Last weekend, Elizabeth and I were in the US for her 5-year college reunion. The R-MWC reunion events are shared between classes celebrating every 5th anniversary of their graduation, and Elizabeth’s year (class of ’03) put in a good showing, with a large proportion of the alumna who attended being Reading Program alums, so I knew a lot of them. Photos from the event are up on Flickr: click below for the full set.

Those of you playing along at home will know that R-MWC has been the centre of controversy the last few years, after they suddenly decided to switch from a woman’s college to co-ed (and change their name to Randolph College), cut staff and courses, and sell off prize pieces from the college museum’s permanent art collection to shore up long-running (and long-denied) financial problems. Lawsuits from alumnae groups resulted, but were lost in the circuit courts and last week were ultimately quashed at appeal.

All of this meant that there was a heightened sensitivity amongst the alums to any male involvement in reunion. There were a small number of snide remarks and people jumping to conclusions over the contribution made by male students at some of the events, and several times I was asked by older alums if I was a student. Very few of the older alums had brought their partners with them, but I think it was mainly my closeness in age to the actual students which led people to assume I was one of them. The first time I was asked “Are you a student?”, I simply quipped, “No, I’m a husband” without even thinking about it, and that became my standard response from then on. Later I realised that, in future, some form of branding might be in order:

I’m thinking of making it into a t-shirt.

Beneath the celebrations, a somewhat more glum mood exists

Whenever banks decide they won’t lend to you for no apparent reason (such as when you earn £22,000 a year and low outgoings, but can’t get a measly £5,000 loan to buy a car to get to work), they’ll tell you that it’s because they are ‘responsible lenders’ who will never lend you more than you can afford.

Then they pull shit like this

Rest assured that aside from some mild stomach upset, I am very much well. However, it seems that while I may currently be the only Jay Schlackman in the world, there was another:

Curiously, I started going by Jay about a year or so after that.

Anyway, the reason we found this is that when seeing my Dad today, I borrowed from him a selection of papers from his collection of family records, specifically the earliest records regarding my great-grandfather, Jacob Schlackman. When we got home, Elizabeth’s librarian/archivist nature kicked in and she quickly located a number of good leads for more information about him. The revelation that another Jay Schlackman died in the US in 1998 is unrelated to our family (as far as we know), but the juiciest of the relevant finds is a record of a court document in the National Archives in which he is named as a “co-respondent” in the divorce papers for Lily Duparc (nee Griggs), the woman he later married (i.e., my great-grandmother). The court document is dated 1919, just one year before their son (my grandfather) was born!

We are now planning to make a trip to the Archives to take a look at this, and other records, including the 1901 Census record for Lily when she was 5 years old. Elizabeth also found burial records for two people who appear to match what little information we have on his parents (Aaron and Lia Schlackman), who were buried in Edmonton Federation Cemetery, North London, in 1925. This is interesting because we did not even know before if they had immigrated to England or whether they had remained in Paris, where we know he had siblings.

As you can no doubt tell, it’s been a thrilling evening of research in the Schlackman household.