Strauss-Dubner-Gordon Family History

In October 2017, cousin Bonnie emailed me with a simple question. She had been in Israel, and during the trip, she met up with our cousin Shalom (formerly Seymour) Paul, who lives there. He wondered how exactly are we related. This actually came up first with cousin Nancy, who had a conversation with him during her own trip to Israel. I had no idea and suggested that Bonnie ask Uncle Arnold. He mentioned that Shalom was an usher at his wedding, but did not know the detailed relationship beyond "cousin." 

How hard could this be to figure out, I thought. I had a file of papers that included printouts from early 1990s genealogy software. Those printouts only included closer relations who I knew well. I also found in my attic a wedding scrapbook that my mother put together. That scrapbook contains a list of all the guests invited to my parents' wedding in 1949. Looking through that scrapbook with my daughter Gail, I found several members of the Paul family (including Shalom's parents and his aunts Eleanor and Sylvia) appear on the guest list. We also wondered about the connections of the other people on the list.

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I started an account with the online site MyHeritage.com and typed in the names from those printouts. I quickly learned about the thousands of searchable records that are available online, not only through MyHeritage, but also ancestry.com, familysearch.org, JewishGen.org, and others. With all that data, it seemed like finding the answers would be quick and easy. But not so. I found a lot of well-organized information about my father's side, thanks to research done by my father's cousin Ilse Cohn (before there was Internet). Not much for my mother's side -- except learning that there is a 37-step trail, through many marriages, leading from my father to the Treblinskis. This is apparently not uncommon among Ashkenazi Jews, who married mostly among themselves in the earliest generations I've located.

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Using the matching features of MyHeritage.com (many matches came from Gail's data entry a few years ago) as well as the original birth, marriage, and death records for many of the Strauss, Dubner, and Gordon families (translated from Russian by helpful volunteers), I pieced together the relationships. I came up with a theory to answer Bonnie's original question, but I still wasn't sure.

I found myself wishing that my mother had left me more information. That's when I went up to the attic, wondering if maybe I hadn't searched thoroughly enough through the boxes. And there it was: one more box of my family's old papers, including a handwritten family tree that my mother put together in 1992, which confirmed the links I discovered in my research. That tree appears below, in my mother's handwriting. The original was carefully ruled on graph paper.

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And now I'd like to share with you the information I've learned about these people. As you read, please feel free to contact me with corrections and other stories, photos, etc. that you'd like to see added.

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P.S. Bonnie and Shalom are third cousins.