About Paper Mensch

What Is a Paper Mensch?

Let me tell you what drives this work. What keeps me up at night searching passenger manifests. What makes me spend hours deciphering handwritten Yiddish on a century-old ketubah. What compels me to track down a third cousin twice removed in Australia because they might have that one photograph no one else has seen.

In Yiddish, mensch means more than just "person." It describes someone of integrity, honor, and deep humanity. A mensch is someone you admire and emulate—someone who acts with rectitude, dignity, and an unwavering sense of what is right and decent in this world.

A Paper Mensch is someone who uses paper—the documents, the records, the certificates, the letters, the photographs—to perform an act of profound menschlichkeit: bringing our ancestors back to life.

I'm David Wilbur, and yes, I am a Paper Mensch. But here's what that actually means.

It means I spend my days (and honestly, my nights) immersed in archival documents, vital records, immigration manifests, census data, naturalization papers, and those beautiful, heartbreaking papers tucked away in dusty repositories and databases around the world. I follow the paper trail left behind by our ancestors—the birth certificates that announced their arrival, the marriage records that documented their unions, the passenger lists that captured moments of extraordinary courage, the naturalization papers that declared their belonging, the death certificates that marked their passage—and I weave these fragments into the rich tapestry of their actual, lived stories.

But here's the thing: I don't just collect facts. Anyone can do that. What I do is excavate lives. I find the humanity in the bureaucracy. The love stories hiding in marriage indexes. The heartbreak in immigration records. The resilience in census data showing families packed eight deep in tenement apartments, working, surviving, building futures they'd never fully see.

The Sacred Work of Paper

Every document tells a fragment of a story. A birth certificate announces arrival. A marriage record documents union, hope, partnership. A passenger list captures a moment of extraordinary courage—leaving everything you know for everything you don't. A naturalization paper declares belonging. A death certificate marks passage.

These aren't just names and dates. They're moments of humanity frozen in time.

The paper trail lets us see:

• Where they came from and why they had to leave
• Who they chose to love and who they lost too soon
• How they worked—tailors, peddlers, shopkeepers, garment workers
• The choices they made when choices were scarce
• The obstacles they overcame that we can barely imagine
• The communities they built in tenements and shuls and corner groceries
• The traditions they fought to preserve in a new world

But Paper Is Not the End of the Line

Here's where it gets real. Here's where good research becomes great genealogy. Here's where names on documents transform into people you feel like you know.

Documents open the door. They establish the facts. They give you the skeleton. But if you stop there, you've only done half the work. Maybe less.

We have to go further. We have to breathe life into these names. We do that by:

Gathering Their Stories

Family stories carry truths no certificate can capture. The way your grandmother spoke about her mother's Shabbat dinners—how she made the challah, who sat where, what they argued about. The story about how your great-grandfather lost his finger in the garment factory but kept working because missing a day meant the family didn't eat. The memory of cousins gathering on stoops during Brooklyn summers, speaking Yiddish mixed with English, old world colliding with new.

These oral histories add color, texture, humanity to black-and-white facts. They tell you what the census can't: who was funny, who was stern, who snuck you candy, who survived the unthinkable and still managed to laugh.

Preserving Their Images

Photographs are windows to souls we'll never meet but somehow recognize. That faded portrait from 1910 shows you their faces, their Sunday clothes, their expressions. You see determination in their eyes. Hope in their postures. You notice a hand on a shoulder—an expression of love and connection that transcends a century.

Every photograph we preserve, digitize, restore, and share ensures they are not forgotten. That they remain visible. That their great-great-grandchildren can look at their faces and say, "I have her eyes. I have his chin. I come from these people."

Connecting Their Descendants

DNA connects us across continents and centuries in ways our ancestors couldn't imagine. A match at 180 centiMorgans reveals a second cousin you never knew existed—living in Israel, or Australia, or three towns over. Through collaboration, we piece together branches of the family tree that were lost to migration, war, the Holocaust, time itself.

Each connection we make honors our ancestors by reuniting the family they built. We're putting back together what history tore apart.

Sharing Their Legacy

Our ancestors deserve to be remembered—not as statistics in a database, not as names on a pedigree chart, but as fully realized human beings whose choices, whose courage, whose sacrifices shaped the lives we're living right now.

By creating comprehensive family histories, building digital archives accessible to anyone who shares this bloodline, and making their stories findable and shareable, we ensure their legacy endures for generations who haven't even been born yet.

We Can All Be Menschy

You don't need a degree in genealogy. You don't need access to archives in Poland. You don't need to read Yiddish or Russian or Hungarian.

You just need to care. And then you need to act on that caring.

Being menschy—acting with integrity, humanity, and decency—in genealogy means:

• Caring enough to search: Taking an afternoon to find that missing birth record. Logging into Ancestry one more time to see if there's a new hint. Asking your aunt if she remembers the family story before it's too late.
• Sharing what you find: Making your research available to cousins you haven't met. Uploading that photo to the family tree. Responding to that DNA match message instead of ignoring it.
• Preserving their memory: Digitizing old photos before they fade into nothing. Recording your grandfather's stories while he can still tell them. Writing down what you remember while you still remember it.
• Teaching the next generation: Helping your kids understand where they came from. Showing them the Ellis Island manifest. Explaining why their middle name matters.
• Honoring their sacrifices: Recognizing the courage it took to leave everything—language, home, family, familiarity—for the possibility of better. They did that for us. The least we can do is remember.

The Paper Mensch Mission

This site exists to honor eight immigrants who arrived in New York between 1889 and 1907, who married, who built families, who established roots that would branch into the sprawling family you're part of today.

Samuel Klein and Katie Ripner. Max Teitelbaum and Gussie Halbfinger. Herman Schwartz and Tillie Greenberg. Samuel Singer and Minne Jacobs.

Four couples. Eight people. Hundreds of descendants.

Through meticulous paper research—combined with photographs, family stories, DNA analysis, and collaboration with cousins near and far—we're bringing them back to life. Not as names in a database. As people.

But this is more than a memorial. It's a living, growing archive where:

• Descendants can discover their heritage and see where they fit in this sprawling family tree
• Cousins can contribute their memories, their photos, their pieces of the puzzle
• Stories get preserved before they're lost forever
• The next generation learns who paved the way for the lives they're living
• We ensure these eight people—and everyone who came after them—are remembered with the dignity, complexity, and humanity they deserve

Paper brought us here. Stories keep us connected. DNA proves we're family. And acts of menschlichkeit—small and large, daily and profound—ensure we never forget.