Reni Steinitz (Berlin) visited Stephan Steinitz in Princeton, NJ, and discovered their common ancestor Moshe Laib Steinitz in Stephan's listed family tree. She became infected with the genealogy virus.

Reni visited Joram Steinitz in Tel Aviv and discovered a second source of information in his graphic family tree. The two sources were compared and appended but didn't make a comprehensive document without the help of information technology.

Erika Waly (Waltham, MA) got interested in family history and interviewed her granny Marianne (Jannu) and her remote uncle Stephan. Eventually she got the Family Tree Maker™ and put a lot of information in it.

I got the software from Erika and with the help of Reni added all the data that were available to me. Somehow I was riveted to the idea and started searching for Steinitz's on the Internet.

After having contacted as many relatives as I could over the Internet I collected more data from Yael in Israel, from Ilana in the UK an from Michael in Canada.

Discussing the project with the Berlin Family Reni got the idea of having a big Family Meeting at her place in the outskirts of Berlin. We started the preparations and invitations to the meeting.

Over 30 people announced their participation in the meeting. Reni got a bit nervous and so we decided to hold it at a conference hotel near Berlin. Reni started to collect pictures, diaries, biographies and stories of the family. While trying to merge the documents into a history the idea of starting a Family History on the Net emerged.

For two days 42 family members from Israel, Italy, the US, Denmark, Holland and Germany gathered in the vicinity of Berlin. What happened there is reviewed on the Family Meeting's page.