Memorial Day, 2026

TL;DR -- Memorial Day is just what it claims that it is. We try to do a task related to Find A Grave for a family during this time. This year, we follow up on an in-law family, the Kallens. 

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Since 2019, we have had task of  updating FindAGrave for a family. Our first year for this, 2019, filled in some missing information about a Civil War vet buried near Logan International in Boston. His name was Walter A. Ingalls who married a Lunt in-law. As we were getting the links in order, we looked at the siblings of that generation and found their profiles. Too, we did several posts: Problems with Find A Grave; Resources and work; and Henry Lunt lot. That last post was to tie into the 1634 arrival of the Lunt forebear. But, we had seen many of these maps while researching Sidney Perley who walked around Salem and reported measurements so that we could look back at the 17th Century with facts from the 19th Century. 

The Jewish Herald
4 Mar 1938

A few weeks ago, we looked to document an American who went to Israel after the First World War in order to help build the country. Deborah Kallen was an educator and had audited classes at Harvard where her brother was a student as well as classes at Radcliff. We will be looking for more material, but add this article to today's post: Untold Stories, American Jewish Women in Yishuv and the Early State of Israel. 

In our post, we mentioned her brother, Horace Kallen, who was a philosopher. He spent some time in Israel which we will write about. But to set the context of his sister's efforts, this paper is an overview: Horace Kallen’s Expanding Vision of Cultural Pluralism: Nationality, Race, and Democracy on the World Stage, 1918–1939. 

The image is from an interview with Deborah who was visiting her brother and looking for support for her educational activity in Israel which was under a British mandate in the 1930s. She is asked about the Arab Uprising and its effect on her educational efforts. Deborah noted that "We need scholarships for our school --  American will provide them." She returned to Israel where we will pick up the story in a later post. 

We have found the grave profiles for her family. Deborah and her siblings are listed in the order reported in Horace's obituary. 

• Rabbi Jacob David Kallen 
• Esther Rebecca Glazier Kallen 
• Horace Meyer Kallen (Wikipedia)
• Frieda Ida Kallen
• Dora Anna Kallen
• Mildred K. Kallen Lunt 
• Deborah J. Kallen (Hadassah - Women's Zionist Organization of America, Inc.)
• Frances E. Kallen (obituary) 
• Professor Miriam Kallen (A Primary Teacher Steps Out) 
• Leo Avrom Kallen, MD (Papers 1916-1981) 

Our post for Memorial Day, 2025 has a listing of the prior posts. 

Remarks: Modified: 05/22/2026

05/22/2026 --

Educational Pioneer, Deborah Kallen

 TL;DR -- After WWI brought the U.S. to the world's attention, organized activity spread from the U.S. to the world. This is one example. Deborah Kallen, ventured to Israel to found a school. We learn a little about her with some information coming via her brother, Horace Kallen. 

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The Jerusalem Post, in 2023, had an article: Which American Jews helped establish Israel? 

In 1920 Deborah Kallen, sister of famed Zionist thinker Professor Horace Kallen, moved to Palestine. Prof. Hillel Blondheim was brought to Eretz Yisrael by his mother in 1928 for eight months. She enrolled him in Miss Kallen’s School. He wrote about his experiences in his autobiography. He told me once when we met, “Every week we had a trip somewhere in Eretz Yisrael near Jerusalem. As I walk around Jerusalem today, I see streets bearing the names of our guides back then.” Blondheim made aliyah in 1951 and lived in Jerusalem until his 100th birthday. He became a noted scientist and won many prizes.

Kallen’s goal was to establish the Parents Educational Association School. Immediately, housed in old Arab building in Jerusalem, she made her educational theories come to life through the creation of classes in painting, carpentry, and athletics. Daily gardening, crafts were part of the regular curriculum, and nature walks. Yigael Yadin, the world-renowned archaeologist, was one of her students.

This post, on Deborah Kallen, is introductory as we will have more information on her and her brother, Horace Kallen, the philosopher. 

Deborah Kallen
courtesy of The Forward 
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.

For now, here is an article that provides information from several sources, including Horace talking about his sister. 

Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies & Gender Issues

Deborah Kallen and the Palestinian Yishuv: The Personal Tragedy of an Educational Pioneer

DEBORAH KALLEN AND THE PALESTINIAN YISHUV: THE PERSONAL TRAGEDY OF AN EDUCATIONAL PIONEER Sarah Schmidt A Personal Note 

The first time I heard the name Deborah Kallen was in 1972, while interviewing her brother, the social philosopher Horace M. Kallen. Our subject was his contribution to the formulation of a specifically American concept of Zionism, and he began by telling me, with evident pride, of his most meaningful Zionist connection , his sister Deborah, who had moved to Palestine in 1920 and had contributed her American perspective to building the system of education there. A quarter of a century later I was teaching a course on "The Israeli Woman: From Myth to Reality" to North American students at Tel Aviv University and looking for material on American women who had contributed to building the yishuv, especially those American women who had tried to extend the American value system to the model society they assumed was then in the process of formation. 

Aside from works by and about Golda Meir and Henrietta Szold there was little to be found. And so I decided to look for Deborah Kallen.1 Nashim:A Journal ofJewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, no. 4. © 2001197 Sarah Schmidt 

The Beginnings Deborah Kallen, born in Boston in 1888, was one of eight children in a large Orthodox Jewish family that had recently emigrated from Germany to the United States. She was educated in the public schools of Boston and, hoping to develop a career as a painter, as a young adult attended classes in drawing and painting at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. As a way of rounding out her education she also audited courses on art and design at Harvard College and on education at its then sister school, Radcliffe. Her studies there proved to be the decisive influence on her life, for early on she became an exponent of a new system of art education for children, one that emphasized her conception that the key to character building lay in teaching young children the principles ofgood design. As a result, she was appointed to the staff of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, responsible both for classes for children and for instructing other teachers in her methods of teaching design. 

In 1920 Deborah took a two-year leave of absence from the museum and accepted an invitation from the Va'ad hahinukh, the official supervisory body for education in Palestine, to help train students at the Zionist teachers' seminary in Jaffa and at the British government seminary for Arab teachers in Jerusalem. Since she had previously shown no particular interest in Zionism, what impelled her to take this step is not entirely clear. A contributory factor was surely the struggle she had waged in the United States to have art accepted as part of the elementary school curriculum. In order to prove the worth of art in the school curriculum as quickly as possible, many art teachers began by having their pupils copy pictures from textbooks, often without any consideration of the picture's intrinsic artistic value. Art instruction focused not on what the children saw but on what they saw in picture books, on exercises in copying without any aesthetic or creative contribution on the part of the student. 

Deborah Kallen developed her own system in direct opposition to this, stressing that children, rather than being required to copy, must be helped to develop their powers of observation. She considered this the most appropriate means to guide them in learning how to think critically and express an independent point of view. But she found herself waging a lonely fight, isolated in her perspective regarding what art education was about.  

Deborah Kallen and the Palestinian Yishuv Deborah had also come to realize that her goal of becoming an artist in her own right was unlikely to be realized. Her talent was not distinct enough, and she lacked the requisite forcefulness to bring her work to the attention of the public. Possibly most discouraging was the evaluation of her art teacher and mentor at Harvard, Professor Denim Ross, who (as she recalled almost a half century later) told her that he...

Several themes motivate this post. Per usual, we have the 250th and 400th as motivation as we look at American History from the start to now, while celebrating an important event. On July 4th, with the commemoration finally coming about, we will have seven years to review all aspects of the U.S., New England, Massachusetts, and Essex County with its Cape Ann. People arrived here over the whole time. Some left to go back to the Old World. Others took off for the interior or for any of the locations accessible by water since New England was a nautical region. 

Remarks: Modified: 05/23/2026

05/15/2026 -- Did post on Lunt in-law, Deborah Kallen on our Henry Lunt blog. 

05/23/2026 -- Minor edits. 

Attainder grudge

TL;DR -- Gardner Family Trust has produced its research results and allows us an opportunity to vet this with regard to provenance and other criteria. It is a first, in a sense, as the computer algorithms (associated with AI) are to be scrutinized, as well. We are fortunate to be using historic data which has meaning beyond the normal. 

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As we saw with the recent visit of King Charles to the White House, the U.S. and the UK have a history which we all know from our American history. Some families have more stories than others. We recently pointed to a post in the blog Gardner Family Trust dealing with the western U.S. From the TGS view, we got reminded by the movie (The Revenant) that was of the mountain man era. 

There was a Gardner in the area and the new blog has some information about that part of the family. Another post was about Silvester Gardner and a namesake who owned the ship, Barque Bostonian (see the Gardiner that was), that sank and caused Gardiner, OR to come to be. 

With respect to provenance and other dutiful notions, we need to establish links to documents that are of value themselves with respect to what information that they provide. Of late, we see projects using GenAI/LLM, about which we have had many things to say, for research, analysis and presentation. In fact, when you look at coding (programming), some teams generate huge systems and only check via test. 

Note: A bit of progress to now has been proving programs so as to establish some notion of stability, maturity, and such, usually with respect to requirements that come from the world of humans. That side of things has gotten ignored; expect that it will come back into vogue. 

In the meantime, while we are verifying Gardner data on this side of the pond, let's look back. We will use this post: The Merchant-Coup Thesis: The Gardiner Syndicate and the Tudor Usurpation of 1485. The notion is that a grudge led to the involvment of the Gardner family with the conflict at Bosworth. But, of interest is additional history gathered from a new look at historical records. This conjecture will be looked at in detail. 

Accompanying the referenced thesis post is one with more clarification: The Fenland Grievances: Lancastrian Merchants' Reckoning and the Yorkist Toll, 1461–1485. The intriguing thing is that we know that history is written topdown. And, we know how personal insights or reports on occurrences do not survive the cuts that force everthing into some envelop of generalization. 

The computer can help us change that limitation. At the same time, we have to be careful so as to not introduce error through lack of proper knowledge which is the case due to those events being past any potential of redo as one would expect in the laboratory situation. 

Before going on, there is a third site that lays out a historic view of the London area while considering the existence of a middle class that persists across generations. And, "Gardner" as a name can represent such threads which is seen as plural as no one line exists across time that we know of. Even modern genetic processing has its issue with respect to using biological markers to bring such a feat to reality. 

See Merchant Coupe Thesis. This site provides an overview of the approach and the basic rationale for the choices that are being made in this retrospective. The scene is London for the culmination of a long series of events, but the overview covers many countries and generations. 

After two U.S. themed posts, we have our first one focused across the pond. So, let's now pull out our pencils and papers and make notes. Meanwhile, TGS will get deeper into the technical aspects with a balance of ensuring timely release of information that can show some type success after undergoing a bit of exercises related to vetting.

A last remark? We have many posts about the Magna Carta which was celebrated more by Americans than by the Brits in the past; that is, until the Americans made the effort. Queen Elizabeth II gave land to the widow of Pres. John F. Kennedy, after his assassination. That site was the focus of the 201 commemoration which was attended by a TGS representative.  

Remarks: Modified: 05/04/2026

05/04/2026 -- In commeration of Erik W. Gardner (1965-2025). His father and mother attended the Magna Carta event.