Presentation of Manchester Free Trade Hall Relic to City of Leningrad

Among the papers I found recently in a file folder related to the 1964 settlement of the estate of my grandmother Mina Magdalena Jonas,  were the newspaper clipping and two letters. I had no prior knowledge of this. What is amusing is that the clipping, without the letters, would have been very mysterious, as my grandmother is not mentioned by name in the clipping.

Newspaper clipping

Letter from Leonard C. Howitt to
M.M. Jonas, Feb. 7, 1956

Letter from Philip P. Dingle  to
M.M. Jonas, Feb. 29, 1956

However, the accompanying letters make it clear that my grandmother had saved the day by working with the Manchester City Architect to provide the Russian translation so clearly desired. Since this blog is about Internet wandering/wondering, I wondered what this was all about, and about the people involved.

"Dr. F. C. Toy": Another Attempted Internet Resurrection of a Life (updated)

So are, this is a failure. Lots of little pieces, but no real biographical information. Not even what the initials stand for, leave alone birth or death dates.

In my mother's memoirs, she writes that she worked for the:

British Cotton Industry Research Association (Shirley Institute) as an Information Officer, doing mainly abstracts from the current literature for our own publication and they were also reprinted in The Journal of the Textile Institute. ... It was a job I really liked; my boss was Dr.Withers, an elderly man, a real teddy bear, his glasses halfway down his nose. ... We were what was known as “Scientific Civil Service”, i.e., we had the best of two worlds: the privileges of the Civil Service (good pension plan etc.) and of Academia (very generous leave time!). ... The Institute also encouraged further education: if you took courses that were approved, you could leave two hours before school started (all evening courses). At first I took just statistics and economics, but then they approved my finishing the degree course, that’s how I ended up with a BA in Public Administration (University of Manchester). In my reference the Director (Dr. Toy) wrote that I “contributed greatly to the textile information of this country”. 

She mentioned Dr. Toy again recently as the director of the Shirley Institute, so I decided some wandering was necessary to see who he was. Known as "F.C. Toy," it quickly became apparent that between "toy" (as in kids toys) and "F.C." (Football Club), searching was going to be a problem! My initial technique was to combine "F.C. Toy" with Shirley Institute and or Manchester. [I do find that there is a book Story of Shirley: History of Shirley Institute, Manchester, 1919-88 but not searchable or viewable online.]

Resurrecting a Life: The Bits and Bytes of Felicias Baumgarten-Campetti

This is a fool's errand, finding bits and bobs of a Great Aunt (familiarly "Aunt Fela"), about whom we know nothing... 

This is how I began this post several months ago. The family stories about her (a sister of my maternal grandmother) are scant, mainly because of a rift after a dispute between her and my grandmother about some money sent for my mother while she was in school in Geneva. So, basically, I knew she had married an Italian and that they were both very big in the Esperanto movement, and that they had not had children. In addition, she excelled in languages and had been a translator. 

So, the bits and bobs that I had been finding (and which I failed to store in the draft of this post at the time) largely were links here and there to translations she had published, often dealing with Scandinavian authors. While I will get back to that, the one real mystery that I came across was a hit in Google books from Trapped in Tuscany Liberated by the Buffalo Soliders: The True World War II Story of Tullio Bruno Bertini. According to the screenshot, on page 217 of the book is the following:

After the war, my uncle Nello was honored by the Italian government and given the title of Cavaliere. 

Israel also gave him the following proclamation:

A forest of 3,000 trees has been planted in Israel to honor the memory of Felicia Baumgarten-Campetti and to recognize the merits of the Reverend Don Mello Marcucci who has helped Jewish families in in the time of German persecution.

Well, I had to know more about that! Bertini describes what his uncle had done--he and three other priests helped shelter refugees in 1944 from both the Germans and the Fascists--but nothing about what my aunt had done. 

[1/9/2020. I had written to Yad Vashem to see if they had any knowledge of the recognition, but they have no records [CAS-238375: "thank you but I could not find any information about your relative in our database. "] I suspect that someone just bought trees through the Jewish National Fund.]

My Great Aunt Franka, Albert Einstein, and The New Fatherland League

I have been meaning for sometime to start collecting links on the Internet to my great aunt, but for now, I am deviating from my intentions, and wandering about something I just found during some random searching, which, of course, has set me both wondering again, and wandering some more.

My first "finding" was a "This Date in History" for November 14, from History.com about the launch of the Bund Neues Vaterland--"the New Fatherland League."  In particular, the second paragraph:

First and foremost, the league argued, World War I, which had begun the previous August, should end promptly in favor of “a just peace without annexations.” Secondly, an international organization should be established in order to prevent future wars. According to Dr. Franziska Baumgartner-Tramer, who attended some of the league’s meetings, Einstein spoke “with great pessimism about the future of human relations….I managed to get to him on one occasion, when I was depressed by the news of one German victory after another and the resultant intolerable arrogance and gloating of the people of Berlin. ‘What will happen, Herr Professor?’ I asked anxiously. Einstein looked at me, raised his right fist, and replied ‘This will govern!'”

Unsourced, unattributed, and my aunt's last name misspelled. Also, I had never heard any story that she had any connections with Albert Einstein. I asked my mother and while she could acknowledge remembering something about this, she had no more information.