'Come in and make yourself comfortable," Trisher (Patricia) Wilson says, smiling ear-to-ear when she opens the door of her Ra'anana apartment and rushes off to boil water for coffee. "Take off your shoes, if you like."
Trisher Wilson
Photo: David Deutch
Though the subject I have come to discuss with the self-proclaimed amateur genealogist is somewhat somber, Wilson is anything but. Indeed, the 59-year-old married mother of three - who made aliya from London in 1993, when her kids were 21, 18 and 12 - discusses the search for roots in general, and the rewards of bringing people together in particular, with unbridled animation.
It's a hobby she says she stumbled upon late in life - and completely by accident. But "once you're hooked," she insists with the passion of someone who's found her true calling, "you're absolutely hooked."
Which is lucky for all those she has helped "complete circles," thanks to her incessant and dedicated sleuthing. In fact, in the last two years alone - of the seven she has been diligently connecting dots - she has reunited 12 families separated by the Holocaust.
Her chief tool, says Wilson - who ran a business with her husband supplying the Jewish community in England and Europe with kippot and after-meal grace booklets - is the Internet, without which she'd "have zilch."
This enables her not only to conduct research, but to network with genealogists the world over. Another crucial reference is Yad Vashem, especially its stock of Pages of Testimony - forms filled out by friends or relatives in memory of people who perished. Though the majority of these were written in the 1950s, she explains, Yad Vashem is now conducting a campaign to enlarge the list. And the Jewish Family Research Association of Israel (JFRA), of which Wilson is a member, is assisting in the endeavor through a project whose slogan is: "It only takes one page."
The idea behind it is to encourage as many survivors as possible to fill out testimonies. To this end, JFRA is going to senior citizens' homes and asking residents to supply names.
Wilson is aware that some people "might think [this] involves telling their stories, and many survivors can't cope with that." But, she insists, "We're not asking for any stories. We are only asking them to fill out a page with a name of a cousin or even an acquaintance - whether or not they know if that person perished, or whether they have any idea where that person might be today."
Is it Wilson's optimism that has led to her success stories or the other way around? Whichever, she emphasizes the positive.
"People who have lost family - especially in the Shoah - often say, 'I'm the only one left. Everybody was wiped out,'" she explains, stressing, "Never say that. Never give up hope."
What made you take an interest in genealogy?
About seven years ago, I got out a photograph of people I didn't recognize, with my maternal grandmother's name on the back. It was a picture my father had told me to look into. "Find out who these people are," he had said. And I had stuck it in a drawer. After he died, I looked at it again, and I thought, "I wonder who these people are."
My grandmother - one of five siblings - had told us that she had a brother who went to America from England. All I knew was that his name was Nathan Nadler, and that he lived in Detroit. Well, eventually I located his grave and his children and grandchildren.
And you know, when I found them, they all said, "Oh my God - we didn't know our grandfather had any siblings!" So I printed out the family tree for them, and they were shocked. Then I made a family chart, listing the address and telephone number of every single living member of the family - those who gave permission, of course.
I was also told that my great-grandmother had a brother who had gone to America from Romania, and that he lived in Rhode Island. Well, I found the whole family, even though they had spread out all over America.
My kids think I'm completely mad. But I think it's so important to know your roots. That's how I got started. Then I realized I could do it for other people, which got me hooked. And, once you're hooked on genealogy, you're absolutely hooked. Soon, everybody began coming to me.
How many families who were separated by the Holocaust have you managed to trace, and how long does it take?
In the last two years, I've reunited about 12 families. Some took a few months; some I did in a day.
How do you do this - mainly through the Internet?
Oh yes. Without the Internet, I'd have zilch. That's why I classify myself as an amateur. I don't have to leave my apartment to actually go to archives to search for vital records.
There are several crucial Web sites, among them "Jewishgen" [www.jewishgen.org].
A real breakthrough came a few years ago, when Ellis Island posted 25 million passenger records of those who entered America between 1894 and 1922. It's the most amazing thing! It enables you to look up a relative from America and see when he arrived.
But on Ellis Island, names were often completely distorted by clerks who couldn't understand the immigrants' pronunciations.
The No. 1 myth of genealogy is that immigrants' names were changed at Ellis Island. Immigrant clerks and translators of more than 60 languages assisted the immigrants, and they worked off passenger manifests that had been prepared before embarkation. But what's so clever about the Ellis Island Web site is that it has something called "soundex," a phonetic system for classifying names that sound similar.
So, for example, when I was looking up my family - Weintraub - different members of whom arrived in the United States at different times, I found one called Weintraub, another Weinraub; then Weinrub; then Weintrub. The site also has all the countries they could possibly have come from.
But the far best thing was when Yad Vashem posted on its Web site the names of three million people for whom "Pages of Testimony" were filled out. A "Page of Testimony" is a form one could fill out in memory of a person or people they knew perished in the Holocaust. The majority of these were filled out in the 1950s, following the Shoah.
