My whole life I have been brought up with the knowledge that my mother's maiden name was "stolen" from a dead man in order to allow my great great grandfather to escape Poland.
I find out today that this is not true and there is evidence. It turns out my mother's maiden name is her true one and the one we thought was the true one was the stolen one. My great grandfather changed the name back to the original when he arrived in South Africa.
A quick search on the new Yad Vashem Names site here brought up and list of other people with the same name (which we never bothered to research before, thinking it was a stolen one), slightly different spelling, from the same area as my great great grandparents.
I am sooo excited about this. Does anyone else have experience with tracing family histories. What do you do when you think you have reached a dead end. What are your resources, besides JewishGen?
I would be very very interested in building a family tree and finding lost family around the world.
