Rashida Jones Says ‘It’s a miracle I’m here’ About Finding That Her Latvian Family were Murdered in the Holocaust

The following is excerpted from an interesting article posted on the May 7, 2012 edition of Hollywood.com:

The Social Network star, the daughter of legendary African-American producer Quincy Jones and Jewish actress Peggy Lipton, embarked on a journey to uncover her maternal roots on genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are? and her research, which aired in the U.S. on Friday (04 May 2012), took her on a heart-wrenching trip to Eastern Europe.

Jones learned that her grandmother had been born Rita Rosenberg and emigrated with her sister Pearl from Dublin, Ireland to New York in 1926, when they were just teens.

The actress dug deeper into her family’s history and managed to trace her lineage back six generations to Riga, Latvia, where her great, great grandfather Benjamin Benson was born.

But her findings took a dark turn as she discovered that while Benson’s dad had managed to leave the country as a young man to avoid the mandatory 25-year military service, his relatives and subsequent generations of their family had remained in Latvia and they were all slaughtered in 1941.

Read the full article.

About Leland Meitzler

Leland K. Meitzler founded Heritage Quest in 1985, and has worked as Managing Editor of both Heritage Quest Magazine and The Genealogical Helper. He currently operates Family Roots Publishing Company (www.FamilyRootsPublishing.com), writes daily at GenealogyBlog.com, writes the weekly Genealogy Newsline, conducts the annual Salt Lake Christmas Tour to the Family History Library, and speaks nationally, having given over 2000 lectures since 1983.

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