Helen Dickson Nestor

Obituary: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?n=helen-dicks...

"Guide to the Helen Nestor Free Speech Movement Photographs" http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf400003dx/

From https://www.jweekly.com/1996/12/06/family-pictures-enjoy-new-life-o... :

Berkeley resident Helen Nestor has managed to combine two of her favorite hobbies, photography and genealogy, in a surprising medium — a quilt that tells the story of her Jewish ancestry.

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In the mid-19th century, Nestor's ancestors arrived in America: her mother's family from Poland, her father's from Germany. Settling first in New York like most Jewish immigrants of the period, many of them moved to San Francisco not long after.

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All these Pragers, Saalburgs, Landsburgs and Dinkelspiels thrived in California. Nestor's maternal great-grandfather, Abraham Prager, operated Prager's, a well-known department store at Jones and Market streets with branches in Portland and Seattle. The San Francisco store burned the day after the 1906 earthquake but was soon reconstructed.

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Another ancestor, William Saalburg, had arrived in America in 1852 at the age of 17 — his occupation was listed in immigration documents as "wigmaker." Soon he became the editor of The Hebrew Observer, a weekly S.F.-based newspaper founded in 1857 by Rabbi Julius Eckman and originally known as The Weekly Gleaner.

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Great-grandfather Lemle Dinkelspiel was originally named Lemle David, after his father, David Grumbacher. But a German law of 1812 required all Jews to adopt permanent surnames. Nestor theorizes that her ancestor chose his name for the village of Dinkelsbuhl, where the family might have originated, although her great-grandfather himself actually came from the village of Michelfeld.
Nestor's fascination with genealogy began in 1980 when she examined an old photograph of the Dinkelspiel family that was included in a traveling exhibition. She joined the San Francisco Bay Area Jewish Genealogical Society.

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Armed with sources including the Mormon church's extensive files and material from Berkeley's Judah Magnes Museum, U.C. Berkeley's Bancroft Library San Francisco's Sutro Library, the Federal Archives in San Bruno and a genealogy web site called Jewishgen, Nestor has been able to track her family back seven generations. Identifying the ancestors was a sizable job, given their prolific nature: Lemle Dinkelspiel, for example, was the father of 27 children, the products of two marriages.