Much of what I know of the extended PUPKO family came from stories told
by my father's late cousin Wiera PUPKO when she visited us on Memorial
Day weekends. One of those weekends my mother managed to sit her
down and get a chart of relationships. This was quite a feat because
Wiera kept track of all living relatives, but thought the past was better
off forgotten. So the chart pretty much encompassed only relatives
talked about during her lifetime. One of the links was to a GORFINKEL
family, one member of which was supposed to have been highly placed in
Israel. I assumed this to be a variant of GARFINKLE or GARFUNKEL,
names common enough that I didn't know how to begin trying to trace mine.
One day, though, I was noodling about Ellen Sadove Renck's 1929 Polish
Business Directory spreadsheet, pulling out all the PUPKOs. I was
electrified to find a firm PUPKO and GORFUNG. I wondered if Wiera
hadn't permuted GORFUNG into GORFINKLE. I did a web search and found
only 2 independent references, one to a family in the US, and one to a
family in Israel. I have a distant cousin in Israel who is a whiz
at cold contacts, and I e-mailed him with my conjecture. In less
than a week, he had, through the Israeli web reference, made contact with
the widow of the highly placed GORFUNG - he'd been editor of Histadrut's
newspaper. She remembered many, many Lida names and was a gold mine
of information!