Family History

For more on me, see my recent posts on Growing Up in the Last Century on the Viral History Blog;

On our family history, see either –

Ethel’s Tape, that tells the true, unvarnished tale of how my mother’s side of the family came to America in the 1920s, based on an old recording of my mom, Ethel Ackerman, chatting into a tape machine almost 60 years after the fact.  Family stories always come with secrets, the kind parents never tell and never pop up on Ancestry.com.  In our family, we got lucky.  Ethel spilled the beans, and it’s a story packed with energy and surprises.  Available on Amazon via our own Viral History Press; or

Horse Radish: Jewish Roots, my Aunt Rachel Farber’s poignant, funny, brutally frank memoir of the Ackerman side of the family and its immigrant experience, from their own tiny Poland/Russia town of Madle-Borzyce to busy early-Twentieth Century America, to marriage, heartache, and finding peace amid chaos.  “I laughed so hard I forgot to cry,” said the cover blurb.  “This story is about living hard times and finding humor in dire places — the things that keep us sane.”

On writing family history generally, try one of my workshops at The Writers Center. Here’s a link to the Powerpoint – Researching Family History: What Every Writer Should Know!

For even more, here are a few more pieces I’ve posted over the years for on our own and a few special friends’ family stories for The Viral History Blog.   Enjoy–

• Growing Up in the Last Century: Washington in the 1970s; First Taste of Capitol Hill
• Growing Up in the Last Century – My First Taste of Politics: Getting Kicked Out of the Polls by the Albany Machine, June 1972
• Growing Up in the Last Century: Tear-Gassed in Washington, D.C., May 1970
• Growing Up in the Last Century: Dad’s Political Career
• Anniversary – One Hundred Years in America
• Guardian Angel, The Ostrovsta Rebbe
• The Forger – Our family’s secret savior?
• The Official Slanderer
• Unfair to General Churchill??
• Pilsudski
• Trotsky
• Welcome to America, 1920
• A Love Story from Poland– Sheah and Yetta Akierman.
• Jewtown, New York City. 1890.
• GUEST BLOGER: Doug Leslie on discovering old family photos.
• GUEST BLOGGER: Wendy Griswold on searching for deported uncle Wolf Pfeiffer, 1906.

Our family in 1926