Welcome, new Geni collaborators

A number of new family connections were recently uncovered and invited to Geni.

Here are a few words about who they are and how I found them.

I contacted my second cousin Laura Popper through Facebook. I knew about a Popper connection in the NY area from my mother. I knew that her cousin Martin Popper was a lawyer whose father immigrated to the US around 1900. My mother as well as Vilma Hoffmann knew Martin, and Martin even met up with us in Budapest in the 1960s. When I found Martin's obituary in the New York Times I was quite surprised by his distinguished career including defending those attacked in the McCarthy era witch hunts. Read more here.

The article mentioned Martin's wife Kathryn Trosper and his children Joseph and Dr. Laura Popper. I guess there aren't that many dr. Laura Poppers, besides, she has been voted one of the top 10 pediatricians in NY and has a wonderful blog site. Hope to find more about this branch of the family, check her out on Facebook!

It's really cool that Laura was named after our common great grandmother Laura Kollin -- and Martin was named after my grandfather Márton, same as where George gets his middle name.

Péter Lóránd is my fourth cousin who lives in Veszprém, Hungary. We share common great-great-great-grandparents Leopold Lazar (1791-1870) and Terézia Bilitz (1798-1860). Neither of us had any idea about the existence of the other branches of the family, even though Péter has been researching his roots for over 12 years. Here is how I found out about him:

I was able to locate the death records for Laura Kollin which documented the names of her parents Márton Kollin and Franciska Lázár. I stumbled upon the website of a Hungarian genealogist Zoltan Györe who has been mapping the history of Jewish families in Veszprém county. Zoltan shared some information about the families of Ajka, among whom were Márton and Franciska, but no mention of Laura! Looking at Zoltan's document more closely I found in he footnotes that much of the information was provided by Péter Lóránd, whose name also appears as one of the family members in the document - Zoltan provided his email address. I expect that we will be learning more about the Lazar ancestors shortly.

The subject of the previous post, Anni Engel also yielded another connection. I mentioned that I found the article in a post from Stevan Harnad who is Annie's cousin on her mother's side. I contacted Stevan -- his email wasn't hard to find, as he is a well-published author. He is at UQAM in Montreal, check him out on Wikipedia.

Stevan also put me in touch with Gabor Kalman, who has recently produced a film called "There Was Once..." a film about the Jewish community of Kalocsa, where the George's mother and aunt come from, as well as the family of Aladar and Olga Schwarcz -- and apparently Anni Engel's mother and Stevan's family. The film website is http://www.therewasoncefilm.com/. As soon as I find out more about it, I will post it.