Why take notes on those “tall tales” that relatives tell?

Welcome to Splaver Stories and Entes Elements!  Lara Diamond of larasgenealogy.blogspot.com has been trying to talk me into starting a genealogy blog, so here goes!

Everyone loves a good story.  As we get older, those stories start to grow.  What’s wrong with a little harmless exaggeration to keep your listener’s attention?  Or, perhaps, our memories get a little fuzzy after a while, so we fill in the gaps with what sounds right to us.  At any rate, I tend to take stories (especially really good ones) with a grain of salt.

One of my favorite family stories is of my great-grandmother, Jessie Allen Glassman.  Jessie, I was told, was an independent woman who was well ahead of her times.  She was an activist all her life "in a time when women weren’t activists” (my apologies to the Women’s Suffrage movement) and even separated (or divorced, depending on who you asked) her husband "in a time when women just didn’t do things like that."  My mother admired her greatly, partially naming me AND my sister after her.

Jessie Allen Glassman

The story was that, when she was young, Jessie absolutely adored her older brother "Yehudas Liebe" (he name turned out not to be Yehudas Liebe, but that's a different story).  She followed him absolutely everywhere… including forbidden Zionist meetings.  They were eventually caught.  Yehudas Liebe was shipped off to the Russian Army.  Jessie was shipped off on the first boat to the Americas and was eventually left to make her own way in New York City where she met and married my great-grandfather.

When I asked my Great-aunt Goldye, Jessie’s daughter, the story got even better!  Not only was Jessie an activist, but so were all her cousins!  They were very important in the Zionist movement and friends with none other than Golda Meir who would visit them in Cleveland, Ohio. 

At this point, I'm sure you can tell that I didn’t believe this story.  My beloved Great-aunt Goldye is as sharp as a tack and would never tell a lie (at least not in the harmful sense), but I assumed she was embellishing things.  An Israeli Prime Minister was friends with my relatives?  My people were just ordinary folk from a little shetl in what is now Belarus.  It’s a little much, don’t you think?

Now some of the story was clearly true.  Jessie did arrive in New York in 1907, according to the ship manifest, accompanied by her Aunt Etta and Etta’s children.  Family lore has it that, when they arrived in America, Etta's husband Frank, a farmer, didn't want (or more likely couldn’t afford) another mouth to feed, so Jessie was left behind in New York.  The records also bore this out.  Etta and Frank, along with their children, show up in Wooster, Ohio.  Frank was indeed a farmer.  According to her marriage license application, Jessie was living in a boarding house and working as a seamstress, having apparently survived well enough on her own.  She married Harry Glassman, whom she had met at a dance, in New York on July 15, 1912.  The two made there way to Cleveland where Jessie was reunited with her cousins who had also made the move to the city.  Jessie's marriage, unfortunately, didn’t stand the test of time.  In keeping with her independent ways, Jessie naturalized on her own in 1939.

Frank and Etta Allen with their children (Sarah is in the last row, second from the left)

Now I’m a little bit obsessed with collecting documents.  Ideally, I prefer to collect at least one document for each year of that person's life.  No, I'm not OCD... except where genealogy is concerned.  I recently discovered that the Cleveland Jewish News, the entire archive, has been placed online free of charge!  This is a fantastic resource for people researching Jewish Cleveland.  I started searching for names, not expecting to do much more than collect a few notices of obituaries, weddings, births, and unveilings confirming things I was sure that I already knew.  If I was really lucky, maybe there would be a few new details about that person's life.

This is what I found in the March 16, 1979 edition of the Cleveland Jewish News (p.36):

Sarah Halperin, my great-grandmother's first cousin who sailed with her from Smorgon to New York, an "Activist in Labor Zionism?"  The pretty young girl in that old family photo "worked closely with her friend Golda Meir?!"

I learned several lessons from this.

1.  Get people to talk to you.
2.  Document those tall tales!
3.  Never assume.  The stories just might turn out to be true.
4.  Never doubt Great-aunt Goldye!!!
5.  ALWAYS document those tall tales!

It turns out that many members of my family were involved with Pioneer Women, and later its successor NA'AMAT.  I'm working on scheduling a call with the current president of NA'AMAT USA (who happens to be my second cousin twice removed).  It'll be interesting to see where this thread leads.