Genealogy Update

During a recent Skype conversation with my friend Julia, I mentioned my new hobby of locating obscure and long-deceased members of the Margoshes clan. Because Ancestry.com only offers a 14-day free trial, my youthful curiosity will be crushed, like the hopes of a young child a half-inch too short to ride the rollercoaster, in approximately eight days. At some point during the vast tundra of my complaining, Julia interrupted. "My library has a subscription," she said. "I bet yours does, too." She was unaware, I'm sure, that her words had just guaranteed her a spot in my bridal party.

My library does in fact have such a subscription, but in a perverted display of librarian power, the subscription can only be accessed from the library itself. No matter. I scrolled through the list of genealogy databases and settled on a link to all New York Times articles published since 1899. My people were Jews: they practically invented the New York Times. I felt like a kid in a kosher candy shop.

I weeded through pages and pages of marriage announcements and property acquisitions lists, scribbled a handful of names illegibly on a piece of paper, and spent no less than eleven minutes staring at the sentence "Dr. Margoshes was born in Jozefow, Galicia, in Austria," trying to figure out how Galicia, Spain could have possibly been located in Austria. Thanks to several minutes of extensive research on everyone's favorite source of mostly erroneous facts (Wikipedia), I now know that Galicia was "the largest part of the area annexed by Austria in the First Partition of Poland."

That was only one miniscule pebble in a whole mountain of fascinating things I learned about the people and places from whence I come. Mostly this knowledge made me angry, mainly because every single one of my ancestors attended NYU and became editors of popular magazines and were awarded the Medal of the Order of Merit by the king of Denmark, while my greatest accomplishment to date has been inventing a type of hot chocolate made with milk, sugar, and unsweetened cocoa powder. (In case you're curious, it's actually purple. I kid you not.)

Once I acknowledged that I was never going to write for the Village Voice or travel to Poland to extol the heroism of the Jews in the face of Nazi oppression, I made a delightful discovery. A man named Henry Margoshes, who I now know was my dad's great uncle, was a lawyer in New York in the 1920s. In the newspaper article entitled "Backward Bessie Always in Reverse," I read that Henry once represented a man who was taken to court for selling a man a horse that only moved backward. This was, as you can imagine, the most thrilling moment of my life. I shrieked to my cat. (She was unimpressed.) I called my dad at work. I raced downstairs and gushed to my mom, who only appeared mildly perturbed that I had interrupted her episode of Criminal Minds. I texted my friend Sara who responded, "That is the best text message of my life."

This is big news in my world. If I learn nothing else about my family, I can die satisfied that I have uncovered the most meaningful snippet of Margoshes history that will ever be recorded.

That is all.