Finding my brother – Part 1

I’m not quite sure when I first heard about my brother, it was either in late high school or college. My sisters had informed me that they thought my father had a child when he was in France named Franz. The only information I could ever find was a picture in my father’s collection that had the words “Your Franz” on the back of it. I’m not sure if the picture was of a woman or of a baby. I never confronted my father about this child, because I didn’t know if my sisters were just joking with me or not.

I am the genealogist of our family. I have all the records of my parents and pictures that they have accumulated over the years. I have found a lot of information about my parent’s ancestry through the Internet and with the help of a genealogist I became acquainted with online that lived near where my parents grew up. Everything I’ve gathered I save on Dropbox on the Internet and share with my sisters and their families. Needless to say at family gatherings I would periodically get the question, “Have you tried to find Franz?” My answer was always the same, “All I have is the name “Franz” and that he was born in France. Not anything to go on.”

That all changed in July of 2013. One of my favorite technology writers is David Pogue. He writes for the New York Times. On July 18, he wrote an article about Facebook that talked about a hidden message feature that people should be aware of. On Facebook you can post a message to the public or write a private message just to one of your Facebook friends. When you log onto Facebook there is a little icon on the top of the screen for private messages and if it shows a number on it, it means that you have that many private messages to read. Right next to that icon is a grayed out word “Other”. This is where Facebook puts messages that have been sent to you that it feels are either spam, or from non-friends that you may not know. Since it is grayed out with no numbers showing, you would never think to check there for messages. Pogue suggested that you should look and see if any of those messages are real. I decided to do so. All of the messages seemed to be from real people or organizations I knew, except for the first message which had been written in November of 2012 by a Cathy Gérard-Fisse and was all in French. Some of my storytelling Facebook friends share their posts in their native language. Normally when I see text written in a foreign language I tend to copy and paste it into Google Translate to see what they are sharing. What intrigued me about this particular letter other than it being in French were the names Kurt, Walter and Franz. Kurt is my uncle’ name and Walter was my father’s name and then there was Franz, the name of the mythical brother I was supposed to have.

When I translated the letter it said that Cathy was doing genealogy research for her husband, Franz. They had a photograph of Kurt and his brother Walter Heilbrun that was taken in Atlanta. Could I be related to Kurt and Walter?

I wrote back to her that my father’s name was Walter and I had an uncle named Kurt and could she give me more information about Franz’s parentage. I said it was rumored that my father had a son named Franz in France, but that we had no evidence to prove it.

I checked out her Facebook page, and even friended her. Though the names were a good connection, there were two pieces of data that seemed in conflict. Cathy was born in 1958, which made her 8 years younger than me. Franz would have to have been much older than me, not that people don’t marry others that have a large age difference, but without further verification it made the connection less plausible. Also my father had never been to Atlanta. I called my sisters to let them know what was going on and surmised that if this was our brother then the picture might have been from Atlantic City, since my father did live and work there and they just misread the writing.

I re-wrote to Cathy and asked if she could scan the picture that she had and send it to me so I could verify that it was my father.

She wrote that they were on vacation and when they returned she would send me the picture. I wrote back with my e-mail address and asked when Franz was born, trying to see if the dates matched. Cathy wrote back that Franz was born in 1938 and that she would send me a longer letter soon. I prepared my sisters for the news that Franz might be our brother.

The letter came on August 12, 2013. Franz was born in August of 1938. I checked the genealogy information that I had on my father and my father came to America from France in April of 1938. That pretty much connected all of the dots. The contents of the letter filled in the picture.

My father lived in France after he left Germany in 1933. At some point he met Franz’s mother, a musician Mily Gérard, and became romantically involved. My father left France for the United States to be with his brother who had already moved here. When my father got here he received correspondence from Mily stating that she was pregnant. Mily decide to have the baby and wished to recognize that my father was the father of her child, but her mother refused to let her, being that they were not Jewish. This was France just prior to World War II and to have a German father, moreover a Jewish one, could be dangerous to Mily and her family.

Unfortunately for Franz, his mother died when he was 13; she never married. With no parents, he was adopted by his grandmother and added her maiden  name, Fisse, to his own.

It wasn’t until his grandmother died, that he found the picture of my father and uncle. It was then that he tried to find my father. Though he almost made a connection through a friend who was visiting the States who met my father and found out that he had 2 daughters and a son; they got the wrong address. A letter that was sent to my father from Franz was returned “Address unknown”.

That’s where the tale would have ended, had it not been for Cathy’s (Franz’s second wife) persistence in trying to find us. According to her she had found me on the Internet and even watched a number of my YouTube video performances before she dared to write me. So thank you Cathy for your persistence and David Pogue for leading me in the right direction.

Franz and Cathy came back from vacation on September 21st. Since then we have been in constant contact via e-mail. She did send me pictures of Franz and some of his family. She also sent the scanned picture that started the search which did say Atlantic City, not Atlanta. My sisters and I have sent her pictures of our families and shared with him memories of our father. We are all sorry that it has taken so long for us to find each other and hope that one day soon we will get to see each other in person either here or in France. Meanwhile I have to brush up on my French.

Continued in Part 2