Prepare yourself, this story is the perfect combination of wacky mother and one thing leads to another. It all began one crisp Friday evening in September when I excitedly called my mother to inform her that I am going on a mission to raise $6,500 to send a darling Acorn Coffee Shop employee to Disney World with her family. My always encouraging but very realistic mother listened to my story and went along with my rambles of making this dream a reality. She definitely doubted me at times just at the sheer amount of money that I was attempting to collect but when the story went viral and news stations across the country picked it up, even my mom started to believe that it was really happening.
My sweet mother isn’t exactly keeping up with the times and does not have a Facebook. Let’s just say that news travel quickly when Facebook is involved so mother was missing out on all the buzz that my story was creating. On the fifth time I was reading her an article through a bad connection Factime session, I demanded she just Google my name and all of he article would appear in front of her. Well, she followed order, read all the articles, and then made the greatest discovery of all. As soon as anyone’s name is anywhere in the media, Ancestry.com picks up the name and tags their descendants.
“Taylor Zisholtz is a descendant of Meyer Leftkowitz” popped up on the screen. This got mother on a cousin’s club reunion mission the likes of which I have never seen. My mom spent hours scrolling through ancestry.com finding out all of her long lost relatives names.
A couple days later, I have three missed calls from my mother and a text message “PLEASE CALL, SLIGHTLY URGENT” When I see this I figure the house is burning down or my father came home with 60 dogs, nope, I was way off. More long, lost leftkowitz relatives had been found.
A business man in the area sent a random flyer out to local business owners offering to help them sell their business and the flyer was signed Michael Leftkowitz. OH MY GOSH. Leave it to my mother to pick up the phone and inform this complete stranger “Hi, Michael, it’s your cousin Lois” Thankfully Michael was receptive and hopped on the bandwagon piecing together the links of this huge long lost family that they both never knew they had.
Incase this wasn’t downright hilarious enough, my mother goes to a foot doctor a few weeks later and who is it but another Leftkowitz. This time the news that “We are cousins!” didn’t exactly get the doctor jumping up and down, so Lois left a tad disappointed that her own flesh and blood didn’t want much to do with her. I had to keep reminder her that these people are literal strangers who’s grandfather’s were half siblings with her grandmother so it’s not exactly absurd that the guy wasn’t all too interested. Nothing stops my mother so a few days later she marches back in the doctor’s office with an entire family tree print out, and announces to the poor, innocent doc just trying to get through the day, “You have to care, we are cousins!” And that he does, he’s caught the Cousin Club bug too now.
The next thing I know, I am home for winter break and my mom announces we are taking a trip to New York City so that she can meet up with Stanley, her second cousin who she never knew existed until the ancestry.com discovery.
