This is my personal introduction:  My name is Dale Prince.  I was born in Oregon, and I grew up mostly in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  I am 48 years old, and I am a Foreign Service Officer.  Right now I live in the Washington, D.C. area, but I am about to begin an assignment in Brasilia, Brazil.  My wife and I have four sons.

My connection to Czernowitz and Sadagora is through my mothers parents, who both emigrated from Sadagora around 1900.  My grandfather, Jake Berger, was part of a large extended family that immigrated over the course of about 25 years and settled mostly in Chicago.  

The Sadagora families that I know of were Burger, From, Edelstein and Stark.   In America, Burger became Berger and From became Froom.  There were no male Edelstein descendants in America.

The last wave of Burgers came over in 1921, including my greatgrandparents.

I have been curious about Czernowitz and Sadagora for as long as I can remember.  My interest is both genealogical and cultural.  Thanks to a work assignment I had in Poland in the period 1989-1992, I was able to make the trip in May 1992.  I may have been the first member of my family to make the return trip since about 1909.  

I saw some of the sights that are surely well known to members of the group who grew up there or visited recently, such as the main square, the Opera, the Synagogue, and of course the Cheremosh Hotel.  

I also visited Josef Burg, the Yiddish writer.  I visited the Sadagora cemetery and was very disappointed at its condition.  I was able to locate only one grave marker of an individual who might have been related, and it was a distant relationship.  

In 1992 the town of Sadagora was not an appealing place, and I went away thinking that I had a better understanding of why they left.  It is hard to imagine what Sadagora was really like in 1900.  

I know that the Burger side of my family was very poor.  In contrast, my great-grandfather Edelstein ran a flour mill.

I should also mention that two sisters and a brother of my grandmother, who was an Edelstein, did not come to America, and none of my relatives know what happened to them.  On this side of the ocean we have always assumed they perished in the Holocaust.  Eventually I would like to know what happened.

I enjoy the messages and other contributions from natives of Czernowitz because it is a constant reminder to me that that there was another Czernowitz besides the Czernowitz of 1900, which seems to me so remote in the past, the city on the eastern edge of the Hapsburg Empire that my grandparents left.  

Czernowitz did not freeze in time after my ancestors came to America, and  I am seeing it as a more sophisticated place than I ever imagined.  As for  Sadagora, that is still less clear to me.  I never had a chance to know my grandparents, so until now I had only heard about those places from relatives who had never been there.

Best wishes to all.