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Family History Writing Challeng 18: Migration Monday

Feb 18th, 2013 by

 

Sophie Klebanska with 2nd class passengers, SS Finland, Dec, 1912

My grandmother, Sophia Klebanskaya, was 17 when she left Volkovysk for the United States in 1912.  She traveled on the SS Finland, from Antwerp to New York.

She remembered traveling in spring; but according to her passenger list, the ship left Antwerp on November 30 and arrived in New York on December 12. She was an unaccompanied minor, but evidently traveled using her sister Mary’s identity. She is listed as Mary Klebanska, age 24, from Volkovysk, slated to go to her sister Juliette Fabry in Chicago. She was befriended by a woman on board, a nurse who helped her find the train station once they arrived, so grandma could travel on to Chicago. One memory that stood out in her mind nearly 80 years later, was the sight of another woman passenger sitting quietly, moving her mouth back and forth, looking like a cow chewing her cud. This was grandma’s first experience of chewing gum.

The SS Finland was a ship of the Red Star Line. Next August, the Red Star Line Museum will be opening in Antwerp, and this picture, and the story that goes with it, will be part of the exhibition. If at all possible, I plan to attend the museum opening in September.

 

 

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Family History Writing Challenge 17: Sunday Obituary

Feb 17th, 2013 by

I’m a genealogist, so I am interested in the stories of those who are no longer with us. But I am also concerned with finding the offspring of those who are long dead, to knit back parts of families that have long been separated.

Obituaries can be a wonderful source of information – a skein of yarn to start the knitting. This recently found one is for a person of whom I knew little, but which gives me clues I will need to move forward 2 generations in time.

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Obituary, Lee Wachtel, Aug 3, 1963 [Syracuse Post-Standard

According to this obituary from the Syracus (NY) Post-Standard, Lee Wachtel died in a car crash on August 1, 1963 at the age of 44. I had never heard the name Wachtel, and would never have seen this newspaper story if it hadn’t mentioned her mother by a name I did know, Eva Newlander. Eva was married to my grandfather’s first cousin, Manuel Morris Newlander. Manuel, who had been born in Chicago, had moved to Michigan years before I started my genealogy research, and no one I knew had ever heard of him. But I knew he was the son of Morris Newlander, my great-grandfather Isaac Kishinevsky’s brother.  If Eva was her mother, then this Lee was the girl I knew as Leonora Newlander, born July 14, 1919.

One thing that is remarkable about this obituary is what it doesn’t say. Were the other passengers in the car injured or killed as well? Luckily, the obit says that the accident took place in Winnemucca, Nevada, and that the family lived in Bethesda, MD. Possibly there were newspaper stories in both towns that covered the accident or that included other obituaries that might have more information.

This obituary included some information about other people I already knew about. Lee’s mother Eva is still alive in 1963 (In fact, the same day I found this obit, I found one for Eva as well, and she lived until 1984). I already knew of Lee’s brother Daniel from census documents. I even knew that Leonora had a sister, Mildred, but I didn’t know her married name – but it’s here: Mrs. Cohen of 135 Victoria Place, Syracuse, NY.

The obit includes information about 3 people I had never heard of: her husband, and her two children. Louis Wachtel was a commander in the US Navy, and the family was driving to San Francisco at the time of the crash for him to take up a post there. I have never worked with naval records before, but there is likely a trail I can follow. And the two children were named Ilene and Robert. Ilene may have been married and lost in time, but a Robert Wachtel would likely be traceable.

I have enough yarn to cast on to my knitting needle and can’t wait to get started finding the rest of the skein!

 

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Family History Writing Challenge (16) Sensus Saturday

Feb 16th, 2013 by

When I first started researching my family history, I didn’t know you were supposed to start from the present and work your way back. I knew only that my Kishinevsky family was living in the US by 1901, because my great-aunt Sadelle was born that year in Chicago. So I decided to search the 1900 U. S. Census.

In those days, before census indexes or digital images were available online, all research was done from microfilms at a local Family History Library. So I headed out to West Los Angeles, which had one of the largest collections available outside of Salt Lake City.

The first step was to figure the Soundex code for the family name that interested you. Because spelling of surnames varied so greatly, the National Archives had established a filing system that categorized names that sounded alike, even though they were not spelled alike, rather than in alphabetical order.

The Soundex code for Kishinevsky was K251. Within that Soundex category, first names were in alphabetical order. Families were filed by the first name of the head of household, so I was looking for my great-grandfather Isaac. I rapidly cranked the handle on the right side of the microfilm reader through the K251 section. First names starting with A, then B, C, etc. flashed past my eyes. I was well into the I section before I realized it. I cranked the handle more slowly to the first names beginning with Isxxx. There were a few Isaacs, but none were for the last name of Kishinevsky, or any variant of it. I was so frustrated – but I realized that I must have missed something. A family with 5 children just wouldn’t have been missed by the census taker!

1900 U.S. Census, index card for Kisinowsky, I

So I went back to the very beginning of the I section. And suddenly – there it was! Kisinowsky, I. Not Isaac, just the first initial. Could it really be? Spouse, Lirba. My great-grandma was Lena. I was crushed. But then, I saw the names of the 5 children. Adella – great-aunt Della? Now I was excited! Next – Jacob – my grandfather’s name. I burst into tears. This had to be them, even though the 2 names of grandpa’s sisters also didn’t match the names that I knew them by:  Martha matched, but Lizzie — not Lydia; Tillie — not Thelma.

I was doing everything wrong, from point of view of genealogical methodology, but I was doing everything right as a family historian. I had found my family – and I was hooked!

As a result of seeing that index card, and the matching census record itself, I was able to find even more information about my family. They lived at 412 Maxwell Street – - the heart of the Jewish neighborhood. The census entry said that great-grandpa had arrived first, in 1896. I eventually found the passenger list showing his departure from Hamburg in that year. Similarly, I was able to find the passenger list for the arrival of my grandpa Jacob, along with his mother and 4 sisters. Although I now know that census data is often unreliable, my grandpa’s birth year (1884) matched what I had been told, and I was overwhelmed to think that my great-grandfather was born as far back in history as 1859…

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Family History Writing Challenge (Day 15): Follow-up Friday

Feb 15th, 2013 by

It’s Follow-up Friday – time to share with my blog community how others have reacted to my posts since the Family History Writing Challenge began.

Melissa responded to my February 5 post about my great-aunt Clara, the midwife. Melissa has found the names of midwives on birth certificates she has found researching her husband’s family history. She suggested I check birth certificates in Chicago. I would have been willing to troll through hundreds of thousands of birth records for Cook County – they were on Family Search just last month – but they have since been removed. Bah, humbug!

Debra responded to my post on February 5 about Berdichev. She lamented that she didn’t speak Yiddish, and told a familiar story. Her grandfather refused to let the family speak Yiddish so they could assimilate thoroughly into American life. I, too, regret that I don’t speak Yiddish. Luckily, I do speak, read, and write Russian, which has helped my genealogy research considerably.

Several readers commented on last Friday’s post, in which I included my grandmother’s recipe for blintzes. Connie complimented me for the post and said that including the recipe made it much better. Thanks, Connie! Anne – one of my real world friends —  said that if I didn’t make some, she would. I can now report that Friendship Dairies, of upstate New York, makes farmer’s cheese, but it is distributed only on the East Coast. I am now all fired up to make blintzes again! When I return from my husband’s family reunion this weekend, I’ll check my local food purveyors and health food stores.  I will see if I can recreate the heavenly taste I remember from my childhood.

 

 

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Family History Writing Challenge (Day 14): Thriller Thursday

Feb 14th, 2013 by

It’s Thriller Thursday.

When I picture the City of Chicago in the 1920s, I think of rum running in the face of prohibition, and gangland slayings under the direction of people like Al Capone. Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined finding a family link to the criminal activities of the time. But there is one…

My grandma Sophie had a sister named Jeanette, a dentist with a wild streak. According to grandma, Jeanette was married at least 4 times. This story concerns husband number 2, Arturo Fabbri. Jeanette and Fabbri married in Brooklyn in 1908, but by 1912, when grandma moved in with them, they lived in Chicago. By 1917, Arthur (as he was known by then) and Jeanette had split up.

Fabbri, a violinist, had graduated from the Conservatory of Ravenna, Italy. He came to the United States playing in the orchestra led by the composer Leoncavallo for the first American production of the opera Pagliacci. Fabbri became well enough respected that by 1916, he was hobnobbing with the likes of conductors Walter Damrosch and Leopold Stokowski, fellow violinist Fritz Kreisler, and the ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky.

Colosimo's nightclub, the day of the murder

Colosimo's nightclub, May 11, 1920 (Image: Joe Walters)

Fabbri then snagged a job at a nightclub called Colosimo’s. The owner was Big Jim Colosimo, who earned the majority of his income from a brothel monopoly in the Windy City, but he had fingers in lots of pies.

In 1917, Arthur was dating a chanteuse named Dale Winter, when he made the mistake of introducing her to his boss. Colosimo became smitten, hired her a vocal coach, featured her in the café’s floor show, and showered her with jewels. Colosimo divorced his wife and married Dale. Fabbri was out of the picture.

That is, until he was in the picture. On May 11, 1920, Colosimo was shot to death. The Chicago Tribune article indicates that Arthur was interviewed by the Chicago police as a person of interest. The cops detained him at Camp Grant, where he was serving out the remains of his military service, having already served overseas during World War I.

Luckily, there was a long list of suspects. There was talk that other, younger gangsters wanted to take over Colosimo’s flesh peddling and gambling interests.

Fabbri was released for lack of evidence. And who was the number one suspect? None other than Alphonse Capone himself. In the end, however, no one was arrested for the crime. Colosimo’s criminal empire was taken over by Johnny Torrio (with Capone in the wings), and eventually the nightclub itself was torn down.

Fabbri remained a musician, remarried, and eventually moved to Puerto Rico, where he taught music at a conservatory in Yauco.

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Family History Writing Challenge (13) Volkovysk Vednesday

Feb 13th, 2013 by

Grodno Guberniya, 1903 Volkovysk highlighted in yellow

In 1905, when my grandma Sophie was 10 years old, her mother (who had been divorced 5 years earlier) remarried Shlomo Zalman Cheifetz. Sophie was the only child still at home, and the family moved to the town of Volkovysk, about 17 miles away from Slonim, her birthplace.

Volkovysk at the turn of 19th to the 20th century was a bustling town of about 10,000 inhabitants, about half of whom were Jewish. The town had clean streets and a large train station.  According to the Vsia Rossiya business directory, the town had wine and food shops, a jewelry store, pharmacy, even a photography studio. Perhaps most important, in the days before there were refrigerators to keep food safe to eat, there was an ice house on the lake. Sophie’s step-father owned it.

In that part of the Russian Empire, winter time temperatures routinely stayed below freezing. The lake would freeze over, and Cheifetz and his crew would cut giant blocks of ice from the surface of the ice downward. The huge blocks of ice would be taken inside the ice house and laid on a thick bed of straw. As each new block was placed, it would be separated from its neighbor by more straw. As the blocks were stacked, a new layer of straw would be laid down. The straw acted as insulation to keep the ice cold even during summer, and to make sure the blocks didn’t melt into an icy, amorphous mass.

One of grandma’s favorite memories came from that time. Before the annual cutting of the ice began, her step-dad would bring a wooden kitchen chair to the lake. Sophie would sit on it, and Shlomo Zalman would skate along the ice, pushing grandma in front of him. Can you imagine the exhilaration of it, being pushed in a chair, skimming along the icy surface, with the air chill enough to freeze your lungs?

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Family History Writing Challenge (Day 12): Talented Tuesday

Feb 12th, 2013 by

Avery Schreiber

Blogs posted for Talented Tuesday are supposed to highlight people with talents of all sorts. The most talented person in our extended family (my second cousin) was the late actor, musician, and comic, Avery Schreiber.

Many people will remember Avery as one half of the comedy team Burns & Schreiber, who made their names at The Second City in Chicago. Or you may remember him as spokesklutz for Doritos corn chips in the 1970s. You can find many clips of his performances, with or without Jack, at Youtube.

But the talents you won’t see on youtube are the ones that I remember him for. He was wizard with telephones – in the days before cell phones – and he could install or fix desk top telephones with the best of them.

The knives in his kitchen were always sharp. This was unfortunate for me. I was slicing a bagel one day while visiting, holding it in my left hand as I maneuvered the knife in my right. My left middle finger bears the scar from that injury, which sliced my finger to bone, to this day.

In everyday life, Avery was just as funny as he was on stage. I remember one family get together when he converted Yiddish phrases deliberately into mangled English. He converted “af tzu luches” (which means spitefully) into “Officer Lucas” and spun a hysterically funny story out of it. We were ROFLAO!

The summer of 1969, I lived with Avery and his family while I worked a summer job. I was the blasé, off-to-college teenager who wouldn’t have been caught dead expressing enthusiasm for anything. He insisted I join him and his family in front of the television to on July 20 watch Neil Armstrong leave the space capsule and take that giant leap for mankind on the moon, and I will be forever grateful that he did. That talent of persuasion undoubtedly helped him as an actor, a husband, and a father. Oliver Show Lem, Ave!

Posted in Chernorudsky | 2 Comments »

Family History Writing Challenge (Day 11):Matrilineal Monday

Feb 11th, 2013 by

Eugenie Peckler, c 1920

Today , February 11, marks the birthday of my great-grandmother, Eugenia Peckler (known in Yiddish as Gittel). I have only vague memories of her, as we didn’t visit Chicago that often, but I do remember her thick accent, and that she had a crystal candy dish on her coffee table.

I was told that Eugenia lied about her age when emigrating from Zhitomir in 1922. She was supposedly afraid of being denied entrance into the United States. This was a legitimate fear, as immigration officials were likely to deport someone they thought was too old to work and therefore  was likely to become a public charge. But, according to the passenger list, she was 60 – which doesn’t seem to be much of a lie based on what I already know.

Eugenia was a remarkable woman who had a mind of her own. When she arrived in Chicago with her husband Naftula and 7 children, she refused outright ever to live with her husband again (he was quite the womanizer, as I understand it). When Social Security started in 1937, she signed right up, even though she was 75 at the time. Good thing she did, too, as she filled in the form SS-5 with her father’s and mother’s names (Shaya Humnenik and Gella Rubinzon), as well as her year of birth. This is genealogical gold!

When she was about 80 or so, she got a bee in her bonnet about becoming a U.S. citizen. Her English had not been good, but she studied hard, and was so proud on the day she took the oath to be an American.

She moved to the Jewish Home for the Aged in Chicago for the last years of her life. When she died there in 1969, she was the oldest resident they had ever had. How old was she? Well, her tombstone says she was 97. Her Social Security application indicated that she was born in 1871, which meant she was 98. The passenger list seems to indicate she may have been born in 1862, so she may have been 107. Either way, a great genetic legacy, eh? Thanks, great-grandma…

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Family History Writing Challenge (Day 10): Ship List Sunday

Feb 10th, 2013 by

Isaac Kischenowsky leaves Tiraspol bound for Chicago, 1896

I have been researching the history of my Kishinevsky family for more than 20 years. I found the passenger list for the arrival of my grandfather, Jacob Kishinevsky, with his mother and 4 sisters early on. And I did it the old fashioned way – with Soundex, and microfilm at the Family History Library in West Los Angeles. So I knew they had arrived in Philadelphia in 1899. I always assumed that great-grandpa Isaac K had arrived earlier, found a job and saved money to bring over the rest of the family – a common story. But when had Isaac arrived?

The same techniques used to find Jacob and his mom and sisters did not work to find Isaac. I tried looking at New York arrivals – this was before the Ellis Island web site existed – no luck. I checked microfilmed for arrivals from Baltimore, Boston, Galveston, Philadelphia – nada. I checked Chicago city directories, but the earliest year in which Isaac was listed was 1901. What to do?

Wait.

One day I was canoodling around on a well-known commercial genealogy web site and somehow came up with the magic combination of wildcards and consonants for the last name, in the right international database, and voila! Isaac Kischenowsky from Tiraspol left Hamburg, Germany on 13 August 1896 on the SS California and arrived in Baltimore, presumably about 5-7 days later.

I wasn’t as consistent with proper source citations then as I am now, but amazingly enough, I was on the ball enough that day to record it properly: Staatsarchive Hamburg,  373-7 I, VIII A 1 Band 094 A, Seite 762(Mikrofilm Nr.  K_1755).

The Soundex/microfilm search techniques from 20 years ago were just too cumbersome (and my tolerance for tedious searching too low), to allow me to find what I needed back in the day. Basically, online databases and computer search technology that were not available when I started out enabled me to find this needle in a haystack.

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Family History Writing Challenge (Day 9) Surname Saturday

Feb 10th, 2013 by

In honor of surname Saturday (Yes, I know its Sunday, but a Jo Dee Messina concert got in the way of posting on time]), I am writing about a family story that I have never been able to confirm.

My great-aunt Esther Peckler (dead these 20 years of more) told me that the Peckler  family name was originally Schnurman. Supposedly, a male Schnurman married into a Pekler family to avoid the military draft and all Schnurman family members changed their names to Pekler, too. I have no idea if the story is true, but the change must have taken place in the mid-1800s, because: 1) Jews in that area didn’t have last names until Napoleon breezed through in the early 1800s; and 2) by the late 1890s (when my grandmother Tanya was born) everyone was known as Pekler.

My grandma Tanya’s (Esther’s sister) family emigrated from Zhitomir, Ukraine to Chicago Illinois in 1921-22, after living illegally for a year in Rovno with false papers.  My grandmother’s father was Naftula Peckler (also known as Nathan). Naftula may have been born in Chernigov, but we don’t know for certain. He and my great-grandma Eugenia probably married and had their first child (Alexander aka Sasha) before moving to Zhitomir.  I know Naftula had one brother (Alexander Pekler) who stayed in Zhitomir when our branch emigrated, and who owned either a hardware or a shoe store. There was supposedly a family of Peckler cousins in Boston in the 1920s-30s, but our family had no contact with them, and now we don’t know who they were or what happened to them.

Five years ago, I was in contact with a woman named Bonnie Schnurman Barber, but we lost contact before a lot of information was exchanged. Five years before that I corresponded with a woman named Schnurman who lived in Israel, but I’ve misplaced the correspondence and the old computer files are long gone. A slap on the hand for me, the one who let things fall through the cracks.

Nowadays, if any of those families had males in the direct Schnurman line whose DNA has been tested, we can compare the results to those from a Pekler cousin in our family to confirm or disprove a relationship. If there are other Schnurmans from the Russian Empire out there in the blogosphere, please contact me so we can figure out if we are long-lost cousins…

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