Tanya visits Dora, January 2011

This post is written by Fisher Picture guest blogger, Dora.

The Fishers have a large, close extended family. I feel so lucky to know and be close with so many of us- Fishers, Cohens, Weinbergers, Fong-Cohens, Luxenburgs, now even some Amiras (venturing into 3rd cousin territory)!

This weekend, second cousin Tanya came to visit me in Chicago. Many of my friends say to me, "what does it mean to be second cousins?". So let this post explain how we are related.

We share great grandparents, Mollie and Isaac Cohen.



Our grandmothers are sisters, Rae Luxenburg and Sue Fisher, both pictured here on the left in this whimsical picture (on the right is Marci, Tanya's aunt and my dad's first cousin)

Our fathers are first cousins, Josh and Verne.

Verne with his aunt, my grandmother, Sue, in 1996.



I'm pictured here with Tanya's grandmother, my great aunt Rae, at my grandparents 50th anniversary 15 years ago:



Tanya, with her mother Susie and grandmother Rae (my great aunt), as a baby:



All this makes us second cousins!

Photo taken 5 minutes ago at a cafe in Chicago:



So fun to have you here, Tanya, and may our families continue to be close for generations to come.

Betty's and Rae's Families (Bronx, NY, and California, ~1957 and ~1995)

Back in Miami, and now I have access to the 6,000 old family pictures again.

The left-most child below is my cousin Verne (Cousin #17/Ray's #2), who I've somehow missed in all these pictures. Just two more of my 19 first cousins to go! To the right of him are his sister Marci, and Ilene and Larry in front of Betty and George.



And here are the four of them again, about 50 years later.

Marci and Larry (various places and times)

The two oldest of my 19 first cousins were born when I was about nine years old: Betty's son Larry, and Rae's daughter Marci (Cousin #15/Rae's #1). I saw a lot of both of them at first, but I saw little of Marci after she was very small, since I was in Syracuse and Rae at some point moved to California. I continued to see a lot of Larry, since he has always lived in the NY area, and I stayed with Betty a lot when I was a teenager racing off to NYC at every opportunity. Here is Marci with Elizabeth just before my parents' 50th anniversary party.


And Marci and Larry with their mothers. I believe that Larry was born in the fall of 1954, and I would guess he's a little over two here.


And Larry, with his wife Judy, at our house in Woodbridge, sometime in the mid-to-late 1980s.