Unknown Family Members Identified

We interrupt your regularly scheduled blog post for this important announcement:

I am pleased to report that I have made a very special connection to family, friends, and neighbors who were lost in the Holocaust.

In the past few days a flurry of emails have gone back and forth between my parents, myself, and a new acquaintance from Austria.

It began with a message coming directly through this website. (Hooray for contact forms!) A woman in Austria has found my posts regarding my grandmother and my great-aunts who were members of the pre-holocaust Jewish community in Lower Austria. She wanted to know if I could put her in contact with surviving members of the Abeles family from Pitten, Austria.

Hey, that’s me!

Completely stunned, I had to read the message three times before I could comprehend that this woman not only knew of my family, but even had some information regarding my family that I did not yet have. I did not quite understand why she was contacting me, but the fact that she knew so much about my grandmother and great-great grandfather was enough to spur me to respond–right after making a very excited phone call to my mother in Utah.

It turns out that this Austrian woman seems just as excited to have gotten a positive response from me. You see, her family lived next door to my family before both families were sent fleeing from imminent Nazi threat. She was eager to know if there were survivors of her family’s old-time friends. The good news is yes, there were several survivors, and the fact that she was able to find me is evidence.

I. Am. Ecstatic.

As a result of my excitement over this new contact, I accidentally closed out all of the renewed pages I had open for research on this week’s new page and corresponding blog post. Once again, I am having to start over to gather resources for the page and article on Aucke Wikoff that was supposed to have been posted last week.

Thanks to this new information, my family was able to update existing family members and add another we were unaware of. On top of that, we now know where my great-grandmother was buried and have a photo of her grave. I think the new page and blog post are going to be put on the back burner for the next couple of weeks as I converse with my new family friend and sort out this new story from the past.

My great-grandmother, Franziska “Fanny” Abeles Daniel

The tombstone, finally identified.

Luckily, this new information came before the post I had planned for next week on the Daniel family. It looks like I’ll be doing something a little different now that I have new information that actually helps to clarify the blog post I had planned for next week. I am really looking forward to sharing all of this with you.

Hooray for Geneablogging and the internet!