During World War II many of the ENGEL family members
disappeared without any apparent trace. It was generally assumed
that they perished in the Holocaust. Most of the living members of
the ENGEL family are descendants of 28 emigrants that settled
outside Poland prior to the war and 27 survivors that somehow
managed to cope with the horrors of the camps and started new
family branches. I am frequently contacted by descendants of a
person named ENGEL to check whether they are members of this ENGEL
family. In most cases, it is easy to show that they are not
related to this family, or at least, there is no obvious link.
There are a few exceptions, where a link is probable but could not
be proven. They are cited in the Appendix section of my book, but
have not been added to the family database.
This summer I learned there were a number of ENGEL descendants
mostly in South Africa and Australia, who can trace their
relationship to Solomon (Szlama) ENGEL of Lodz. Further checking
revealed that this Szlama ENGEL was a Cohen and that his birth year
and father's name were identical to the Szlama ENGEL (SR.1543) in
my database. Apparently, one of his sons had emigrated to South
Africa before World War II, and a daughter and four of his fourteen
grandchildren had also survived the death camps (three in
Auschwitz). I had not known about this. None of them are still
alive today, but they and their descendants added some 92 members
to the family. This version includes this newly discovered branch
as well as some other new additions.
The original computer program allowed for a thousand different
first (given) names. At the time, this was estimated to be beyond
all expectations. With the entry of this version's new members,
this number has been surpassed. In the few cases where additional
names could not be entered, the program will indicate: "(entry
pending)". To allocate additional (given) names significant
program revisions will have to be made. They will be included in
a future version.
This version includes a family tree of 2458 entries and if
duplication due to marriages between cousins, adoptions within the
family, etc., are eliminated it consists of 2242 individual
members.
This version consists primarily of an update in the people
matrix, correcting a number of errors that crept in the addition of
new members in the past two versions. A few new additions have
also been made.
The previous version was scheduled for publication in February
2001. This was delayed until now, primarily because of my medical
problems last year. In the meanwhile, the database has been
further updated with more recent events. Thus, the family tree now
includes 2347 entries and 2132 members.
A rare bug in the FORM function (line 46) has been corrected.
Additional improvements were made to the DECODE and LOOKUP
functions. Note that SR.2036 has not been allocated to any one in
this version.
The millennium adjustments to our program (see comments to
Version 1.17) have been completed and this version accommodates a
time span of six centuries, including family members born after
December 31, 1999.
Two newly discovered branches of our family are now included.
One is the LANDSBERGER branch (headed by SR.1633 - 1635 on page 8
of the book), and mostly located in Iowa. The second consists of
descendants of Mayer ANGEL (SR.94 on page 22 in our book) and are
mostly located in California, U.K., Australia and Israel.
This version includes 2319 entries in our family tree.
Reducing this number by duplications caused by marriages between
cousins, or adoptions within the family, 2115 individual members
remain. This number exceeded the capacity of the diskette-based
STATFN (which was 2100). With this version, the STATFN was
modified to handle up to 2400 members and it's capacity can easily
be increased (at the expense of processing time).
Last October I visited the Lodz (Poland) archives and hence,
many of the birth, marriage, and death dates for the period 1888 -
1898 have been added or corrected. Based on the latest Stawiszyn
information (see previous version comments), the birth order of
SR.287 and SR.127 was also reversed.
In 1999, the LDS (Mormon) church listed several microfilms of
Polish Jewish records, not previously covered in their catalogs.
Included are three films from Kalisz, and two each from Stawiszyn
and Kozminek. On examination, these films included considerable
new information about our family. Primarily, a number of
additional children were listed, that later died still in
childhood. Thus, their memories had not always been preserved in
family stories. Additional information indicates that the
birth order of early generation siblings presented in this database
was, in some cases, not correct. This version includes all the new
information and corrections provided by these films.
One of the consequences of adding all these members, that died
in childhood, is that the display in the NEWSHOW program had to be
upgraded to accommodate as many as sixteen siblings in a single row
(the case for Israel Fajwel ENGEL, SR.1).
The late Maurice ABBEY (SR.769), on several occasions,
reminisced about his attendance as a young boy at a family wedding
at the Crown Hall London. A daughter of his cousin Mordke or Marks
ANGEL, a baker at the Crown Hall, married the son of the owner of
Crown Hall. He remembered that his name was MICHAELS. Subsequent
research verified that the establishment, Crown Hall, was indeed,
owned by Solomon MICHAELS. However, no records, or any other
marriage evidence of an ANGEL daughter to a MICHAELS son could ever
be found. Based on the recollections of SR.769, such a
relationship had been included in the ENGEL database for many
years.
During the past year two relevant discoveries were made.
Descendants of Mordke Ssskind ENGEL, SR.93, (name changed to Marks
Alexander ANGEL) have been found (see comments to version 1.16,
below). Contact was made with SR.93's grandson, Sheldon COHEN,
SR.1856, who has extensive historical information about his family
branch. However, he had no knowledge or any other information
about any marriage between a daughter of his grandfather and the
MICHAELS family. On the other hand, he was well aware about the
marriages between his maternal uncle, Meyer ANGEL, SR.94, and first
one, and later (after becoming widowed) a second daughter of
Solomon MICHAELS. The second discovery made in London late last
year, was a fairly complete family tree of the MICHAELS family.
This tree confirms the findings of SR.1856 and mentions nothing
about an ANGEL daughter marriage to a MICHAELS son. Hence, with
this version, it has been assumed that the recollections of Maurice
ABBE (SR.769), may have been slightly confused and that he, in
fact, recalled the Mayer ANGEL / Leah MICHAELS wedding. This
occurred about 1915, when Maurice was 16 years old. Hence, the
ANGEL daughter - MICHAELS relationship has been removed in this
version. The respective serial numbers, SR.1724 and SR.1725, have
been reallocated to other members.
In a recent update, in which the LOOKUP program was
"improved", a new bug was, inadvertently introduced. Whenever
there were more than two members with the same first and last
names, there were problems in selecting the correct SR.#. This has
been fixed in the current version (as well as some other minor
bugs).
The same situation produced a different problem in the KINSHIP
program. There the display window was not large enough to show the
(idiopathic) characteristics of more than two persons with the same
first and last names making it impossible to select a SR.# beyond
the second. This has been rectified by introducing screen
scrolling utilities to this window.
The KINSHIP table print utility, introduced with version 1.16,
has been further enhanced. When displaying the relationship
between any two members, their respective relationship numbers and
vectors are included in the printout. Thus, when multiple
relationships exist between the two members, one can immediately
determine which relationship had been chosen.
With this version, the database became so large, that there
may be difficulty obtaining a sufficiently large workspace to
perform the STAT program. To run the STAT program over 600 KB of
free conventional memory is needed, something not easily obtained
in older DOS computer configurations. (Its running fine on my 18-
month old IBM Aptiva). The other programs should not be
affected.
For the past year, or so, the database and programs were
analyzed for potential Y2K (or millennium bug) problems. None are
now anticipated with the current database. The numerical data
encoding, however, does not permit the recording of births of new
members after December 31, 1999. A few months ago an effort was
launched to develop a new numerical encoding method to accommodate
births after that date, without a significant increase in storage
requirements. Program modifications to handle the new code are
currently underway and it is hoped that they will be completed by
the end of this year.
Seventeen new members have been added to the database,
including three additional holocaust victims. We have only
recently been made aware of them.
A couple bugs in the FAMILY program of Version 1.16 have been
fixed. The birth order of the children of SR.344 was
corrected.
The FAMILY and NEWSHOW programs have been augmented to
accommodate domestic partners. Both, heterosexual and homosexual
partners are supported.
The database has been enlarged to include the recently
discovered ANGEL branch (descendants of Mortke Ssskind ENGEL,
SR.93, also known as Marks Alexander ANGEL). This brings the
family membership to 1939 and adds a new, ninth generation to the
family tree.
An error in posting the children of SR.431 has been
corrected.
The problems with unassigned SR numbers, mentioned under
Version 1.13 has been fixed and the statistical programs should
again present correct results.
The KINSHIP function was further modified to correctly handle
a family membership of over 1800. The ability to print out the
KINSHIP table on an IBM Graphics printer has been added.
A relatively rare bug was fixed. In the LOOKUP and KINSHIP
utilities, when entering a member name who's first name is Jacob
and/or who's last name is ANGELL produced sometimes incorrect
listings or false error messages.
The LOOKUP utility was enhanced by an additional field that
provides coded information on the existence of photographs of the
referenced member. The database for this is still under
development, and the absence of such a code does not, at this time,
indicate that there are no photos for the requested member. This
is just the first step for making such pictures available from an
additional storage medium (e.g., DVD).
The STATSFN utility was modified to handle membership above
1800. It will perform correctly only with maximum available
(conventional) memory. To free additional lower memory, reduce the
number of buffers and/or files or consider running: MemMaker
program.
The database was modified to reflect new information about
SR.31's descendance. Previous assignments of SR.1099, 1500 and
1501 have been changed. SR.1099 and SR.1501 have been reassigned.
SR.1500 has been assigned, but is temporarily withheld from the
relationship matrix (RM), in addition, SR.1622, which had been
assigned in error to SR.1515, in several previous versions, is not
in use at this time. Due to this, the program in some
applications, including the STATSFN, will not report the
correct membership (i.e., 1808 instead 1807) and some of the other
figures will be off by 1 or 2. NEWSHOW and some other programs
will produce errors for these SRs. This will be corrected in a
future version.
The program now correctly reports birth and death years of
members older than 99 years.
The basic program, written almost 25 years ago, had an
artificial limit of 1800 family members. At that time it was not
anticipated that a larger capacity would ever be needed. However,
during the past months our family membership started approaching
this limit, requiring a major change of the People Matrix part of
the database. This version is the first such enhancement and is so
far limited to the INFO programs, supplied on this diskette.
Similar enhancements for the remaining in-house programs
(UPDATE, OUTPUT and STATS) are still underway. The programs are
being modified to manage family memberships with no apparent
software limits on the size of the family.