Who am I, what am I?

It's been some time since my last post about genealogy. In this post, I'm going to try to address the "Who am I?", and "What am I?" questions.

I always felt like something was off. I would look at my little brother, and look at my reflection in the mirror, and then look at my mom and dad and think, "How can these people be my parents?" My dad told us we were German. I grew up without the benefit of extended family around so I didn't even have cousins to compare my looks to. I think we were told that at a young age we were German because that was an easy answer. It was believed that I had German ancestors on both sides of my family because of the surnames in the family tree.  

The more complicated answer was one I began to discover when I was 19 years old and sick in the hospital after surgery from having a ruptured appendix. I was told I was part Jewish. My grandfather, on my dad's side, who was born in New York to a Jewish immigrant family who was either Romanian and/or Polish and/or German, converted to Catholicism to marry my grandmother. I take it that being Jewish is not something that you decide lightly to be or not to be because it's a culture... a way of life.

But in America, culture is subjective. On one hand, you're told to be proud of where you come from, your heritage and traditions. On the other hand, you're also part of a 'melting pot' of humanity and you need to speak and read American English and get enough education to function in society well enough so you can make money to be judged by all of the other people making money. That leads to discussions on the social classes and how big is your house and what car that you drive, etc. But I digress.

American culture is the habits you do and share with your family and friends. My parents would have little to none of it. Where does that leave me?

Years down the road, and DNA testing arrives which opens up the idea of how we now have a definitive scientific way to find out who we are related to and where our ancestors came from. This is how I was discovered by a second cousin who said she was related to surnames I had no connection to, but had to find out more.All of the second cousins, come to find out, had these breadcrumbs to the path that lead me to the realization that my German surname was not my surname at all, it was a made-up name by a boy who ran away from home and went into hiding from his family. After all of the discovery and the dust settled, I believe my true last name is Weschler, which was Americanized to be Wexler when my great-grandfather immigrated to the US in the 18XXs from where he came from.

One cousin took a trip to Romania in 2023 with the hope that there were still records yet to be discovered. 

We are still researching the location of his immigration papers.