Berkeley resident Helen Nestor has managed to combine two of her favorite hobbies, photography and genealogy, in a surprising medium — a quilt that tells the story of her Jewish ancestry.
Her project, which took 10 years to complete, incorporates photographs of her ancestors as well as her descendants, including her great-grandparents and her own grandchildren.
In the mid-19th century, Nestor’s ancestors arrived in America: her mother’s family from Poland, her father’s from Germany. Settling first in New York like most Jewish immigrants of the period, many of them moved to San Francisco not long after.
All these Pragers, Saalburgs, Landsburgs and Dinkelspiels thrived in California. Nestor’s maternal great-grandfather, Abraham Prager, operated Prager’s, a well-known department store at Jones and Market streets with branches in Portland and Seattle. The San Francisco store burned the day after the 1906 earthquake but was soon reconstructed.
Another ancestor, William Saalburg, had arrived in America in 1852 at the age of 17 — his occupation was listed in immigration documents as “wigmaker.” Soon he became the editor of The Hebrew Observer, a weekly S.F.-based newspaper founded in 1857 by Rabbi Julius Eckman and originally known as The Weekly Gleaner.
Great-grandfather Lemle Dinkelspiel was originally named Lemle David, after his father, David Grumbacher. But a German law of 1812 required all Jews to adopt permanent surnames. Nestor theorizes that her ancestor chose his name for the village of Dinkelsbuhl, where the family might have originated, although her great-grandfather himself actually came from the village of Michelfeld.
Nestor’s fascination with genealogy began in 1980 when she examined an old photograph of the Dinkelspiel family that was included in a traveling exhibition. She joined the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society.
What had started as a sideline soon became an obsession. Genealogical research is “the greatest detective work there can be,” says Nestor. “It’s addictive.”
Armed with sources including the Mormon church’s extensive files and material from Berkeley’s Judah Magnes Museum, U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library San Francisco’s Sutro Library, the Federal Archives in San Bruno and a genealogy web site called Jewishgen, Nestor has been able to track her family back seven generations. Identifying the ancestors was a sizable job, given their prolific nature: Lemle Dinkelspiel, for example, was the father of 27 children, the products of two marriages.
Years before, Nestor’s mother had assembled photo albums, one for each side of the family. These, too, provided a spark of inspiration.
While a quilt might seem a difficult if not impossible vehicle for displaying photographs, that is exactly what Nestor decided to create.
She designed a tree motif, and appliquéd earth-tone branches, roots and leaves onto a cotton background.
To transfer photographs to cloth, Nestor used a technique called Vandyke or brownprinting, a contemporary of the better-known daguerreotype. She dipped cotton cloth into a mixture of chemicals and emulsion, then printed the pictures treating the cloth as paper. The images were exposed using sunlight instead of electrical light. As a result, the pictures have an antique-looking brown tint. Then she appliquéd the pictures onto the quilt, after processing the cotton so the quilt would be washable.
The actual quilting, whose pattern Nestor also designed, was done by a professional quilter.
And now the artist’s ancestors are her constant companions: Nestor’s quilt, no mere decoration or wall-hanging, covers her bed.