In the first half of the interview Rose Jacobs Webster and Sadie Bogoslaw Want discuss the Weinberg family history, a typescript they frequently consult and quote, referring to various generations and connections. The family can be traced to the early 1600s in Germany. Their relative, Benedict A. Weinberg, served in the Napoleonic Wars as a young man, and came to Charleston, South Carolina, ca. 1830, where he was a tailor and dry goods merchant. He died in Darlington, S.C., in 1885. By his first wife, Jenetta Knockman, he had one child; he had thirteen more with his second wife, Fanny Rice. Benedict's granddaughter Edith Rose Weinberg married Theodore Cecil Jacobs of Kingstree, S.C. They had two children, Harold Weinberg Jacobs and Rose Iseman Jacobs, the interviewee. Her grandfather, Louis Jacobs (father of Theodore Cecil), had come from Germany in 1859, served in Bachman's Battery, Hampton's Legion in the Civil War, and held several political offices in Williamsburg County, before moving to Kingstree where he became a merchant. He had married a non-Jew, Mary Gewinner of Germany; they decided that if their first child was a girl, the family would be Christian; if a boy, the family would be Jewish, which ultimately was the case. Their son, Theodore Cecil Jacobs, and his wife, Edith Rose Weinberg Jacobs, raised their family in Kingstree. In the second half of the interview, their daughter discusses growing up in the small Jewish community there, where due to the various intermarriages in her family, she was expected to keep and honor both Sabbaths--Jewish and Christian. She speaks of her father's farming and grocery businesses, her schooling and her work as a home extension agent in various SC counties. In 1950, she married Joseph O'Neal Webster. Feeling like a "fish out of water" in Kingstree and wanting her children to belong, she became a Baptist, her husband's faith. Both husband and wife refer to the lack of anti-Semitism in the areas and eras they grew up, noting that in small towns, everyone worked and socialized together.
