Following the Trail Harlan Left Us

Six months ago, we shared a Shabbat Shalom post about the Yaffe family tree and opened it with three simple words:

Six months ago, we shared a Shabbat Shalom post about the Yaffe family tree and opened it with three simple words: Six…

Harlan did it.

With Ancestry, raw persistence, fierce curiosity, and far more patience than most people could ever muster, Harlan reopened a branch of our family history that had been lost, scattered, and disconnected for decades.

At the time, we wrote:

L'Dor V'Dor — from generation to generation.

What we didn't fully realize then was that Harlan hadn't actually finished the family tree.

He had done something better.

He gave us the trail so we could keep walking it.

And this week, we followed that trail a little farther into the past.

Beyond the Man in the Buggy

For years, the man in this old photograph was basically just that:

"The man in the buggy."

We had a name — Julius Yaffe, our paternal great-grandfather.

We had the image of him in a suit and hat, sitting behind a well-groomed horse in what appears to be an open surrey carriage.

We had some dates.

Some names.

A few scattered branches on a digital family tree.

But Julius died in March 1942, long before we were born.

His son Harry Yaffe — our paternal grandfather — was also gone before either Harlan or I entered the world.

Think about the silence created by that gap.

We were born already missing two entire generations of firsthand paternal family memory.

We could never sit down with Grandpa Harry and ask the everyday questions:

What was your father Julius really like?

Did he have an accent?

Was he strict, or did he laugh easily?

What did he tell you about the old country?

What did he do for a living?

And we certainly couldn't ask Julius the questions that burn a little brighter now:

Where exactly were you born?

Why did you leave?

What was the voyage to America like?

What did America look like through your eyes when you first arrived?

Were you scared?

Were you excited?

And yes...

Was that actually your horse?

Those voices were already gone.

Which is why what we found this week feels so meaningful.

Two Words Carved in Stone

We located Julius's gravestone in New Jersey.

Above the English inscription, his identity is preserved in Hebrew:

Yehudah ben Avraham Yitzchak

Judah, son of Abraham Isaac.

Beneath it:

BELOVED FATHER JULIUS YAFFE DIED MAR. 17, 1942 AGE 78 YRS

But after all the dates and genealogical details, it was those first two English words that made us stop:

BELOVED FATHER

Someone chose those words.

His children knew the man we are now trying to piece back together.

They knew the cadence of his voice.

They knew what made him angry and what made him smile.

They knew what it felt like to sit at his dinner table.

They knew stories about him that no census taker, immigration official, or newspaper could ever record.

And when it came time to summarize his life in stone, they didn't choose:

Immigrant. Russian. Lithuanian. Businessman. American. Successful.

They chose:

Beloved Father.

And the line continued:

Julius Yaffe — Yehudah ben Avraham Yitzchak Harry Yaffe Our Father Harlan and me

L'Dor V'Dor.

The Beautiful Friction of the Past

This research is also teaching us something important:

Family history rarely moves in a perfectly straight line.

Six months ago, the best information we had placed Julius's birth in Pandėlys, in what is now Lithuania, in 1862.

Other family records we have uncovered point instead toward Smolensk, Russia.

The older family tree identified his father as Yitzhok Yaffe.

His gravestone gives us Avraham Yitzchak.

The family tree gives Julius a birth year of 1862, while the gravestone says he was 78 when he died in 1942, suggesting his birth may have been closer to 1863 or 1864.

Those questions are not failures in the research.

They are the research.

Genealogy isn't a perfectly bound history book waiting for someone to open it.

We inherit fragments.

A photograph someone managed not to lose.

A name passed down through several generations.

A handwritten census entry faded by time.

A marriage record.

An old newspaper advertisement.

A gravestone in a quiet cemetery.

Sometimes the pieces fit perfectly.

Sometimes they argue with each other.

And almost every answer creates two new questions.

But the fog is clearing.

We can now see Julius's wife, Liba, and the names of their children appearing in the records — including Morris, Harry, William and Mary, with more pieces still being sorted out.

Harry, of course, is the anchor for our branch.

From the coastal communities around Belmar, New Jersey, Harry's path eventually led to Toledo, Ohio, where the next chapters of the Yaffe story were written.

And that is where genealogy stops feeling ancient.

Because that line eventually reaches Dad.

Then Harlan and me.

Then our children.

And the generations still to come.

L'Dor V'Dor.

A Witness to an Extraordinary Transformation

Looking at that buggy photograph now, the timeline is almost impossible to comprehend.

Julius was born in the early 1860s.

He entered a world of horses, steam, oil lamps and handwritten letters.

He lived to see electric lighting transform cities.

The telephone.

Motion pictures.

The automobile.

The Wright brothers take flight.

Radio bridge enormous distances.

He lived through World War I.

The 1918 influenza pandemic.

The Great Depression.

And he lived just long enough to see America enter World War II after Pearl Harbor.

Julius died on March 17, 1942.

Imagine the distance between the world into which that little Jewish boy was born in the Russian Empire and the America in which that old man closed his eyes.

The horse and carriage in the photograph would eventually give way to automobiles.

Letters crossing oceans would give way to voices traveling through the air.

Entire countries would disappear and borders would be redrawn.

And somewhere in the middle of that enormous changing world...

our family happened.

The Command to Remember

This week's Torah portion, Eikev, repeatedly returns to the importance of remembering the journey.

Do not become so comfortable with where you are that you forget the difficult road that brought you there.

That message feels especially powerful this week.

Remembering isn't simply memorizing names on a family tree.

It is understanding that our lives began long before we drew our first breath.

People we never met made choices that eventually made our lives possible.

They packed bags.

Crossed borders.

Crossed oceans.

Started over.

Found work.

Built businesses.

Raised children.

Buried people they loved.

Took chances.

Failed.

Tried again.

And somehow kept the next generation moving forward.

Eventually...

there was us.

Which Brings Us Back to Harlan

For seven years, these weekly Shabbat Shalom stories have helped make sure that Harlan never becomes a sterile record:

Harlan Blaine Yaffe Born... Died... and an old photograph someone finds eighty years from now.

We know too much to let that happen.

We know the punchlines.

The businesses.

The favorite restaurants.

The childhood scrapes.

The stubborn arguments.

The private conversations.

The people he quietly helped.

We remember Mom and Dad.

We remember growing up.

We remember things that seemed completely ordinary when they happened.

And we keep returning to Harlan's message:

Peace, Love & Equality for all.

Those ordinary stories are exactly what we wish we had from Julius and Harry today.

We cannot ask Grandpa Harry.

We cannot ask Julius.

And now we cannot ask Harlan.

But there is one very important difference:

Harlan asked.

He dug.

He searched.

He called.

He connected cousins.

He followed names into forgotten branches.

He helped reconnect generations of a family that had drifted apart.

And most importantly, he left us enough breadcrumbs to keep going.

Six months ago, we said:

Harlan did it.

Today, we understand those words a little differently.

Harlan didn't finish the family tree.

He made sure the tree was still alive.

He gave us a trail.

And because he did, more than 84 years after Julius Yaffe died, the man in the buggy is slowly becoming a person again.

Not just a faded face in an old photograph.

Not just Julius Yaffe.

But:

Yehudah ben Avraham Yitzchak.

Our great-grandfather.

Harry's father.

One link in a chain that eventually reached us.

And according to the people who actually knew him, sat beside him, argued with him, laughed with him, loved him and missed him...

A Beloved Father.

May we keep asking the questions.

May we preserve the answers we are fortunate enough to find.

May we correct the story when new evidence teaches us something new.

And may we leave the generations who follow us a clearer map of where they came from than the one we inherited.

L'Dor V'Dor.

Shabbat Shalom.