SOUTH ORANGE COUNTY CALIFORNIA GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY
June 15, 2024
“Murder in Boston’s West End”
Presented by: Hal Bookbinder
In researching my family, I was surprised to find a relative in the Massachusetts State Penitentiary in 1910. Archival newspapers revealed an unknown marriage, a child, infidelity, murder, attempted suicide, and divorce. Upon his guilty plea, Louis Tennis was sentenced to 11 to 20 years. Yet, after just five, at the behest of the warden and the warden’s wife, the governor pardoned him. He proceeded to lead a nondescript life as a dressmaker, husband and father and his notorious past disappeared into the mist. My research included locating and obtaining 115-year-old court documents containing a revealing plea for leniency penned by the prison’s Jewish chaplain. The story has some intriguing twists and odd coincidences both before and after the murder in Boston’s West End.
About the speaker: Hal is a retired information systems professional who continues to instruct at the university level. He has been actively researching his genealogy for more than three decades, identifying over 4,000 relatives and tracing two lines to the mid-1700s in modern Ukraine. He is a past president of the JGS of Los Angeles and of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies. Hal publishes a series of monthly articles on safe computing which are freely available at http://www.tinyurl.com/SafeComputingArticles. He and his wife, Marci, were raised in the Catskills of New York State, in the famed “Borsht Belt”. After attending New York University and a four-year stint in the US Air Force, they have lived in the Los Angeles area. In 2018, he made a journey to Ukraine, visiting various areas of the former Volhynia and Podolia in which his family lived for hundreds of years.
This month we will be offering our speaker’s presentation In-Person ONLY! NOTE: This presentation will NOT be recorded.
Meeting Place:
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
27976 Marguerite Pkwy, Mission Viejo, CA 92692
Time: 10 a.m. to 12 p.m.
