Discovering hidden roots Sherry Landa It all began with a birthday present and a year off work

Discovering Hidden Roots

by Sherry Landa

It all began with a birthday present and a year off work. In early 1999 I had a birthday and received a copy of the CD-ROM, Family Tree Maker. My husband thought this would be a good hobby for me during my sabbatical. At that time we were living abroad and so my father obtained the software and posted it to us. Little did the three of us know what would unfold as a result of that innocent little package.

I grew up, an only child, in a small village 20 miles from London. Everyone knew my mother, who had lived there since she was five.

When I was five, I came home from school and asked what a grandparent was. I had none, so I did not know what they were. My mother told me a lot about her parents, who had died when she was young, and I had many great-aunts and uncles who told me about their branches. However, when I asked about Dad's family, I was told some scant details, and when I pushed for more I was told to leave it, because my father had "had a hard life".

My parents brought me up as a Christian. I was baptised. I married in church. My father was secretary of the parochial church council when I was young. He was a regular church-goer and took communion; I often counted the collection with him on Sundays, after Sunday school.

My father had told me some things about the family over the years, and when I started to compile the family tree he gave me a date for his brother's birth and his parents' approximate age and date of marriage, and said that his father's sister was older than his father, but that his mother's brother was younger than she was. So, I began with the following information.

*Charles Landa, a shopkeeper of Leeds, had two children, Fanny and Dick.
*Fanny was married to Jack.
*Dick left Leeds, and moved to London and married Daisy Gray, and their sons were my father and his brother, Basil.
*I knew my father's and Basil's dates of birth and an approximate date for my grandparents' marriage.
*Dick, Daisy and uncle Basil were all killed in WWII: a bomb fell on Dick and Daisy, and Basil went down on The Hood.
*My father was away at war at the time. He returned to find his family dead and his sister-in-law had cleared the bank accounts, so he could not take up a place at Cambridge.

I began to check on this information. I searched the Internet and learned that The Hood was sunk in 1942, but my father had said that when his mother received the notification that he was missing in action in Crete in the spring of 1941, she had thought she had lost them both. Only when she got the notification that he was a POW did she know that she still had her younger son. The years did not match, she could not have thought she had lost both sons a year before The Hood went down.

I searched the GRO index for war dead and found no one fitting the description of my family. I wrote to London to try to find out if the address where my grandparents lived had been bombed; it had not. I searched the GRO indexes and found a marriage for Fanny Landa, which seemed right, although the groom's name did not match. I also found a few other Landa entries. I found the Landa families on the fiche of the1881 census in Leeds, and they were all born abroad.

By this time I was seriously confused. My father is quite racist and "very Christian" (if you can be both). If his family were "foreign", this seemed odd. Everyone seemed to have Jewish-sounding names, which I mentioned to him, but he reacted by telling me to drop it, I would never find anything, it was all silly. That of course made me want to dig deeper.

So, I dug and dug. I joined the Yorksgen list [1] and someone put me in touch with Murray Freedman. I made trips to the UK for vital records when I could.

Almost exactly two years ago, I made contact with Jackye Sullins in San Diego. She posted to Yorksgen about Leeds Jewry and I replied, and we struck up a friendship. We are now as close as two people can be, considering we have never actually met. We correspond all the time. We bounce ideas off each other. We also share research: I pay for her English items, and she pays for my US ones.

Then in June 1999 things began to come together within the space of a couple of weeks. Anthony Winner mailed me, saying he had Dick Landa on his tree. My certificates arrived from ONS saying that Fanny was married in a synagogue. Murray gave me marriage and burial information from Leeds Jewry databases
[2]. Someone sent me some wills information.

I remember sitting reading the wills late one evening at home. It was one of those all-defining moments, the kind of thing where you remember everything almost in slow motion. I scrolled through names that I did not know. The first name I found was Alice; Alice was Dad's sister-in-law, who had died in 1955, but she was noted as wife of Basil, not widow. Then I found Daisy in
1963, three years after I was born. Then I found uncle Basil in 1993 - I was 33 when he died!

I cannot describe what I felt, except the most fundamental kind of betrayal. I felt that my whole life had been a lie. All I wanted to do was talk to my mother, but she had passed away in 1987. She was on the list of wills too, which I think made it harder. What could I say? What could I do? Why had my father lied to me? Why had he not let me meet my uncle? Why had he pretended? Why? Why? Why?

I wrote to my father, not trusting myself to speak to him rationally. I received a very irate call in reply in which he said a lot of hurtful things, none of which actually helped with my research. We were at an impasse. He was not speaking to me; I was not speaking to him. Luckily, I had a lot of support from my husband, and from friends I had made on the Net, some of whom had found out things about their families which were even more disturbing. I began to redefine my tree, who I was, where I came from, who my family were. I searched Web sites and repositories, got look-ups and professional guidance.

My father, meanwhile, suffered a stroke and I returned to UK. It was a double-edged event; suddenly he was not omnipotent and 'in charge', and he needed me. It also gave me a chance to go to the PRO and find the naturalisations I wanted.

At the same time Anthony Winner put me in touch with uncle Basil's son Clive, my first cousin. We had not known of each other's existence. Something happened between our fathers and neither would talk about the other. Basil had told Clive that he thought my father was in Australia. My cousin and I also met up with a distant relation on our great-grandmother's side. She was most helpful with little stories, although she did not fully seem to understand what it was like not to know things. However, she staunchly refuses to tell us exactly what had happened.

Back in February, Jackye had a problem. She was at what seemed like a dead end with some research concerning a woman who married twice in Leeds, whose first husband's death she had tried unsuccessfully to find. I was trying to help her, writing cheques for death certificates for every Barnet Cohen that ever died. In the end we were in such a mess that I suggested she should mail me all her documents, as possibly something would leap out at me that she had over-looked. She had not looked at some of them for years, so she dug them out, scanned them and e-mailed them to me. I searched them, not seeing anything until the second marriage.

One of the witnesses to the second marriage was a name that looked to me like "C Landa". It was a hand-written extraction and not very legible. I e-mailed her right away and asked about it, and she replied that she thought it said "C Laniola". I asked my husband and he said he could see what she meant. So I faxed ONS and asked them to send me the certificate. It arrived ten days later and the signature was most definitely C Landa. My great-grandfather's shop was in the same street as the bride was living. She was a tailoress, he a draper. I was so pleased, so thrilled and so spooked. What on earth must the chances be of that happening? An ancestor witnesses a marriage in 1890 and 111 years later two of the descendants of the witness and the bride are chatting to each other on the Internet!

Amazingly, this is not the end of the story. Last November Dad turned 80 and I made him a book of the tree with photos of gravestones and photos of him he did not know I had. In the book his father's brother, Myer, is mentioned. However, Dad never reacted to this or to the book, in general. He just thanked me, said it was nice and would I put it in a safe place. Then the breakthrough came.

I decided to tell my Dad about Charles Landa turning up as a marriage witness in Jackye's marriage. He said it was a little bit strange, to say the least, and we chatted about marriage witnesses in general. I was telling him about something once posted on JewishGen about the witnesses sometimes being different on the religious copy from those on the civil copy and why, and I was just chatting about synagogues and churches. Then he suddenly said that after his grandfather died his father came to London to be with his uncle (his father's brother). He had never admitted before that his father had a brother! From there, we have been able to talk about the family and about some of the events and motivations. My father still will not admit to being brought up as a Jew, but we have made some progress. There has been no shouting or hurtful things being flung into the conversation or outright bans on speaking about it, as there were in the past.

Over the last 18 months we have reached a peace. By biding my time and picking my moments, and above all not letting him know how hurt I felt, nor seeking revenge, we have come to some sort of understanding. I would say our relationship is the best it has ever been. I do not put up with his bullying any more and he knows it. He knows I know about the family and he has failed to stop me researching more.

I still do not know if my mother knew my father was born Jewish and brought up in an Orthodox Jewish household.

The Internet is a powerful tool. When I joined Yorksgen over two years ago a chain of events was set in motion. Mine is not a story of a tree back to Adam, using the IGI; mine is the story of how a whole life can change and how the Internet can help you, not just to access records, but possibly far more importantly to access people. A network of help and support is there for you, at your fingertips. You can find support in whatever way you need it, professional researchers, free look-ups, advice, databases, emotional support or just a chat.

Mine is also a story of how information can mislead. You should not always believe what you are told, or what a certificate says. You should question everything and take nothing for granted. I received a mail last week which, in part, said "From the 7th generation down to the bottom, these have come from census records, and word of mouth from family members, so all these are OK." I did not dispute it, but if it was a part of my tree, I would. I still have a lot to learn about my family, but now I do at least have a tree which bears some relationship to the truth, whatever that is. I have ancestors of whom I can be proud.

Winner of the Ronny Brickman Award for the most interesting article published by a member in the Society's journal SHEMOT during 2001

This article can be seen, in its entirety, in the June 2001 issue of Shemot (Volume 9,2). It runs from page 41 to page 44, and includes two certificates and two tree diagrams, the 1881 census entry mentioned and footnotes. If you would like to join JGSGB and receive Shemot as part of your annual subscription, please me and I will put you in contact with the membership secretary.