, including people who also have this photograph that I've been describing, in their own family photo album. One of these other cousins got on board and sent out some photographs and one of them was of these same three people. Same photo, different story. Not drastically different, but different enough.

The first story, via Phyllis, claimed that the man in the picture was her grandfather, which would make him my great grand-uncle by marriage. That is, married to my great-grand aunt Yetta, sister to my great grandmother Anna. So, the picture appears and the man who sends it via e-mail says his mother, Phyllis's aunt Elena, one of Yetta's daughters, says this is a picture of Yetta's grandparents. It's not right, though. The people in the photograph, none of them are old enough to be the grandparents of someone born in the 1860s. So I ask, is it possible that they are Elena's grandparents, Yetta's parents? The picture is taken some time in the 1880s. Which is about right. We'd (Pat and I, independently, on ancestry.com) already decided Yetta's parents were born sometime in the 1840s or 1850s. So, the e-mails flew around for a day or so and we (us heretofore unknown cousins) that the people in the picture were, left to right, one of the Foxman girls; Yetta, Ethel, Anna, Fanny or Esther, and Usher Anshil Foxman, and Sussa Ruchel. I'll let you know when I find out which of the Foxman girls it is.

In the meantime, have a look at this picture, which is a family photo of Benjamin Watnik, his wife Yetta Foxman Watnik, and their three sons, Irwin (Erving), Louis, and David Nathan. The girls, Elena and Anna, are not pictured here. But it is the two of them, through their grandchildren, that brought us all together. May their memories be for a blessing.

Here's a picture of Elena, circa 1923, on a pony. Such a stylish little girl, yes?