Not surprisingly, Forseter is not among the most common family names in America. For s list of those names compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, click here: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026/2020-census-names-data.html
Forseter is an Americanized, some might say Anglicized, version of my father’s Old World surname, Fuersetzer (Fürsetzer). The transition was not straight line.
When my parents married, Sylvia Gerson wed Kopel Fuersetzer September 6, 1942. He carried that name into the U.S. Army on December 1, 1942. His specialty was as a machine gunner but never served in combat. He received a medical honorable discharge August 4, 1943.
Back in my mother’s arms, Kopel was induced to Americanize the family name. Frost was chosen. Two entities ensued. He started a company, Frostex (Frost Textiles), and produced their first heir, my brother Bernie whose February 24, 1945, birth certificate registered him as Bernard Frost.
Kopel was not too happy with the Frost name as it disassociated him from his heritage, especially after it became known that all of his family back in Ottynia, Poland, had been killed in the Holocaust (he did not yet know one of his brothers, Willy, was the sole survivor).
So he returned to his original family name with a slight twist. It became Forsetzer. It was Forsetzer when my sister Lee showed up January 25, 1947. Again, Sylvia’s input had him drop the “z.” I was born a Forseter March 6, 1949.
When Uncle Willy arrived several years after the war, he adopted the Forseter name as well.
Growing up, my siblings and I would say that the only Forseters in America were the five members of our immediate family and the three of Uncle Willy’s.
In the early 1980s Mike Bailenson joined Chain Store Age’s New York office from Chicago. He told me he went to school in St. Louis with an Elliot Forseter. Can’t be, I responded. People often mistake our surname for Forester, like the Subaru car, or Old Forester bourbon, I suggested. No doubt Elliot spelled his surname differently, I said.
Naturally, an argument ensued. We wagered 10 bucks on who was right. To settle the matter, I trekked down to our fifth floor office to look in a St. Louis phonebook used by our directory division. Sure enough, Elliot Forseter was listed there in black and white. After forking over the $10, I called my father to ask who was this guy, Elliot Forseter. “Oh, that’s Allen’s son,” he said. “Allen!?!,” I screamed into the phone. “Who are these people? Where did they come from? Why hadn’t we heard about them before?”
My father didn’t really have a good explanation as to why he didn’t stay in touch with his St. Louis relatives, or for those in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area that used a Fursetzer spelling, or a Forseter cousin who had lived in Queens but died in the mid 1950s. Since I traveled the nation quite a bit back then, I was determined to meet Elliot next time I was in St. Louis. Only trouble was, I rarely visited St. Louis.
Several years later, in 1986, en route to Las Vegas, I had a one hour layover in St. Louis, too short a time to leave the airport but time enough to contact Elliot by phone. He wasn’t home. As I explained who I was to his wife, I could visualize her looking into the phone and saying, “Yeah, right.” I told her I’d follow up with a letter. On the plane ride to Las Vegas I long-handed a legal-sized, seven-page letter detailing our family history. Elliot checked with his uncle, Isadore Forsetzer, in Florida before replying. Elliot, too, had no idea he had any Forseter relatives, as his parents had divorced 26 years earlier when he was 13 and his father moved to Los Angeles (by weird coincidence, to a home around the corner from my sister, which she never knew). He enclosed a picture of himself and his family. He could have passed as one of my father’s sons.
A few years later I actually visited Elliot and his family, as well as my cousins in Minnesota. We all said we would stay in touch. That was decades ago. I have not stayed in touch. Sadly, I inherited my father’s anti-social gene when it comes to distant family relations. Maybe it was a universal Fürsetzer gene. My cousins haven’t stayed in touch, either.
