The Much-sought-after Jan Peerce Connection to My Family!

Five years ago, I wrote about my maternal grandparents' wedding for a Wedding Wednesday post.  One piece of information I included in my story was my grandmother's comment many years later that the famous Metropolitan Opera tenor Jan Peerce had sung at her wedding (even though she couldn't remember what he sang, but remembered what the cantor's son sang).

Bubbie (Yiddish for grandmother, and what we always called her) said at the time that she thought the reason Peerce sang for the wedding was some connection to my grandfather's brother's wife, Ida Bogus.  Her family was involved in catering, and she was somehow connected to Peerce by family, and that's all Bubbie could remember.  She was married in 1939, so for 60 years later, that's actually remembering a lot.

After being told this, I did quite a bit of research on Peerce's family, including buying a copy of his autobiography and mining it for family history details, trying to find some connection to my family.  I have Perlmans in my family, whose original family name was Perlmutter, which is close to Perelmuth, Peerce's original family name, so that seemed the logical place for the link, even though Bubbie had said it was through Ida.  I didn't find a connection with my Perlmans/Perelmutters or with Ida, however, so I was stuck.

Then, a couple of years ago, I saw someone on one of my genealogy mailing lists with the last name Bogus.  I decided to write because I don't see the name come up often.  I explained my story, and lo and behold, she knew the answer!

The research I had done on Ida Bogus had shown that her parents were Abraham Bogus and Minnie Posner.  My new genealogy friend told me that Minnie's sister Anna married Louis Perelmuth, and they had a catering business.  And Louis and Anna were the parents of Jan Peerce!  So my granduncle's mother-in-law was the sister of Peerce's mother.  That's extended family, all right, but apparently close enough, because I believed my grandmother when she said that Jan Peerce sang at her wedding.  And after looking up more information about Peerce, he was not yet famous in 1939, so it wasn't out of the realm of possibility that he would sing at the wedding.

So thank you, Felice!  I was able to resolve one of my longstanding (about 25 years) genealogy questions!

But I still want to find out one day if the wedding was covered in a Yiddish newspaper that mentioned that Peerce sang.