It was discovered in 2003 by Felix Gundacker, a genealogist[59] working with The Boston Globe, that Kerrys paternal grandparents, who had been born Jewish, as Fritz Kohn and Ida Lowe, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, changed their names to Frederick and Ida Kerry from Kohn in 1900 and converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism in 1901[60][61] or 1902.[62] Fritz elder brother Otto had earlier, in 1887[61] or 1896,[59] also embraced Catholicism. The Kerry name, widely misinterpreted as indicative of Irish heritage, was reputedly selected arbitrarily: According to family legend, Fritz and another family member opened an atlas at random and dropped a pencil on a map. It fell on County Kerry in Ireland, and thus a name was chosen.[60][62] Leaving their hometown Mödling, a suburb of Vienna where they had lived since 1896, Fred and Ida, together with their son Eric, emigrated to the United States in 1905, living at first in Chicago and eventually moving to Brookline, Massachusetts, by 1915.[60] The village where Fritz Kohn was born in 1873 was at that time known as Bennisch and was a part of Silesia in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but is today known as Horní Benešov in the Czech Republic. After learning of his ancestral connection with their village, the mayor and citizens sent congratulatory correspondence to John Kerry with regard to his political pursuits.[61] For a time, Fred Kerry was a prosperous and successful shoe merchant. He and Ida along with their children Richard (who would become the father of John Kerry) and Mildred were able to afford to travel to Europe in the autumn of 1921, returning on October 21.[60] A few weeks later, on November 15, Fred Kerry filed a will leaving everything to Ida and then, on November 23, walked into a washroom of the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a handgun.[60] The suicide was front-page news in all of the Boston newspapers, reporting at the time that the motive was severe asthma and related health problems, but modern reports cite family sources saying that the motive was financial trouble: He had made three fortunes and when he had lost the third fortune, he couldnt face it anymore, according to granddaughter Nancy Stockslager.[60] John Kerry has said that although he knew his paternal grandfather had come from Austria, he did not know until informed by The Boston Globe on the basis of their genealogical research that Fred Kerry had changed his name from Fritz Kohn and had been born Jewish,[62] nor that Ida Kerrys brother Otto and sister Jenni, died in Nazi concentration camps.[59]
Posted on: Sun, 02 Feb 2014 18:56:00 +0000
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