Genealogy, like melodies, is all about those 'permutations and combinations' we learned in school

Every wonder how a composer get a endless stream of unique melodies from 'just seven notes' ?

 Ever wonder how researchers find people lost to history, with only a tiny handful of facts to guide them ?

Math popularizers explain all those wonderfully different melodies and all those wonderful genealogical successes by the simple arithmetic of combinations and permutations.

Why all melodies are so unique

First, remember that most successful melodies don't actually stay in just one key and one octave, which is where all this hot-aired talk about 'only seven (diatonic) notes' comes from.

They always have a few accidentals (chromatic notes) added and usually extend the melody range up to one octave and a fifth --- giving us about 20 notes to work with on each step of the melody.

In reality, to be successful, each new note in a melody is best restricted to a handful of choices most of time (the interval between two successive notes is more likely to be some kind of a third or a second than a flat seventh for example).

But good melodies are good mostly because they do throw in unexpected surprises, in the interval department among others.

So for any average note, the next note can truly be any of ten notes higher or lower in pitch.

(It can also remain at the same pitch or even remain silent.)

In an average dozen note long 'tune', that is already billions of choices (basically 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 x 20 etc) - and we haven't even considered the fact that each note can be one of about a dozen common durations.

(Half notes, 16th notes, tied notes, triplets,swing 8ths, etc - on and on.)

Now we're up to trillions of choices.

Thrown in the fact that every successful tune has a meter and musical style indicated at the top of the score sheet that imply* a built in set of expectations of varying accents (loudness,brightness,forcefulness) on each note.

Accents that we are also free to ignore, momentarily, to provide some more of those wonderful musical surprises.

Now we're climbing into the cosmos of infinite choices.

While melody building adds choice , genealogical research reduces choice

Genealogy also starts with just a few notes, err, facts.

Say just a person's first name, last name, year of birth and the area where they lived.

So Columbia Presbyterian hospital SBE patient Charles Aronson, born 1913 and living in the New York City area in October 1940 and again in April 1944.

But a melody is truly unique only over the run of its dozen or so notes - it builds up it uniqueness.

By contrast, finding a lost historical figure requires , in a real sense, that each note in a tune be totally unique in its pitch x duration x accent - it seeks to cut down a long long humdrum melody to a single unique note.

Genealogy is helped by the fact that the choices for each of its equivalents to pitch, duration and accent are much, much larger than that of music.

For at any moment in time there are only about 100 possible birth years involving living people.

But with the sort of dead people that we can hope to find more about (say the fairly recent past of the last 200 years), we now get a choice of several hundred birth years.

Even when shared amongst ten billion people (counting everyone who ever lived in the past 200 years), we still find that , on average, only about 50 million people shared each birth year.

But that reflects today's huge populations and drop in childhood deaths --- probably only a million people worldwide survived childhood to share the birth year of 1913 by the year 1940.

We also have a first name.

Now Charles is a very common name in western culture - but there are literally hundreds of names as common as Charles in our culture and in total tens and tens of thousands of possible first names worldwide.

Let us guess wildly and say  100,000 people in 1940  had the name Charles.

Aronson is a relatively uncommon last name in a world of tens and tens of thousands of last names.

Uncommon except among Eastern European Jews immigrants - two million who lived in NYC area between 1913 and 1940.

Maybe 100,000 people were named Aronson worldwide in 1940.

So say 5000 people named Aronson lived in NYC area in those years and 20,000 in total in the two Americas.

(In wartime, I don't feel anyone but from the two Americas would have/could have travelled to New York to treat an illness --- particularly a disease mostly found among the poor.)

How many were both Charles and Aronson in all of the two Americas ?

At best, I feel maybe 400.

How many are Charles Aronsons in the Americas  born in 1913 ?

Two.

At least as far as I have found by searching the half dozen national and local census produced between 1915 and 1940 in the US and Canada.

One born and raised in the NYC area and living on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx in 1940 , the other born in the Mid-West who wandered widely over his life - living in the metropolitan Detroit area in 1940.

Now it is still a very, very remotely possible the Detroit Charles Aronson might have travelled specially a thousand miles, only to end up to a public (charity) ward in a 1940 NYC hospital.

There to be treated as extensively as all public charity cases are always treated (joke !).

And to treated for a rapidly invariably fatal disease by a doctor who had never been known for treating this disease, until now.

But it doesn't seem likely, now does it - if one is going to die at the hands of a relative amateur - why not do so more cheaply and comfortably at home ?

And remember the known medical history of our Charles Aronson is relatively extensive and seems to indicate he remained in close contact with the doctors at Columbia Presbyterian in 1940-1941 and 1944-1945 - again suggesting he was from the NY area.

(For wartime travel was almost as difficult within America as it was travelling to America in the war years.)

So of the literally thousands of metropolitan areas in the two Americas, I have further restricted my choice down to just one - albeit by far the biggest one, if looking for Aronson names !

These are the cumulative reasons  why I have focussed all my efforts in finding the Charles Aronson who was the first patient in history to receive an antibiotic, upon this Bronx Charles Aronson.....

* My good friend, Queens Professor Margaret Little , had a good classical education on piano but had never heard any Rolling Stones songs and tried, one day in 1980, to play some of their songs from a conventional piano score.

She accurately followed the score, including the meter, but did not understand the implied musical conventions. The results were - my other good friend Paul Withers would agree - interesting !

They sounds totally not at all like the actual tune.

Penicillin's first MIRACLE : that at the height of race prejudice in 1940 America, the first two to receive the miracle drug were a Jew and a Black

If you are Jewish and your family was from Greater NYC , in particular from the Bronx between the 1910s and the 1960s , I could really really use your help

The patient initially intended to receive history's first ever penicillin shot was Aaron Leroy Alston from St Nicholas Ave in Harlem.

But when Charles Aronson arrived at NYC's CUMC hospital with the same disease (SBE - a form of endocarditis) just before the historical first injection began, he was added in at the last moment.

So both young men shared in that historic 'first in the world' penicillin shot , on October 16th 1940.

When Alston died and Aronson went home cured of SBE, a third man - a private (full paying) patient named George Milton Conant from Middletown in upstate New York - got the penicillin intended for Alston.

I have located the families of Alston and Conant  , so now only Aronson's relatives remain to be found .

(We know nothing at all of the fourth and fifth patient in this historic series of penicillin cases.

An eyewitness to their treatment, bacteriologist Dr Gladys Hobby (part of the small four person team involved in making and using this early hospital-made medication) wrote a book on early penicillin thirty years later.

She evidently found nothing in her memory or in hospital records worth recounting of these two SBE patients in her book (Penicillin : Meeting the Challenge).

We know only that they were almost certainly males, that they was suffering from SBE endocarditis and that they probably died sometime in 1941 -- probably at CUMC.)

Here is what we know for certain about Charles Aronson - followed by what we can surmise about him.

He was born in 1913 and soon demonstrated that he was both (A) extraordinarily susceptible to death-dealing diseases caused by strep bacteria and (B) very capable of repeatedly fighting them off.

Dr Dawson, his penicillin doctor, does not detail all of Charles' very complicated medical record but shows enough to prove my claim.

 For at least six times he snatched himself out of death's jaws.

In 1921, at age eight, he has full blown acute Rheumatic Fever.

His immune system over-reacted to strep throat by damaging his heart valves and temporarily giving him arthritis and attacking his nerve and brain cells , so called chorea,  a fairly severe neurological condition thought to eventually resolve itself.

In 1926, age 13, Aronson gets severe sleeping sickness (a la Oliver Sacks and L-dopa) - a disease now believed to also be an auto-immune over-reaction to strep throat.

Again it did not kill him but leaves him with a severe post-sleeping sickness Parkinson's syndrome which he also survives.

In 1940 he gets his first bout of SBE endocarditis , a disease of mouth strep bacteria settling in and destroying damaged heart valves caused by Rheumatic Fever.

It then was usually considered to kill 99 out every 100 patients. But - once again - with a little penicillin and a lot of sulfa drugs he survives !

In 1944 he gets SBE again , survives it with much more of Dr Dawson's penicillin only to get a severe life-threatening stroke that leaves him paralyzed.

Again he survives and is alive two years later (in a chronic care hospital).

He doesn't appear on the indexed NYC death registry up to its close-off in 1948 and I can find no further trace of him.

Because Dawson had not been involved in endocarditis research before Alston and Aronson, he couldn't have been the type of doctor to attract patients from far and near.

Instead he was just a relatively newly promoted middle level doctor now allowed to look after one (male) public ward without too much heavy hand from his superiors.

Its non-paying patients usually were relatively poor and as a result tended to come from a catchment area just a few miles around CUMC --- so their equally poor relatives could visit them easily and still sleep at home at night.

In 1940 that catchment area meant (A) then mostly black Harlem (Alston) and (B) then mostly Jewish Bronx (Aronson).

Or so it seems to me.

Dr Dawson's notes on him shows a detailed knowledge of Aronson's post-hospital care in 1940-1941 and again in 1944 and again in 1944-1945 , which suggests he was living close enough to Dawson at CUMC for the doctor to easily keep tabs on him.

This led me to seek any Charles Aronson born in 1913 and living in the greater NYC cum tri-state area in 1940 - conveniently also a federal census year.

You try this yourself, in archives.com etc.

I found just one - living on Vyse Avenue, Bronx - just a few miles from CUMC.

Father Alex (Alexander) , mother Olga - Jewish , in their fifties, from the former Russian Empire . She is a homemaker and he is a machine operator in a ladies cloak factory.

Charles has a brother Samuel who is born about 1919 and a sister Lillian born about 1914. Both work in a ladies belt factory.

Charles has been an office clerk and now is a teletype operator in a newspaper plant - he is working full time , getting more hours annually than the rest of the family.

We can consistently trace this family backwards through federal and state censuses till the turn of the century -they lived in Bronx for at least a half century.

But so far, a total dead end after 1940 for all five members.

A hint that a Samuel Aronson from the Bronx might have become a wartime merchant seaman - another hint that a Lillian Aronson from the Bronx never married .

Hints from the social security index that Alexander dies in 1971, Samuel in 1976 and Lillian in 1980 --- all in NYC  .

The NYC death index shows an Alexander Aronson dying in Manhattan (at a Manhattan hospital ?) June 10 1947 aged 65 - birth 1887 - which also fits well.

I'd like to find someone who says that 'combining that unique medical history with that birth date and name --- my family knew of just such a Charles Aronson !'

And I'd like it soon - because next October 2015 is the 75th anniversary of history's first ever penicillin shots - and it would be extra nice if Aronson's relatives also joined Alston's relatives in receiving the accolades from around the world....