Perhaps you noticed that it's been two weeks since I last posted? I am slowly catching up  with things including some of the blogs I follow, but we just got home Monday night after 12 days away in Berlin and Paris. We were motivated to visit Berlin because our daughter Maddy was going there to run her tenth marathon! And her fifth of the six "major" marathons: Boston, New York, London, Chicago, and now Berlin.

By the end of July 1938, only two of the eight Baer siblings were left in Germany: Arthur and Eugen. Five (Klara, Selma, Jenny, Paula, and Meyer) were in the US, and Julius was in France. This post will tell more about what I’ve learned about Arthur Baer and a correction to what I once thought. As I wrote earlier here…

To learn what next happened to Julius Baer and his family after Julius was released from the Osthofen prison camp in March 1934, I relied on a combination of a biography written by his son Arnold in 2005 that I obtained from the archives in Darmstadt,  a residence registration I received from the archives in Butzbach, and a collection of documents I obtained from the Swiss archives detailing the family’s experiences in Switzerland.

Here we are once again at the end of one year and the beginning of a new one on the Jewish calendar. It's time to hear the shofar and wake up once again to the world around us and its beauty and its challenges. It's time once again to consider our own actions during the past year and to consider how we want to live in the year ahead.

It's been several weeks since I last posted about my Baer cousins, the children of Therese Spier and Eisenmann Adolf Baer and great-great-grandchildren of Sprintz Blumenfeld, the sister of my three-times great-grandmother, Breine Blumenfeld. I had an incredible couple of weeks with my own children and grandchildren and a chance to re-energize myself for more genealogy research. Discussing my latest novel, …

I accidentally pushed publish instead of save draft. Please disregard...that post is not yet finished and won't be for weeks! Just my week for mistakes....

By the end of July 1938, only two of the eight Baer siblings were left in Germany: Arthur and Eugen. Five (Klara, Selma, Jenny, Paula, and Meyer) were in the US, and Julius was in France. As I wrote earlier here, Arthur was eventually able to escape from Germany to England, but I was wrong when I wrote that he had been arrested after Kristallnacht.

As we saw in the last post, the four daughters and one of the sons of Therese Spier Baer escaped from Germany before Kristallnacht and ended up in the United States. Klara was in Baltimore as was Paula while Jenny and Selma were living in New York. Their brother Meyer/Manfred settled in Baltimore. Another son, Arthur Baer, escaped with his family to England.

Therese Spier Baer, the first child of Samuel Spier, died on July 26, 1935, in Griedel, Germany, at the age of 64, leaving behind all eight of her children and all of her grandchildren. By that time the Nazis had come to power. What was the fate of those eight children and all of their children? Even before Therese died, her youngest daughter Klara and her husband Hermann Fuld and their two-year-old daughter Helga had left Germany.

Thank you to Phyllis Karas, New York Times best selling author of the book  Brutal: The Untold Story of My Life Inside Whitey Bulger’s Irish Mob and over ten other books as well as a journalist and professor of journalism. She who wrote this wonderful review of The Women Before Us: How wonderful to read a historically accurate female driven story that is also charming and intriguing.

We saw last time that Therese Spier and her husband Eisemann Adolf Baer (hereinafter just referred to as Adolf, the name he seems to have been known as) had eight children, four girls and four boys, born between 1893 and 1909. By 1919, those children began to marry and have families of their own. Paula, the oldest child, married Julius Steinberg on September 13, 1919, in Griedel.

My cousin Therese Spier Baer, the first child of Samuel Spier, had eight children with her husband Eisemann Adolf Baer between 1893 and 1909, and amazingly all eight survived to adulthood, and they all survived the Holocaust as did their children. Almost all of them then lived remarkably long lives. Therese's first child was her daughter Paula, born on June 14, 1893, in Griedel, Germany.

I have received two more five star reviews on Amazon for The Women Before Us. Here are excerpts from the reviews by the authors of two wonderful family history books: From Joy Neal Kidney, author of Leora's Letters: The Story of Love and Loss for an Iowa Family During World War II: "This is a compelling historical novel based on the lives of women in the author's life, Jewish women who immigrated to the US.

The article below was written by my fifth cousin, Richard Bloomfield, who recently visited our mutual ancestral town, Momberg, Germany, with his first cousins (and my fifth cousins) Jim and Steven Bloomfield. Momberg is where our mutual four-times great-grandparents Abraham Blumenfeld I and Geitel Katz lived and raised their children, including my three-times great-grandmother Breine Blumenfeld Katzenstein and Richard, Jim, and Steven's three-times great-grandfather…

The first born child of Sarchen Frank and Isaac Spier was their son Samuel, born as we saw on December 18, 1842, in Schrecksbach, Germany. On March 1, 1870, in Langendiebach, Germany, Samuel married Amalie (Malchen) Adler, the daughter of Markus Adler and Dolce Rosenstrauch; she was born in Hintersteinau, Germany, in about 1849. 1 Samuel and Amalie had at least five children.

Thank you so much to Luanne Castle for her wonderful review of The Women Before Us.  Luanne is an amazing award-winning poet and author (as well as a genealogy blogger at The Family Kalamazoo), so her words of praise mean a great deal to me. I recently reviewed her latest book, Scrap, one of the best books I've ever read.

Happy Fourth of July! I remember when I was growing up how much I enjoyed celebrating the Fourth of July. The fireworks, wearing red, white, and blue, ice cream that was red, white, and blue, celebrations at camp, singing patriotic songs. Parades and flags. It was all so innocent. I was so innocent. In 2026 as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, I am no longer innocent, and the holiday is tinged with nostalgia, sadness, and gratitude.

Another five star review of The Women Before Us! This one is from Helen Joyce, the acclaimed author of the wonderful book, Good for a Single Journey. I am so pleased that she enjoyed my book! She wrote: A thoughtful and moving story of three generations of diverse women from one Jewish family. Spanning a period from the late 19th century to post-WWII, the tale moves between Philadelphia, Denver and Santa Fe.

The first-born child of Sprintz Blumenfeld and Samuel Frank was their daughter Sarchen (Sarah) Frank, born in Momberg, Germany, in about 1816, as determined by her age of 78 on her 1894 death record (see below). Sarchen married Isaac Spier in Momberg on May 25, 1842. Isaac was the son of Samuel Spier and Telsa Katz, and he was born in Schrecksbach, Germany, in about 1812, according to his age of 30 on their marriage record.

In August 2021, I began writing about my Blumenfeld family, starting with my four-times great-grandparents Abraham (Katz) and Geitel (Katz) Blumenfeld and then their oldest child, Moses Blumenfeld. Since then, I have been writing about the children and later descendants of Moses Blumenfeld. That has taken more than four and a half years, and Moses Blumenfeld had only three children. Having now finished writing about the youngest child of the youngest child of the youngest child of Moses’ daughter Gelle Blumenfeld Rothschild, I am finally ready to move on to the second child of Abraham and Geitel Blumenfeld, their daughter Sprintz.

The youngest child of Meier Rothschild and Bertha Lorge was their daughter Anna. And unlike with her older siblings, I was able to learn where she and her family were in the 1930s and 1940s. I found the Palestine immigration files for Anna, her husband (and my cousin) Julius Hamberg, and for two of their three children, Alice and Ernst, on the Israel State Archives website.

After several weeks focused on updates on Berthold Rothschild and other topics, I now will return to the other children of Meier Rothschild and Bertha Lorge. As with the three oldest children of Meier Rothschild and Bertha Lorge, Berthold, Theodor, and Gertrud, I struggled to learn more about what happened to their fourth child Siegfried Friedrich Rothschild and his family during and after the Holocaust.

My cousin Adelheid Rothschild survived the Holocaust, as did her father Berthold and sister Helene/Hana, as we have seen,  but unlike her father and sister, Adelheid spent time in a concentration camp. She was deported from Amsterdam to the concentration camp at Bergen Belsen. She survived the war and at some point immigrated to Palestine/Israel, where she lived near her sister for the rest of her life.

Coming in a few weeks! My latest family history novel, The Women Before Us, will be available in paperback and e-book format on Amazon! The Women Before Us was inspired by the stories of my female ancestors and relatives, women who had little power in the outside world and often little power over their own lives. Many of them married and then moved far from their families and friends to start a life with a man they probably hardly knew and in many cases didn't even choose.