127 years later: back to their shtetls

A few days ago, I had one of those family roots tour days when we did not find an old family house, a gravestone or any other direct trace of the family. And still, at the end of the day, it felt that we had brought two people back home.

Fania was born in Kamajai (Kamai in Yiddish) in 1885, and Jacob in Anykščiai (Aniksht) in 1879. The two towns are only about a 40-minute drive apart, but they met only after both emigrated to the United States in 1899. They married there and started their family.

127 years later, their great-granddaughters came to Lithuania.

Two sisters from the USA brought their great-grandparents back home. Their faces are blurred to respect their privacy.

We travelled first to Anykščiai and then to Kamajai, looking for the places where Jacob and Fania had been born and spent the first years of their lives.

Unfortunately, very little has been found so far about the family in Lithuania, apart from some traces of Jacob’s father, Israel Osher, in Anykščiai. My guests have been searching for their family history for almost 40 years, and many of the clues they have today still come from the memories of their great-grandmother.

But this does not mean that the search is over. There are still Lithuanian archives and other historical records to explore with the help of professional researchers, and perhaps some more pieces of the family story are still waiting to be found.

Anyway, we walked the streets and tried to imagine where these families could have lived and which prayer houses they might have gone to. We tried to picture what these places looked like then and what life in these small Lithuanian shtetls was like when Fania and Jacob were young.

Kamajai in 1928. Market square with a church and townhouses — Kamajai in 1928 (from here)

And somehow, after almost 127 years, Fania returned to Kamajai and Jacob returned to Anykščiai through their great-granddaughters.

“It was a very, very good, meaningful and interesting day,” my guests told me at the end of our tour.

As I often do after family roots trips, I wished them good luck in continuing their search. A family story is a puzzle that is probably never completely finished.

There is always one more piece to find.