This Project
My quest into my family’s past began with boxes of documents and photographs.
There was my father’s stack of documents, letters, and photos documenting him, his parents, his emigration and his new life in Canada.
When we moved aunt Lily from Montreal to Toronto, we found more photos and documents. There was also 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, but who were they?
Boxes of materiel in need of organization. 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 I started to work on this project, I realized that what I perceived as “relevant” left out many of the details I now needed.
In the fall of 1997, my daughter and II visited Budapest for the first time since I left in 1948. I reconnected with Lily Bolgár (cousin Lily), the daughter of my grandmother’s younger sister, Irén, and my mother’s first cousin.
Cousin Lily 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 to Hungary.
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 environment in which my Günsberger family lived and died.
I tackled the period of the occupation in Budapest last. It became 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: it had to be my voice. I had 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?