Latest / Stories That Live In Us / From Belarus to the Boston Meat Wars: Uncovering a Rebel Ancestor (with Suzanne Hoffman) | Episode 127

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From Belarus to the Boston Meat Wars: Uncovering a Rebel Ancestor (with Suzanne Hoffman) | Episode 127 · Stories That Live In Us

• 0:00
  Crista Cowan: Picture a 15-year-old Jewish girl arriving in America alone in the 1880s.
• 0:06
  Crista Cowan: English quickly becomes the sixth language she speaks.
• 0:09
  Crista Cowan: She grows up to lead street marches for working mothers, run for Massachusetts State Treasurer, and organize the famous Boston Meat Wars Boycott when food prices spike beyond belief.
• 0:21
  Crista Cowan: Her name was Eva Hoffman.
• 0:24
  Crista Cowan: Her gentle photographer husband was constantly bailing her out of jail, but her fierce love for her community changed Boston forever.
• 0:34
  Crista Cowan: My guest today is Eva's great-granddaughter Suzanne, and the moment she started pulling back the layers on Eva's courageous life, everything about her own family story suddenly fell into place.
• 0:46
  Crista Cowan: Have you ever wondered if that fiery streak inside of you was passed down from an ancestor you never met?
• 0:53
  Crista Cowan: Think about it and enjoy my conversation with Suzanne Hoffman.
• 0:58
  Crista Cowan: Hi, I'm Crista Cowan, and this is the podcast where telling your family stories can help create a deeply connected family.
• 1:07
  Crista Cowan: Welcome to Stories That Live In Us.
• 1:09
  Crista Cowan: Well, Suzanne, we're so excited to have this conversation with you.
• 1:16
  Crista Cowan: You and I have known each other for a few years.
• 1:18
  Crista Cowan: Um, but this is the first time that I think we've ever sat down and really had a conversation about family history.
• 1:23
  Crista Cowan: So tell me, how did you get started in family history?
• 1:27
  Suzanne Hoffman: Uh the same way a lot of people got started.
• 1:29
  Suzanne Hoffman: It's my daughter had a high school, a junior high school project.
• 1:32
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 1:33
  Suzanne Hoffman: So in grade six and grade eight, the Illinois State History Fair, and they have to participate.
• 1:38
  Suzanne Hoffman: And she and a third cousin of hers were going, oh gosh, what are we gonna do?
• 1:43
  Suzanne Hoffman: And oh wait, wait, wait.
• 1:44
  Suzanne Hoffman: Did she know this person was a third cousin at the time?
• 1:46
  Suzanne Hoffman: At the time.
• 1:47
  Suzanne Hoffman: She didn't know if this was her third cousin because um the family is a little bit illustrious in southern Illinois.
• 1:53
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 1:54
  Suzanne Hoffman: Not me.
• 1:54
  Suzanne Hoffman: I'm from Boston, Massachusetts, but this is my husband's family.
• 1:57
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 1:58
  Suzanne Hoffman: So they were both doing it, one in Springfield, Illinois, and the other one in Chicago.
• 2:02
  Suzanne Hoffman: And um my husband's cousin just said, Do it on Peter Cartwright.
• 2:07
  Suzanne Hoffman: And we all looked at him and said, Who the hell is Peter Cartwright?
• 2:10
  Suzanne Hoffman: I mean, Peter Cartwright is a known quantity in Sangamon County, Illinois.
• 2:14
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 2:14
  Suzanne Hoffman: He was uh the first Methodist preacher, circuit rider, and uh friend of Abraham Lincoln's and saved Illinois from becoming a slave state.
• 2:24
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 2:25
  Suzanne Hoffman: So there's some notoriety there, and it was the perfect person to basically uh eulogize in a presentation that the kids had to do.
• 2:35
  Crista Cowan: And how is he related to your daughter?
• 2:37
  Suzanne Hoffman: He is her fourth great grandfather.
• 2:39
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 2:40
  Suzanne Hoffman: And unfortunately, she was all excited about the project, but who do you think had to do the history of Peter Cartwright?
• 2:48
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, so I had already started looking at ancestry uh census records, which were available on CD at that point in time.
• 2:57
  Suzanne Hoffman: What year was this?
• 2:58
  Suzanne Hoffman: Oh, probably 1996, 97, somewhere in there.
• 3:02
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I went through them and I could pull up Peter Cartwright and what story came to mind when you heard today's father, who looked like he had participated in the Revolutionary War.
• 3:15
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 3:16
  Suzanne Hoffman: So at that point in time I said, ooh, DAR as well.
• 3:19
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay, now we're really cooking with gas.
• 3:21
  Suzanne Hoffman: So she did um the I don't remember what the thematic content was supposed to be in sixth grade.
• 3:27
  Suzanne Hoffman: I do know in eighth grade when she redid the project that it had to be something of significance in the history of Illinois.
• 3:36
  Suzanne Hoffman: And slavery was the perfect match between these two.
• 3:40
  Suzanne Hoffman: And she went all the way on to um that she won the state level and went on to the national competition doing that.
• 3:46
  Crista Cowan: And by she, you mean you.
• 3:48
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah, and I was hooked.
• 3:50
  Suzanne Hoffman: So with my husband's family, with Cartwright and Smith, I was able to get back into the 14th century.
• 3:56
  Suzanne Hoffman: Even with Smith.
• 3:57
  Suzanne Hoffman: Well, okay.
• 3:58
  Suzanne Hoffman: Smith, we haven't quite cleared out of Cape May, New Jersey in in the uh early uh um 18th century.
• 4:06
  Suzanne Hoffman: But um, Cartwright, we got pretty far back.
• 4:09
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I in my next visit to London, I went to the Society of Genealogists in their basement, and lo and behold, they had an 1830 legacy roll that was 12 feet long.
• 4:20
  Suzanne Hoffman: It took me five minutes to find five errors and realized, oh, this isn't his Cartwright family.
• 4:26
  Suzanne Hoffman: Uh, but I have I kiddingly say, and I still love my indecipherable and undocumented and poorly researched Lithuanian and Belarusian family, which is my side of the family, uh, but the um English and um there's a little bit of Dutch in there as well.
• 4:46
  Suzanne Hoffman: Uh I've got pretty well down.
• 4:47
  Crista Cowan: And the Dutch from New Jersey, maybe?
• 4:49
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um no, the Dutch was actually from um New Zealand.
• 4:54
  Suzanne Hoffman: Oh, oh okay.
• 4:56
  Suzanne Hoffman: Like all over the place.
• 4:57
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah.
• 4:57
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, what was your career in?
• 4:59
  Suzanne Hoffman: Oh, my career is actually I am a statistician by background, but I'm actually a business intelligence analyst.
• 5:08
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 5:08
  Suzanne Hoffman: So I was in sales and marketing for a variety of startups in what's known as um analytics.
• 5:15
  Crista Cowan: Okay.
• 5:15
  Crista Cowan: That that doesn't surprise me.
• 5:17
  Crista Cowan: I think I knew a little bit of that, but it's always interesting to me to hear what people do for a career and then when and where they're drawn into family history.
• 5:24
  Crista Cowan: I think there's a lot of parallels sometimes to the work we do with you know some of the stuff you have done in your career.
• 5:30
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah, it it definitely ties into the analytics piece of it.
• 5:33
  Suzanne Hoffman: Would someone have pinned me as a researcher or somebody who wrote wonderful and English composition?
• 5:42
  Suzanne Hoffman: No.
• 5:43
  Crista Cowan: Fair.
• 5:43
  Crista Cowan: So tell me what you knew growing up about your own family.
• 5:48
  Suzanne Hoffman: So almost very little.
• 5:49
  Suzanne Hoffman: It's it's interesting that I'm 100% Ashkenazi Jewish, so there's not a hell of a lot of variation in who I am or what I stand for.
• 5:58
  Suzanne Hoffman: But I knew three of my four grandparents.
• 6:02
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 6:02
  Suzanne Hoffman: Uh, my father's father died um when he was 46.
• 6:06
  Suzanne Hoffman: So even when my father was um, you know, relatively young.
• 6:10
  Suzanne Hoffman: But I did not know any of my great-grandparents.
• 6:13
  Suzanne Hoffman: So it was difficult for me as the youngest child of really getting any more insight into what happened with our family.
• 6:23
  Suzanne Hoffman: Everybody in my family was already in the United States by the mid-1880s.
• 6:29
  Crista Cowan: Okay.
• 6:29
  Suzanne Hoffman: So I don't have any of the recent um migration from Europe and and um the eastern um countries.
• 6:37
  Suzanne Hoffman: But it was interesting.
• 6:39
  Suzanne Hoffman: My grandfather was a conservative Jew in Boston.
• 6:43
  Suzanne Hoffman: Everybody else was like, okay, what holiday is this?
• 6:47
  Suzanne Hoffman: So it was there wasn't a lot of depth from a cultural or an ethnic perspective or religious perspective.
• 6:54
  Suzanne Hoffman: We just knew what we were and it settled in the community.
• 6:58
  Suzanne Hoffman: My dad was a pediatrician, so almost every single kid in my hometown knew my knew our family and knew my dad because he was their doctor.
• 7:06
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 7:07
  Crista Cowan: Okay.
• 7:08
  Crista Cowan: And did the family like, were they a storytelling family, or was there any curiosity around any of that ever?
• 7:15
  Suzanne Hoffman: I I think that on my father's side of the family, there was some notoriety.
• 7:21
  Crista Cowan: Okay.
• 7:21
  Suzanne Hoffman: I've got a uh a great-grandmother who was what I would call a rabble rouser today.
• 7:27
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, if there was a march, she was at the head of the march.
• 7:30
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 7:30
  Suzanne Hoffman: If there was a cause to be sanctioned, she was right there in line.
• 7:34
  Suzanne Hoffman: Uh when she came over, and and she was the first immigrant in the family.
• 7:41
  Suzanne Hoffman: She came over as a 15-year-old.
• 7:43
  Suzanne Hoffman: By herself?
• 7:43
  Suzanne Hoffman: By herself.
• 7:44
  Suzanne Hoffman: What was her name?
• 7:45
  Suzanne Hoffman: Her name was Eva Bucksbaum.
• 7:47
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 7:47
  Suzanne Hoffman: And um, she came into New York and met Lewis Hoffman, who also came over very young, like 16 or 17.
• 7:55
  Suzanne Hoffman: And somehow the two of them hooked up, but I was able to find that they had a religious marriage and then they had a civil service as well.
• 8:03
  Suzanne Hoffman: So I found the two marriage records.
• 8:04
  Suzanne Hoffman: So I knew that they were married in New York.
• 8:06
  Suzanne Hoffman: I know that my great-grandfather died um in Boston, but had been born in New York.
• 8:12
  Suzanne Hoffman: So I did find all that from early New York records, but I didn't know anything about them, with one exception.
• 8:18
  Suzanne Hoffman: We have thousands of images, thousands of pictures taken by Goffman Studios that started sometime in the 1860s.
• 8:30
  Suzanne Hoffman: In is that in New Yorker Barnes?
• 8:32
  Suzanne Hoffman: Eastern Europe.
• 8:34
  Suzanne Hoffman: Oh, what?
• 8:35
  Suzanne Hoffman: Lithuania.
• 8:36
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 8:37
  Suzanne Hoffman: And then Belarus.
• 8:38
  Suzanne Hoffman: So there was an article that was actually online that talked about photography studios in Gomo, Belarus.
• 8:46
  Suzanne Hoffman: And the Goffman Studios is listed as the second largest studio in Gormel in um 1920.
• 8:55
  Suzanne Hoffman: So if you think about it, my family's already been in the United States but for 40 years at that point in time.
• 9:00
  Suzanne Hoffman: That was my great-grandfather's brother, who was still holding the tradition.
• 9:05
  Suzanne Hoffman: And you said those pictures date back to the 1860s.
• 9:07
  Suzanne Hoffman: 1860s.
• 9:08
  Suzanne Hoffman: I've got a picture of my great-grandaunt behind the lens of a camera when she was about 17 that was probably taken 1866, 1865.
• 9:21
  Suzanne Hoffman: Interesting.
• 9:21
  Suzanne Hoffman: Somewhere in there.
• 9:23
  Crista Cowan: And isn't that the part of the world where like a lot of the early um motion picture cameramen came from?
• 9:28
  Crista Cowan: Exactly.
• 9:29
  Suzanne Hoffman: So there was a tradition of you'd see people styled in there in the um uh Russian metrical records in their listing occupation.
• 9:37
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, these were colorists, these were painters, these were people who understood um how to image in colors, and they became photographers, and they were itinerant photographers because the records that have passports, in internal passports, to Lithuania, you see the family come up every two years getting passports so that they could go around and take images.
• 10:02
  Suzanne Hoffman: Explain an itinerant photographer.
• 10:04
  Suzanne Hoffman: Well, I think it's yeah, it is sort of an interesting um, you know, image.
• 10:09
  Suzanne Hoffman: It's like, what do you do?
• 10:10
  Suzanne Hoffman: You're going around carrying photography equipment and you're going around Which was not small.
• 10:14
  Suzanne Hoffman: No, no, I mean these are large tripods with a box camera on top.
• 10:18
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, some of the original pictures we have are tin types.
• 10:21
  Suzanne Hoffman: Uh most of them are carte de visites, which are the the um postcard size um cardboard images.
• 10:28
  Suzanne Hoffman: And uh people who are leaving the country wanted to have pictures as memorials.
• 10:33
  Suzanne Hoffman: So they they took pictures and handed them out to their family members, um, which was the brilliant idea that my great-grandfather had.
• 10:41
  Suzanne Hoffman: He took his photography equipment with him to show that he would not be a likely public charge and be um you know stopped from getting into the United States, and would take pictures of people in the streets in New York and offer them for sale.
• 10:56
  Suzanne Hoffman: There's pictures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, in the West Um West End Museum in Boston, all with the um tagline and and in this beautiful embossed um uh background for the images that they took.
• 11:19
  Suzanne Hoffman: Uh, there are thousands of pictures.
• 11:20
  Suzanne Hoffman: The problem is we don't know who many of them are.
• 11:23
  Suzanne Hoffman: They're not of our subjects are who the subjects are, but you can recognize them even if we didn't have the embossment in the in the front of the card.
• 11:31
  Suzanne Hoffman: You could tell by the backdrop, by the seats, by the clothing that they had people wear.
• 11:37
  Suzanne Hoffman: Because they had a whole costume.
• 11:39
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, the chair, actually, that was in my um great-grandfather's studio, or one of his studios, um, is actually still in existence and it somehow got shipped to California for another one of the siblings' uh children.
• 11:51
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um but it's really fascinating to see in pictures from the late um 19th century, how photography changed, how people's impression of what they wanted to have available to their future families um in as memorials, what images they wanted.
• 12:12
  Suzanne Hoffman: So you've got a lot of pictures, you've got um men playing cards, you've got um uh uh children riding bicycles or or with their bicycles.
• 12:19
  Suzanne Hoffman: Actually, they're not moving.
• 12:21
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um we do have some of the early, very, very early photography that was video um recordings or motion picture recordings from the 1920s that they also took.
• 12:30
  Suzanne Hoffman: But they wound up with the the studio Aaron Goffman.
• 12:34
  Suzanne Hoffman: My last name is Hoffman, but there's no H in the Russian alphabet.
• 12:38
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 12:38
  Suzanne Hoffman: So it winds up being a G or a K or an X as the first part of the letters.
• 12:43
  Suzanne Hoffman: It's not like one of those like guttural, it's it's a uh guttural G.
• 12:48
  Suzanne Hoffman: So it was Goffman and it's written as G-O-F-M-A-N in uh Belarus.
• 12:53
  Suzanne Hoffman: And Aaron was the inherited the big studio that was there.
• 12:59
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I virtually know nothing of his family.
• 13:01
  Suzanne Hoffman: And here this is my great-grandfather's brother.
• 13:03
  Suzanne Hoffman: And it's your surname.
• 13:04
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah, yeah, it's my surname.
• 13:06
  Suzanne Hoffman: And then when Lewis came over, the interesting thing about Lewis is I almost think that they were doing a um um uh uh uh a stopping ground for people.
• 13:17
  Suzanne Hoffman: In Boston, similar to New York, they had tenements.
• 13:21
  Suzanne Hoffman: And the tenements became the first place that a new ethnicity would come into and and stop and sort of gather themselves and understand, learn the language, learn the customs, and move on.
• 13:31
  Suzanne Hoffman: And that was the West End of Boston uh when they came in.
• 13:35
  Suzanne Hoffman: So my uh great-grandfather set up the photography studio in the heart of the West End.
• 13:41
  Suzanne Hoffman: And uh he was uh holding a um uh almost uh an open door policy because you see all these people come over and they come off the manifest and they say they're photographers, they're apprentice photographers, and they come and they live with my grandfather for two or three years, and then they move on.
• 13:59
  Suzanne Hoffman: And that's in fact and were they moving on to other professions or were they training and apprenticing?
• 14:05
  Suzanne Hoffman: So here's Eva Hoffman, who had um her parents had died when she was young, and she went to live with her mother's sister's family, which was the Rice family.
• 14:15
  Suzanne Hoffman: And we watch all seven of the Rice kids come over over the score about 10 years period, um, and they either went on to be lawyers or insurance or in the photography business.
• 14:29
  Suzanne Hoffman: A couple of them stayed with my great-grandfather and opened additional studios in the Boston metropolitan area.
• 14:35
  Suzanne Hoffman: I have no idea why they chose Boston.
• 14:37
  Suzanne Hoffman: They came into New York and then somehow magically moved to Boston.
• 14:42
  Suzanne Hoffman: Now, we have a letter that was written by my, let's see if I put this right, my grandfather's sister, who she had interviewed her parents.
• 14:53
  Suzanne Hoffman: So it was on, you know, yellow lined paper, and we have the original copy, but it it's one generation removed from the original source.
• 15:04
  Suzanne Hoffman: So we're not, you know, it said they came from Radzvilliscus.
• 15:07
  Suzanne Hoffman: Well, Radzaville, Count Radzaville, owned a tremendous amount of land in you know, eastern Lithuania and Belarus.
• 15:14
  Suzanne Hoffman: We have no idea where where the town really was.
• 15:16
  Suzanne Hoffman: We sort of think we do, but um and she said, you know, I went to live with the rice family.
• 15:22
  Suzanne Hoffman: So that was the tie to the rice family.
• 15:24
  Suzanne Hoffman: I stupid things you learn.
• 15:26
  Suzanne Hoffman: I, you know, I uh later I in well, actually within the past 10 years, I tripped over someone and said, Oh, you're my second cousin.
• 15:33
  Suzanne Hoffman: She goes, Yeah.
• 15:34
  Suzanne Hoffman: I said, Do you know anything about the rice family?
• 15:36
  Suzanne Hoffman: She goes, Yeah, one of them lived here in Needham, where you live.
• 15:39
  Suzanne Hoffman: That like, what?
• 15:40
  Suzanne Hoffman: So different people in your family have different um viewpoints into your family.
• 15:47
  Suzanne Hoffman: And so you absolutely have to talk to everybody in your family.
• 15:50
  Suzanne Hoffman: I said, to this day, if I haven't paid for someone's DNA kit, they haven't done DNA, which irritates me to no end.
• 15:57
  Suzanne Hoffman: I'm like the family historian.
• 15:59
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, but because of that, I've been interested enough to call people, to, to reach out to people who I do share DNA with and say, what do you know about the Hoffman family or the Hoffman Studios or the Rices or anybody like that?
• 16:16
  Suzanne Hoffman: And Eva Hoffman keeps cropping up as being um an interesting focal point.
• 16:23
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um not only was she a rabble rouser and and the head of all these marches, there was a particular time in history, both New York and Boston, which tended to parallel each other in history.
• 16:35
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I I keep telling people, I said, you can't have history without people.
• 16:38
  Suzanne Hoffman: So you reached the root of the problem.
• 16:40
  Suzanne Hoffman: What who are the people who were involved, either at the core of the dissension or the people who were trying to change history?
• 16:48
  Suzanne Hoffman: And my grandmother evidently was part of a network, it was a mother's network, is what it was called.
• 16:53
  Suzanne Hoffman: And it started in New York and went to Boston.
• 16:55
  Suzanne Hoffman: And they had trouble because they were um in the midst of a small downturn.
• 17:01
  Suzanne Hoffman: And one of the things that was changing was the cost of living, the cost of food, specifically the cost of meat.
• 17:08
  Suzanne Hoffman: Because remember, most of these Jews that were coming over from Eastern Europe needed kosher food.
• 17:14
  Suzanne Hoffman: Right.
• 17:14
  Suzanne Hoffman: And the process of making something kosher adds to the cost of making it available.
• 17:21
  Crista Cowan: And how many children did Eva have?
• 17:23
  Suzanne Hoffman: Two boys and two girls.
• 17:23
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 17:24
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah.
• 17:24
  Crista Cowan: So her husband's running a photography studio, but he's also apparently sounds like running a little bit of a charity.
• 17:30
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah.
• 17:30
  Suzanne Hoffman: And she's raising four children and trying to and she's being written up all over the place because she spoke six languages.
• 17:38
  Suzanne Hoffman: Oh, wow.
• 17:39
  Suzanne Hoffman: This is a woman that it came over it as a 15-year-old.
• 17:44
  Suzanne Hoffman: I still have never found her documentation on her entrance into the United States.
• 17:48
  Suzanne Hoffman: And she wound up getting um going through naturalization.
• 17:52
  Suzanne Hoffman: She inherited it because of her husband, so she never had to actually go through the process.
• 17:55
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, I do have one of the original naturalization little booklets that they give you to um uh study.
• 18:01
  Suzanne Hoffman: Oh, yeah.
• 18:02
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, and so that she had that.
• 18:04
  Suzanne Hoffman: But she was, by the time um she was getting involved in some of these more visible marches, it was the late teens, so 19 uh 14, 15, 16, right before World War I, and then right after World War I, I think the the marches started to um escalate.
• 18:24
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um she was an avowed communist.
• 18:26
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um but but communism at that point in time wasn't like it is today.
• 18:30
  Suzanne Hoffman: I mean, it really was.
• 18:31
  Suzanne Hoffman: And and when you say she was involved in marches, were these like all different causes, or did she have pet causes?
• 18:36
  Suzanne Hoffman: Oh, she had pet causes.
• 18:37
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 18:37
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um women's rights.
• 18:39
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 18:39
  Suzanne Hoffman: So she was, in essence, a suffragette.
• 18:42
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, children's rights, children's working laws.
• 18:46
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah.
• 18:46
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, baths, because they had communal baths.
• 18:50
  Suzanne Hoffman: It was like, you know, the Roman baths that they had, and they had um certain hours that women could go, certain hours that men could go, certain ethnicities were allowed, and things like that.
• 19:00
  Suzanne Hoffman: In this multi-ethnic cultural environment, there was always contention of who could use the baths and when.
• 19:05
  Suzanne Hoffman: So orchestrating that.
• 19:07
  Suzanne Hoffman: All I could think of is like the YMCA and being able to go to the swimming pool, but um uh no, that she was uh involved in that.
• 19:14
  Suzanne Hoffman: But it she's very interested in anything that affected the family and we're would detract from that.
• 19:21
  Suzanne Hoffman: She was very much uh in favor of anything that um had children going to education, of being schooled.
• 19:30
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, she didn't like the fact that you could pull a child out at sixth grade and age 12 and 13, allow them to work.
• 19:36
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, she wanted everybody to go through at least eighth grade, which is what the the predominant uh culture was.
• 19:42
  Crista Cowan: Had had she come from Europe knowing six languages, or did she pick them up?
• 19:46
  Suzanne Hoffman: She picked three of them up once she hit the United States.
• 19:49
  Suzanne Hoffman: So she knew Yiddish, she knew um Polish, she knew Lithuanian, she picked up English, she picked up German, and what was the other one?
• 20:01
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um she picked up the um, I think some Gaelic.
• 20:06
  Crista Cowan: Okay.
• 20:06
  Suzanne Hoffman: Because again, it had to do with the ethnicity of the population in the area.
• 20:12
  Crista Cowan: And so the fact that she already spoke three languages, though, hints of the fact that she was probably well educated where she came from.
• 20:18
  Suzanne Hoffman: She had already gone through um what is equivalent to first year in high school.
• 20:23
  Suzanne Hoffman: So when she came over, she was 15.
• 20:25
  Suzanne Hoffman: I think she was probably in maybe through 10th grade or something like that.
• 20:29
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, Lewis, her husband, had only gone through eighth grade.
• 20:33
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, both of her sons were lawyers by the time they got done.
• 20:37
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um and her one daughter was uh a teacher, and the other one was a um physical therapist.
• 20:45
  Suzanne Hoffman: So everybody went not only through uh college, but through the next level, um, whatever it was for preparatory work.
• 20:54
  Suzanne Hoffman: But uh she ran for Massachusetts state treasurer three times uh twice.
• 21:00
  Suzanne Hoffman: She was um third highest vote, which isn't bad as a communist.
• 21:04
  Suzanne Hoffman: So it's and a woman.
• 21:06
  Suzanne Hoffman: And a woman, right?
• 21:07
  Suzanne Hoffman: So it's like uh you get the two.
• 21:09
  Suzanne Hoffman: She had multiple things against her.
• 21:11
  Suzanne Hoffman: But I think it was really funny.
• 21:14
  Suzanne Hoffman: It's um trying to track it down.
• 21:16
  Suzanne Hoffman: There is an organization called the Ford Hall Forum in Boston.
• 21:20
  Suzanne Hoffman: And basically, if you think about it as an open um opportunity to speak, you sign up and you had a uh something you could talk about.
• 21:29
  Suzanne Hoffman: She was there multiple times.
• 21:31
  Suzanne Hoffman: There is a book that was written about the Ford Ford Hall Forum.
• 21:34
  Suzanne Hoffman: She has her own chapter in that book.
• 21:36
  Suzanne Hoffman: She had things to say.
• 21:38
  Suzanne Hoffman: She had lots of things to say, and she was everything was about you know what the people needed.
• 21:44
  Suzanne Hoffman: And um when I was doing the research to find out more about her, because I mean I lit had a little bit of hint from these three pages of handwritten notes from my uh um great aunt, uh great great grandgrand aunt, I guess.
• 21:58
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um the interesting Thing was that the um book didn't quite give the infamous side of her background as much.
• 22:08
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I found a lot in the police report the number of times her husband had to bail her out of jail for um infraction.
• 22:16
  Suzanne Hoffman: But she was well well respected.
• 22:17
  Suzanne Hoffman: She had a good uh relationship with the mayor of Boston and um finding out, but I I would never have known if it weren't for doing newspaper research.
• 22:26
  Suzanne Hoffman: Oh, yeah.
• 22:27
  Suzanne Hoffman: And if you can believe it, the one newspaper that seemed to cover her most closely was the Christian Science Monitor.
• 22:34
  Crista Cowan: Hoodoo.
• 22:36
  Suzanne Hoffman: You expect to find it in in the Boston newspapers, but it wasn't.
• 22:39
  Suzanne Hoffman: It was in the Christian Science Monitor.
• 22:41
  Suzanne Hoffman: There must have been a reporter that really felt that she was, you know, doing some good and was following her.
• 22:47
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um an interesting, you know, sort of side point for this, she's she's running this open door policy.
• 22:53
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I have an image of three boys standing in a line, sort of um, you remember my three sons, and they were on the staircase, and we had three different heights of boys.
• 23:03
  Suzanne Hoffman: There's a picture there that has my grandfather in the middle, has this older cousin, Jacob Hoffman, who's the taller one, age 17 or about, so my great-grandfather must have been 15, and then the younger um brother Harry Hoffman on the bottom.
• 23:18
  Suzanne Hoffman: Well, the 1910 census shows two Harry Hoffmans and a Rose Hoffman in the same household with the family.
• 23:28
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I'm like, who the heck are these other two kids?
• 23:30
  Suzanne Hoffman: I know they're not Aaron's kids from Belarus.
• 23:33
  Suzanne Hoffman: I still to this day couldn't find those other two.
• 23:37
  Suzanne Hoffman: And Jacob, who what was Jacob in a picture with Irving and Harry in Boston?
• 23:44
  Suzanne Hoffman: He was only 17.
• 23:46
  Suzanne Hoffman: How did he get there?
• 23:47
  Suzanne Hoffman: I could not find him at all on any manifest.
• 23:52
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I said, you know, where do I look?
• 23:54
  Suzanne Hoffman: So I decided, well, let me go into the immigration naturalization system and see what images I pull up.
• 24:00
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I pulled up his declaration of intent filed in 1909 as Jacob Hoffman as a photographer at 125 Leverett Street.
• 24:10
  Suzanne Hoffman: I mean, that is the exact address.
• 24:12
  Suzanne Hoffman: It's gotta be my great uh, you know, my uh second cousin.
• 24:16
  Suzanne Hoffman: And wait, the declaration of intent.
• 24:20
  Suzanne Hoffman: It this is the ship I went back line by line on the Saratov, and I'm actually gonna be talking about the impact that the Saratov and the Russian, the volunteer Russian fleet had on changing the American um immigration policies because of the strangeness that went on with the number of um personifications of individuals.
• 24:46
  Suzanne Hoffman: In other words, they weren't coming over under their own name, they were coming over under somebody else's name, they were hiding, they were I mean, these are people who were fleeing a place.
• 24:54
  Suzanne Hoffman: They were fleeing a place, they you know, wanted to to get somewhere else, and they were the people who are most likely to be they were kids for the most part, too.
• 25:01
  Suzanne Hoffman: They weren't older conscription.
• 25:03
  Crista Cowan: Right, yeah.
• 25:04
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah.
• 25:04
  Suzanne Hoffman: So he was in line to be, you know, conscription to the army and everything else.
• 25:08
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, but he comes over under a completely false name.
• 25:11
  Suzanne Hoffman: And the only reason I was able to find it was because of column 17 in the 1907 um immigration manifests that actually said, Where are you going?
• 25:23
  Suzanne Hoffman: And it said L.
• 25:24
  Suzanne Hoffman: Hoffman, 125 Leverett Street.
• 25:27
  Suzanne Hoffman: And the name that he was traveling under was Scholen Babin.
• 25:30
  Suzanne Hoffman: And Sholan Babin shows up four times with three other brothers, all named Babin, on four different uh manifests.
• 25:40
  Suzanne Hoffman: So there was clearly something going on with the Russian volunteer fleet.
• 25:45
  Suzanne Hoffman: So I was very curious to see if I could pinpoint my great-grandmother into this and see whether she had any inkling of what was going on, but he doesn't show up in the 1910 census.
• 25:56
  Suzanne Hoffman: The last report we have of him is 1909.
• 26:00
  Suzanne Hoffman: The next I report I have been is in a Russian uniform in 1912 in Gomel, Belarus.
• 26:06
  Suzanne Hoffman: So he obviously went home.
• 26:08
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 26:09
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, and we don't know, you know, the the story is beyond that.
• 26:13
  Suzanne Hoffman: I know that he had it he wound up having a daughter who was born the same year my mother was in 1923, but um, I don't know anything about the family, nor do I have any inkling about Eva Hoffman and what she thought of for her grandson who came over, was there here long enough to have his image taken with his two younger cousins and then went up back in in Belarus.
• 26:34
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um my great-grandmother was somebody that everybody seems to have admired.
• 26:39
  Suzanne Hoffman: Anybody who I've uh asked about if they knew her or knew of her contextually, or said she did everything that our um, you know, our relatives needed.
• 26:52
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah.
• 26:52
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um the meat wars is something that I think she has some notoriety in because when they started raising the prices on meat, there were marches everywhere.
• 27:02
  Suzanne Hoffman: They were in New York, they were in Boston, they were in Lowell, Massachusetts, they were all along that 128 beltway around um Massachusetts because I mean it was a staple.
• 27:12
  Crista Cowan: And was this like was this uh artificial inflation by greedy people, or was this like just natural cost of living increases?
• 27:19
  Suzanne Hoffman: Well, it it some of both, right?
• 27:21
  Suzanne Hoffman: So there's a cost of living increase, you've got a depressed economy, it costs more to um, you know, find the beef, produce the beef, um, have it blessed, and then have it available, and you've got every middleman along the way.
• 27:34
  Suzanne Hoffman: The funny thing is, there is a article that I found that talked about David Yavner as a meat producer.
• 27:42
  Suzanne Hoffman: Little did my great-grandmother know that the Yavner and Hoffman sides of the family were going to get together under her grandfather.
• 27:49
  Suzanne Hoffman: Years later.
• 27:50
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah.
• 27:50
  Suzanne Hoffman: So my grandfather, Irving Hoffman, married Julia Fisher, who was the daughter of a Yavner on her mother's side.
• 27:58
  Suzanne Hoffman: So there was a tie between the families, but he was one of the first uh providers of meat to apologize to the communities that were mostly affected and said, you know, it was just the cost of production.
• 28:14
  Suzanne Hoffman: And for him to acquire the meat and to then go through the kosher process of preparing the meat to make it available.
• 28:21
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, you know, he was being sort of wrenched into having to um uh apply a higher cost uh basis for it.
• 28:29
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um but he apologized.
• 28:31
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um they eventually did back down the prices.
• 28:34
  Suzanne Hoffman: So they won.
• 28:35
  Suzanne Hoffman: So we call them the Boston Meat Wars.
• 28:38
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yes.
• 28:38
  Suzanne Hoffman: Like what did like what did that look like?
• 28:40
  Suzanne Hoffman: What did those battles look like?
• 28:42
  Suzanne Hoffman: Well, it it looked like people forsaking meat and going back to fish or going back to some other So they boycotted the meat industry.
• 28:49
  Suzanne Hoffman: They strode they uh did a very successful protest against the meat industry, and they got hotels and restaurants to join them.
• 28:58
  Suzanne Hoffman: Oh, so they were rallying the community.
• 29:00
  Suzanne Hoffman: They were they were um a very vocal and very opinionated and productive voice against it.
• 29:08
  Suzanne Hoffman: So they and the mayor of Boston got involved and said you cannot raise prices because the prices were being raised more than 20%.
• 29:16
  Suzanne Hoffman: It it just was unconscionable at that uh economic conditions.
• 29:20
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 29:21
  Crista Cowan: So it's so interesting to me because you you hear stories about women like Eva, right?
• 29:25
  Crista Cowan: Like you have this image of her.
• 29:28
  Crista Cowan: I assume there are actual images of her with a husband who was a photographer.
• 29:31
  Crista Cowan: Was she an imposing woman?
• 29:33
  Crista Cowan: Was she a tiny woman?
• 29:34
  Crista Cowan: She's a big girl.
• 29:36
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 29:36
  Suzanne Hoffman: She was a big girl, and and um, yeah, she looked like uh somebody we reckoned with.
• 29:41
  Suzanne Hoffman: Okay.
• 29:42
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um it wasn't somebody that I wanted to cross paths with, but that was for sure.
• 29:46
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, but you know, her husband was a gentle nun in the purest form of description, and he was loved by everybody, and he did whatever his wife wanted him to do.
• 29:59
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, and she ran the roost there.
• 30:01
  Suzanne Hoffman: I mean, it really.
• 30:02
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I, you know, I look back at the two families that I know personally of the Hoffman's, or actually the three families, and everybody within them has a very positive outlook on life and a very um pragmatic view of the world.
• 30:17
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I it's gotta come from her.
• 30:19
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, it sounds like it.
• 30:20
  Crista Cowan: And yet she used her powers for good.
• 30:23
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah, it sounds like and I was very surprised when she went back to Russia in 1926.
• 30:27
  Suzanne Hoffman: What?
• 30:27
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I know that she made her eldest daughter for her um wedding trip also go back there with her new husband.
• 30:36
  Crista Cowan: So that's so unusual because I think so often we think about people, especially Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, as just destitute and they are eking out of living here and they're sometimes uneducated.
• 30:49
  Crista Cowan: And this is a whole different cultural experience.
• 30:52
  Crista Cowan: And the fact that they went back and forth maybe more times than even you have record of.
• 30:57
  Crista Cowan: Right.
• 30:57
  Crista Cowan: Like that is something that even even for immigrants from Ireland or Germany or wherever, we just don't think about happening.
• 31:04
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah.
• 31:04
  Suzanne Hoffman: I mean, it they they started with nothing and they had they actually had a profession, right?
• 31:10
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um the the photography really helped them a lot, but it wasn't something she knew.
• 31:15
  Suzanne Hoffman: She actually, when she was in New York, she did start uh marches on the shirt waist industry.
• 31:23
  Suzanne Hoffman: Because that when she went there, that was what she was employed doing.
• 31:26
  Suzanne Hoffman: She was doing some of the shirtwaist uh production and felt that it was very demeaning um to the people who were in there.
• 31:34
  Suzanne Hoffman: So somewhere she got that real strong image of um self-preservation.
• 31:40
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 31:40
  Crista Cowan: Well, and not just standing up for herself, but it sounds like standing up for a lot of other people too.
• 31:44
  Crista Cowan: What a gift.
• 31:45
  Crista Cowan: What a story.
• 31:46
  Crista Cowan: That's so amazing.
• 31:47
  Crista Cowan: And actually hearing you tell that story helps me understand you a little bit better.
• 31:52
  Suzanne Hoffman: Well, you know, they say you look for traits that you carry through.
• 31:56
  Suzanne Hoffman: I mean, there are things that about my daughter, uh, you'd never think that we're a mother and daughter until she starts opening her mouth and you listen to her and you said, that's something your mother would say, or or a mannerism or something like that.
• 32:08
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I've often wondered that.
• 32:10
  Suzanne Hoffman: You know, said, how much of what I'm like do I carry back through my father's family to Eva Hoffman?
• 32:17
  Suzanne Hoffman: Because I don't have my mother's disposition at all.
• 32:20
  Suzanne Hoffman: So I know that some of what she professed that my father picked up that he passed down to us.
• 32:27
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah.
• 32:28
  Crista Cowan: Oh, I love that.
• 32:29
  Crista Cowan: Thank you for sharing her with us and the Hoffman's and the photography.
• 32:33
  Crista Cowan: Um, I'm so excited about that.
• 32:35
  Crista Cowan: Now, we don't usually do um promotional segments in the podcast, but you and I have a connection.
• 32:41
  Crista Cowan: We're working together right now on the conference, the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies.
• 32:47
  Crista Cowan: That is always a mouthful.
• 32:49
  Crista Cowan: Um, so the 2027 conference is uh virtual and it's coming up in April.
• 32:56
  Crista Cowan: And you have, as the co-chair of that, you have kind of a different vision for it this year that I think ties in directly with some of the things we've been talking about.
• 33:04
  Crista Cowan: Tell us, tell me a little bit about that.
• 33:06
  Suzanne Hoffman: Well, I think that the intent on learning genealogy is not only about the records, but it's about the story behind the records.
• 33:14
  Suzanne Hoffman: It's about the family history.
• 33:16
  Suzanne Hoffman: So it's no longer genealogy as a science, but it's about the contextual imagery that we um really can create with our family backgrounds and being able to tie into history.
• 33:28
  Suzanne Hoffman: I often say you can't have history without people.
• 33:32
  Suzanne Hoffman: And as we devolve to people, we need to understand what their passions were and how it evolved in their own lineage and how it um caused some things to happen within their family.
• 33:43
  Suzanne Hoffman: So I said, you know, the records tell part of the story, the inferences of following the records, following the trail, will give you a much more uh rich context of where that person came from, um, what they uh contributed to society and where they needed to go to get to where your family is today.
• 34:03
  Suzanne Hoffman: Everybody has that tie.
• 34:05
  Suzanne Hoffman: And um, I I think a turning point for me was an educator in Illinois.
• 34:12
  Suzanne Hoffman: He teaches high school and he actually does a class for seniors that is family heritage.
• 34:18
  Suzanne Hoffman: And it's an elective English class that he takes 16 weeks for them and he teaches them uh how to do genealogy, and then they have to do a podcast, they have to do a video presentation of what they learn about their family.
• 34:33
  Suzanne Hoffman: Whether the family is their direct line or an adoptive line or however they are, it's about interviewing people and understanding when someone tells you something how they're interpreting it.
• 34:46
  Suzanne Hoffman: So you say, tell me more, right?
• 34:48
  Suzanne Hoffman: You want to eke out of someone, not just the facts, but the context of those facts.
• 34:53
  Suzanne Hoffman: So if we take that and and project it forward into the types of talks that we want, we want people to learn not only that the records are important, but the family history is an enrichment of everything that we're finding as genealogists.
• 35:08
  Suzanne Hoffman: And that'll help people who are partially Jewish, partially of any ethnicity, understand how that ethnicity has presence in their own personality.
• 35:18
  Suzanne Hoffman: And I think that's what I'm looking for is I'm I'm I really want people to feel comfortable in their own skin and understand why they do things the way they do.
• 35:26
  Suzanne Hoffman: What is it about their background or about some um, you know, genetic trait that's been passed down through to them that makes them do this.
• 35:36
  Suzanne Hoffman: So we want new stories, new um uh you know, added-on content to older history that people have done.
• 35:45
  Suzanne Hoffman: We're not just looking for the same old thing.
• 35:47
  Suzanne Hoffman: We're looking for new opportunities to give people to present.
• 35:51
  Suzanne Hoffman: And we're gonna do it almost around the clock.
• 35:53
  Suzanne Hoffman: We're gonna start early, early in the morning, 5:30 in the morning, go through 11 o'clock at night, with not just live sessions, but pre-recorded sessions, an opportunity for small groups to get together of like ethnicities or of like cultures.
• 36:07
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, so it's it's much, much more than a traditional genealogical um uh meeting.
• 36:14
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah.
• 36:14
  Crista Cowan: I love that.
• 36:15
  Crista Cowan: And I love that you're um focused on the fact that there are people who identify as Jewish, right?
• 36:22
  Crista Cowan: You identified as ethnically Jewish, but not religiously Jewish, not culturally Jewish.
• 36:28
  Crista Cowan: And then there are people, you know, who are in your position.
• 36:31
  Crista Cowan: There are also people who don't even know they're Jewish until they take a DNA test.
• 36:36
  Crista Cowan: Right.
• 36:36
  Crista Cowan: And then they discover that, you know, they have a grandparent or a great-grandparent that has this rich history and these stories that they didn't even know about and have no idea how to go about obtaining.
• 36:48
  Suzanne Hoffman: Right.
• 36:48
  Suzanne Hoffman: And they don't know how to start.
• 36:49
  Suzanne Hoffman: And we we realize that there are people who are beginners, there are people who've been doing this for 10 or 15 years, dabbling, the hobbyists, and then the people who are the professionals.
• 36:59
  Suzanne Hoffman: And we want to be able to address the needs of all three groups and and those in between.
• 37:03
  Suzanne Hoffman: So it's not just about, as I said, the records.
• 37:06
  Suzanne Hoffman: Maybe it's interpreting the records.
• 37:08
  Suzanne Hoffman: I mean, you know, we've talked on and on about the fact that, oh, we wish some of those manifests um were in color.
• 37:13
  Suzanne Hoffman: Because so many people had crayon pencils that they added color in the notations of um, you know, what were the codes that were behind um all the columns and things like that.
• 37:25
  Suzanne Hoffman: And then we've lost a lot of that because they've been black and white digitized or or they've been destroyed for that matter.
• 37:31
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, but you've got people that um we just don't know where they wound up.
• 37:36
  Suzanne Hoffman: And you a chance um voters list will tell you that they're in a completely different county than you thought they were, and then you can go and find those immigration records in that county.
• 37:45
  Suzanne Hoffman: So you don't know what'll lead to your next discovery.
• 37:49
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yeah.
• 37:49
  Suzanne Hoffman: And that's what people think outside the box.
• 37:52
  Crista Cowan: Yeah, absolutely.
• 37:53
  Crista Cowan: And there are so many resources now for people to make those discoveries.
• 37:56
  Crista Cowan: So I'm excited that that our organization is putting on this conference um and excited to support you in that over the course of the next several months.
• 38:05
  Suzanne Hoffman: I I it's going to be really exciting because it is uh a little bit different than we've done before.
• 38:10
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, takes a lot of volunteers.
• 38:12
  Suzanne Hoffman: It does.
• 38:12
  Suzanne Hoffman: Right.
• 38:12
  Suzanne Hoffman: It's a volunteer army.
• 38:14
  Suzanne Hoffman: And uh as I said, we've got um many already in place, but we need many more if anybody's interested.
• 38:22
  Crista Cowan: Fantastic.
• 38:22
  Crista Cowan: Well, thank you for sharing Eva with us and all six of her languages.
• 38:26
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 38:26
  Crista Cowan: Um, and her husband Lewis and the photography.
• 38:29
  Crista Cowan: Um, just such a delightful story.
• 38:31
  Crista Cowan: So I appreciate that.
• 38:32
  Crista Cowan: Now it is time for our final segment, which we call one word, one story.
• 38:39
  Crista Cowan: Our word today is bicycle.
• 38:46
  Crista Cowan: Do you have a story or a memory about a bicycle?
• 38:50
  Suzanne Hoffman: I I actually have two, but one, I have a picture of Lewis um on a bicycle in Belarus.
• 38:58
  Suzanne Hoffman: Um, and it's a very interesting looking bicycle.
• 39:01
  Suzanne Hoffman: It has weird handlebars and a weird seat.
• 39:04
  Suzanne Hoffman: His um feet are on the pedal, he's holding on to the handlebars.
• 39:08
  Suzanne Hoffman: He's got this wonderful, gleeful grin on in his face.
• 39:12
  Suzanne Hoffman: And uh he's um uh with another one of his friends.
• 39:16
  Suzanne Hoffman: So I've got that image.
• 39:18
  Suzanne Hoffman: Uh my sister on Facebook decided to post a picture of me at a Fourth of July parade with my bicycle completely decorated when I was about four or five, I want to say.
• 39:30
  Suzanne Hoffman: Do you remember that bike?
• 39:31
  Suzanne Hoffman: Uh I do.
• 39:32
  Suzanne Hoffman: It was a blue and white um oh show Schwin bicycle.
• 39:37
  Suzanne Hoffman: There you go.
• 39:38
  Suzanne Hoffman: And it had red streamers all over it.
• 39:40
  Suzanne Hoffman: That was my favorite.
• 39:41
  Crista Cowan: That was so fun.
• 39:42
  Crista Cowan: So here's my bicycle story.
• 39:44
  Crista Cowan: Um, so my grandparents lived in Los Angeles, and they lived on a little bit of a hill.
• 39:51
  Crista Cowan: Um, they lived uh south of Ventura Boulevard in the valley.
• 39:55
  Crista Cowan: And um, the day that my grandfather retired, he worked for the city of Los Angeles as a city engineer.
• 40:02
  Crista Cowan: And um, so we were like all the cousins and aunts and uncles and everybody was at we're at my grandparents' house, um, and all the adults had left to go to the retirement party.
• 40:13
  Crista Cowan: Um, and the kids were left to play.
• 40:15
  Crista Cowan: And I'm the oldest of the grandchildren.
• 40:17
  Crista Cowan: Um, and I had been swimming at the next door neighbors.
• 40:22
  Crista Cowan: I was in a bikini, I had no shoes on my feet.
• 40:25
  Crista Cowan: I was probably seven or eight years old.
• 40:28
  Crista Cowan: And I decided to ride my bike down the hill.
• 40:33
  Crista Cowan: And I wiped out so hard.
• 40:37
  Crista Cowan: I still have scars.
• 40:38
  Crista Cowan: I have scars on my elbows, I have scars on my knees.
• 40:41
  Crista Cowan: I was a mess.
• 40:42
  Crista Cowan: And the neighbor who I had been swimming at her house, she came running out and scooped me up.
• 40:47
  Crista Cowan: Now, of course, this is in the days before cell phones.
• 40:50
  Crista Cowan: There is like no way to contact my parents or my grandparents where they're at.
• 40:54
  Crista Cowan: She took me in, she set me on her bathroom counter, she cleaned me up.
• 40:57
  Crista Cowan: There was Mercurichrome involved.
• 40:59
  Crista Cowan: I still remember the sting of that.
• 41:02
  Crista Cowan: Um and uh, you know, wrapped me up and took me, you know, over to my parents when they all finally got home.
• 41:10
  Crista Cowan: And I just like I was traumatized.
• 41:12
  Crista Cowan: I thought I would never get on a bicycle again.
• 41:15
  Crista Cowan: It didn't last long, but that was when I think of a bicycle, that is probably my earliest memory.
• 41:21
  Crista Cowan: I learned, even though I hate shoes, if you're wearing a bike, at least wear shoes.
• 41:26
  Suzanne Hoffman: Yes, exactly.
• 41:27
  Suzanne Hoffman: Your flip-flops won't do it.
• 41:28
  Crista Cowan: No, not at all.
• 41:29
  Crista Cowan: Well, there you go.
• 41:30
  Crista Cowan: That is your one-word, one story, which is bicycle.
• 41:34
  Crista Cowan: If you've got a bicycle story, would you share it in the comments if you're watching on YouTube?
• 41:39
  Crista Cowan: If you're listening on Podcast App, we would love it if you would go over to your Instagram or your Facebook, post your bicycle story, tag us, tag the podcast.
• 41:48
  Crista Cowan: Um, I just really love this idea of sharing our memories, and stories are as simple as sometimes one word.
• 41:56
  Crista Cowan: Well, Suzanne, thank you so much again.
• 42:01
  Crista Cowan: Thank you.
• 42:01
  Crista Cowan: It's been a joy to get to know you better.
• 42:03
  Crista Cowan: Yeah.
• 42:04
  Crista Cowan: Studio sponsored by Ancestry.