When I last said goodbye to her on a visit to her May 2005 she told me, in a Yiddish accent undiminished by eight decades in Ohio, "God Villing I Vill Get Von Hoondred." She was a happy, optimistic and kind person no matter the topic. She grew sad only when she thought about her long-departed brothers and her husband, who she missed dearly. Her nieces, nephews, and their children were devoted to her.

She welcomed me into her life when she was 99 years old, though I was a complete stranger to her. I began to explain why I had come to see her: "You met my grandmother, Lily, in Toronto many years ago..." She stopped me immediately. She had instant perfect recollection of my grandmother, who was then, like Ruth, a young woman in her twenties, and my grandmother's brother Harry, who was a potential match for Ruth, and my grandfather, the furrier, who made her a coat which she apparently smuggled back to Cleveland by sewing a tag from May's Department store inside the coat. I was astonished. She was not the first nonagenerian I had interviewed in my years of genealogical research, but she had by far the most impressive memory and made great efforts to recall every detail in answer to my questions.

The story of how I found Ruth Lavine begins with a c. 1931 photograph of my grandmother taken behind my great-grandparents' house in Toronto (where my sister and her family live today). Proceeding from there, I used archival census data from 19th century Czarist Russia; Latvian government's passport records from 1920; and Ellis Island passenger manifests from the same period to put the pieces of a puzzle together. Next followed the discovery of a distant cousin named Linda in Chicago. Linda had found photographs among her fat her's possessions of people she did not know, but who were well known to me, specifically the linchpin of my research, "cousin Minnie" who lived in Cleveland until she passed away in the 1960s. Linda shared with me post-WWI era Latvian photographs of other cousins including Minnie, who later end up in Toronto on their way to Cleveland. The notations on the back in Russian and Yiddish were hard to decipher, but with the help of a translator and using some imagination I eventually found a few more pieces of the puzzle. Next followed an intense flurry of activity and the combined genealogical research efforts of my newly-found cousin Omer in Israel who had shared with me his research of our family tree. Omer and I, it turned out, descended from two sets common great-great-grandparents on separate sides of our respective family trees. After traveling to Latvia, Israel and Chicago, I was ready to meet Ruth Lavine. Although she was not related to me, her brother had married my grandfather's cousin, Minnie. And Minnie, it seems, became a part of Aunt Ruth's family when she was orphaned at a young age and was taken in by Aunt Ruth's parents. This is how Minnie met her future husband and how my Toronto family became connected to the Moskowitz's of Cleveland, and ultimately, Aunt Ruth.

I spent an afternoon hearing stories of her childhood in Dvinsk, a then-thriving city with a population of 50,000 Jews (only a few hundred Jews remain there today) in what is now southern Latvia near the Lithuanian border. She told me about her parents and her siblings and their emigration to the United States. (Apparently, Minnie immigrated to Toronto from Europe and stayed with my great-grandparents awaiting permission to immigrate to the United States. The sticking point was that she was not yet married to her fiance; so he came to Canada, married her and she was subsequently allowed to immigrate. How funny that immigration laws should have been the reason Minnie was united with (my great-grandfather, her uncle Solomon, a man she had never met as he had left Latvia before she was born.)

It would be an understatement to say that Ruth was overjoyed to meet me. I showed her photographs of her parents and her siblings taken around 1920 in Latvia that were sent to me by archivists. She was delighted and tearful as she burst forth energetically with memories. She indulged me with enthusiasm and good humor. I looked forward to returning to celebrate her birthday this year, though meeting her in person it was hard to believe she was 99. She had a joy for living greater than many people much younger and that is what I will always remember about her.

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