I’m writing and reminiscing about the day after my brother’s 11th Yahrzeit. It was the day after Purim. Be happy because it’s Adar? So that haunted and taunted me. I think I will be happy because of his life, not his end, a wonderful and full life. The sadness because it was relatively short and felt unfair, but nobody knows what is fair and what you’re going to get. So maybe be happy anyway? My brother was gone. My parents were gone. I was alone, divorced with no children. I had wonderful friends, almost no living family left, but I wanted to know about my family’s origin almost forever.
In June 2014 a group of people met, many or most for the first time in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was a weekend of events culminating in a luncheon of 80 people Sunday at the Jewish Healthcare Center. These were my relatives, the descendants of my maternal grandfather’s family. The quest had been percolating in some of our minds but seriously got started around 2012-2013 when the internet made it all possible.
At a family dinner I showed my latest discoveries to my brother and he said not unkindly that’s nice but I’m not interested. I didn’t get it, but I printed out materials for my nephew, my brother’s son, whose wife wanted to know where our people had come from and forged ahead. The Adlers (also Udlers) originated in the Ukraine and the maternal side Lithuania and “somewhere in Russia.”
I remember asking my nephew if he had ever heard of the Pale of Settlement. That was the “somewhere in Russia.”
He had not.
My generation had grown up learning that these were the borders between Russia and the rest of Europe because the Jews had been kicked out of the interior of Russia by Catherine the Great to the borders. A lot of Jewish genealogy and history was either not being taught or forgotten and disappearing fast and the memories going with them.
I often questioned myself, why did I care? Why did I have a burning desire to know that just kept burning brighter over time? Because we were all getting older and I knew time was slipping away and for me the immediate family that was gone, and how ultimately did I get a lot of the information? Yes, the internet, but maybe even more importantly or as important, people, actual relatives.
I had tried years earlier to get information, starting during a trip to Ellis Island. A perusal of their databases yielded nothing. My dad championed my interest and it was also his interest. He drew up computer generated programs on his family and on mom’s, and unearthed new information. I think the spark for me goes back further than that in the form of letters in blue airmail envelopes in the 1950s that arrived from dad’s uncle in Israel.
So as I sit here in 2025 there are still a lot of blanks in all the branches of my family, that I try to fill in every few years, but with my grandfather’s family, the ones that met in Worcester, Massachusetts in 2014 we/I hit the jackpot.
We had the internet, genealogical research was booming and I had JewishGen.org and Ancestry.com. There were other sites, but these were the main ones, and particularly JewishGen.org, but a little bit before I get to that, Ancestry.com, the comprehensive all encompassing behemoth of genealogy search engines.
Why we were even able to hit the jackpot was also due to a lucky name. I say lucky because my grandfather had a somewhat unusual last name — Brunell. Brunell was not the original name as it turned out. The original name was Brumel or Brummel (pronounced like hum).
As I started on my internet search, for starters I was alone because my family of origin and immediate ancestors were mostly gone as far as I knew. There was no one to get answers from, or so I thought. I had not grown up in Massachusetts, where both of my parents and their parents had lived, but Ancestry showed me something else.
My great grandfather and eight siblings had emigrated to America around the turn of the 20th century from Lithuania. I knew about the Lithuania origin, but eight people?
This was stunning news to me, unbelievably exciting, and there was more to come, but why didn’t I know this? Why had I not heard this? My parents never mentioned it.
An uncomplicated answer, a surmise–mom’s family was very close to my grandmother’s family, but not my grandfather’s and my mother lived a lot of her childhood in Western Massachusetts with her maternal relatives. I didn’t grow up in Western Massachusetts or Worcester, where the family in America was living. I had very little contact with relatives.
My grandfather, Benjamin Brunell, was the oldest of seven. He and the other siblings were all born in America, but that’s almost all I knew. I had met some of them once or twice. There was one exception to the Brunell ancestry story and the nine siblings who came to America from Lithuania.
My mother once made an offhand comment about her awful Uncle Julius who told her when she wasn’t already engaged at 16 years old. What? You’re going to be an old maid, he said. She hated that. That’s it! He was the youngest of the nine. An irony about Uncle Julius will pop up later. Before I go further, my great grandfather was Ruben. He died when I was about a year old, I was told.
So I was able to enter the Brunell information in Ancestry and I got nine names and the order in which they came to America. I’m not remembering everything in exact order and my records and notes are buried somewhere, but not on computer!
So I had these nine names of people I had never heard of except for Ruben. Of course I assumed that they had descendants.
Skip to JewishGen.org.
In 2012-2013 JewishGen.org was completely free with lots of related sites totally free, not so much now, and a wealth of information. Names and pictures of villages. So we were told and/or thought that the Brunells came from Ivya or Ivye and environs outside of Vilna and there were loads of pictures of old time Ivya and its Jewish people. Later, I found out that it was much more than Ivya, but yes, close to Vilna. How did I even know about Ivya? That’s to come.
First was checking names and cemetery records for Brunells in or near Worcester, Massachusetts in two cemeteries. Again, lucky, because if you were to check Boston, you would have to sift through a lot more and forget New York. I knew the immediate names now, but I was looking for their parents’ names, Hebrew and English, where they were born, dates.
Much later on, I found another rich site called Find a Grave, now with photographed gravesites and stones. So now I can find names of two- and three-times great grandparents on my mother’s mother’s side as well and the grave of a formerly unknown to me baby great aunt. A macabre fact and this there are records of also — childhood and childbirth deaths, death from tuberculosis, pneumonia and other currently preventable or treatable diseases.
In 2012-2013 one day I started sifting through other people’s family trees on JewishGen, I think just to get a feel for it, not sure why, but another really lucky thing happened which seriously started bringing some answers.
I looked at a woman’s family tree with hundreds of names. In the middle of her family tree one name stood out — Brunell. I emailed her. She lived in Chicago. She had reached a dead end a long time before with her family because she had names like Goldberg and Cohen.
She didn’t think there was a connection to my Brunells on her tree, but I told her my story and she decided to do some digging. Within a day or two she told me she had located somebody whom she thought was a relative of mine and lived in California.
She thought it might be a match because I had told her my great great grandfather was Avigdor Brunell from Lithuania and that person had been searching for details regarding an ancestor with this name with brothers for quite a while. She also had a phone number. She called and spoke to them.
I deliberated for a day and then I called. This was it. This was a Brunell descendent, Victor Brunell. I was the descendent from the second sibling, a brother, Ruben, and he was a descendent from the third sibling, Abraham, and in fact he was originally from Worcester and had a thick Massachusetts accent. He was a wealth of information. He was at least ten years older than me so he had met and known people and about people, and in fact told me there had been a reunion in Worcester in the 1990s.
He told me there were a lot of Victors because they had been named for Avigdor. Victor, also called Billy, mailed me in the mail tons of photocopied documents, ship records, family trees, I think some photographs.
Wow! We were off and running.
I never met him unfortunately, and truthfully I don’t know if he’s still alive. I didn’t meet him at the reunion because his wife had died back home while he was en route so he never made it to the reunion. So bizarre and tragic. I called him shortly after, and he told me he was so lonely he wanted to remarry right away. I advised him to hold off on that. I did meet his sister. She died about a year after the reunion, but Victor also lived near Norman Brunell in California and Norman was from Worcester but had lived for years in California. He is also a descendent of my great grandfather. I had met Norman one time decades earlier. We did get in touch and he also shared information and did some of the research.
One of the most important findings in what Victor sent me was a family tree with a few hundred names. As I looked down the list, I spotted what looked like Israelis. This also figured into our reunion.
Victor explained several things to me in addition to what I already mentioned.
He said the other reason I never found immigrant records was that people came through different ports to America and sometimes they changed their names or spellings or the names were spelled for them.
So in fact my great grandfather was listed as Bruniel and coming through Baltimore. A mutual cousin, Amy, from Worcester and New Hampshire was the main 2014 reunion organizer and did further research on the maternal family — Brunells by marriage — harder to do, but found out that my great grandparents who came over on the ship together to Baltimore went to Western PA so he could work in the coal mines because she had a sister who lived there. Amy later located a granddaughter of that sister and met her. So the story has many tentacles.
How did my great grandfather wind up in Massachusetts then?
Partly because he had asthma and had to stop with the coal mines. I know this very well. My grandfather and my brother had severe asthma. Also, we were told that Worcester had a large thriving immigrant Jewish population with lots of synagogues and it was known even in Europe as a desirable place for Jews to settle in America, and possibly there were relatives already there. That part of the story is murky, but in fact if you look at the Worcester directory or several of them from the late 1800s — forerunners of later telephone books — you will see listings. During the reunion we visited Water Street, the old Jewish section.
Somehow between Victor in California and Norm also in California and Amy in New Hampshire, we started to piece things together and decide that we should have a reunion. Amy made the arrangements.
Initially about six of us met on a group phone call and made the decision. One of them was the Israeli cousin on the family tree list. She was originally from Miami and had immigrated to Israel when she was 18 — she was almost my exact age — and married an Israeli that she met on a summer youth group trip. Anyway, she was coming to the reunion by herself and I told her right away she must come back to New Jersey with me and stay for a visit and she agreed and did.
I told myself ahead of time, don’t be disappointed, don’t expect to make friends. At the most it should be a useful and interesting experience about my roots, but I did make a friend for life — Hinda, who lives in Israel. By the way, Hinda’s grandfather was Julius Brunell. Several Brunells lived in Florida during my lifetime and Hinda’s, and I didn’t know that either. Hinda had that information.
Hinda is a photography nut and besides taking pictures she is the family history photo keeper, has posted on the internet and sent many many pictures. I never knew what my great grandparents looked like, but now I do. And others! Hinda even had videos of her parents’ wedding in the 1940s showing many ancestors. Things like that.
Hinda has nine adult children and at least 30 grandchildren, most in Israel, some fighting or were until the ceasefire in this terrible war. Her kibbutz, Ein HaNatziv, is inside the modern state ‘s original borders near Tiberias and Beit She’an, the archeological site.
This is a woman who when I met her was full of life and happy go lucky and now is completely changed. I stay in touch. I offer support. I sometimes don’t know what to say.
We went to the reunion. Most of it was not a bonding experience for me. It was rather strange, even awkward, meeting and being with people I had nothing in common with but blood, but I was grateful because I was there for a reason, an answer to a question that I asked myself in the beginning of this story.
What did I want from this? Why?
As Amy had arranged each — I think nine people representing the nine siblings — presented, it all came together. And it wasn’t just those nine ancestors. There were siblings of those ancestors and their parents’ siblings, on and on. This was real. I was getting the chills.
The reunion was over, but later that month, I reconnected on JewishGen.Org and hit another jackpot on the family tree.
There was and is a site called Litvaksig.org. It was free at the time. Two different times I logged on separately and found translated census records, first going back to the mid 1800s in Lithuania and then further back into the mid 1700s!
All the names, all Brumels, what shtetls they lived in, how they were related to each other, all there!
So there were Jews there that long and really even before then. There is some speculation the original Brunells got there as a lot of the Jews post the Spanish inquisition through Germany, but I don’t know.
The Brunell/Bruml pictures of my great great grandfather and family show a dark skinned family, even taking into account the black and white photography, but most pictures of Lithuanian Jews that I’ve seen show light skinned people. Circumstantial evidence?
Norm Brunell did a DNA test and claimed that we were also related to Jewish Brunells in Czechoslovakia. I found some listings on the internet, but could not figure out how they connect to us. I also made a bizarre find on the internet of a tax record from Spain from the 1200s with the name Brunell on it. All the people listed on that record were Jews. More circumstance?
Some other connections — I can’t begin to share it all here. A cousin from Vancouver Island, Canada, Brenda, who is not Jewish, and has a fascinating story.
Her grandfather was Philip and we don’t know much about him – and some of this might not even be completely true, that he might have been an orphan in the old country and adopted, but he came to America with the other siblings, and somehow had a falling out with my great grandfather and left Worcester and wound up in Canada!
He moved to a remote town in British Columbia, made a fortune in logging, bought a hotel, married his employee, and they had a daughter — my new-found cousin from the reunion.
He became mayor of his town, converted to the Anglican Church, didn’t tell anyone he was originally Jewish, and he was an alderman. He wrote a book which she brought. They eventually moved to Vancouver. Yes, life is strange. She said he reconnected with his family when he was able to drive to the U.S. East Coast even during the 40s when gas was rationed.
Another more recent strange fascinating story. I should reconfirm with Amy. She somehow found out that our mutual great grandmother — Anna, maiden name Levine — might have been an orphan in the old country and might have a descendent that’s our relative by the name of Ian Levine in London. She thought that some facts line up. I checked him on Facebook for about a year before I decided to contact him, and he said it could be. He found my information interesting.
He was an avid researcher of both of his parents’ ancestry from Lithuania and Latvia, but more of his mother’s side, and has connections he says with about 2000 relatives. If I had known, when I had traveled to London, I could have arranged to look him up back when. He’s a few years younger than me, and is in a wheelchair and paralyzed from a stroke since I don’t known when. He’s a former record producer and owned a disco, his father owned a nightclub, and he was into the British equivalent of the “Motown Sound,” but also was and still is a “Doctor Who” aficionado.
He’s on Facebook as I said, a lot, and when he’s not railing against the antisemitic marches in London and the people who have dropped his friendship because he’s Jewish and a Zionist, he is restructuring and finding old footage of “Doctor Who” episodes. He might also have been a producer of “Dr. Who” as well.
He has lists and a family tree of Levines going back to the 1300s. I have it all on computer and printouts!
Wow! How was this possible? How did he get the information? I would have to sit down and talk with him to find out, but too late for me. It’s a lot, too much.
What do I feel now?
I have periods of time I think about all this and find it amazing. Sometimes I feel frustrated about what I don’t know and might never know, about all branches of my family. I’ve found out more and some I’ll never have answers to, but I have proof that I belong to a Jewish family that goes back hundreds of years and beyond.
It’s identity. It’s memory.
It’s not fame or fortune or a competition, but a quiet awe and satisfaction. For Jews honoring the memory of ancestors, not forgetting, this is it.
What I think finally is that after reading so much and talking with other people about their family histories, I see similar patterns.
Why did they come?
I just had this talk with my neighbor whose parents came from Poland in the 1920s. I asked him. They didn’t have a life. They couldn’t have the professions they wanted or practice their religion safely. They lived in fear all the time. What do you think, he said? There was no life there. It was a terrible place.
My ancestors: You can surmise in a chilling way what must have happened. Pogroms, poverty, fear, lack of opportunity, World War II and the Nazis, a new chance, any chance across continents and on ships to America.
I read a book about a year ago and the title and author escapes me — it could have been my family but it was not.
This woman spent ten years researching her family and specifically one of that family who was an actress in Lithuania. There was a record of what happened. People had visited them before World War II. She was chased and caught by the Nazis and gunned down over an open pit in a forest but she fought back.
I have a picture of my great great grandfather who died in 1933 in Lithuania with his second wife and second family. That wife died in 1941. The Nazis?
Her name was Hinda. My cousin in Israel is named for her. What were these young adults’ names? It haunts me. I asked Victor. His answer was probably the Holocaust.
I can’t pay someone to go to Lithuania and try to research records, which one can do.
Where do I come from? What are my roots?
I always want to know more, more, more, but the Jewish story has threads and tentacles that belong to all of us.
We are all connected.
My brother’s story is added to that and we will keep telling it and remembering it.
A.B. Liberal Arts, Temple University 1974.
ME.D. Psychoeducational Processes, Temple University, 1982.
My “hodgepodge” background includes English and journalism, nurses’ training, medical transcription, psychology and group dynamics, and a stint in the world of buying and selling antiques and collectibles with an emphasis on rare books. I also spent several years researching my Jewish ancestry and informally advising others in the “how-to’s.” I lived in Israel from 1982 to 1983.
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