It�s a small world after all.

Recently my brother received the following email from someone who just happened to come across his website:

My name is Eliana A., and I live in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

I was searching art in Israel, when I saw your site and your name, R-- G--, born in Toronto, Canada. I�m doing genealogy research for my mother�s family. A few weeks ago she gave me some old photos and one of them was taken in Toronto and had an inscription on its back side: Golda and Velvel G--. Golda is from my mother�s family, the V.s, that around 1922 went from Pischonke, Podolia Gubernia, Ukraine, to Toronto, Canada, and changed their surname to W.

My mother�s name is Lucia / Raie (n�e V.) A., and she's 90 years old. Her parents were Baruch and Esther V.

I would like to know if you�re a descendent of Golda and Velvel. Or maybe if you know that family, I would be grateful if you could put me in contact with them.

My brother responded thusly:

Dear Eliana:

Very interesting!

It seems to me that my grandfather Wolf G--'s Yiddish name was Velvel, and he came from Brezhin in Galicia, which is today in Poland south of the Ukraine. �I believe he came to North America around 1900, first to the USA and then to Canada. �His first wife, my grandmother, was born Toba M. (went by the name �Tillie� in Toronto), and died around 1929-30 when my father, the late Mr. G--, was 16 years old. �Velvel remarried soon thereafter, I don�t know the name of his second wife. �I only knew his third wife, my step-grandmother, Esther. �We never developed much of a rapport, as he spoke only Yiddish which I didn�t understand. �The name was never changed, and I remember seeing my grandfather, �Zeida�, �listed in the Toronto telephone book as �William G--�.

Over the years I have met a few G--s here in Israel� yet we could not find any relationship. �One was from Austria and another (the musician and chorale leader, my namesake, R-- G--) traced his family back to Roumania. � There was another G-- in Toronto, yet no relation.

Looking once through the North American telephone directory on the Internet, I found half of the G--s listed to be with Jewish first names, the other half, Chinese!

Thanks for your communication...

Hope you liked the paintings :-)

your possible distant cousin,

R--

She wrote back with this reply:

Dear R--,

Thank you very much for your kind response. As I understood, there is still one possibility, that is the second wife of your grandfather. For this reason I have attached to this message the photograph which I referred to in my previous message, and also the back side of it, with the inscription in Yiddish. It says: Golda and Velvel G--. Do you recognize him as your grandfather?

Yes folks, that is my grandfather with his second wife, a woman totally unrelated to me and whom I never met, Zaide already having been married to Auntie Esther when I knew him. He died when I was 12, in 1969 and, as my brother said, we never really got to know him because he spoke no English and we spoke no Yiddish. But isn�t it a small world?

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