Date: October 15, 2024 Time: 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM Location: Brewster Ladies Library, 1822 Main St., Brewster, MA 02631 or via Zoom.

An Artifact Breaks Down a Brick Wall

Guest speaker: Susan Feinberg

A treasured family memoir led me to search the internet for a piece of a religious sculpture my great-grandfather created in the early 20th century in Lithuania that supposedly ended up in an unnamed synagogue in Canada. While I never found any evidence of that particular sculpture, I did discover that his “masterwork” survived the destruction of the Jewish Lithuanian community during World War II and was on permanent display in a museum in his home country. This presentation describes the research tools and processes I used to verify that the artist whose work I found was indeed my great-grandfather and includes an interesting twist that happily resulted in an expansion of my family tree.

Susan Feinberg is a lifelong resident of Massachusetts. Her early fascination with family history began with learning about her maternal grandfather's immediate family (he was one of thirteen siblings and her first American-born direct ancestor). Her most rewarding genealogical accomplishment has been building out the tree on her paternal line, which had been a blank slate other than knowing her grandparents' names and the courtiers from which they emigrated to Boston. Susan is an advanced user of DNA testing for finding unknown relatives and taught a class in genetic genealogy at Academy for Life Long Learning for two years. She is a member and volunteer with the Jewish Genealogy Center of Greater Boston. Susan retired from a career in banking technology in 2017 and is happily retired in West Dennis, Massachusetts.

Return to Previous Page