Research: For more than thirty years I have been collecting data for the Blumenfeld / Bloomfield family tree: data about jobs, dates when people were born, got married, had children, moved, emigrated or died. In time, I had assembled a lengthy list of names, dates, and keywords. However, the list didn’t satisfy me. The data hung on the names like dried out bones on a skeleton mounted on a stand in some laboratory. “Can these dead bones live?” I asked myself.

I wanted some meat on those bones! Names connected to a list of data don’t give you a real picture of the person. And even if you have a picture showing someone’s face, the person behind the face remains hidden. Were the bones to begin living, I would need to add the corresponding historical and social settings, as well as the personal stories connected to the dry data that I had gathered.

The impersonal list of data needed to be converted into a story. Researching into historical sources and corresponding with persons with first- or second-hand knowledge about our ancestors have enabled me to tell the stories about the Blumenfeld/Bloomfield family from Momberg, Hessen, Germany, that appear in this blog.

Richard’s personal family tales: This section offers a personal glimpse into my experiences with other family members. The individual tales spotlight single events or a number of related happenings from my point of view. Certainly, different family members had different experiences.