acknowledgements
This website was designed by Nicole Rienecker of Neekdesign.com. I owe her an inestimable debt of gratitude for her patience and generosity in teaching me how to use the platform and for designing such an attractive and easy to navigate repository for my research.
Thank you…
to Ken Blady for tirelessly translating over 400 Yiddish letters in various difficult handwritings.
to Maria Belaev for translating a few of the Russian letters and giving me much insight into the mindset of Russian Jews of that time period.
to Charles Salkin for the fabulous research he has done about Jewish farmers in Delaware giving me many clues and stories about the Benioff family.
to Yana Rathman, my “long lost” Benioff cousin for helping me find the Benioffs that were left behind.
To Annette Bothman who put many years ago had the foresight to interview on tape my grandmother, Libe Friedman and her sister Celia, and who put together a fabulous photo album of over a thousand Friedman photos.
To Annette Bothman and Bea Kopp, my aunts, who helped me go through each and every one of those thousand photos putting in names and places and helped me finish transcribing Libe’s oral history.
To Dagmar Benioff Friedman, my mother, who continues to write her fabulous memoir, thus preserving her story and the story of her parents.
To Frances Dinkelspiel and Leora Benioff, my cousins, who joined me on the journey to try and uncover and understand the painful truth of our slaveholding ancestors.
To Lea Spector Hellner – who went before me, annotating letters with yellow post-its, keeping track of the family.
To fellow genealogists that did so much of this work on my father’s side of the family – Glen Strauss and Moshe Milner.