Dedication: Sarah Meyer's World Wide Family

Sarah Lee Meyer's Genealogy Web Site

This web site is dedicated to my parents and grandparents.

On my mother's side, I never met my maternal grandmother, Sarah Lee, but I was named for her.

My maternal grandfather, Isaac Hersh, (my Zeidi) is the one who felt that knowing our family's roots was very important, and he wrote the original manuscript going back to his grandparents and his wife's grandparents. He did a paragraph or more about the personalities (and occasionally the libraries) of the family members. He included aunts, uncles and cousins, but only names and relationships. No dates were included. This manuscript enabled me to find cousins and was a tremendous head start on this project. However, I received an English translation after he died, so I was unable to ask questions. All of the grandchildren dearly loved him.

On my father's side, my grandfather, H.C. , was quite a philosopher, and well educated in life's lessons. He lived the longest of any of my parents and grandparents. His parents were the first of my family to come to America, in the 1880's, and he was the only native US citizen among my grandparents. His address book has left me with some of the family mysteries (see Help Solve Mysteries).

My father's mother, Tillie, was a fabulous seamstress and I remember sitting on the kitchen floor in her home, playing with buttons, while she sewed on a Singer Treadle Sewing machine. My father and sister also played with the same buttons as did my own children (although not as much). Whenever I hear "from generation to generation", I add silently, "with buttons." Grandma was also an immigrant, and when I was in high school, I asked her questions about her family, taking notes on a small piece of scratch paper. Although I misheard her father's first name (leading to problems later), I was able to find the descendant's of her half-sister Fayge in Argentina, because I knew which questions to ask. I was very close to her. Her help has led to my largest family tree, and most of the information in it came from family members.

My mother, Nina, was always interested in the genealogy and helped with the oral history. Occasionally she even did a little research for me in Los Angeles. She was an artist, and I have gotten many compliments on her pictures and wall hangings.

My father, Fred, was a brilliant man, with two earned PhD's. The first was in Chemistry (1940) and the second in Mathematics (1959). His contribution to the genealogy project has been indirect. He is the one who encouraged me to "study my programming", back when I was in college. He lead me to my careers in mathematics and actuarial science, and my interest in computers. But even more than this, I learned from my cousin Harry recently.
In the early 1950's when my father was a graduate student in mathematics at Wayne State University, he was part of a team that was responsible for the first machine language. Previously, computers were programmed by hard wiring the vacuum tubes or transistors . Apparently when this project was successful, my father came home and told my mother, "the rest will be history." This is only one of three major history making projects in which my father played a role. I do not know how large or small a role he played in this project... only that without the first machine language, this web site would not be here today.