The answer to the question I have been asked all my life is:  Yes.

I told the girls what I had learned, and this is what they said:

Cici - Are you really Jewish, Papa?

Ping - In China people say that Jews are born ready to do business.  This is why you are so good at business Niu Baobao.

It took some time but I traced the family tree back to Bavaria, Germany.  In 1739, the Jews living there were going through some unsettling events, and some of them decided to migrate to America.  Abraham Solomon, my ancestor, was one of them.  He arrived in America and settled in Pennsylvania.  For the next three generations, there was a child in the family named Abraham Solomon.  The second generation Abraham had four children, and it was the child named Jesse, not the one named Abraham, who is my ancestor.

Jesse was born and died in Bucks, PA.  He had six children, one of whom was named Abraham, and one of whom was also named Jesse, but this time it was the son named Charles who is my ancestor.  Charles was also born and died in Bucks, PA, but at least one of his five children was born in Hunterdon, NJ.  That child, James, is my ancestor.  He was born in 1839, one hundred years after his great great grandfather Abraham Solomon arrived in America.

James, as it turned out, is my ancestor who would migrate to Texas.  He moved to Texas at some point and died in 1920 in Forestburg, Montague, Texas.  He did what farmers who earned a living from the dirt tended to do in those days:  He had ten children who could help in the fields.  At least one of those children was born in Dunham, Bucks, PA, however, before the family moved to Texas.  He was named Daniel.

Daniel is my great grandfather, and he  left an interesting story behind.  He was still living in Montague, Texas in 1880, but by 1920 he was living in Canby, Clackamas, Oregon, which is where he died in 1941.  Before he left Texas, he married my great grandmother and they had four children, one of them being my grandfather, before they divorced.  In Oregon, he fathered two children with another woman who he married. 

Daniel left a few questions behind.  According to some historical records, he married both women the same year, but I think the records were accidentally cross-referenced at some point.  This is because the year of both marriages was shown to be 1915, but by 1910 my great grandmother Maud was already remarried to a man who had three children, and my grandfather and his three siblings were raised as stepchildren in his home.

Whatever that story might be, my great grandmother Maud and my grandfather Oliver Adam Solomon moved with the family from Texas to Love County, Oklahoma some time between 1910 and 1920.  This isn't far from Montague, Texas where my great grandparents had lived.  My grandfather and grandmother married in 1913 in Cooke County, Texas.  Love County, Oklahoma borders Cooke County, Texas to its North.  Montague County, Texas borders Cooke County, Texas to the West.  My grandmother was born in Sivell's Bend, Texas, which is in Cooke County just 4 miles south of the Love County, Oklahoma border.

My father always talked about growing up in Love County, Oklahoma, but census records show that he and his five siblings were born in Texas.  Family legend holds that my grandmother refused to birth her children in Oklahoma, so she returned to Texas to give birth each time so that her children would all be Texans.  That mark of determination is even more remarkable when one considers that she was 14 and my grandfather was 15 when they married.

So there you have it, I told Ping and Cici.  Their eyes didn't even glaze over as I walked them through the family tree, and I think that Cici even felt a little pride when she learned that her Papa is of Jewish ancestry.