Patrick McGing
M, #4702, b. April 20, 1881
Parents
Biography
Patrick McGing was born on April 20, 1881 in Derrindafderg, Mayo, Ireland
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August 18, 1907 Pat McGing, age 26 and listed as single, arrived in New York City on the ship Columbia, having sailed from Glasgow, Scotland. Liverpool is listed as his place of residence. Occupation is laborer. Destination is Scranton, Pennsylvania. Closest relative in Ireland is mother, Mrs McGing, Ballinrobe, Srah, Co Mayo. Birthplace listed as Gortmore. His sister paid his fare. He was staying with sister Bridget, 2626 Winton St, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was 5 feet, 10 inches, with a fresh complexion, fair hair and blue eyes.
Found in 1920 US Census living as a roomer in St Louis.
Declaration of Intention: Dated May 6, 1912 St Louis
I, Patrick McGing, age 31 years, occupation, freight handler do declare on oath that my personal description is Color White, complexion fair, height 5 feet 9 inches, weight 150 poinds, color of hair dark brown, color of eyes, blue other visible marks, none. I was born in Derreendafberg, Ireland ib the 20th day of April anno Domini 1881; I now reside at 2029 Eugenia St, St Louis Missouri. I emigrated to teh United States of America from Glasgow Scotland on teh vessel Columbia: my last foreign residence was Glasgow Scotland. It is my bona fide intention to renounce forever all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty and particularly to George I, King of Great Britain and Ireland, of whom I am now a subject: I arrived at the port of New York in the state of New York on ro about teh 11th of August anno Domini 1907; I am not an anarchist, I am not a polygamist nor a believer in teh practice of polyugamy and it is my intention in good faith to become a citizen of the United States of America and to permanently reside therin SO HELP ME GOD.
| Last Edited | January 3, 2005 19:41:00 |
Nancy Helen Kohner
F, #4712, b. December 28, 1950, d. March 1, 2006
Parents
Biography
Nancy Helen Kohner was born on December 28, 1950. She died on March 1, 2006, at age 55, in Oxfordshire, England
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Nancy Helen Kohner was also known as Bridget Valerie Norah. Http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/families/article4050496.ece
b»Of love and grief
Nancy Kohner devoted her life to piecing together the lost history of her Jewish family. Finally, in the last year of her life, battling cancer, with her daughter at her side, she wove together an extraordinary story
/b»Joanna Pitman
When Bridget McGing was a child, growing up in Oxfordshire, she was aware that there was something unusual about her family. Things in her home were different compared to those of her friends, but not in a way that made her feel excluded; rather, it was something that singled her out and made her feel special.
All over the house she shared with her mother, Nancy Kohner, her elder brother, Daniel, and her younger sister, Grace, were memories of her Jewish maternal grandfather, Rudi, and his family. Having fled Prague in 1939 and set up a new life in Bradford as the manager of a company selling heating units, he had married an English girl named Olive. The couple had two daughters, the younger being Nancy. Rudi's brother Franz had left Prague for Belfast with his wife the same year. The brothers' widowed mother, Valerie, had remained behind alone, eventually to perish at the hands of the Nazis in Treblinka.
As she grew up, McGing, now 24, absorbed the stories behind the old family photos that hung on their walls - tender black and white portraits of a smiling Valerie and a youthful Rudi, of Nancy on his shoulders, of Franz standing proudly buckled and belted in uniform at the start of the First World War. Without any conscious awareness of it, her life became steeped in Kohner history. She lived with the precious cargo of furniture, crockery, linen and memorabilia that Rudi had brought with him in wooden crates and trunks when he came to England. She ate with the cutlery he and his parents had used, sat on their chairs and slept in the embroidered sheets that had come from the family shop that Rudi had run as a young man. And then there were the files of letters and diaries, covering three generations, all translated and ordered, ready and waiting to be turned into something.
"I grew up with this story," she explains. "My mother had been thinking about writing it for years - she'd started in her twenties, without knowing much of the detail. Then she found the wonderful translator Peter Heller. All through my secondary-school years, she and I worked on piecing together the elements." After 20 years in gestation, it is finally to be published.
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My Father's Roses /i» is the tragic tale of a loving Jewish family from Podersam (a small town between Prague and the German border), split up by the Second World War. But there is a layer of unwritten tragedy, too - Kohner died of breast cancer a week after completing the manuscript, leaving McGing and her siblings alone, their father having left the family many years earlier. "Mum was diagnosed during my second year at Cambridge, and told it was terminal half an hour after my last finals exam. I went home to be her carer. She started writing the book in June 2005 and finished it in February 2006. She died on March 1."
i»My Father's Roses /i» was a lifeline for Kohner during her illness. It is a conflation of her memoirs of a post-war British childhood and the correspondence not only between the two brothers and their mother, left to her fate, but between Valerie and Franz, while he was fighting in the trenches. The extensive research gave her a project in which to lose herself. "It absorbed her completely, providing the distraction she so desperately needed," recalls McGing. "She'd had chemotherapy for a long while, but it had stopped working. She had her last session at Christmas 2005. We used to joke that a laptop and a pile of old papers did more for her than a dose of morphine."
Kohner wrote to her three children just before she died, telling them that she was sorry that writing the book had taken her away from them. "But it wasn't the case at all," says McGing. "It kept her going, kept her focused, and that was a great relief for us. She needed to write it and I'm so glad she did."
For all its tragedy, i»My Father's Roses /i» does paint a vivid picture of a wonderfully warm and loving family. "Mum and I laughed at some of the details we unearthed: how Rudi and Franz always seemed to take off their shirts at the slightest opportunity, Rudi's obsession with roses (which gives the book its title), the way that dogs seemed to be mandatory in the photographs, the string vests they wore, the jokey names they used for each other. And my great-grandfather's pompous, patronising letters! Their lives are very real to me."
As a schoolgirl, McGing - who now works at the Wiener Library in London, the world's oldest Holocaust memorial institution - would spend hours with her mother at weekends poring over family memorabilia. During the summer after her GCSEs, the two crammed it all into the back of Kohner's car and went off to stay in the Dales for a week to work on the story uninterrupted. A year later, they went off to Prague to plough through archives, locate census records and traipse through museums. McGing opted to study history and German as two of her A levels and then went up to Cambridge to read history. She wrote her dissertation on German identity in Podersam (now known as Podborany).
"I never made a conscious decision to pursue all this; it just developed, having started at an age when you don't decide," she says. "Later on, I was almost as obsessed with it as my mother. We came to know Podersam so well that we could walk around it in our minds. When we went there together, we'd wander around, trying to imagine where this or that had taken place, and then we'd turn a corner and see that a road had been Tarmacked, look at each other indignantly and say, 'Tarmac! And, look - they've moved the postbox!' The locals would look at us and think we were nutters."
Kohner had read English at Cambridge and, in later life, had become a respected authority on perinatal bereavement, writing prolifically on the subject. Her final and most personal book is the culmination of a lifetime of curiosity and careful probing. "When she first started writing, she said it was about making sense of her relationship with her father," explains McGing. "But, in her last year, she started writing the book she really needed to write."
Kohner stitched her material together beautifully, interspersing family voices with her own speculation and observations, and leaping nimbly from past to present and back again. Towards the end of the book are her grandmother's final heartbreaking letters to her two sons, in which she tries to reassure them but also reach out to them in a last effort of love and will.
"I believe what she tells me," writes Kohner, "and when she expresses pleasure, I know that she feels it, and when she expresses longing, I can feel the longing. Above all, I can feel her mood of resignation and her need to communicate that to her children - who do not wish to hear it because they feel they must be active and fight and they long for her to fight and struggle too."
McGing is a remarkably wise and strong young woman. She has written a tender, honest and beautifully composed prologue to the book. While the memories of her mother's last days are still terribly raw, she can take solace in the knowledge that, in i»My Father's Roses /i», her family's loving and meaning-laden words will always be there, reaching out across the years for her and her siblings and, one day, for their children.
My Father's Roses i»by Nancy Kohner is published by Hodder & Stoughton on June 12 and is available from BooksFirst priced £17.09 (RRP £18.99), with free p&p. Call 0870 1608080 or visit u»timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst /u» /i»
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BOOK EXTRACT: My father's roses /b»
Riding on my father's shoulders was precarious and thrilling. I must have still been small at the time, maybe not older than five. He would grasp me by the waist and swing me up over his head and onto his shoulders. I felt dangerously high up. There was nothing to hold on to, and his wiry frame wasn't solid enough to make me feel safe. I put my hands around his head, leaning forward, trying to steady myself. His forehead felt smooth and very hard, and his hair smelt faintly sweet.
Riding in the wheelbarrow was another treat. It usually happened on a Sunday when, weather permitting, my father would spend almost all day working in the garden, coming inside only for the Sunday lunch which my mother spent much of the morning cooking. We would have roast beef or lamb, and a pudding, and to the outsider's eye there would probably have been little to show this was not a conventional English household. Join us on the right day, however, and you would be served a strange concoction named as noodles, a mixture of flour and egg, rolled into sausage shapes and roasted in dripping in the oven. These were an invention of my mother's. My father had described to her the Czech knedlicky, or in German, Knödel, that he loved as a child, and unable to follow his account of how his mother cooked them, she created an alternative.
My father had a green wooden wheelbarrow and through the course of a day's gardening he filled it with a mountain of weeds and clippings. At the end of the day, he would take the wheelbarrow across and up the road outside our house to a piece of unused land where the weeds could be tipped. Sometimes there was enough room for me to ride on top of the debris; sometimes I had to walk. But either way, the journey back, when
I could travel in the empty wheelbarrow, was a great excitement. As he rounded the corner towards our house, he would put on a reckless turn of speed that had me rocking and jolting in the barrow so much that it's surprising I didn't fall out. I would scream, he would shout, and it was better than any fairground ride.
Any kind of game with my father provoked the same mixed feelings of thrill and risk, protection and exposure, love and rejection. I never, not for one moment, felt rejected, but contradictory impulses seemed always at work within him - to love and yet not to commit, to commit and yet to let go, to let go but still to cling. He would talk about what did not matter and one knew that he was speaking of what mattered; he worked hard and valued the security he achieved, but a true sense of security eluded him. Strong and stoical, he was also vulnerable, anxious and fragile.
When I was a little older, in my first year at the local grammar school, I tripped one day as I was running in the school grounds and broke my leg. I was taken to hospital in an ambulance, and a teacher phoned my parents. It was lunch time, and my father, as it happened, had called in at home for a quick lunch, so the phone call had caught both my parents there. They came at once to the hospital and found me on a trolley in the accident and emergency department, waiting for the effects of my school lunch to wear off before I could be given an anaesthetic and the leg could be set. My mother sat by my side and talked to comfort and distract me. My father, utterly distraught at the sight of his daughter damaged and in pain, could not bear to stay with me.
That was how it was with him. His pride in my sister and me, his hectic enjoyment of life, his happiness when we were together, were real. But just below the surface, and sometimes ill-concealed, there was sorrow. I knew it, I think, from my earliest consciousness, and I grew up side by side with the extremities of love and grief. (Research):Nancy Helen Kohner
Birth: Dec 28 1950
Death: Mar 2006
Oxfordshire, England
Reg. code: 695/1R
Registration #: R05D
Entry #: 222.
| Last Edited | July 30, 2019 20:07:00 |