by Victoria Hess — Dec. 2010

Dr. Fritz Hirschland (born 1880) received his medical degree in Germany and moved to the US around 1913. (An Ellis Island document suggests it might have been the year before.) Of course, he took up his vocation in Flushings after he got settled. The authorities did not like that very much.

In March 2011, one of Fritz’s grandsons, Alex Ivsky, got in touch with us, having found our family tree on-line. He was surprised to have found us, since, as he said of his grandfather, “Fritz really never talked about his family.  How they came to live in Flushing?  I don’t know.  Did they know your grandparents??? (who lived on the upper west side at the time)  Unknown.”

Alex added that this news article makes sense in the context of little family history he knows, since it explains why “my grandmother took her three children BACK to Germany for a year in 1922.  Both my mother and her sister talked about that trip although, they never said why (they might not have known?)  My maternal grandmother (Lehnert) was one of eight so, there are plenty of relatives on that side, as well.”

Alex added that the only other Hirschland he had known was “was an actor who lived in Kontanz (Constance on the Lake of Constance) and who was on summer vacation while I lived there during the summer of 1978  (so I never met him).”

What Alex found even more amazing was that he lived only blocks from Roger Hirschland in Washington DC, who I first found when I lived across the street from him in Washington. Roger (my second cousin) had been the first Hirschland outside of my immediate family that I met as a adult, and it appears it will be the same for Alex (our fifth cousin)!