A bit more on my meshugge relatives

As I wrote yesterday, I continue to find out more about my relatives on my father’s side, and whether I have any gentile genes from Ireland remains a mystery. So does the source of the name “Coyne”, which apparently goes back in that form to the early 19th century—in Ireland.

But I now have several relevant newspaper articles found by a friend who subscribes to Newspapers.com, where apparently you can find nearly any clipping. From these I discovered that my father, his father, and his father’s mother were in a car crash on the Pittsburgh-Monongahela road on August 6, 1929; my dad was 11 and sustained “head injuries”, but nobody was seriously hurt.

Here are two items of interest—to me (I promise I won’t bore you with many of these). In this one, my paternal grandfather, Joseph C. Coyne of Uniontown, Pennsylvania, seems to have sued one of his relatives (Zoffer was his mother’s maiden name) for pecuniary reasons. This clipping, from the Pittsburgh Press on August 1, 1928, will surely raise the Jewish stereotypes:

And the wedding of Aunt Mannie, my father’s sister. I remember her well. Uncle Emil, her husband, died fairly young of a heart attack, and she spent her final years in Florida—the end of the line for all Jewish people. Before that she was the secretary of the famous and racist anthropologist Carleton S. Coon. Note that my dad and my future mom (Lillian Frank, not yet married to my dad) were in attendance at the wedding, and my aunt is described as “attractive daughter of Joseph Coyne”! Also, it was a Jewish wedding—I’m not sure if Uncle Emil was Jewish—and the bride didn’t wear white.  This was published in the Morning Herald of Uniontown, Pennsylvania on June 23, 1939. Both bride and groom apparently worked at Joseph Coyne’s auto parts store.

I think our family has a penchant for outbreeding. My great-grandfather Peter Coyne (who married a Jewish woman) might himself have been a goy, my uncle Bernie took a shicksa for his second wife, much to my grandmother Sadie’s chagrin, and I’ve dated only two Jewish girls my entire life. Grandmother Sadie Frank was a piece of work: when I was in high school in Virginia, and she was visiting, she once gave me $5 to take a girl to the movies. When she found out the girl wasn’t Jewish, she took the money back. I am not making this up.

Oh, here’s my grandfather’s radio store (I didn’t know he had one along with the tire store and other stores); this was in the Evening Standard of Uniontown Pennsylvania on May 2, 1929, just a few months before the stock market crash that bankrupted Joseph Coyne: