Photoessay #2879 - My grandparents 1971

Picture of my paternal grandparents; Harold and Betty Ginsburgh in 1971.  This might be at their first house in southern California, in Dana Point.  Date on print Feb 71.  I was off at UCSC not paying a bit of attention to my family; only dimly aware that my grandparents had moved.

Notice my grandfather with his sport coat and tie.  He always wore a tie; that's how he always dressed.  To him, casual meant a string tie rather than a regular tie.  Always quite formal and correct.  As I reflect on their life course as I do on my own...they are only 10 years older than I am now.  Fully in control of themselves and their surroundings.  Both are children of eastern European immigrants; hard to imagine.

I was always my grandfather's favorite; his first grandchild.  I became closer to him later in his life.  His first, most important identification was that of a Harvard graduate.  He was a Harvard man.  I don't think there were too many Jewish young man in the class of 1920.

They lived in Boston most of their lives.  He came to Boston to go to Harvard; he spent his first two years in college at University of Rochester then won a scholarship from the Harvard Club of Rochester.  My grandmother was born and raised in Boston.

I just went to a meeting of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Washington.  They had a good speaker as usual.  I outlined the story I have from my aunt of Betty's family immigration.  We agreed it was fishy.

As the speaker said, everybody was from Odessa.  And so my great grandfather was from Odessa.  Don't know anything about his family, but he came to Kiev (or the area around Kiev) as a young man.  He met his wife Sonia, who lived with her grandparents.  They married quite young.  A Canadian woman came looking for her family's ancestral village.  They convinced her to let them come to American posing as her children on her passport.  The ship stopped in Boston, my young great grandfather heard there was construction work in Cape Cod and they got off the ship.  My great grandfather decided to take the name Cohen because it seemed like a good Jewish name.  Edward Cohen; he eventually did very well in real estate and mortgages.  They had three daughters then three sons. 

My grandmother was the third daughter.  All her life she bemoaned the fact...who needs a third daughter?

The story has tons of holes in it and a jillion 'brick walls'.

I need to focus on my father's side.  One of my burning questions, why did my great great grandfather settle in Rochester?

From the pictures I got from my sister's version of the family book made by my mother.  She scanned the old pictures for me; but they are not good quality.  I didn't realize that she was saving them as .pdf files.