When I started this venture, my intent was to assemble a biographical document in text and pictures. The stimulus for the project can be found in A Letter to My Father written on the occasion of his 75th birthday, October 8, 1972.
I started by drafting a time-line of my life focused on yearly groupings mostly defined by where I lived. Eventually it evolved into “Through the Years,” a chronology of activities.
As my collection of information expanded, I realized that I had a much bigger story to tell: a Schock Family History. Yet, at the same time, I wanted to include biographical information. And so further brainstorming began: searching for documents and documenting my memories; asking family and relatives to do the same; finding supporting documents and photographs; recounting family and personal stories as accurately as I could; researching genealogy resources; traveling to the Baltics with my daughter Lisa and searching for documentary evidence in libraries and online.
I never dreamed that someday I would be able to discover facts related to the history of my father’s life prior to his arrival in the United States. For years I wanted to know about his childhood, his teenage years, his emigration from Lithuania and his family’s history. He never shared much more than the names of two cities (Slabodka and Hamburg) and a comment about coming to the US on a steam ship out of Hamburg, Germany. As the Internet expanded, I learned more and more about his early life, his family and about his emigrating to the United States. Using online genealogy websites and histories, I came to better understand why he never wanted to share any details. I think his way of coping – with what we now refer to as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) – was to look ahead, not back.
As I was watching a 60 Minutes presentation on April 5, 2020 about the “Power of Shared Memories,” I imagined my father sitting before the array of cameras and lights and answering questions about his life and family in Kovna (Kaunas), Lithuania (Russia) and how he traveled to Hamburg, Germany to set sail for the United States in 1914 just three months before the start of the First World War. Had he remain in Kaunas, he would have been conscripted into the Russian Army and this Schock Family History wouldn’t exist.
While I was able, eventually, to piece together some information about my father’s early years, I’ve not been able to account for my mother’s, most likely because she and her mother emigrated from Russia (Belarus) when Mom was just two years old. Her father came earlier. Nonetheless, I keep searching.
Fred Schock October 2020