The two mysteries we discovered that day in 1977 still intrigue me today.
Because the clerk in the New Orleans City Records Department recognized our cousin Bruce as an attorney and frequent visitor, we were allowed complete freedom to roam the myriad of aging grey file cabinets. Deep in the labyrinth, our curiosity took us to a drawer crudely marked “K”. Our Korn grandmothers were sisters. Inside we found many of our Korn family’s birth, death and marriage documents. But, two of those documents stunned and amazed us, and set me off on a forty year path of ancestry research. First was the death certificate of our great grandmother Anna Bernstein Korn with the Cause of Death, “Melancholia”. I wondered how someone dies from sadness. Second was the documentation of a judge’s 1919 ruling in a case in which great grandfather, Rabbi Jacob Korn had sued and won financial support from three of his children.