I’m quickly finding out some of the excitement that can be involved in genealogical pursuits.
Like finding out that I am 32 people away from Albert Einstein in my family tree.
My first excitement came 14 years ago, when I began doing genealogy. Armed with the names of some of my father’s and mother’s more recent ancestors, I was thrilled when I found the first birth and marriage records that confirmed not only what I already knew about these family members, but provided new information and led me to new relatives.
From those new relatives, I did more research, and found still more. I was disappointed when some of the branches of the burgeoning family tree led to dead ends — no more records beyond a certain point, or others with the same name born around the same time, so it was not possible to know for certain who my relatives’ parents were.
For a while, I thought I had come to a stalemate, unable to find any more relatives. But genealogy has developed quite a bit online since I had begun. There are spectacular possibilities now in terms of being able to find relatives that you might have in common with someone else who also has a tree online. So by searching under the names I had, I was able to make some connections on my mother’s side of the family tree, which first led me to additional living relatives, and then, via those they had on their tree — to my first thrill, which was to find a connection (10 people away from me) to a family of nobility in the 19th century Hungarian Empire, the Zamarovsky family.
Once I had found the Zamarovskys, I sensed I would find some other important people, as the elite tend to associate with the elite. So, I searched online under some of the Zamarovsky names, and then obtained a “Smart Match” for one of them. A Smart Match is when you set up a family tree on a genealogy website (such as MyHeritage.com) and then the site software sifts through the family trees of everyone else who has a tree on that site or on some other sites. The software looks for people on your tree who are on someone else’s tree, a tree that has more information about that person, and notifies you of a “Smart Match”. Well I got a Smart Match for a Julianna Baumgartner, who’d married into the Zamarovsky family in the mid 1800’s. From her, connections then led through her brother to the Adler family, then the Kassowitz family, the Bauchs, the Dannhausers, the Moos, and then the Einsteins.
So what’s my relationship to Albert Einstein? Geni.com has a fun way of articulating the connection :
“Albert Einstein is your third cousin once removed’s wife’s great uncle’s wife’s brother’s wife’s aunt’s husband’s brother’s wife’s uncle’s wife’s father’s wife’s sister’s husband’s great nephew.”
Doing more work on the tree from Albert Einstein on out, finding his relatives, and children, led me to another fun discovery, which is that Albert’s son Hans Albert Einstein, and his wife Elizabeth Einstein, lived in my area, in Berkeley California, up to the time of their deaths in 1995. I found records that showed they lived at 1090 Creston Road in Berkeley, and have another address as well for Elizabeth Einstein as 2150 Shattuck Avenue. Looking up the former on Zillow I find the house depicted and there is a note that the Einsteins did formerly live in this house:
Mikuteit Family Tree 