THE KABAKOFF FAMILY TREE
The Kabakoff Family Tree is an ongoing process. A database has been constructed on and off over a period of 24 years, ever since Brian Neil Burg was inspired by reading Dan Rottenberg’s book Finding Our Fathers: A Guidebook to Jewish Genealogy. Brian soon inspired his wife Rosalie, and together they established the “modest” goal of tracing their families from their great-grandparents’ generation on down. If they found info on further generations back, it would be icing on the cake.

Since they each had 8 great-grandparents, that was 16 family lines, not to mention collateral relatives deriving from siblings of great-grandparents. It soon became obvious that the task was enormous. To simplify matters, they decided to concentrate on just one family line in the beginning: Kabakoff. Why? Because they thought “Kabakoff” was an unusual name and therefore easier to trace, and also because Rosalie’s mother was a Kabakoff who was actually born in Dokshitsy, Minsk Gubernia, and Rosalie had grown up curious about the funny-sounding shtetl name (which she, like many other Kabakoff descendants we discovered, assumed was a joke).

And so they began this odyssey in 1983 by first calling relatives they knew and then going to a local library and scouring U.S. phone books for the name Kabakoff. About 50 letters were sent out all over the U.S. to various Kabakoffs with an information form to fill out, and several people responded enthusiastically. Suddenly, Brian and Rosalie were discovering whole clans of Kabakoffs in different parts of the U.S., all tracing their origins to Dokshitsy. Multiple letters, many long-distance phone calls, multiple trips to the Mormon Family History Library and the National Archives, visits to the East Coast, purchase of computer software, and now the Internet, and the Kabakoff Family has literally exploded into hundreds of names and stories—and that is even with several branches still lacking most of the basic information!