Father's Birth Year Is a Mystery

Had several interesting conversations with my sister Lee and brother Bernie Friday on the occasion of our father’s birthday. I’d tell you how old he would have been but that was what we were trying to agree on.

Family lore has it that Kopel Fuersetzer (through several iterations Fuersetzer evolved into Forseter) was born in Ottynia on January 5, 1911. Or was it 1912? My recollection is the date disparity centered on Austria-Hungary’s military draft rules. Ottynia, a small shtetl in the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in Galicia, was part of Austria prior to the Great War, World War I. 

Young men could be drafted when they turned 18 so there was reason behind the fluidity of actual birthdates in the Hapsburg Empire. At least that’s the story I grew up with. And my brother did as well. (After the war Ottynia became part of Poland. After World War II Ukraine absorbed Ottynia within its borders.)

Lee, on the other hand, remembers Dad telling her he was 35 when she was born in 1947. That would put his birth year as 1912. That’s what we had engraved on his tombstone.

But ... several official papers I reviewed Friday—his Polish good citizenship document, his U.S. military enlistment record and his death certificate—all list his birth year as 1911!

Out the window went the theory of military draft evasion. Enter the realm of supposition. 

Bernie posited he claimed being a year older because he needed that earlier date to obtain government permission, perhaps a peddler’s license, after he moved to Danzig when he was 16 or slightly older. As official records from a small shtetl would be rare to come by, it would have been easy to prop up his age in Danzig (present day Gdansk).

Sounds plausible. With Polish document in hand he would be forever recorded as having been born in 1911, though in his mind he was a year younger.

Mom and Dad always said he was six years older than she. Sylvia Gerson was born November 11, 1917, in Lodz, Poland. But was their age difference a rounded up six years from five years, 10 months, from a 1912 birth year, or a rounded down six years from 1911?

My siblings and I will never know.

How I Know Winter's Officially Over, The Joy of Spellcheck, Why I Blog

While snow was still falling this morning on eastern Long Island, the City of White Plains officially declared the end of winter. Not by proclamation, mind you, or by adherence to the astronomical calendar which placed the end of winter last Thursday. 

Rather, White Plains put action behind its conviction that no more massive storms will drop snow within our fair city’s borders. A Dept. of Public Works employee came by this morning to remove the red metal pole and flag from atop the fire hydrant in my cul de sac. There’s still an iceberg of slowly melting snow in front of the hydrant, but the city no doubt is confident its trucks will not have to plow any more flakes onto the heap.

Spellcheck Doesn’t Catch Everything: If I have one continuous fault I am willing to own up to, it is my inability to let small writing and speaking mistakes escape my correction. I particularly find “between you and I” to be highly objectionable. Are we not teaching that “between” is a preposition and that the object of a preposition can only be “me,” not “I”?

Not that I am infallible. It is très difficult to edit one’s own copy and speech, though I did have a rule on my magazine that any copy editor who changed even a comma in my manuscripts had to first run it by me for approval, or else. 

I've become a little less pedantic in my dotage, except when it comes to résumés and cover letters I review. But I still occasionally point out an error when I am amused by its presence. Such was the case in an email from Ellie earlier this week suggesting a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art where she works. 

“I just wondered through this contemporary Chinese art show, which closes April 6, and it was so good … maybe you could see this show … It's great how it's installed among the rest of the collection, rather than in a separate gallery,” she wrote.

To which I replied, in part: “Don’t take this the wrong way, that is me trying to correct you all the time, but I was tickled by a mistake you made in your note that actually makes perfect sense. You wrote, you "wondered" through the art show. You probably meant "wandered," but wondered actually conveys a real sense of discovery and joy.”

Spellcheck doesn’t work when the wrong word is spelled correctly. Sometimes, it’s for the best. BTW, Gilda and I will be going to see the exhibit next week. For those who can, take Ellie’s suggestion and see it, as well.

Preserving the Past: It is difficult to gauge how readers will react to any single post. Monday’s story about my father’s reunion in Perth, Australia, with his first love elicited some heartwarming notes of personal stories from their respective families. 

When I started this blog four and a half years ago one of my objectives was to initiate remembrances among readers through the stories of my family’s history. While I wanted to bring you into the Forseter family sphere, I would have been less than fulfilled if I did not make you reflect on your own, individual heritage.

I am not alone in trying to capture history for the next generation. The NY Times recently ran an article titled, “Preserving Family History, One Memory at a Time,” ( http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/business/preserving-family-history-one-memory-at-a-time.html?ref=business). 

As far back as the mid-1980s my brother, sister and I videotaped our parents and their siblings. Within the last year I transferred the tapes onto DVDs, and with the help of our nephew Eric have made copies for each of our children. For Gilda’s family there’s a DVD of their early life in Saratoga Springs, NY. 

Sherlock Holmes is one of my favorite fiction characters. It would not be too much of a stretch to quote his oft-repeated phrase, “Time is of the essence.” If you’re not already doing something to preserve your patrimony, get cracking. 

Social Networking

Highly unusual occurrence on the softball diamond this morning. As the first player, a young man perhaps 30 years my junior, stepped into the batter’s box against me, both teams cheered, “Let’s go Murray.” I quickly ascertained the batter shared my name, an anomaly I hadn’t encountered in close to 30 years of playing in the Sunday Jewish organization softball league. It’s most unusual to meet anyone younger than I with the name Murray. As I’ve written in the past, Murray is a moniker usually confined by script writers to policemen or dogs (http://nosocksneededanymore.blogspot.com/2009/11/whats-in-name.html). 

My last name is even more unusual than my first. People often mistake it for Forester, like the Subaru car, or Old Forester bourbon. But it’s Forseter, an Americanization of Fürsetzer. When we grew up, my brother, sister and I thought the only post-World War II surviving Forseters were our family and that of our father’s brother, Willy. All told, eight of us.

So when a St. Louis-raised colleague remarked he’d gone to school with an Elliot Forseter, I told him it was not possible. No doubt Elliott 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). 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 20 years 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.