Eva Hoffman’s Daring Arrival

Crista Cowan 0:00

Picture a 15-year-old Jewish girl arriving in America alone in the 1880s. English quickly becomes the sixth language she speaks. She grows up to lead street marches for working mothers, run for Massachusetts State Treasurer, and organize the famous Boston Meat Wars Boycott when food prices spike beyond belief. Her name was Eva Hoffman. Her gentle photographer husband was constantly bailing her out of jail, but her fierce love for her community changed Boston forever. My guest today is Eva's great-granddaughter Suzanne, and the moment she started pulling back the layers on Eva's courageous life, everything about her own family story suddenly fell into place. Have you ever wondered if that fiery streak inside of you was passed down from an ancestor you never met? Think about it and enjoy my conversation with Suzanne Hoffman. Hi, I'm Crista Cowan, and this is the podcast where telling your family stories can help create a deeply connected family. Welcome to Stories That Live In Us. Well,

A School Project Sparks Research

Crista Cowan 1:14

Suzanne, we're so excited to have this conversation with you. You and I have known each other for a few years. Um, but this is the first time that I think we've ever sat down and really had a conversation about family history. So tell me, how did you get started in family history?

Suzanne Hoffman 1:27

Uh the same way a lot of people got started. It's my daughter had a high school, a junior high school project. Okay. So in grade six and grade eight, the Illinois State History Fair, and they have to participate. And she and a third cousin of hers were going, oh gosh, what are we gonna do? And oh wait, wait, wait. Did she know this person was a third cousin at the time? At the time. She didn't know if this was her third cousin because um the family is a little bit illustrious in southern Illinois. Okay. Not me. I'm from Boston, Massachusetts, but this is my husband's family. Okay. So they were both doing it, one in Springfield, Illinois, and the other one in Chicago. And um my husband's cousin just said, Do it on Peter Cartwright. And we all looked at him and said, Who the hell is Peter Cartwright? I mean, Peter Cartwright is a known quantity in Sangamon County, Illinois. Okay. He was uh the first Methodist preacher, circuit rider, and uh friend of Abraham Lincoln's and saved Illinois from becoming a slave state. Okay. So there's some notoriety there, and it was the perfect person to basically uh eulogize in a presentation that the kids had to do.

Crista Cowan 2:35

And how is he related to your daughter?

Suzanne Hoffman 2:37

He is her fourth great grandfather. Okay. And unfortunately, she was all excited about the project, but who do you think had to do the history of Peter Cartwright? Um, so I had already started looking at ancestry uh census records, which were available on CD at that point in time. What year was this? Oh, probably 1996, 97, somewhere in there. And I went through them and I could pull up Peter Cartwright and what story came to mind when you heard today's father, who looked like he had participated in the Revolutionary War. Okay. So at that point in time I said, ooh, DAR as well. Okay, now we're really cooking with gas. So she did um the I don't remember what the thematic content was supposed to be in sixth grade. I do know in eighth grade when she redid the project that it had to be something of significance in the history of Illinois. And slavery was the perfect match between these two. And she went all the way on to um that she won the state level and went on to the national competition doing that.

Crista Cowan 3:46

And by she, you mean you.

Suzanne Hoffman 3:48

Yeah, and I was hooked. So with my husband's family, with Cartwright and Smith, I was able to get back into the 14th century. Even with Smith. Well, okay. Smith, we haven't quite cleared out of Cape May, New Jersey in in the uh early uh um 18th century. But um, Cartwright, we got pretty far back. And I in my next visit to London, I went to the Society of Genealogists in their basement, and lo and behold, they had an 1830 legacy roll that was 12 feet long. It took me five minutes to find five errors and realized, oh, this isn't his Cartwright family. Uh, but I have I kiddingly say, and I still love my indecipherable and undocumented and poorly researched Lithuanian and Belarusian family, which is my side of the family, uh, but the um English and um there's a little bit of Dutch in there as well. Uh I've got pretty well down.

Crista Cowan 4:47

And the Dutch from New Jersey, maybe?

Suzanne Hoffman 4:49

Um no, the Dutch was actually from um New Zealand. Oh, oh okay. Like all over the place. Yeah. Um, what was your career in? Oh, my career is actually I am a statistician by background, but I'm actually a business intelligence analyst. Okay. So I was in sales and marketing for a variety of startups in what's known as um analytics.

Crista Cowan 5:15

Okay. That that doesn't surprise me. I think I knew a little bit of that, but it's always interesting to me to hear what people do for a career and then when and where they're drawn into family history. I think there's a lot of parallels sometimes to the work we do with you know some of the stuff you have done in your career.

Suzanne Hoffman 5:30

Yeah, it it definitely ties into the analytics piece of it. Would someone have pinned me as a researcher or somebody who wrote wonderful and English composition? No.

Growing Up With Few Family Stories

Crista Cowan 5:43

Fair. So tell me what you knew growing up about your own family.

Suzanne Hoffman 5:48

So almost very little. It's it's interesting that I'm 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, so there's not a hell of a lot of variation in who I am or what I stand for. But I knew three of my four grandparents. Okay. Uh, my father's father died um when he was 46. So even when my father was um, you know, relatively young. But I did not know any of my great-grandparents. So it was difficult for me as the youngest child of really getting any more insight into what happened with our family. Everybody in my family was already in the United States by the mid-1880s.

Crista Cowan 6:29

Okay.

Suzanne Hoffman 6:29

So I don't have any of the recent um migration from Europe and and um the eastern um countries. But it was interesting. My grandfather was a conservative Jew in Boston. Everybody else was like, okay, what holiday is this? So it was there wasn't a lot of depth from a cultural or an ethnic perspective or religious perspective. We just knew what we were and it settled in the community. My dad was a pediatrician, so almost every single kid in my hometown knew my knew our family and knew my dad because he was their doctor.

Crista Cowan 7:06

Yeah. Okay. And did the family like, were they a storytelling family, or was there any curiosity around any of that ever?

Suzanne Hoffman 7:15

I I think that on my father's side of the family, there was some notoriety.

Crista Cowan 7:21

Okay.

Suzanne Hoffman 7:21

I've got a uh a great-grandmother who was what I would call a rabble rouser today. Um, if there was a march, she was at the head of the march. Okay. If there was a cause to be sanctioned, she was right there in line. Uh when she came over, and and she was the first immigrant in the family. She came over as a 15-year-old. By herself? By herself. What was her name? Her name was Eva Bucksbaum. Okay. And um, she came into New York and met Lewis Hoffman, who also came over very young, like 16 or 17. And somehow the two of them hooked up, but I was able to find that they had a religious marriage and then they had a civil service as well. So I found the two marriage records. So I knew that they were married in New York. I know that my great-grandfather died um in Boston, but had been born in New York. So I did find all that from early New York records, but I didn't know anything about them, with one exception.

The Goffman Photography Legacy

Suzanne Hoffman 8:19

We have thousands of images, thousands of pictures taken by Goffman Studios that started sometime in the 1860s. In is that in New Yorker Barnes? Eastern Europe. Oh, what? Lithuania. Okay. And then Belarus. So there was an article that was actually online that talked about photography studios in Gomo, Belarus. And the Goffman Studios is listed as the second largest studio in Gormel in um 1920. So if you think about it, my family's already been in the United States but for 40 years at that point in time. That was my great-grandfather's brother, who was still holding the tradition. And you said those pictures date back to the 1860s. 1860s. I've got a picture of my great-grandaunt behind the lens of a camera when she was about 17 that was probably taken 1866, 1865. Interesting. Somewhere in there.

Crista Cowan 9:23

And isn't that the part of the world where like a lot of the early um motion picture cameramen came from? Exactly.

Suzanne Hoffman 9:29

So there was a tradition of you'd see people styled in there in the um uh Russian metrical records in their listing occupation. Um, these were colorists, these were painters, these were people who understood um how to image in colors, and they became photographers, and they were itinerant photographers because the records that have passports, in internal passports, to Lithuania, you see the family come up every two years getting passports so that they could go around and take images. Explain an itinerant photographer. Well, I think it's yeah, it is sort of an interesting um, you know, image. It's like, what do you do? You're going around carrying photography equipment and you're going around Which was not small. No, no, I mean these are large tripods with a box camera on top. Um, some of the original pictures we have are tin types. Uh most of them are carte de visites, which are the the um postcard size um cardboard images. And uh people who are leaving the country wanted to have pictures as memorials. So they they took pictures and handed them out to their family members, um, which was the brilliant idea that my great-grandfather had. He took his photography equipment with him to show that he would not be a likely public charge and be um you know stopped from getting into the United States, and would take pictures of people in the streets in New York and offer them for sale. There's pictures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in the West Um West End Museum in Boston, all with the um tagline and and in this beautiful embossed um uh background for the images that they took. Uh, there are thousands of pictures. The problem is we don't know who many of them are. They're not of our subjects are who the subjects are, but you can recognize them even if we didn't have the embossment in the in the front of the card. You could tell by the backdrop, by the seats, by the clothing that they had people wear. Because they had a whole costume. Um, the chair, actually, that was in my um great-grandfather's studio, or one of his studios, um, is actually still in existence and it somehow got shipped to California for another one of the siblings' uh children. Um but it's really fascinating to see in pictures from the late um 19th century, how photography changed, how people's impression of what they wanted to have available to their future families um in as memorials, what images they wanted. So you've got a lot of pictures, you've got um men playing cards, you've got um uh uh children riding bicycles or or with their bicycles. Actually, they're not moving. Um we do have some of the early, very, very early photography that was video um recordings or motion picture recordings from the 1920s that they also took. But they wound up with the the studio Aaron Goffman. My last name is Hoffman, but there's no H in the Russian alphabet. Okay. So it winds up being a G or a K or an X as the first part of the letters. It's not like one of those like guttural, it's it's a uh guttural G. So it was Goffman and it's written as G-O-F-M-A-N in uh Belarus. And Aaron was the inherited the big studio that was there. And I virtually know nothing of his family. And here this is my great-grandfather's brother. And it's your surname. Yeah, yeah, it's my surname. And then when Lewis came over, the interesting thing about Lewis is I almost think that they were doing a um um uh uh uh a stopping ground for people. In Boston, similar to New York, they had tenements. And the tenements became the first place that a new ethnicity would come into and and stop and sort of gather themselves and understand, learn the language, learn the customs, and move on. And that was the West End of Boston uh when they came in. So my uh great-grandfather set up the photography studio in the heart of the West End. And uh he was uh holding a um uh almost uh an open door policy because you see all these people come over and they come off the manifest and they say they're photographers, they're apprentice photographers, and they come and they live with my grandfather for two or three years, and then they move on. And that's in fact and were they moving on to other professions or were they training and apprenticing? So here's Eva Hoffman, who had um her parents had died when she was young, and she went to live with her mother's sister's family, which was the Rice family. And we watch all seven of the Rice kids come over over the score about 10 years period, um, and they either went on to be lawyers or insurance or in the photography business. A couple of them stayed with my great-grandfather and opened additional studios in the Boston metropolitan area. I have no idea why they chose Boston. They came into New York and then somehow magically moved to Boston. Now, we have a letter that was written by my, let's see if I put this right, my grandfather's sister, who she had interviewed her parents. So it was on, you know, yellow lined paper, and we have the original copy, but it it's one generation removed from the original source. So we're not, you know, it said they came from Radzvilliscus. Well, Radzaville, Count Radzaville, owned a tremendous amount of land in you know, eastern Lithuania and Belarus. We have no idea where where the town really was. We sort of think we do, but um and she said, you know, I went to live with the rice family. So that was the tie to the rice family. I stupid things you learn. I, you know, I uh later I in well, actually within the past 10 years, I tripped over someone and said, Oh, you're my second cousin. She goes, Yeah. I said, Do you know anything about the rice family? She goes, Yeah, one of them lived here in Needham, where you live. That like, what? So different people in your family have different um viewpoints into your family. And so you absolutely have to talk to everybody in your family. I said, to this day, if I haven't paid for someone's DNA kit, they haven't done DNA, which irritates me to no end. I'm like the family historian. Um, but because of that, I've been interested enough to call people, to, to reach out to people who I do share DNA with and say, what do you know about the Hoffman family or the Hoffman Studios or the Rices or anybody like that? And Eva Hoffman keeps cropping up as being um an interesting focal point. Um not

Eva’s Activism And Six Languages

Suzanne Hoffman 16:24

only was she a rabble rouser and and the head of all these marches, there was a particular time in history, both New York and Boston, which tended to parallel each other in history. And I I keep telling people, I said, you can't have history without people. So you reached the root of the problem. What who are the people who were involved, either at the core of the dissension or the people who were trying to change history? And my grandmother evidently was part of a network, it was a mother's network, is what it was called. And it started in New York and went to Boston. And they had trouble because they were um in the midst of a small downturn. And one of the things that was changing was the cost of living, the cost of food, specifically the cost of meat. Because remember, most of these Jews that were coming over from Eastern Europe needed kosher food. Right. And the process of making something kosher adds to the cost of making it available.

Crista Cowan 17:21

And how many children did Eva have?

Suzanne Hoffman 17:23

Two boys and two girls. Okay. Yeah.

Crista Cowan 17:24

So her husband's running a photography studio, but he's also apparently sounds like running a little bit of a charity.

Suzanne Hoffman 17:30

Yeah. And she's raising four children and trying to and she's being written up all over the place because she spoke six languages. Oh, wow. This is a woman that it came over it as a 15-year-old. I still have never found her documentation on her entrance into the United States. And she wound up getting um going through naturalization. She inherited it because of her husband, so she never had to actually go through the process. Um, I do have one of the original naturalization little booklets that they give you to um uh study. Oh, yeah. Um, and so that she had that. But she was, by the time um she was getting involved in some of these more visible marches, it was the late teens, so 19 uh 14, 15, 16, right before World War I, and then right after World War I, I think the the marches started to um escalate. Um she was an avowed communist. Um but but communism at that point in time wasn't like it is today. I mean, it really was. And and when you say she was involved in marches, were these like all different causes, or did she have pet causes? Oh, she had pet causes. Okay. Um women's rights. Okay. So she was, in essence, a suffragette. Um, children's rights, children's working laws. Yeah. Um, baths, because they had communal baths. It was like, you know, the Roman baths that they had, and they had um certain hours that women could go, certain hours that men could go, certain ethnicities were allowed, and things like that. In this multi-ethnic cultural environment, there was always contention of who could use the baths and when. So orchestrating that. All I could think of is like the YMCA and being able to go to the swimming pool, but um uh no, that she was uh involved in that. But it she's very interested in anything that affected the family and we're would detract from that. She was very much uh in favor of anything that um had children going to education, of being schooled. Um, she didn't like the fact that you could pull a child out at sixth grade and age 12 and 13, allow them to work. Um, she wanted everybody to go through at least eighth grade, which is what the the predominant uh culture was.

Crista Cowan 19:42

Had had she come from Europe knowing six languages, or did she pick them up?

Suzanne Hoffman 19:46

She picked three of them up once she hit the United States. So she knew Yiddish, she knew um Polish, she knew Lithuanian, she picked up English, she picked up German, and what was the other one? Um she picked up the um, I think some Gaelic.

Crista Cowan 20:06

Okay.

Suzanne Hoffman 20:06

Because again, it had to do with the ethnicity of the population in the area.

Crista Cowan 20:12

And so the fact that she already spoke three languages, though, hints of the fact that she was probably well educated where she came from.

Suzanne Hoffman 20:18

She had already gone through um what is equivalent to first year in high school. So when she came over, she was 15. I think she was probably in maybe through 10th grade or something like that. Um, Lewis, her husband, had only gone through eighth grade. Um, both of her sons were lawyers by the time they got done. Um and her one daughter was uh a teacher, and the other one was a um physical therapist. So everybody went not only through uh college, but through the next level, um, whatever it was for preparatory work. But uh she ran for Massachusetts state treasurer three times uh twice. She was um third highest vote, which isn't bad as a communist. So it's and a woman. And a woman, right? So it's like uh you get the two. She had multiple things against her. But I think it was really funny. It's um trying to track it down. There is an organization called the Ford Hall Forum in Boston. And basically, if you think about it as an open um opportunity to speak, you sign up and you had a uh something you could talk about. She was there multiple times. There is a book that was written about the Ford Ford Hall Forum. She has her own chapter in that book. She had things to say. She had lots of things to say, and she was everything was about you know what the people needed. And um when I was doing the research to find out more about her, because I mean I lit had a little bit of hint from these three pages of handwritten notes from my uh um great aunt, uh great great grandgrand aunt, I guess. Um the interesting Thing was that the um book didn't quite give the infamous side of her background as much. And I found a lot in the police report the number of times her husband had to bail her out of jail for um infraction. But she was well well respected. She had a good uh relationship with the mayor of Boston and um finding out, but I I would never have known if it weren't for doing newspaper research. Oh, yeah. And if you can believe it, the one newspaper that seemed to cover her most closely was the Christian Science Monitor.

Crista Cowan 22:34

Hoodoo.

Suzanne Hoffman 22:36

You expect to find it in in the Boston newspapers, but it wasn't. It was in the Christian Science Monitor. There must have been a reporter that really felt that she was, you know, doing some good and was following her. Um an interesting, you know, sort of side point for this, she's she's running this open door policy. And

A Missing Cousin And False Names

Suzanne Hoffman 22:54

I have an image of three boys standing in a line, sort of um, you remember my three sons, and they were on the staircase, and we had three different heights of boys. There's a picture there that has my grandfather in the middle, has this older cousin, Jacob Hoffman, who's the taller one, age 17 or about, so my great-grandfather must have been 15, and then the younger um brother Harry Hoffman on the bottom. Well, the 1910 census shows two Harry Hoffmans and a Rose Hoffman in the same household with the family. And I'm like, who the heck are these other two kids? I know they're not Aaron's kids from Belarus. I still to this day couldn't find those other two. And Jacob, who what was Jacob in a picture with Irving and Harry in Boston? He was only 17. How did he get there? I could not find him at all on any manifest. And I said, you know, where do I look? So I decided, well, let me go into the immigration naturalization system and see what images I pull up. And I pulled up his declaration of intent filed in 1909 as Jacob Hoffman as a photographer at 125 Leverett Street. I mean, that is the exact address. It's gotta be my great uh, you know, my uh second cousin. And wait, the declaration of intent. It this is the ship I went back line by line on the Saratov, and I'm actually gonna be talking about the impact that the Saratov and the Russian, the volunteer Russian fleet had on changing the American um immigration policies because of the strangeness that went on with the number of um personifications of individuals. In other words, they weren't coming over under their own name, they were coming over under somebody else's name, they were hiding, they were I mean, these are people who were fleeing a place. They were fleeing a place, they you know, wanted to to get somewhere else, and they were the people who are most likely to be they were kids for the most part, too. They weren't older conscription.

Crista Cowan 25:03

Right, yeah.

Suzanne Hoffman 25:04

Yeah. So he was in line to be, you know, conscription to the army and everything else. Um, but he comes over under a completely false name. And the only reason I was able to find it was because of column 17 in the 1907 um immigration manifests that actually said, Where are you going? And it said L. Hoffman, 125 Leverett Street. And the name that he was traveling under was Scholen Babin. And Sholan Babin shows up four times with three other brothers, all named Babin, on four different uh manifests. So there was clearly something going on with the Russian volunteer fleet. So I was very curious to see if I could pinpoint my great-grandmother into this and see whether she had any inkling of what was going on, but he doesn't show up in the 1910 census. The last report we have of him is 1909. The next I report I have been is in a Russian uniform in 1912 in Gomel, Belarus. So he obviously went home.

Crista Cowan 26:08

Yeah.

Suzanne Hoffman 26:09

Um, and we don't know, you know, the the story is beyond that. I know that he had it he wound up having a daughter who was born the same year my mother was in 1923, but um, I don't know anything about the family, nor do I have any inkling about Eva Hoffman and what she thought of for her grandson who came over, was there here long enough to have his image taken with his two younger cousins and then went up back in in Belarus. Um my great-grandmother was somebody that everybody seems to have admired. Anybody who I've uh asked about if they knew her or knew of her contextually, or said she did everything that our um, you know, our relatives needed. Yeah. Um the meat wars is something that I think she has some notoriety in because when they started raising the prices on meat, there were marches everywhere. They were in New York, they were in Boston, they were in Lowell, Massachusetts, they were all along that 128 beltway around um Massachusetts because I mean it was a staple.

Crista Cowan 27:12

And was this like was this uh artificial inflation by greedy people, or was this like just natural cost of living increases?

Suzanne Hoffman 27:19

Well, it it some of both, right? So there's a cost of living increase, you've got a depressed economy, it costs more to um, you know, find the beef, produce the beef, um, have it blessed, and then have it available, and you've got every middleman along the way. The funny thing is, there is a article that I found that talked about David Yavner as a meat producer. Little did my great-grandmother know that the Yavner and Hoffman sides of the family were going to get together under her grandfather. Years later. Yeah. So my grandfather, Irving Hoffman, married Julia Fisher, who was the daughter of a Yavner on her mother's side. So there was a tie between the families, but he was one of the first uh providers of meat to apologize to the communities that were mostly affected and said, you know, it was just the cost of production. And for him to acquire the meat and to then go through the kosher process of preparing the meat to make it available. Um, you know, he was being sort of wrenched into having to um uh apply a higher cost uh basis for it. Um but he apologized. Um they eventually did back down the prices. So they won. So we call them the Boston Meat Wars. Yes. Like

The Boston Meat Wars Boycott

Suzanne Hoffman 28:39

what did like what did that look like? What did those battles look like? Well, it it looked like people forsaking meat and going back to fish or going back to some other So they boycotted the meat industry. They strode they uh did a very successful protest against the meat industry, and they got hotels and restaurants to join them. Oh, so they were rallying the community. They were they were um a very vocal and very opinionated and productive voice against it. So they and the mayor of Boston got involved and said you cannot raise prices because the prices were being raised more than 20%. It it just was unconscionable at that uh economic conditions.

Crista Cowan 29:20

Yeah. So it's so interesting to me because you you hear stories about women like Eva, right? Like you have this image of her. I assume there are actual images of her with a husband who was a photographer. Was she an imposing woman? Was she a tiny woman? She's a big girl.

Suzanne Hoffman 29:36

Okay. She was a big girl, and and um, yeah, she looked like uh somebody we reckoned with. Okay. Um it wasn't somebody that I wanted to cross paths with, but that was for sure. Um, but you know, her husband was a gentle nun in the purest form of description, and he was loved by everybody, and he did whatever his wife wanted him to do. Um, and she ran the roost there. I mean, it really. And I, you know, I look back at the two families that I know personally of the Hoffman's, or actually the three families, and everybody within them has a very positive outlook on life and a very um pragmatic view of the world. And I it's gotta come from her.

Crista Cowan 30:19

Yeah, it sounds like it. And yet she used her powers for good.

Suzanne Hoffman 30:23

Yeah, it sounds like and I was very surprised when she went back to Russia in 1926. What? And I know that she made her eldest daughter for her um wedding trip also go back there with her new husband.

Crista Cowan 30:36

So that's so unusual because I think so often we think about people, especially Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, as just destitute and they are eking out of living here and they're sometimes uneducated. And this is a whole different cultural experience. And the fact that they went back and forth maybe more times than even you have record of. Right. Like that is something that even even for immigrants from Ireland or Germany or wherever, we just don't think about happening.

Suzanne Hoffman 31:04

Yeah. I mean, it they they started with nothing and they had they actually had a profession, right? Um the the photography really helped them a lot, but it wasn't something she knew. She actually, when she was in New York, she did start uh marches on the shirt waist industry. Because that when she went there, that was what she was employed doing. She was doing some of the shirtwaist uh production and felt that it was very demeaning um to the people who were in there. So somewhere she got that real strong image of um self-preservation.

Crista Cowan 31:40

Yeah. Well, and not just standing up for herself, but it sounds like standing up for a lot of other people too. What a gift. What a story. That's so amazing. And actually hearing you tell that story helps me understand you a little bit better.

Suzanne Hoffman 31:52

Well, you know, they say you look for traits that you carry through. I mean, there are things that about my daughter, uh, you'd never think that we're a mother and daughter until she starts opening her mouth and you listen to her and you said, that's something your mother would say, or or a mannerism or something like that. And I've often wondered that. You know, said, how much of what I'm like do I carry back through my father's family to Eva Hoffman? Because I don't have my mother's disposition at all. So I know that some of what she professed that my father picked up that he passed down to us. Yeah.

Crista Cowan 32:28

Oh, I love that. Thank you for sharing her with us and the Hoffman's and the photography. Um, I'm so excited about

Genealogy As Story At IAJGS

Crista Cowan 32:35

that. Now, we don't usually do um promotional segments in the podcast, but you and I have a connection. We're working together right now on the conference, the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies. That is always a mouthful. Um, so the 2027 conference is uh virtual and it's coming up in April. And you have, as the co-chair of that, you have kind of a different vision for it this year that I think ties in directly with some of the things we've been talking about. Tell us, tell me a little bit about that.

Suzanne Hoffman 33:06

Well, I think that the intent on learning genealogy is not only about the records, but it's about the story behind the records. It's about the family history. So it's no longer genealogy as a science, but it's about the contextual imagery that we um really can create with our family backgrounds and being able to tie into history. I often say you can't have history without people. And as we devolve to people, we need to understand what their passions were and how it evolved in their own lineage and how it um caused some things to happen within their family. So I said, you know, the records tell part of the story, the inferences of following the records, following the trail, will give you a much more uh rich context of where that person came from, um, what they uh contributed to society and where they needed to go to get to where your family is today. Everybody has that tie. And um, I I think a turning point for me was an educator in Illinois. He teaches high school and he actually does a class for seniors that is family heritage. And it's an elective English class that he takes 16 weeks for them and he teaches them uh how to do genealogy, and then they have to do a podcast, they have to do a video presentation of what they learn about their family. Whether the family is their direct line or an adoptive line or however they are, it's about interviewing people and understanding when someone tells you something how they're interpreting it. So you say, tell me more, right? You want to eke out of someone, not just the facts, but the context of those facts. So if we take that and and project it forward into the types of talks that we want, we want people to learn not only that the records are important, but the family history is an enrichment of everything that we're finding as genealogists. And that'll help people who are partially Jewish, partially of any ethnicity, understand how that ethnicity has presence in their own personality. And I think that's what I'm looking for is I'm I'm I really want people to feel comfortable in their own skin and understand why they do things the way they do. What is it about their background or about some um, you know, genetic trait that's been passed down through to them that makes them do this. So we want new stories, new um uh you know, added-on content to older history that people have done. We're not just looking for the same old thing. We're looking for new opportunities to give people to present. And we're gonna do it almost around the clock. We're gonna start early, early in the morning, 5:30 in the morning, go through 11 o'clock at night, with not just live sessions, but pre-recorded sessions, an opportunity for small groups to get together of like ethnicities or of like cultures. Um, so it's it's much, much more than a traditional genealogical um uh meeting. Yeah.

Crista Cowan 36:14

I love that. And I love that you're um focused on the fact that there are people who identify as Jewish, right? You identified as ethnically Jewish, but not religiously Jewish, not culturally Jewish. And then there are people, you know, who are in your position. There are also people who don't even know they're Jewish until they take a DNA test. Right. And then they discover that, you know, they have a grandparent or a great-grandparent that has this rich history and these stories that they didn't even know about and have no idea how to go about obtaining.

Suzanne Hoffman 36:48

Right. And they don't know how to start. And we we realize that there are people who are beginners, there are people who've been doing this for 10 or 15 years, dabbling, the hobbyists, and then the people who are the professionals. And we want to be able to address the needs of all three groups and and those in between. So it's not just about, as I said, the records. Maybe it's interpreting the records. I mean, you know, we've talked on and on about the fact that, oh, we wish some of those manifests um were in color. Because so many people had crayon pencils that they added color in the notations of um, you know, what were the codes that were behind um all the columns and things like that. And then we've lost a lot of that because they've been black and white digitized or or they've been destroyed for that matter. Um, but you've got people that um we just don't know where they wound up. And you a chance um voters list will tell you that they're in a completely different county than you thought they were, and then you can go and find those immigration records in that county. So you don't know what'll lead to your next discovery. Yeah. And that's what people think outside the box.

Crista Cowan 37:52

Yeah, absolutely. And there are so many resources now for people to make those discoveries. So I'm excited that that our organization is putting on this conference um and excited to support you in that over the course of the next several months.

Suzanne Hoffman 38:05

I I it's going to be really exciting because it is uh a little bit different than we've done before. Um, takes a lot of volunteers. It does. Right. It's a volunteer army. And uh as I said, we've got um many already in place, but we need many more if anybody's interested.

Crista Cowan 38:22

Fantastic. Well, thank you for sharing Eva with us and all six of her languages. Yeah. Um, and her husband Lewis and the photography. Um, just such a delightful story. So I appreciate that.

One Word One Story Bicycle

Crista Cowan 38:33

Now it is time for our final segment, which we call one word, one story. Our word today is bicycle. Do you have a story or a memory about a bicycle?

Suzanne Hoffman 38:50

I I actually have two, but one, I have a picture of Lewis um on a bicycle in Belarus. Um, and it's a very interesting looking bicycle. It has weird handlebars and a weird seat. His um feet are on the pedal, he's holding on to the handlebars. He's got this wonderful, gleeful grin on in his face. And uh he's um uh with another one of his friends. So I've got that image. Uh my sister on Facebook decided to post a picture of me at a Fourth of July parade with my bicycle completely decorated when I was about four or five, I want to say. Do you remember that bike? Uh I do. It was a blue and white um oh show Schwin bicycle. There you go. And it had red streamers all over it. That was my favorite.

Crista Cowan 39:41

That was so fun. So here's my bicycle story. Um, so my grandparents lived in Los Angeles, and they lived on a little bit of a hill. Um, they lived uh south of Ventura Boulevard in the valley. And um, the day that my grandfather retired, he worked for the city of Los Angeles as a city engineer. And um, so we were like all the cousins and aunts and uncles and everybody was at we're at my grandparents' house, um, and all the adults had left to go to the retirement party. Um, and the kids were left to play. And I'm the oldest of the grandchildren. Um, and I had been swimming at the next door neighbors. I was in a bikini, I had no shoes on my feet. I was probably seven or eight years old. And I decided to ride my bike down the hill. And I wiped out so hard. I still have scars. I have scars on my elbows, I have scars on my knees. I was a mess. And the neighbor who I had been swimming at her house, she came running out and scooped me up. Now, of course, this is in the days before cell phones. There is like no way to contact my parents or my grandparents where they're at. She took me in, she set me on her bathroom counter, she cleaned me up. There was Mercurichrome involved. I still remember the sting of that. Um and uh, you know, wrapped me up and took me, you know, over to my parents when they all finally got home. And I just like I was traumatized. I thought I would never get on a bicycle again. It didn't last long, but that was when I think of a bicycle, that is probably my earliest memory. I learned, even though I hate shoes, if you're wearing a bike, at least wear shoes.

Suzanne Hoffman 41:26

Yes, exactly. Your flip-flops won't do it.

Crista Cowan 41:28

No, not at all. Well, there you go. That is your one-word, one story, which is bicycle. If you've got a bicycle story, would you share it in the comments if you're watching on YouTube? If you're listening on Podcast App, we would love it if you would go over to your Instagram or your Facebook, post your bicycle story, tag us, tag the podcast. Um, I just really love this idea of sharing our memories, and stories are as simple as sometimes one word. Well, Suzanne, thank you so much again. Thank you. It's been a joy to get to know you better. Yeah. Studio sponsored by Ancestry.