My family name is Tree, with roots reaching back into medieval England. Or so I believed for more than 50 years, along with the story of my grandfather, M. Maxwell T. Tree. According to family legend, this father of three had joined the French Foreign Legion as a pilot in World War I, dying gallantly in 1916 when his plane was shot down.
My husband had caught the genealogy bug while researching his Irish-American family's history. One day, in the course of checking passenger lists on the Ellis Island website, he spotted the name M. Maxwell T. Tree. There could have been only one person with that name. My grandfather had arrived in New York aboard the British liner Imperator on Nov. 14, 1920 - four years after he was supposed to have died.
A myth exploded meant a mystery to solve. A retired journalist, my husband was like a bloodhound on the scent. Our first clue came from a question for householders on the 1920 federal census: "What was your father's native language?" My grandfather's answer: "German." The real stunner, however, was his 1920 passport application. On the form he supplied his father's name: Lippmann Tannenbaum.
Further research revealed that my great-grandfather had been born in the village of Mansbach in the German state of Hesse and was 17 when he arrived in New York in 1868. According to stories on the New York Times archival site, he became a major supplier of precious stones to Tiffany's and at one time owned the world's largest tourmaline mine.
In the Times archives I also found my grandfather's death notice. Maxwell died on Jan. 3, 1923, in Wiesbaden. Contacted by e-mail, a helpful city clerk found his death certificate, which gave the place where he died, the Hotel Kaiserhof. She also discovered that he was buried in one of the city's Jewish cemeteries.
