90’S FAMILY : The Roots of Ourselves : As more people search for lost family history, they are discovering truths about themselves.

With just a snapshot taken in 1947 and a misspelled last name, Meyer Denn did what seemed impossible--he united an American woman with her two cousins in Czechoslovakia, both of whom had survived the Holocaust by hiding in cellars for five years.

“It was a stunning experience,” said Marsha Friedman of Madison, Wis., who in 1992 took her 25-year-old nephew to Bratislava to visit her cousins. “Being there gave me a sense of what life was like then--you see who you come from, what your own relatives had to endure, the conditions they lived under. And I felt it was important for my nephew to see who he is and where his roots are.”

Denn, a 32-year-old genealogical consultant who grew up as one of 16 Jews in a Texas town of 20,000, knows the importance of rediscovering the past. He has spent much of his life uncovering his own history, and helping others--especially Jews--find theirs.

“You ask someone my age where their grandparents come from, and many of them don’t know,” said Denn, who lives in Santa Monica. “It’s very sad. When you don’t know where you come from, you’re losing a part of yourself.”

Denn, who earned a degree in history from the University of Texas and studied Jewish immigration, the destruction of Slovak Jewry and the Holocaust at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, said many Jewish people falsely believe that all records of their families were destroyed in World War II.

But many family documents remain intact throughout Europe, he said--good news for people like Robinn Magid, 34, who had always assumed that the Holocaust had obliterated all evidence of her family. After hooking up with Denn three years ago, Magid learned to recognize and read birth and death certificates and other records using a Polish dictionary. She has since traced 11 generations of her family back to Lublin, Poland in the 1730s.

“Hitler may have deprived us of our family, but I will not allow Hitler to keep them off our family tree,” said Magid, who lives with her 3-year-old daughter, infant son and husband in Northern California. “We can’t bring them back, but I can make sure they won’t disappear from our family tree.”

Magid said her search has helped her answer questions she has always had about her family--who they are, where they came from, how they got here. It has also helped her answer questions about herself.

“I’ll always remember when I was in third grade, and my teacher asked for a show of hands of who could trace their ancestors to the crossing of the Mayflower,” she said. “Now I see we each have our own Mayflower, we just have to find it.”

Denn said he is seeing a growing interest in finding the family “Mayflower”--of uncovering and discovering family history.

“There is a grass-roots movement to connect with the past, to come back home,” said Denn, who also works with non-Jewish immigrants. “There was the turbulence of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and now people want to connect with their essence. People are realizing that your past is part of what makes you what you are.”

Denn’s preoccupation with genealogy began at age 9, when he became fascinated with a photo of his great-great-grandparents--dressed in the shtetle garb of Eastern Europe.

“They looked so different from me, I wanted to know how we were connected,” he said. “My dad used to tell me bedtime stories about our relatives. I always wanted to know more.”

After spending years pursuing genealogy as a hobby, Denn opened a consulting firm, Meyer Denn & Associates, last year. He charges $50 an hour but encourages the do-it-yourself approach to get the full impact of locating relatives.

In his searches, Denn uses citizenship and naturalization papers, passports, ships’ passenger lists, census records and Yizkor Books (published by Holocaust survivors in memory of those killed). The Mormon Temple’s Family History Center-Los Angeles is also an invaluable source of genealogical information.

And thanks to aerial photos taken by the Nazis of nearly every town and village in Eastern Europe, Denn has been able to locate family villages and sometimes even specific houses of ancestors.

“I provide documentation, rather than just a family tree,” said Denn, who speaks Yiddish, Hebrew and German. “It’s important for people to know more than just names, and to be able to visit, if they choose, the places they come from.”

Denn’s apartment is a testimony to his travels through history. Faded photos of family members from another age stare from the walls and shelves, and mementos of his trips throughout Eastern Europe--including antique candlesticks, Jewish art objects and even stones from his great-grandparents’ back yard--litter his tables and countertops.

On one trip to Czechoslovakia, Denn met a man who was a guest at Denn’s grandparents’ wedding in 1918, and a villager who witnessed Denn’s great-grandfather being taken away by Slovak soldiers to Auschwitz.

“My grandfather always said there was nothing there--he said his town was destroyed,” said Denn, who has traced his family roots to the mid-1600s. “What was destroyed was the Jewish community of the town, but the town is still there.”

Denn’s bookcases are crammed with history books, stacks of documents and tattered volumes of archives. He excitedly breaks out a slide projector to showcase not the usual pictures of monuments and landscapes, but pages of records with the signatures and vital statistics of distant relatives.

“There is such a charge you get from seeing the actual signature of a great-, or even great-great-grandparent,” he said. “There’s nothing like it.”

Some of Denn’s work involves finding not-so-distant relatives for recent immigrants like Boris Nesterovsky. Nesterovsky immigrated to this country from Russia four years ago with his wife and daughter. He knew he knew he had relatives in the United States but had no idea where they lived, or even the correct spelling of their last names.

“It was my mom’s dream to find them,” said Nesterovsky, 66, whose great aunt and uncle immigrated to America prior to the Russian Revolution in 1917. “She always said, ‘Maybe some day you will be able to emigrate, and you will find our relatives.’ Now that I have found them, it is not only for my benefit, but for my mother’s. And now my daughter has relatives in America.”

Diane Medved, a convert to Judaism who found that her relatives actually did come over on the Mayflower, said her exploration of her family’s history gives her more than just a connection to the past and a link to the present. For her, getting in touch with where she came from builds upon her religious beliefs.

“The Jewish perspective is that people are elevating technologically, but not spiritually,” she said. “We have a lot to learn from those who have come before.”

Inevitably, we will all be the ones who have “gone before.” Which is why it is important, Denn said, to begin documenting your life, and the life of your family, now--through audio- or videotape--before your history dies with those who know it.

“There is nothing more valuable than, 50 or 60 years from now, your kids watching you tell your story,” Denn said. “By giving them that, you’re keeping people alive, and bringing your story to life.”