Success Story

by  Irene Newhouse

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!



Copyright © 2000 Irene Newhouse
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