While we hold our secrets close to our hearts, sometimes they slip out. Five stories

When I married my husband, I went from belonging to a family that waited three hours between eating fleishigs and milchigs to a family who had the minhag of waiting six. I’d rib my husband about this only half-jokingly: “As a baal teshuvah who’s unsure of his family’s mesorah, you can select your minhagim. So why in the world did you decide to pick six hours?”

“Because I researched the inyan and felt it’s the right thing to do,” he’d volley back. “If it bothers you so much, you’re welcome to look into my family history and try to find someone who really liked ice cream.”

At this point in the conversation, we’d usually smile at each other in truce, and move on to looking for something pareve to snack on.

Many years later, after my father-in-law retired from the medical profession, he still had the scientific itch within him, and he turned his research skills toward our family genealogy. He went about it systematically and diligently, combing obscure documents, attending genealogy conferences, trying to connect the dots, and fill in the gaps of what, at the time, was a very fall-turning-winter-looking family tree.

Like many things involving the past, the project moved along at a very slow pace. When my father-in-law would visit, he’d gather my family to the table to report on the incremental findings. Each of us would bravely put a smile on our face and politely glaze over while he would tell tales of minute family details he was able to uncover via microfilm at his recent genealogy conferences (ship records of family member’s travels to America, pictures of lost family tombstones, etc.).

But then one day, an important detail was discovered that jolted us awake: a link had come to light that ignited our collective interest.