38. Summer break - A Pause

A Pause

For all my regular readers you will be expecting a new post today, Sunday 7^th September. It has been a very busy last couple of months, and I have chosen to put aside my research and have a small break. So, this is a very different post today.

My Mother

Yesterday was a special day as it was my mum’s birthday, born on 6^th September in 1925. Had she not died during Covid, we would be celebrating her 100^th birthday. She too was a refugee, leaving Germany suddenly and ending up in Wales at the age of 13 and receiving her English education from nuns in the small Welsh town of Abergavenny. The family had originally settled in Penarth, just south of Cardiff on the northside of the Severn estuary. When war broke out, she, her parents and two sisters, were moved away from the coast as they were deemed a danger to national security as enemy aliens capable of signalling enemy submarines from the shore.

Mum has not featured in my posts for obvious reasons, being that this series of posts is about my dad’s family. However, this seems a great opportunity to mention her. And for those of you wondering, her name was Anne Marie Kohnstamm.

Recap

The posts have been dealing with specific individuals in my family history and while in earlier posts, there were many family trees, there have not been any in the last few posts. On this basis I thought a small recap would be a good idea.

Four Families

I have been writing about four groups of families with the intention of bringing them all up to the period of the Second World War. We are not quite there yet but almost! The tree below shows how branches of four families join at my paternal grandparents, Erna Abraham and Erich Marx. This family will take up the story next and the stories will widen again across many of the descendants of these four families. For the pedants, there are actually five given that my great grandfather Ludwig’s mother, Adelheid Marx, after the death of her husband Emanuel Marx, remarried to Simon Holländer.

When looking at this tree, while it brings everyone together to a single marriage, it misses the point. Such trees are highly directional, leaving out the richness of each family and of each generation. In this format, a few people from vast families, just become names on a chart. Their lives and connections are stripped out.

It is remarkable that there have been some 37 posts about many of the members of these families and there are still many more who we will come across in the following posts as we enter the turbulent times of the 1930’s and 1940’s.

I hope from the chart that there is now some visible logic to all the posts. This break is a time to pause. Thank you for being on this journey of discovery with me.