This Project
My quest into my family’s past began with boxes of documents, letters, and photographs from both sides of my family.
Eventually, when I discovered a treasure trove of old photos and documents in Montreal, I decided to focus on my Günsberger ancestors in Vas County, Hungary, the family of my mother and grandmother.
When we moved aunt Lily from Montreal to Toronto, we found boxes of old photos and documents. There was a very old photo album that I had never seen, which must have belonged to my grandmother. These people must have been important to her. Unforunately, I still don’t know who they are.
Armed with genealogy software, scanner, and the assistance of my grandson Aaron, most of the documents and photos were scanned, and “relevant” data was entered.
Years later, as this project took on a life of its own, I realized that what I perceived as “relevant” left out many details.
Several years later, in the fall of 1997, my daughter and I visited Budapest. This was my first return since we left in 1948.
I was able to reconnect with Lily Bolgár (cousin Lily), the daughter of my grandmother’s younger sister, Irén, and my mother’s first cousin. She was, to my knowledge, the last survivor of that generation of Günsberger descendants. We talked about the family, the Holocaust, those who survived, and the many who didn’t. We spent just a few hours together, hours of joy and pain.
I didn’t plan to return for another visit. Yet, as I dug deeper into family history, two additional summer visits followed. Cousin Lily is the source for most of what I know about my Günsberger family.
In what became an unstructured path through her memories, facts and family gossip intermingled. She spoke in Hungarian, while I took notes in English. The pain of the Holocaust memories was evident in her halting speech. I am enormously grateful for her help.
With that additional information, what started as a simple documentary genealogy project expanded into a need to understand the context: the larger social, economic, and political environment in which generations of this Günsberger family lived and died.
I started this website with the period of the occupation in Budapest. This period was, by far, the most challenging one to research and write … because I was there, because it is about my immediate family, the people who raised me, who were the closest to me.
I tried writing in the “objective” academic voice, but it didn’t sound right. I tried writing in other voices, but none of them sounded right. Finally, I submitted: I had to use my own voice if I was to find a way of placing our experiences into the larger context of history.
The next challenge awaits: how can I, how can we help others place their families, their ancestors, into the larger context of history?
With the completion of this first “exploration and learning” phase, I developed some ideas on how we might answer these questions.