I can’t write tonight, so I decided to do something I’ve not done for ages, and research my family tree.
I think I’ve lost one of the bits of paper I scrawled stuff about my great-great grandfather on, which is VERY annoying. Also my lack of maths skills (so I find it hard to work out when people were born) and my inability to pay for any of the big genology sites are weighing me down. But…
I am pretty sure that my great-great grandfather’s name was Levenski, and he was Jewish, and a scribe in the court of the Russian Tsar, Alexander II. After Alexander was assassinated (in a really gruesome way) everything seems to have gone to hell really fast. A pogrom against Jewish people quickly sprung up (since they were blamed for the assassination for…some reason. Well, I suppose anti-semitism’s the actual reason) and loads and loads of Jewish people, including my great-great-grandfather and his family, decided to get out of there as soon as possible. They ended up in Britain (Leeds or Hull, I think? Maybe?) and somewhere down the line my great-grandfather, whose name was Phillip, changed the family surname from Levenski to Phillips, which was my mother’s maiden name. (Also, this made him Phillip Phillips.) He had seven kids including my grandfather, and the rest is um…history?
Also, Phillip Phillips’s wife / my great-grandmother came from a family called Godowski, and she may have been related to this guy, I’m not sure.
The older members of my family then continued to have a really odd relationship with Jewishness as far as know and there are some strings there I am just plain not gonna pull.
Annnnd…that is the story of my mother’s family history, as far as I know it. I really, really I knew more, because while most of the time they lived through was horrible I still kinda…want to know about it. I suppose that’s only natural. (After all, if they hadn’t survived, I wouldn’t be here…)