Write it down!

This page was last updated in mid 2004. At the time we had been learning about our family history for 10 months. We knew of around 140 family members. By the end of 2006 our family tree stood at over 1000 members and guess what 100's of those are living relatives.

What amazes me is how can so many relatives not know about each other. In one branch Simon Berman a known ancestor arrived in the UK around 1882. We learned about the man, found out about his life found a paper trail of documents that helped tell the story, We traced all his descendants and interviewed every single one. Each interview was written down and used to form questions for he next Interviews finally we started round again asking some of the first family relatives questions based on interviews.

Three separate branch's remembered talk about a nephew called Myer. What was interesting was that each of the three branch's had not had contact for many years. we continued researching Myers family and after building his family tree of nearly 119 family members and finding coincidence after coincidence we located Myers 84 year old youngest sister, who after me presenting my research doubted that there was a link BUT like most families due to war, marriage and many other reasons had lost touch with many of her uncles and cousins. But the coincidences kept mounting up until recently when I was put in contact with someone who had encouraged his grandfather to write down stories about his past and it was because of these stories we were able to discover that Myers grandfather Mark Berman and my Great Great Grandfather Simon Berman were brothers.

We also discovered that their family name before they went to the UK was not Berman but something that sounded like Salkovitz.

By 1893 Simon had got married to a young woman called Katie Berman and already started a family and when his brother Mark joined him from Lithuania. When he married he adopted her family name Berman as Saklovitz was too much of a mouthful. When his brother arrived he too adopted Berman.

This information would NOT be possible to to guess and there were no official documents showing a name change so it was not written down by an old man all those years ago we may never have been able to find this out.