Traditionally the father came first without his family. Then everyone
followed. Mary and Rose came without their mother, Bella, because she was taking care of a sick child that eventually died. Then Bella joined the rest of the family. The family was joined together in the Baron Hirsch settlement in Woodbine N. J.
My grandmother, Mary, had one bad experience on the trip over. She was offered a banana, a fruit that she had never seen. She attempted to eat the banana with the peel in place. Have you ever tried to eat a banana peel? She never ate another banana in her 93 years of life.
In the settlement Mary met Samuel Spector and they married in 1905. In 1906 their first son Aaron was born. Bella raised that son in Woodbine for the first year of his life while Mary and Sam settled in Philadelphia.
Bella had the honored position of washing the dead and preparing them for burial, although they were not a religious family.
Woodbine continued to be a center of family life through the 1930s. The family returned for Passover Sedars. The grandchildren, Sidney and Aaron Spector and Helen Baskin return for summer vacations and the closeness of the New Jersey shore resorts.
The Ebys were city people and brought property on Jackson Ave. in the town center.
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