I never knew my paternal grandfather. He was born in 1880 and existed only in black & white or sepia photos and a handful of vague stories, recalled by my father. For a long time the only facts I knew were that he came to America from Russia as a young man, supposedly from Odessa, had several children, by several women (2 before the arranged marriage to my grandmother), he was functionally illiterate, but had once been a successful businessman and salesman, he spoke Russian (probably a Ukrainian dialect), Yiddish and broken English.
The "origin" story, that was related to my father, was that when he was rougly 14 years-old, Harry came home to find his stepmother beating his younger sister and when he intervened, by throwing the stepmother off of the girl, he was told, "Wait until your father gets home!". He apparently didn't stick around for whatever punishment lay in store for him and ran away (leaving his sister behind, to suffer further abuse). Harry also told my father that he had spent time in South Africa (his age at that time is unknown, so presumably he got on trains or a ship at some point, which would've been the only way to travel that far from Russia at that time) and while walking through the jungle, with whomever he was there with, got pelted by monkeys, high up in the trees, tossing down the seeds of the fruit they were enjoying. The only other story from Harry's early life was that he was once riding in a cart pulled by horses, when wolves came out of the surrounding woodlands, spooking the horses, which overturned the cart, so to avoid being attacked, he undid the horses' reins, releasing them to run away, while he hid under the overturned cart until the wolves lost interest and moved on. Both are good stories, but I have NO idea if either are true or they were just exciting, cautionary tales told to entertain my father as a young boy.
All of my life, I have been fascinated by my paternal grandfather and his arranged marriage to my paternal grandmother... I would stare at a particularly fascinating image of them, in what I assume was their wedding picture, taken in the mid 1920's, which hung in a black, oval frame, above my father's dresser... He in a 3-piece suit, his stocky frame balanced with one elbow propped on a high, small table, lined with fringe, looking intensely into the camera and she in a long buttoned coat, her black hair pulled back into braids, with a somewhat shy and demure expression. Who WERE these people? WHERE did they really come from? WHY did they come to America, HOW did they live? WHAT could their DNA, now coursing through MY veins, possibly tell me?
When I was in my 30's, I joined Ancestry.com, started piecing together the puzzle of my family tree, with mysterious figures on BOTH sides of my family and began to uncover a treaure trove of facts, documents and evidence to support my research on the people who I was descended from. It was and is my geneological/forensic anthropology dream come true! Harry Marshall, my paternal grandfather, who made his momentous, incredible life journey, over the course of 74 years, all the way from Russia (Ukraine) to his small grave in the Kishenev section of Waldheim cemetery in Forest Park, Illinois (on the far outskirts of Chicago), where he is buried next to his 3rd wife, my grandmother Eva. The things I managed to uncover made me happy, sad, amazed and some discoveries literally blew my mind. ALL of them are now being committed to memory via this blog and I hope eventually into an actual book.
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