Latest / Stories That Live In Us / Alabama: Generations of Joy (with Noah Lapidus) | Episode 97

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Alabama: Generations of Joy (with Noah Lapidus) | Episode 97 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Noah Lapidus: And that was just the best way to kick off my journey, realizing that at the end of the day, everyone is far more similar than they are different.
• 0:07
  Noah Lapidus: They knew we were Jews.
• 0:08
  Noah Lapidus: They were thrilled that we'd come home.
• 0:11
  Noah Lapidus: And these are the best people.
• 0:16
  Crista Cowan: Stories That Live in Us is a podcast that inspires you to form deep connections with your family, past, present, and future.
• 0:24
  Crista Cowan: I'm Crista Cowan, known online as the Barefoot Genealogist.
• 0:27
  Crista Cowan: Counting down to the upcoming celebration of America's 250th birthday, you'll meet families from each state whose stories are woven into the very fabric of America.
• 0:38
  Crista Cowan: Tales of immigration, migration, courage, and community that remind us that when we tell our stories, we strengthen the bonds that connect us.
• 0:47
  Crista Cowan: So join me for season two as we discover from sea to shining sea the stories that live in us.
• 0:54
  Crista Cowan: You all know that I've been interested in family history since I was a child.
• 1:00
  Crista Cowan: But that's not all that usual.
• 1:03
  Crista Cowan: And I always felt a little weird about it, a little nerdy about loving family history.
• 1:08
  Crista Cowan: Well, my guest today is just as big of a nerd as I am.
• 1:12
  Crista Cowan: He also has been interested in family history since he was a kid.
• 1:16
  Crista Cowan: But like me, he didn't think that family history could be a career.
• 1:21
  Crista Cowan: It took me until I was about 30 to figure that out.
• 1:25
  Crista Cowan: Noah figured it out a little bit earlier, and I'm so excited for you to hear his story.
• 1:31
  Crista Cowan: My guest today is Noah Lapitas, and he is from Alabama, and he is a research manager with Ancestry ProGenealogists.
• 1:41
  Crista Cowan: And even though his childhood research into his own Jewish family history was what he started with, he has become an African-American research specialist.
• 1:52
  Crista Cowan: As a matter of fact, if you go back and listen to episode 11 of this podcast, you'll hear a story all about a man named Hawkins Wilson.
• 2:02
  Crista Cowan: He was a man who was enslaved in Virginia and then sold away to Texas.
• 2:08
  Crista Cowan: And it's a brilliant story that had hours and hours and hours of research poured into it.
• 2:17
  Crista Cowan: And Noah is the one who discovered the first record about Hawkins' family outside of the original Freedmen's Bureau Records.
• 2:26
  Crista Cowan: So he is not only a brilliant researcher, but you'll hear he is also a brilliant storyteller.
• 2:32
  Crista Cowan: Enjoy my conversation with Noah Lapitas.
• 2:36
  Crista Cowan: Well, Noah, thank you so much for joining me today.
• 2:39
  Crista Cowan: I'm so excited to get to know you a little bit better.
• 2:41
  Crista Cowan: Um, I would love to just hear all about your childhood in Alabama.
• 2:46
  Crista Cowan: Okay.
• 2:47
  Noah Lapidus: Sure.
• 2:47
  Noah Lapidus: Well, I uh I'm from a very tiny knit Jewish community here in Birmingham, uh, where my family's lived since the 1880s.
• 2:56
  Noah Lapidus: Um I uh have a very small family.
• 3:00
  Noah Lapidus: I have one sister, two cousins on each side.
• 3:04
  Noah Lapidus: Um, each of my grandparents only had one sibling.
• 3:08
  Noah Lapidus: So um I know my second cousins as well, as many folks know their first cousins.
• 3:13
  Noah Lapidus: Um I grew up down the street from my grandparents, on the same street as my grandparents.
• 3:19
  Crista Cowan: Both sets or just one set?
• 3:21
  Noah Lapidus: Just one set.
• 3:21
  Noah Lapidus: My mom's family is actually from Rochester, New York.
• 3:24
  Noah Lapidus: Okay.
• 3:24
  Noah Lapidus: Um so from my dad's parents grew up down the street and uh within a mile of where their parents were born and raised.
• 3:33
  Noah Lapidus: And I live within that same one mile radius.
• 3:36
  Noah Lapidus: So that really sort of set the stage for my love of family history, just sort of surrounded by it.
• 3:42
  Noah Lapidus: My home was filled with heirlooms, which I've since stolen.
• 3:46
  Noah Lapidus: Um, and uh, so it's really no surprise to anyone, I think, that I fell in love with family history.
• 3:52
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 3:53
  Crista Cowan: So as you think back on your childhood surrounded by family, were there stories like that stand out to you that you heard growing up or things that intrigued you when you were a kid?
• 4:03
  Noah Lapidus: Yeah, absolutely.
• 4:04
  Noah Lapidus: And very few were true.
• 4:05
  Noah Lapidus: Um you know, that's one of the curses of being a genealogist, is that you have to break everyone's heart and tell them that a lot of these stories aren't true.
• 4:13
  Noah Lapidus: But for example, I was told I was related to uh Victor Brenner, who designed the penny.
• 4:19
  Noah Lapidus: Um, not true.
• 4:21
  Noah Lapidus: I was told it was related to Al Jolson, not true.
• 4:26
  Noah Lapidus: Um and I was told my my grandmother's uncle died in prison after selling stolen furniture, which turned out to be true.
• 4:35
  Noah Lapidus: Oh.
• 4:36
  Noah Lapidus: And so thanks, Ancestry.
• 4:38
  Noah Lapidus: Um, but it's you know, none of the none of the great stories turn out to be true.
• 4:43
  Noah Lapidus: Um it's so really all of the fun and exciting stories I've had to find out for myself.
• 4:49
  Noah Lapidus: Okay then.
• 4:52
  Crista Cowan: Well, it's it's interesting because as you think about that, like I think of the way stories get spun up in a lot of families.
• 4:58
  Crista Cowan: Sometimes it's somebody heard something and they misunderstood something, or somebody's recounting something they heard as a child without like the filter to understand exactly what it meant.
• 5:08
  Crista Cowan: And they kind of just filled in the gaps when they retold the story as an adult.
• 5:12
  Crista Cowan: Why do you think some of those stories got spun up in your own family?
• 5:15
  Noah Lapidus: We wanted to feel important.
• 5:17
  Noah Lapidus: Um, you know, I, you know, I come from poor Russian Jews.
• 5:21
  Noah Lapidus: Um, you know, um, they they didn't necessarily have the means to to do all that much in their lives.
• 5:28
  Noah Lapidus: Um, so, you know, we grasped for those, you know, few Jews who at that time did make something of themselves and said we were related.
• 5:35
  Noah Lapidus: Um, you know, Jolson sounded like Smolson, which was a family name.
• 5:40
  Noah Lapidus: Um so um, you know, just an attempt to try to place ourselves in um in a history that we don't know much about.
• 5:49
  Noah Lapidus: You know, Jews aren't historically as well recorded as some other populations.
• 5:55
  Noah Lapidus: Um, you know, I'm an African-American research specialist, and it's similar, you know.
• 6:00
  Noah Lapidus: Um uh, you know, for enslaved folks and Russian Jews, neither community really had surnames before the 1800s or even into the 1800s on my Romanian side.
• 6:11
  Noah Lapidus: Um, so um, you know, we're just trying to um figure out where we fit in all this, and I suppose, you know, some some exciting fibs got told along the way, but nothing, you know, all harmless.
• 6:25
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah.
• 6:26
  Crista Cowan: So at what point did you decide to start investigating the truth or falsehood of some of these stories?
• 6:32
  Noah Lapidus: You know, I started early, as a lot of us do.
• 6:34
  Noah Lapidus: Um, I had a fourth grade family history project and I was hooked immediately.
• 6:40
  Noah Lapidus: Um, I had a sick brother and I was desperate for attention.
• 6:45
  Noah Lapidus: Um, and the ancestors made me feel important.
• 6:48
  Noah Lapidus: And um, you know, I I'm very grateful to my to my ancestors uh for for giving me that attention and that sustained me for a long time um to this day.
• 7:00
  Noah Lapidus: Um and uh so I was very quick to look into the mysteries.
• 7:06
  Noah Lapidus: Um and I had a very supportive family.
• 7:08
  Noah Lapidus: You know, my my parents bought me my first ancestry subscription when I was 11 years old.
• 7:14
  Noah Lapidus: Um and they bought me death certificates and obituaries and really anything a little 12-year-old could ever wish for.
• 7:22
  Noah Lapidus: And um they took me for my bar mitzvah present, they took me to Rochester on a family roots tour.
• 7:28
  Noah Lapidus: And um, you know, I I had a very supportive Bubby grandmother.
• 7:34
  Noah Lapidus: Um, I used to make her schlep to the old Jewish cemetery with me in 90 degree heat to record names and dates.
• 7:42
  Noah Lapidus: Um, and I used to make her pull out the phone book and uh call her distant relatives so I could interrogate them.
• 7:49
  Noah Lapidus: Um, so I, you know, it's I I could have been into worse things, I suppose.
• 7:55
  Noah Lapidus: And so I think everyone was generally pleased that this is what I was obsessed with.
• 7:59
  Noah Lapidus: Um and it just, you know, brought me so much happiness and still does.
• 8:03
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 8:04
  Crista Cowan: That's I just can picture a little Noah, you know, just dragging Granny through the cemetery.
• 8:09
  Noah Lapidus: Yeah, they used to draw me off at the Birmingham Public Library with my little backpack.
• 8:14
  Noah Lapidus: And uh, and I knew all the staff there.
• 8:16
  Noah Lapidus: I was using microfilm when I was, you know, 13.
• 8:19
  Noah Lapidus: And uh everyone was was so happy about it, I think.
• 8:24
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 8:25
  Crista Cowan: So as you dove into these stories to prove them true or false, what were some of the real stories you uncovered?
• 8:35
  Noah Lapidus: I mean, yeah, it's interesting.
• 8:36
  Noah Lapidus: None of them are you know fun per se.
• 8:39
  Noah Lapidus: I I uh located my uh second great grandfather's 1913 will, for example, wherein he, you know, bequeathed um some property to an extra child that no one knew about that it turned out that he'd had and uh before he immigrated, um, you know, through DNA analysis, found out another second great grandfather had a child out of wedlock.
• 9:04
  Noah Lapidus: Um and um, you know, for for me, the more the merrier in terms of family.
• 9:12
  Noah Lapidus: Um, you know, it's not necessarily true for everyone in my family, not everyone feels that way.
• 9:17
  Noah Lapidus: But for me, I, you know, there's there's no cousin I don't want to find.
• 9:21
  Noah Lapidus: Um and um, you know, the some of the most exciting discoveries were relatives who never immigrated, relatives who remained in in Europe, uh survived uh the Holocaust and and still live in in Europe today.
• 9:36
  Noah Lapidus: Um, you know, I discovered, you know, many of us Jews whose families immigrated um in the 1880s to 1920s don't really think of us as having a particularly close connection to the Holocaust.
• 9:49
  Noah Lapidus: But in my case, which is which I think is probably true of you know most cases for folks like me, it turned out that every single one of my second great grandparents, the immigrant gener immigrant generation, had either a sibling, niece, or nephew who died in the Holocaust.
• 10:04
  Noah Lapidus: Um so it's it's just endless stories, not all fun, and yet I want to know them all.
• 10:12
  Noah Lapidus: And um, I want to know all the relatives, I want to know all the secrets.
• 10:17
  Noah Lapidus: And um, you know, maybe the most interesting thing I've uncovered is our family's origin story in Birmingham.
• 10:24
  Noah Lapidus: Um, you know, we used to make up reasons that we that we got to Birmingham.
• 10:29
  Crista Cowan: Because Jews don't typically go to Birmingham, right?
• 10:31
  Crista Cowan: Like it's not the first place.
• 10:32
  Crista Cowan: We see that Jewish immigration from, you know, especially in those 1890s, 1900, like to New York, to Philadelphia.
• 10:41
  Crista Cowan: Birmingham, Alabama doesn't feel like the top choice on the list.
• 10:45
  Noah Lapidus: No, not at all.
• 10:46
  Noah Lapidus: And truth be told, we have no idea why they would, you know, choose to live here.
• 10:50
  Noah Lapidus: We love it here, don't get me wrong, but you know, we can understand why people are surprised that they have a Siena.
• 10:56
  Noah Lapidus: So yeah, I uncovered that story, and that was um, you know, it was really nice putting that to rest.
• 11:03
  Crista Cowan: So explain so is there a story?
• 11:05
  Crista Cowan: What is the story?
• 11:06
  Noah Lapidus: So, I mean, it's a long story, um, but it took a long time to unravel.
• 11:10
  Noah Lapidus: So essentially the the first piece of context for the story is that folks don't most folks don't realize the Birmingham wasn't founded until after the Civil War.
• 11:20
  Noah Lapidus: Um, it was founded in 1871 when some prospectors discovered the three main ingredients for creating steel here.
• 11:28
  Noah Lapidus: Um, don't ask me what the ingredients are.
• 11:31
  Noah Lapidus: Um, but they um they in fact you won't find these three ingredients closer to each other anywhere else on earth.
• 11:38
  Noah Lapidus: So go Birmingham.
• 11:40
  Noah Lapidus: Um so um so this town grows up out of nowhere.
• 11:45
  Noah Lapidus: So from 1871 to the 1880s, it turns from nothing into a metropolis, and that's why they call it the magic city.
• 11:51
  Noah Lapidus: But they need laborers to work in the mines.
• 11:54
  Noah Lapidus: So where do they get laborers from?
• 11:55
  Noah Lapidus: They uh a lot of Eastern European immigrants, lots of Czechoslovakians, Austro-Hungarians, not Jews.
• 12:02
  Noah Lapidus: Um uh, and that's why to this day you still have many Eastern Orthodox churches in and around Birmingham.
• 12:09
  Noah Lapidus: Um, but most of their labor was convict later labor.
• 12:13
  Noah Lapidus: So the state of Alabama thought it would be a really good idea to incarcerate um all the black folks who had just been freed uh during Reconstruction, and then lease them to these mining interests in Birmingham.
• 12:27
  Noah Lapidus: And in fact, in the late 1800s, uh convict leasing was the single largest source of Alabama's revenue.
• 12:36
  Noah Lapidus: Um, and um Alabama's you know prison systems are obviously still heinous.
• 12:41
  Noah Lapidus: Um but anyway, so that's the first uh piece of context.
• 12:45
  Noah Lapidus: The the second piece is about Jews in the South, which is that you have Jews in the South for hundreds of years, um, but not you know, Yiddish-speaking fiddler on the roof Jews.
• 12:57
  Noah Lapidus: Um, you have uh Sephardic Jewish migrants who end up in Charleston and Savannah and elsewhere on the East Coast hundreds of years ago, Jews with roots in Spain and Portugal.
• 13:07
  Noah Lapidus: Um, you have you know wealthy German and French Jews who end up across the Deep South, but you know, largely in Louisiana, along the Gulf Coast, Mobile, so on and so forth.
• 13:18
  Noah Lapidus: Um, but you don't only get Russian Jews uh in earnest coming, immigrating until the to America, until the 1880s to the 1920s.
• 13:27
  Noah Lapidus: Um they start trickling in, let's say, in the 1860s, but really not in earnest till the 1880s.
• 13:32
  Noah Lapidus: And so um, so my family story is that one of those early Jewish families that immigrates immigrates in the 1860s to New York City, as Jews do.
• 13:44
  Noah Lapidus: Um, and they come from a small town called Kobrin in the Russian Empire, which is um now in the southwest corner of Belarus, the corner of Poland and Ukraine and Belarus.
• 13:55
  Noah Lapidus: And um they settle in New York, they have some kids.
• 13:59
  Noah Lapidus: And in the 1880s, those kids hear about the magic city of Birmingham that had grown up out of nowhere, and they want to make their mark.
• 14:08
  Noah Lapidus: And so they take some of their family's inventory.
• 14:10
  Noah Lapidus: Their family owns a dry goods store in New York, so they take some of their family's inventory south, and they set up a department store in downtown Birmingham, let's say two miles from where I am now.
• 14:21
  Noah Lapidus: Um and then when they're there, they hear about all these small little mining towns on the outskirts of Birmingham.
• 14:29
  Noah Lapidus: Um, and they figure, you know, wow, I'd I'd like some folks to sell our product in these little towns.
• 14:35
  Noah Lapidus: Let's see what we can do there.
• 14:36
  Noah Lapidus: So they bring over, um they bring over their cousins, they bring over their friends.
• 14:42
  Noah Lapidus: And one of their cousins was Harry Weinstein, my second great-grandfather, who came over in 1885 and they set up in um a little town called Brookside, uh, Alabama, north of Birmingham.
• 14:55
  Noah Lapidus: And um, Harry Weinstein starts uh what they called a Jew store.
• 15:01
  Noah Lapidus: Um, and there are books written about Jew stores.
• 15:04
  Noah Lapidus: It's a thing, I promise.
• 15:05
  Noah Lapidus: Um, and there were all these little Jews stores in all these communities around uh the South, and including uh around Birmingham.
• 15:12
  Noah Lapidus: So they established the there, the, and these are stores run by the only Jewish family in town.
• 15:16
  Noah Lapidus: So very brave of these immigrant families to be doing this in the deep south at that time.
• 15:20
  Noah Lapidus: But um so Harry Weinstein's to uh settles himself there.
• 15:27
  Noah Lapidus: Uh the Weinstein uh brothers bring in another uh Cabrenner family, and Harry marries their you know 15-year-old daughters.
• 15:34
  Noah Lapidus: He's 45, 50 at the time.
• 15:37
  Noah Lapidus: And that's a whole nother story.
• 15:39
  Noah Lapidus: And um, and then they have my great-grandma Dora in 1905 on Brookside.
• 15:44
  Noah Lapidus: And then, fast forward to the 20s, she marries my great-grandfather Irving Lapitas, whose family uh settled in Bayonne, a much more traditional uh immigration story, Jewish immigration story on the outskirts of you know New York.
• 15:59
  Noah Lapidus: And he comes here following relatives in the 20s.
• 16:02
  Noah Lapidus: They have my grandfather in 1930, who was born less than a mile from where I am, and I pass by his apartment almost every day and point it out to my fiance, and she is so tired of hearing about it.
• 16:14
  Noah Lapidus: Uh, but I do it every day because I get so excited.
• 16:18
  Noah Lapidus: And um uh yeah, so and I I suppose the climax of this story is that 125 years later, little Noah is is you know researching his friends' family trees.
• 16:32
  Noah Lapidus: I think that's how a lot of us professional genealogists get started as researching our friends' trees.
• 16:37
  Noah Lapidus: Um, and I keep seeing the town of Cabrin and all of their trees.
• 16:41
  Noah Lapidus: And it turns out that a very large portion of the Jews living in Birmingham today can trace their roots back to the town of Cabrin, having been brought here either by the Weinstein family or by folks that they then brought over.
• 16:54
  Noah Lapidus: And the other part of this story, I know this is a long story, but the other part of this story is that I then visit Cabrin in 2016 on a roots journey, and um, it's decimated.
• 17:06
  Noah Lapidus: You know, Hitler completely destroyed it.
• 17:08
  Noah Lapidus: He destroyed the, you know, the cemetery, the the synagogue.
• 17:11
  Noah Lapidus: The synagogue actually stands remarkably.
• 17:14
  Noah Lapidus: It's one of the few few synagogues standing in Belarus, but as swastikas all over it.
• 17:18
  Noah Lapidus: And um, but there's no Jewish community there.
• 17:21
  Noah Lapidus: No Jew has lived there in eons.
• 17:23
  Noah Lapidus: But in a sense, I feel that you know the Cabrin community survives in Birmingham, Alabama, of all places somehow.
• 17:32
  Crista Cowan: Wow.
• 17:32
  Crista Cowan: So it's a it's not just an echo of its former self, it has become a thing into itself.
• 17:38
  Noah Lapidus: Exactly.
• 17:39
  Crista Cowan: That's amazing.
• 17:40
  Crista Cowan: I love the way that you just told that story.
• 17:43
  Crista Cowan: So many times when we um when genealogists get together and talk, they can't help but intersperse themselves into the story about how they found these pieces of information.
• 17:54
  Crista Cowan: And so I love that you just told the story.
• 17:57
  Crista Cowan: I'm happy to tell you about my discoveries.
• 18:01
  Crista Cowan: Well, I always I always love hearing about those too, but I also love a good story.
• 18:06
  Crista Cowan: So thank you for for telling the story.
• 18:08
  Crista Cowan: I think that was just beautiful.
• 18:09
  Crista Cowan: Um, but let's talk a little bit about like young Noah going to the library with his backpack, right?
• 18:15
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 18:15
  Crista Cowan: Like did you grow up wanting to be a genealogist professionally?
• 18:19
  Crista Cowan: Or how does that how does that work?
• 18:21
  Noah Lapidus: No, no.
• 18:22
  Noah Lapidus: If anything, I was extremely insecure about uh being obsessed with genealogy.
• 18:26
  Noah Lapidus: I don't know if I'm alone in that, but when I was when I was a kid, I definitely kept it for my friends.
• 18:31
  Noah Lapidus: It I I did not perceive of it as being the coolest thing for a kid to do.
• 18:35
  Crista Cowan: It is a little nerdy.
• 18:36
  Noah Lapidus: Uh thank you.
• 18:37
  Noah Lapidus: Yes.
• 18:38
  Noah Lapidus: I I that's how I felt.
• 18:40
  Noah Lapidus: And um, you know, even uh even starting college, I was not gonna be a genealogist.
• 18:47
  Noah Lapidus: I um I uh when I was 18, I left Birmingham, went as far away as I could.
• 18:53
  Noah Lapidus: I went to Boston, Massachusetts, and went to Northeastern University, and um and had no intention of of uh doing genealogy.
• 19:03
  Noah Lapidus: I I was freelancing, of course, but not as, you know, I didn't picture that being my career.
• 19:07
  Noah Lapidus: Um and so I was torn actually between politics and slash law and history.
• 19:13
  Noah Lapidus: So something more mainstream library sciences, you know, archives, public history, something like that.
• 19:20
  Noah Lapidus: But so I did internships in both.
• 19:22
  Noah Lapidus: I worked for a senator in DC, which was super fun.
• 19:26
  Noah Lapidus: And I worked at the Library of Congress a few times trying to figure out history, politics, law, what.
• 19:32
  Noah Lapidus: And it wasn't helpful at all because I loved them both so much.
• 19:35
  Noah Lapidus: Um and I worked at worked at the Library of Congress again the following year on the Indigenous Law Portal with Dr.
• 19:41
  Noah Lapidus: Yolanda Goldberg.
• 19:43
  Noah Lapidus: And um and I I was still so torn.
• 19:47
  Noah Lapidus: Um and so then fast forward to senior year, I um I find out that the Jewish Studies Department has an essay contest, uh, $5,000 giveaway, you know, tell us how you want to use the money, and you win.
• 20:01
  Noah Lapidus: And I was, you had to be a Jewish studies minor, but I was not.
• 20:05
  Noah Lapidus: So I declared a Jewish studies minor and I wrote an essay about how I would use the $5,000 to travel to the 20 plus towns in Eastern Europe where my family was from.
• 20:17
  Noah Lapidus: And I won.
• 20:19
  Noah Lapidus: And I declared a Jewish studies minor, and I uh enrolled at Vilnius, Vilnius University in Lithuania, and I visited the, you know, I toasted through classes and I spent all my free time visiting all the towns across Eastern Europe, Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Moldova, Latvia, Lithuania, where my family was from.
• 20:41
  Noah Lapidus: And um, so, you know, that's when I said, you know, maybe this is meant to be.
• 20:48
  Noah Lapidus: Um, but then what happened is I return home.
• 20:53
  Noah Lapidus: It's um senior year of college.
• 20:56
  Noah Lapidus: And I'm like, okay, I need to start thinking about this career thing.
• 21:00
  Noah Lapidus: And I get a um a research assistant job with the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project.
• 21:06
  Noah Lapidus: Um, this is a civil rights organization based out of Northeastern's law school.
• 21:10
  Noah Lapidus: They needed some someone to identify descendants of the hundreds of lynching victims in their database so that they could pursue restorative justice measures.
• 21:20
  Noah Lapidus: So C R J, the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, that is the largest um archive on Jim Crow era lynchings in the world.
• 21:28
  Noah Lapidus: And um and I was utterly attached to this project.
• 21:33
  Noah Lapidus: It was incredibly fulfilling, which is why I wanted to go into politics in the first place, but it also scratched my, you know, history itch.
• 21:42
  Noah Lapidus: And um and so, you know, then you know, we're nearing the end of the semester, and I decide I think I need to go to law school because this is where the project is based out of.
• 21:53
  Noah Lapidus: It's out of Northeastern Law School.
• 21:54
  Noah Lapidus: I feel like this is meant to be.
• 21:56
  Noah Lapidus: So I enrolled in law school, started that August, and I Spent the next three years sort of coasting through classes and spending all my free time identifying descendants of the lynching victims in this database and helping them pursue justice.
• 22:09
  Noah Lapidus: Um, I identified, you know, hundreds of descendants, researched hundreds of victims.
• 22:14
  Noah Lapidus: I um identified names of unknown victims, which was incredibly fulfilling.
• 22:20
  Noah Lapidus: Um and then um March 2020 rolls around.
• 22:26
  Noah Lapidus: My um my senior year, my final year of law school, and COVID happens.
• 22:33
  Noah Lapidus: And um so I moved back in with my parents in Birmingham and I graduated during COVID.
• 22:40
  Noah Lapidus: I took the bar during COVID, passed the bar during COVID, got licensed during COVID, started practicing law during COVID.
• 22:47
  Noah Lapidus: And I had a great legal job practicing whistleblow whistleblower law.
• 22:52
  Noah Lapidus: It was as cool as it gets.
• 22:53
  Noah Lapidus: And yet it was it was just a dark time for all of us.
• 22:58
  Noah Lapidus: And so um, and meanwhile, I was also scratching my history itch by freelancing for various lynching memorialization organizations uh throughout the South, um, uh, you know, researching enslaved folks for various civil rights organizations in Alabama and Lowndes County.
• 23:18
  Noah Lapidus: And um and so then, you know, March uh 21, I'm doom scrolling LinkedIn, as we all did uh maybe during COVID.
• 23:29
  Noah Lapidus: And um there it is, you know, uh, you know, ancestry, pro-genealogist, African-American research specialist.
• 23:38
  Noah Lapidus: And it felt to share it, as we say in Yiddish.
• 23:40
  Noah Lapidus: It felt meant to be.
• 23:42
  Noah Lapidus: Um, and so I left law, and I accepted that genealogy was and always would be my passion since the age of 10 until the day I die, and that it did not make sense to do anything else full time.
• 23:57
  Noah Lapidus: I'd always done it part-time, made sense to do it full-time, and it will always make sense to do it full-time, and I will be at Ancestry until they fire me.
• 24:04
  Noah Lapidus: I'm I pinch myself every day.
• 24:06
  Noah Lapidus: I love my job so much.
• 24:08
  Noah Lapidus: I am so incredibly happy as a professional genealogist.
• 24:13
  Crista Cowan: I love that for you, I love that for us, and I love that for nerdy 13-year-old Noah.
• 24:18
  Noah Lapidus: Thank you.
• 24:19
  Noah Lapidus: Thank you.
• 24:20
  Noah Lapidus: You would be smoothly crowd.
• 24:23
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it's so interesting that so many of us, and and you know, I started family history as a kid too, thought it was the nerdiest thing on the planet.
• 24:32
  Crista Cowan: Luckily, I had a dad who he didn't just send me to the library.
• 24:36
  Crista Cowan: He brought me to Salt Lake, you know, in the summers and would sit with me for a week at those microfilm readers.
• 24:42
  Crista Cowan: And it was something that we were able to connect over, but it never occurred to me that it could be a career until I was 30 almost.
• 24:50
  Crista Cowan: Like, um, and and similar to you, like I was doing family trees for my friends and you know, just kind of trying to scratch that itch however I could.
• 24:58
  Crista Cowan: And so yeah, I also feel very fortunate and lucky to be employed by ancestry, doing something that I love every day.
• 25:07
  Crista Cowan: And I don't get to deep dive into the research quite as often as you do, but but the opportunity to teach other people how to do that research.
• 25:16
  Crista Cowan: And then the opportunity to to hear people's stories and to be able to share those stories with the world, I think is so important.
• 25:25
  Crista Cowan: So thank you for sharing your story with us.
• 25:29
  Crista Cowan: Um, I love the story of how you became a genealogist.
• 25:31
  Crista Cowan: I love the way that you shared the story of how the Jews ended up in Birmingham because it does seem like kind of an odd, um, an odd thing.
• 25:40
  Crista Cowan: Um, I would love to just spend a few minutes talking about that trip you took.
• 25:45
  Crista Cowan: Um like nerdy 13-year-old Noah going to the library.
• 25:49
  Crista Cowan: Now we've got senior college, senior Noah going on a you know, cross-Europe trip to visit all these little villages.
• 25:58
  Crista Cowan: Like what tell me about, tell me a little bit more about that experience.
• 26:02
  Noah Lapidus: It was it was the most important thing I've done with my life.
• 26:05
  Noah Lapidus: It was the most breathtaking experience I've had, out of body.
• 26:09
  Noah Lapidus: I think anyone who's been on a roots journey probably feels that way.
• 26:13
  Noah Lapidus: Um, I was gonna find a way to do it.
• 26:16
  Noah Lapidus: Um, you know, subsidized or not, if I had to work my whole life, I was gonna find a way to do it.
• 26:21
  Noah Lapidus: Um and, you know, it wasn't necessarily to make a discovery, you know.
• 26:28
  Noah Lapidus: Um fortunately, many of those records that do exist for that part of the world are digitized.
• 26:35
  Noah Lapidus: Um, so it wasn't really to make a discovery as much as it was just to go home and to see how my ancestors lived for most of recent history.
• 26:44
  Noah Lapidus: Um, you know, I had incredible experiences along the way.
• 26:49
  Noah Lapidus: The ones that stuck out were the ones that were never supposed to happen.
• 26:54
  Noah Lapidus: Um uh the first uh my trip begins in uh um Lviv, uh Ukraine in Galizia.
• 27:03
  Noah Lapidus: Um, and uh a friend of mine from college, my only other sort of history nerdy friend from college, he travels to kick off my journey with me.
• 27:12
  Noah Lapidus: So he spends the first two weeks there with me.
• 27:15
  Noah Lapidus: And we rent a car and we decide we're gonna go through Galizia, through to Moldova and Romania and visit the um towns where both of our families are from before um before my semester starts at Vilnius University.
• 27:29
  Noah Lapidus: Uh Chase Nelson, who is uh an incredible um uh archivist in Vancouver.
• 27:36
  Noah Lapidus: Um and um while we're traveling through middle of nowhere, Ukraine, Nod Virna, the folks there might take offense to my calling it the middle of nowhere, but uh our car breaks down.
• 27:47
  Noah Lapidus: And um, we're two Jews in the old country where you don't want your car to break down, or so we thought.
• 27:54
  Noah Lapidus: And um, you know, some young folks our age and uh the only people in town who speak English end up meeting us at the gas station.
• 28:04
  Noah Lapidus: And um we were terrified.
• 28:06
  Noah Lapidus: Um we did not speak the language, they did not speak much English, and everything we could have possibly imagined was wrong.
• 28:16
  Noah Lapidus: These were the warmest, kindest people I've ever known.
• 28:20
  Noah Lapidus: They housed us for three days while our car was being prepared was being uh repaired.
• 28:25
  Noah Lapidus: They took us to the waterfalls, they took us to the castles in a far more intimate way than we, you know, Chase and I would have been able to experience the country had we been alone.
• 28:36
  Noah Lapidus: Um and um, they introduced us to everyone in town.
• 28:40
  Noah Lapidus: And um they're they're you know, we keep in touch with them to this day.
• 28:45
  Noah Lapidus: And that was just the best way to kick off my journey, realizing that at the end of the day, everyone is far more similar than they are different.
• 28:52
  Noah Lapidus: They knew we were Jews, they were thrilled that we'd come home.
• 28:56
  Noah Lapidus: Um and um these are these are the best people.
• 29:01
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, that's amazing.
• 29:02
  Crista Cowan: I love that you were able to have that experience.
• 29:04
  Crista Cowan: Um, was it your great-great-grandfather that the Weinsteins brought over?
• 29:09
  Noah Lapidus: Yes, that's right.
• 29:10
  Crista Cowan: Okay, so so you know, a lot of people when they think about Jews in Eastern Europe, they think about the Holocaust.
• 29:16
  Crista Cowan: That's I think what most of us are educated into knowing and understanding about Jewish persecution.
• 29:23
  Crista Cowan: But Jewish persecution began long before that.
• 29:26
  Crista Cowan: And those people that were leaving Europe um, you know, in the late 1800s, they weren't leaving just because something was better in America.
• 29:37
  Crista Cowan: They were actually, in many cases, fleeing um some pretty harsh, harsh persecution.
• 29:44
  Crista Cowan: And so as you think about your great-great-grandfather being brought over, you know, by the Weinsteins coming to Birmingham.
• 29:52
  Crista Cowan: And now you, as a young college student, are back in those places in Eastern Europe where your family lived.
• 29:59
  Crista Cowan: Like, what do you think they would think about that?
• 30:03
  Noah Lapidus: I don't know.
• 30:04
  Noah Lapidus: They may think, what are you thinking?
• 30:05
  Noah Lapidus: Uh going back there.
• 30:08
  Noah Lapidus: You know, they spent every last penny they had to get out.
• 30:11
  Noah Lapidus: Um, and um, you know, there was definitely Jewish joy.
• 30:16
  Noah Lapidus: You know, I, you know, I things weren't ever great for them there.
• 30:20
  Noah Lapidus: They endured pogroms and they endured poverty and violence.
• 30:24
  Noah Lapidus: And um, you know, I I don't envy their lives, but you know, they they undoubtedly had joy.
• 30:32
  Noah Lapidus: I mean, the what I know about my great-great-grandparents, I mean, I'll give you an example, my great-great-grandmother, we call her Big Mama affectionately.
• 30:42
  Noah Lapidus: Um that's a very southern term.
• 30:45
  Noah Lapidus: Yeah, and um, you know, I I I don't know why she has such a big presence in our lives, but her name is definitely fitting.
• 30:56
  Noah Lapidus: Um, but Big Mama had such a strong, happy, glowing personality that we talk about her to this day.
• 31:04
  Noah Lapidus: Now, fiance and I had a portrait of her in our house.
• 31:07
  Noah Lapidus: Um, you know, and and that's the side of the family that we have our family reunions on.
• 31:12
  Noah Lapidus: You know, there's always one side of the family that um that I think, you know, ever you attach to.
• 31:19
  Noah Lapidus: And for whatever reason, my great-grandmother's side of the family, her momeless Big Mama, her and her three brothers, those that's the family we have family reunions with.
• 31:26
  Noah Lapidus: And it's because Big Mama, from what I know, I never knew her.
• 31:29
  Noah Lapidus: But um she just had such a big, warm personality, and I can't imagine that someone with that much joy could have come from such a miserable place.
• 31:43
  Noah Lapidus: She certainly had some laughter and happiness and something to bring her excitement.
• 31:49
  Noah Lapidus: So I think maybe Big Mama would be excited that I went to Vaslui, Romania.
• 31:53
  Noah Lapidus: Maybe Harry Weinstein wouldn't be thrilled that I went to Cabrin.
• 31:56
  Noah Lapidus: You know, it's not a binary.
• 31:58
  Noah Lapidus: These things are in black and white.
• 31:59
  Noah Lapidus: There was, I'm sure there was joy with the bad.
• 32:01
  Noah Lapidus: Um, Vaslui was an incredible, beautiful town in Romania.
• 32:06
  Noah Lapidus: Um, but um, let's say they'd be happy.
• 32:11
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
• 32:13
  Crista Cowan: Well, you know, um we kind of come full circle as you think about you, you're talking about you talk about Big Mama as if she's larger than life.
• 32:22
  Crista Cowan: And part of your entrance into family history was from some of those tall tales that were shared by your family.
• 32:28
  Crista Cowan: Um, as you think about kind of how you're gonna pass those stories on, you know, to the next generation, if you have children or nieces and nephews or cousins that you still connect with.
• 32:39
  Crista Cowan: Like, what are the stories that you want to make sure you pass on?
• 32:44
  Noah Lapidus: Oh, stories and heirlooms.
• 32:47
  Noah Lapidus: I am the collector of heirlooms.
• 32:50
  Noah Lapidus: Um, I this is this is Ida Lapidas's samivar that she brought over with her in 1891 from the Russian Empire.
• 33:00
  Noah Lapidus: That's Ida.
• 33:01
  Noah Lapidus: That's my beautiful second great grandmother.
• 33:04
  Noah Lapidus: And um, it has Cyrillic writing on it uh that I had to figure out.
• 33:08
  Noah Lapidus: And I didn't acquire this until after I got home from Lithuania.
• 33:12
  Noah Lapidus: This is one of the best parts of my roots journey, is that I get home and all these distant relatives say, We don't we don't need this.
• 33:19
  Noah Lapidus: Um, this guy obviously cares a lot.
• 33:22
  Noah Lapidus: So I I got two samovars, not one, but two.
• 33:25
  Noah Lapidus: I had no idea what a samovar was before that.
• 33:28
  Noah Lapidus: Um, but um it's a it makes tea.
• 33:31
  Noah Lapidus: But the Shtel Jews brought over the samovars with them because they were the most expensive thing they owned.
• 33:36
  Noah Lapidus: And so I am just the keeper of heirlooms.
• 33:39
  Noah Lapidus: I have a second great-grandfather's pocket watch over there, I have a second great-grandmother's mirror over there, I have all the pictures, the original pictures, which I've of course digitized.
• 33:48
  Noah Lapidus: Um, so my, you know, if I have kids, they will definitely inherit the heirlooms and they will know um to protect them with their lives.
• 33:57
  Noah Lapidus: Um in terms of uh, they'll they'll they'll um inherit my collection of family pictures, um, which I treasure treasure so so much, um and which add so much color to my family story.
• 34:12
  Noah Lapidus: Um they'll hear about Big Mama.
• 34:16
  Noah Lapidus: I'll I'll keep up the family reunions.
• 34:18
  Noah Lapidus: My dad is the family reunion organizer in the family.
• 34:22
  Noah Lapidus: Um, so they'll know their cousins, not that they have all that many to know.
• 34:25
  Noah Lapidus: As I said, I have two cousins on each side.
• 34:28
  Noah Lapidus: Um and yeah, they'll know Jewish Joy and um they'll know about Cabrin and the old country and the stories that I've been able to gather.
• 34:37
  Noah Lapidus: Um so unfortunately, my fiancee comes from a you know very big Utah family, which brings in their own uh family story.
• 34:46
  Noah Lapidus: She has a Bass grandfather, which adds a whole new element and a whole new avenue for me to research, which I'm so excited about.
• 34:54
  Crista Cowan: Love that.
• 34:54
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, every every generation as we blend families, we have to figure out like how to move forward with the traditions and and how to tell the stories and you know what to keep and what to leave behind.
• 35:08
  Crista Cowan: Um, but it sounds like you've moved back to Birmingham.
• 35:11
  Noah Lapidus: Sure have.
• 35:12
  Crista Cowan: And and settling back in there in a place where your ancestors have lived for generations.
• 35:18
  Crista Cowan: So maybe, maybe Alabama is is gonna be play a more prominent role in the lives of of future generations for you as well.
• 35:27
  Noah Lapidus: God willing.
• 35:27
  Noah Lapidus: Yes, I love it here.
• 35:29
  Noah Lapidus: I think everyone should visit Birmingham and Alabama once in their lives.
• 35:32
  Noah Lapidus: Uh, in another life, I was a tour guide, and I'd be happy to give anyone a tour.
• 35:37
  Noah Lapidus: We have so many great uh historic civil rights sites to see, um, fantastic museums in Montgomery.
• 35:44
  Noah Lapidus: I could go on and on, but put Alabama on your bucket list.
• 35:48
  Crista Cowan: Love that.
• 35:48
  Crista Cowan: Well, Noah, thank you so much.
• 35:50
  Crista Cowan: Thank you for telling us your story and the story of your ancestors and the story of Alabama, particularly of the Jews in Birmingham.
• 35:57
  Crista Cowan: Um, it was a history that I wasn't aware of.
• 36:00
  Crista Cowan: So thank you for sharing.
• 36:01
  Noah Lapidus: My pleasure.
• 36:02
  Noah Lapidus: Thank you so much for having me.
• 36:03
  Noah Lapidus: This was great.
• 36:05
  Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.