Discover your family story
Family Memory Trust is the culmination of over half a century of fascination with genealogy, history, geography, geopolitics and traditions.
Family Memory Trust has three main components.
Family
Research
Assisting others with Family Research related to the pre-War Jewish communities of Breslau, and other towns and cities in Silesia, Posen Province and West- and East Prussia;
Claasenstrasse Jewish Cemetery Project
The Claasenstrasse (ul. Gwarna) Jewish Cemetery Project to identify the people buried there with a goal of creating a memorial to them and this lost cemetery;
Partner
Organizations
Collaborating with Partner Organizations in Poland, Germany, Israel and elsewhere to further the goals of Family Memory Trust.
Our mission
Our goal is to preserve or to find, restore and retain memory. Memory of who and where we came from. Memory of where we went for opportunity or to escape persecution. Memory of who was murdered in the Shoah. Memory for the future.
About Us
Family Memory Trust was founded in 2020 by Stephen Falk to support the work that he and his brother Dr. Donald Falk have been in engaged in for many years.
What started as a personal journey to learn about our own family history from Breslau, Germany, gradually expanded to learning about the families that intersected with my family. From there, the research evolved into exploration of the entire Breslau Jewish community, and then other communities (Brieg, Lissa, Glogau, Kempen, etc.), leading to the formation of a vast network that is often instrumental in helping others with their family research [link].
Early on, the research also expanded geographically from its Breslau focus to towns in Silesia (Brieg, Kieferstädtel, Cosel, Myslowitz, Kreuzburg), in Posen Province (Posen, Kempen, Schmiegel, Lissa, Rawitsch, Inowroclaw), in West Prussia (Rosenberg, Neuenburg, Schubin), and in East Prussia (Allenstein, Liebstadt). Occasionally, our research has crossed borders, tracing family to towns in Poland, Galicia, Moravia and Bohemia.
There is a theme here of expansion from the personal to the communal, and from the local to the regional.
Stephen Falk is a retired intellectual property attorney, happily spending most of his time on genealogy research. In addition to founding and leading Family Memory Trust, he is currently president of the Jewish Genealogical Society of British Columbia, and a co-founder and board member of the Urban Memory Foundation in Wroclaw.
Dr. Donald Falk is a retired physician, deeply involved in the Claassenstrasse Cemetery Project [link] as well as his art work and gardening. He is also a co-founder and board member of the Urban Memory Foundation in Wroclaw.
Stephen and Don make frequent trips to Wroclaw and Berlin to further the work of Family Memory Trust.
Point Roberts, Washington, USA
January 2026
Work & Projects
Discoveries and reflections from decades of genealogical and historical research.
Family trees
There is something very meaningful about old family trees.
Some are nearly incomprehensible jumbles or in an almost illegible handwriting. Others are beautifully written or designed. All are full of information that can bridge gaps in the available records. And, if they are from long enough ago, it seems very likely that their information is reliable -- uninfluenced by the dubious information that fills so many family trees today.
I encourage anyone with family trees focused on people living in Silesia, Posen Province, West Prussia and East Prussia, former areas of Germany which became part of Poland after the War, to share images of those family trees with Family Memory Trust. It would be a pleasure to see these family trees and a privilege to post them on this website (with consent of the donor).