My mother's tree - following the US trail

Two of my mother's uncles had left Austria and ended up in California. I believe that they left before my mother.
I knew that one uncle, Jack, had travelled west to the UK and then on to the United States.
I already knew that he had settled in California with his wife, a son and a daughter.
Following his first wife's death in 1969, he remarried and died in 1982.
His daughter married in 1962, had a son in 1967 and sadly died when he was only 10 in 1977.
His son married in 1975 and he in turn had a son in 1983, who was named after Jack.

I discovered that most Europeans arriving in the United States at that time came to New York by ship and entered through Ellis Island.
Ellis Island has been maintained as a museum with a lot of information available on the Ellis Island website. This site includes a free facility to search for passengers. For those just starting out there is also a genealogy section with some useful links.From this passenger search, I was able to find my great uncle. I could access an image of the actual passenger list that showed that he had sailed from Southampton to New York in 1939 aboard the Lancastria with his wife and two young children and proving that he entered the US through Ellis Island and New York.

Although not directly linked to my tree I discovered on Wikipedia that a few months later this Cunard liner was commandeered by the UK government for war use and renamed HMT Lancastria.After a short overhaul, she left Liverpool on 14 June 1940 under Captain Rudolph Sharp (born 27 October 1885) and arrived in the mouth of the Loire estuary on 16 June. She anchored 11 miles (18 km) south-west of St. Nazaire. By the mid-afternoon of 17 June, she had embarked an unknown number (estimates range from 4,000 up to 9,000), of civilian refugees (including embassy staff, employees of Fairey Aviation of Belgium), line-of-communication troops (such as Pioneer and RASC soldiers) and RAF personnel. The ship's official capacity was 2,200 including the 375 man crew. Captain Sharp had been instructed by the Royal Navy to "load as many men as possible without regard to the limits set down under international law".At 1350 hrs, during an air-raid, the nearby Oronsay a 20,000-ton Orient liner, was hit on the bridge by a German bomb. Lancastria was free to depart and the captain of the British destroyer HMS Havelock advised her to do so, but without a destroyer escort against possible submarine attack, Sharp decided to wait.
A fresh air raid began before 4 p.m. Lancastria was bombed at 1548 hrs by Junkers Ju 88 aircraft from II. Gruppe/Kampfgeschwader 30. Three direct hits caused the ship to list first to starboard then to port; she rolled over and sank within twenty minutes. Over 1,400 tons of fuel oil leaked into the sea and was set partially on fire, possibly by strafing. Many drowned, were choked by the oil or were shot by the strafing German aircraft. Survivors were taken aboard other evacuation vessels, the trawler Cambridgeshire rescuing 900. There were 2,477 survivors, of whom about 100 were still alive in 2011. Many families of the dead knew only that they died with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF); the death toll accounted for roughly a third of the total losses of the BEF in France. She sank around 5 nmi (9.3 km) south of Chémoulin Point in the Charpentier roads, around 9 nmi (17 km) from St. Nazaire. The Lancastria Association lists 1,738 deaths.

Tracing my mother's family in Vienna

My mother had told me that that her family had been quite extensive in the 1930's. Many of them had lived close to each other in Central Vienna.

I discovered that the  establishment of an autonomous Jewish religious community was officially sanctioned by Emperor Franz Josef in 1849. This distinction was the first of a series of measures culminating in definitive establishment of the Jewish Community (Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde) vesting the highest diplomatic status in the Jewish Community (Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde) as an official representative serving the Jewish population of Vienna as well as the Jewish community of Austria.

In 1938, the Vienna Jewish community had more than 185,000 Members, at the end of 1990s only 7,000 were registered in the Community.  While leaving their entire immovable and movable property behind, more than 130.000 Jews succeeded to escape Austria by the end of October 1941. Altogether more than 65.500 Jews from Austria are known to have been "eliminated" in the Shoah. Only approximately 5.500 of the Jews that were still in Austria in 1941 remained in Vienna at  the end of the Second World War.
Due to the autonomous nature of the Jewish community in Vienna, the Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde had maintained its own records of births, deaths and marriages. This information is not available online. I received no response to an emailed initial enquiry so the only way forward with these records would be a trip to Vienna. This would be further complicated by the records being entirely in German, a language that I don't speak. (Vienna Jewish Records Office)

I discovered that as Vienna grew in size the old local cemeteries has become too small and in 1874 the Central Cemetery known as Zentralfriedhof was opened. This is reportedly one of the largest cemeteries in the world, largest by number of interred in Europe and the most famous cemetery among Vienna's nearly 50 cemeteries. There are graves of many of Austria's most famous people in this large cemetery and there are also jewish sections. 

Fortunately the records for this cemetery are accessible online (Zentralfriedhof) and I was able to find details for some of my relatives, including my maternal grandparents.

Getting started on my mother's family tree

My mother was able to help me with the people who had come to England. Based on the information that she provided, I was able to trace a few events in the General Records Office registrations of births, deaths and marriages. I found entries by using FreeBMD to search the index. Two of my great aunts had died too recently for their deaths to show up using FreeBMD.

Apart from these few people who had come to England, I knew that my mother had three uncles who had managed to get out of Vienna. Two had found their way to the USA and settled in California and had lived quite close to each other. They had both married. In fact, one had remarried. One of them had had a son and a daughter and then grandchildren. They had visited the UK so I knew that I had some family in California.

The other Uncle had managed to find his way to Australia. We had contact with his grandsons in Adelaide.

So now I had four avenues to follow;
- To see if I could find more information and family links in the UK. I decided for now that getting actually copies of register entries was a costly exercise that could wait,
- To see what I could trace in Vienna,
- To see what more I could find out to add to the USA branch of the family, and
- To see what I could find out about the Australian branch of the family.

My family tree - the first steps

I had now made the decision to start to record my family tree.

By now the internet was well established and, as with any question, I explored the web for alternative ways to store family tree data and for online data sources. I was amazed by what I found.

There were various possibilities for how to keep the data and an incredible variety of data sources.

Before I decided how best to store my data, I wanted to gather some more information

My cousin gave me a copy of the family tree he had prepared in a gedcom file.
This was very exciting because his information was stored in a linked database, which, with a gedcom file reader, showed the relationships between family members in a tree like structure.

This tree meant that there was already a record of some of my family on my father's side so I wanted to start by seeing how much of my mother's side I could put together.

I knew that I had had some great aunts who had come to England from Austria and were related to my mother. Unfortunately they were no longer around so I could not talk to them to gain more information. They had not had any children who might know more. Apart from anything more that I could find out from my mother, I would need to find another way to gather information.

Whilst looking on the web, I had discovered that a lot of UK genealogical data was available online. Some of this information could be accessed without charge.

I knew that births, deaths and marriages need to be registered and I discovered that records were maintained by the General Records Office. The recording of births, marriages and deaths was started in 1837. There is a Civil Registration index and copies of certificates can be ordered from the GRO website but at a cost, so this would be an expensive way to gather information so I considered that it was not the way forward at this stage.

The GRO site referred me to another site, Free BMD, that I had already discovered. The GRO does not have web access to the index and suggests that the Free BMD site can be used to explore the index to get reference numbers which then makes ordering a certificate easier. Certain libraries also provide access to the index.

The aim of Free BMD is to transcribe the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free Internet access to these transcribed records. This is an ongoing project carried out by teams of dedicated volunteers and so far contains index information for the period 1837-1983. It is not yet complete.

I knew that two of these great aunts had died more recently than 1983 so their deaths did not show on Free BMD. I realised that although there was a lot of useful information that I would be able to get from Free BMD, I needed other sources to progress this search.

My family tree - the beginning of the journey

When I was young, there were lots of family gatherings. There was always a lot of reminiscing with many interesting stories about various family members.

I would listen to these stories with interest but I never thought to record these stories or even to note down who these people were and how they were related to me.

Unrecorded, these stories only existed as unwritten memories. Gradually they began to be lost.
As years went by, the number of surviving members of the older generations declined and these important memories were extinguished.

In time, when I already had my own family, I started to think more about these stories. They represented the experiences and family history that had led my family to where they were and to the point at which my sister and I were introduced into the world. Subsequently our own children were born.
This was part of our heritage and part of the key to who we are.

It was later still when I discover that my first cousin had created a family tree covering the reasonably close family on my fathers side that I began to feel a desire to build our family tree.

 

I realised that my first task should be to do something similar for my mothers family. 

My work began with a conversation with my mother. She had very few surviving relatives and by this time there was nobody else left alive in England. She had come over from Vienna in the late 1930's with her mother and father and was only able to provide some of her early recollections that related to her family. She was only 7 when she left Vienna and she could not remember the full names and relationships for many of the family that had been around when she left.

She had a hand written tree that she had been given many years ago. It had been done by a cousin from memory without research and mostly only showed first names.There was a mark against each person who had passed away before the end of WWII. Some had died earlier but most died had because of it and mainly in the camps.

More than ever, I now felt a need to add more detail and build on this family tree.