In The Beginning...trying to get blood out of a turnip!

Reeves, Shirlye and Bertha, circa 1927

Sometime around 1989 (the coincidence of the year, around the time we moved to Charleston, SC, will become clear later) I had a sudden yearning to know more about my family history. I had always been interested in past generations, and, in fact, keeping track of what, I now know, was the bare tip of the family tree came very easily to me. I could always draw family trees in my head, even as a youngster understanding the whole "third cousin, twice removed" generational mapping code. But now I wanted more. I wanted to know how they lived, where they came from and who their parents and great-great-great grandparents were. I wanted to understand what it felt like to elope with someone your parents mightily disapproved of, to be cut off by your family for marrying out of the faith, to decide when the time was right to uproot your entire family after hundreds of years in one part of the world and move them half-way around the world to a land of new, if as yet unknown, opportunities.

Bertha and Reeves, circa 1950

I made up my mind to track down some answers!  The first thing I did was take my then 85-year-old maternal grandmother, Bertha Goldsmith Sherrard, out to breakfast, equipped with a tiny voice-activated tape recorder and a list of questions about her own early life. Every time I mentioned to her that I wanted to know more about her life as a child, or her decision to elope with my grandfather, Sullie Reeves Sherrard, which held great romantic fascination for me, or what it was like to live in the era of flappers and speakeasies, all she would say was "It was a long time ago," or "That's not important anymore." So when I took the recorder out of my purse and tried to surreptitiously slip it behind the salt and pepper shakers on the tiny table at Le Peep, Grandma immediately became suspicious. "What is that? If that's a tape recorder, you can just put that thing away right now! I'm not talking into any tape recorder!" she fairly screeched. For someone who rarely uttered more than six words in a row, always in an almost inaudible tone, this was quite a diatribe! I tried in vain to cajole her into answering just a few questions, telling her how important it was to me to try to understand where we all came from and how my ancestors lived. Her only response was to clam up good and tight! There had never been any doubt where the stubborn streak in my mother's family came from!

Grandpa Sullie Reeves Sherrard and Janice, circa 1950

Of course, I asked my mother what she knew, but she wasn't terribly helpful. After all, she didn't live through it and everything she "knew" was hearsay...really gossip...from her aunts, my grandmother's sisters, Selma and Roslyn Goldsmith, and the snippets that would creep out from time to time when Mama was growing up.  As it turns out, much of what Mama "knew" is not borne out by research, but I must say it made for some interesting stories!  More about those later!

A couple of years later, after settling into our new home in Charleston, my parents and grandmother came to visit us.  I had been talking with a congregant about his new video camera (he was our first acquaintance to own one) and it came to me that perhaps this was a way to record some genealogical information and stories from my parents, Sol and Shirlye Maurine Sherrard Wald, as well as from Grandma Bertha.  My idea was that since my husband, Edward Marc Friedman, had been Grandma's rabbi before he married her granddaughter (me!), she would have a much harder time refusing to talk with him about her past.  Also, with my parents there, encouraging her and helping to fill in the blanks--and sharing their own stories--she might not be as intimidated by the equipment I would be wielding...admittedly much more imposing than my pocket recorder!


So, we borrowed the video camera and sat the three Elders down on the couch in our den, with Ed ensconced on the love seat in Interviewer Mode.  I was right, as it turned out, that Grandma would open up to her former rabbi, and, in fact, we now have about six hours of interviews with Grandma, Daddy and Mama.  Priceless, especially since Grandma and Mama are no longer with us.

Panda, Janice, Reeves and Dave, circa 1953

To come: Fast Forward to 2011