Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Most Recent No-Name Ancestor

I'm not going to write about the ancestor most people might expect for tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music), is:

1.  Sometimes an ancestor or relative has no name at all — not even a given name (for males, we usually can surmise a surname, but . . .).  We all have millions of them.

2.  Tell us about one (or more) of your ancestors that have no given name and no birth surname who has perhaps married an ancestor with a given name and surname from whom you are descended.  (Don't worry, we'll do unknown parents some time soon.)

3.  When was the last time you looked for this no-name ancestor?

4.  Share information about your no-name ancestor(s) in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook comment.

Okay, here's mine.

I'm sure many people would expect me to write about my paternal grandfather's father, whom I usually discuss when it comes to recent ancestors I haven't identified.  But in June I posted that I have decided his last name must be Mundy (or a spelling variant thereof), and I was already pretty sure his given name included "bert" in it.  So he really isn't a no-name ancestor anymore.

I'm going further afield.

The first person who next came to my mind is the father of my great-great-grandmother Beila, who married Simcha Dovid Mekler, possibly in Kamenets Litovsk (now Kamyanyets, Belarus).  I wrote about her in August for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, "Five Questions for an Ancestor."  I know her given name, and I have estimated her year of death to be before 1924.  That's all I know about her.

So it stands to reason that I don't know anything about her father, who I am calling my "no-name ancestor" for the purpose of this post.

I admit I have never looked for him.  To be honest, I have barely looked for Beila.  I'm pretty sure both were born in the Russian Empire.  I think Beila was probably born in what was Grodno gubernia and is now part of Belarus.  Her father might have been born there, or possibly in what is now Lithuania.

If I could find a marriage record for Beila, it might include her father's name on it.  But because of the dearth of records for Jews in the former Grodno gubernia (most having been deliberately destroyed during World War II, to eradicate the history of the Jews in the area), it is unlikely I will ever find that marriage record.

If I could find a tombstone for Beila, it might have her father's name on it in Hebrew.  But the Jewish cemeteries in that area were also pretty thoroughly destroyed during World War II, and it is unlikely I will find that tombstone.

If I could find the family in a Russian revision list, perhaps the 1897 list, it would probably list her father's name and maybe even a maiden name.  Even a Russified version would be helpful.  I actually have tried searching for her, Simcha Dovid Mekler, and the two children I know of in the revision lists as transcribed on JewishGen.org, but I have not found them.  I know that many of the revision lists did not survive.  Perhaps one day a page with my family on it will be found in an attic or tucked inside the wall of a house.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Which Ancestral Home Would You Like to Visit?

Randy Seaver asks for a difficult decision in this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) Tell us which ancestral home (an actual building, a village, a town, even a country) you would most like to visit.   Which ancestors lived there and for how long?  

(2) Share your ancestral home information in your own blog post or on Facebook, and leave a link to it in the comments.
 
Thank you to Linda Stufflebean for suggesting this topic.

Randy appears to be fortunate in that he has several lines in his family that were in the same location, making it easy to choose that place.  Mine are kind of scattered all over the place, which makes the choice difficult.  On the other hand, Randy did give country as an option, so I think I'll choose "Russian Empire."  As in the one that doesn't exist anymore.  But it was the country from which all of the ancestors on my mother's side of the family emigrated.

All the American documentation I have says that the Brainins came from Kreuzburg, which is now Krustpils, Latvia.  I would love to go there and try to find some European documents that actually confirm that's where they were from.  Supposedly my 3x-great-grandfather was a doctor; maybe that increases the possibility of finding a record about him?

The Mecklers came from Kamenets Litovsk, Grodno gubernia, which is now Kamyanyets, Belarus.  I have that family tracked back to my 3x-great-grandfather Zvi Mekler.  I wouldn't expect to find much about my family in modern Kamyanyets, but I want the opportunity to look.

The Nowicki family came from Porozovo, Grodno gubernia, now Porazava, Belarus.  This is another location where not much has survived regarding the former Jewish population, but you never know unless you try.

The Gorodetskys were at least registered in Orinin, Kamenets Podolskiy gubernia, which is now Orynyn, Ukraine.  I don't know how far back that registration goes or how long it might have been since someone lived there.  The family was apparently at one time in the city of Kamenets Podolskiy (now Kamyanets Podilskyy), which is where my great-grandfather and his older sister are said to have been born, so that's probably the more important location to visit first.

The Schneidermans were also said to have been from Kamenets Podolskiy, although I don't think it was stated whether that was the city or merely the gubernia.

I don't know where the Jaffes, Bindermans, Blooms, or Yelskys are supposed to have been from.  I guess I would start searching for the Jaffes and Bindermans in Krustpils and the Blooms and Yelskys in Porazava.  I might also have Cohen/Kagan and Kardish/Kortisch ancestors.  I would start my search for them in Kamyanets Podilskyy.

So that gives me a lot of territory to cover.  What was once one (very large) country would now necessitate going through at least three modern countries.  And not going at all to modern Russia, because my ancestors all seem to have stayed in the Pale, apparently not having any of the high-end occupations that permitted one to reside in Russia proper.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Ellen's Questions, Part 3

In this week's challenge for Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, we continue to follow up on a previous one.

Here is your assignment, if you choose to play along (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music, please!):

(1) Ellen Thompson-Jennings posted 20 questions on her Hound on the Hunt blog two weeks ago — see Even More Questions about Your Ancestors and Maybe a Few about You (posted 27 June). 

(2) We will do these five at a time, with Questions 11 to 15 tonight (we did 1 through 5 two weeks ago and questions 6 through 10 last week).

(3) Tell us about it in your own blog post, in a comment on this post, or in a Facebook post.

Okay, these are my answers.

11.  If money weren’t an issue, where would you go to do genealogy research?

All over the world!  I would go to Ukrainian archives and hire interpreters to find information about my Gorodetsky and Schneiderman (and maybe Kagan) family lines.  I would try doing research in Moldova with more interpreters, looking for my Gorodetskys.  I would visit the Latvian archives with yet more interpreters, desperately trying to find even one measly document about my Brainins and Jaffes.  I would go to archives in Belarus (yes, more interpreters) to see if any of the record sets listed on the Routes to Roots site include any of my Mekler, Nowicki, Yelsky, or related relatives.  If I found addresses in any of those records, I would look to see if those buildings had survived.  In Belarus I would also search for records and information about the families of my many Mekler cousins with whom I am now in contact.

It would be ineresting to go back to Cuba, now that I have a little more information about my Cuban cousins, to try researching in person, instead of having to rely on e-mail communications with my researcher there.  At least I can read Spanish fluently and understand spoken Spanish fairly well.

And that's just my mother's side of the family!

For my father's side, I'd like to go to Manchester, England (where my brother has been able to go, once) and research the Dunstans and Winns (and I wouldn't need an interpreter there).  If I could trace the Dunstans back to Cornwall, that would be my next stop.  I should also go to New Jersey to do archives research on all of his other lines, because they were all in New Jersey for such a long time.

And after all that I would probably take a break to determine my next destination.

12.  Do you ever feel as though you’re the only person researching your family?

At this point, yes.  A cousin in Ottawa, Canada was doing research for a while, even going to the point of creating a legal-sized two-page questionnaire that she sent around to all the relatives there (I am very fortunate that she made photocopies of all of the pages for me).  I don't think she is pursuing that anymore.  Other than the occasional random forays my brother makes online (which almost always produce something substantive and useful), I'm it.

13.  Why do you think you’re interested in your family history and other family members might not be?

I used to actually listen to the stories that my mother and grandmother told about family when I was a little girl.  For whatever reason, my brother and sister were apparently not as interested.  So I was already primed when, at the age of 13, I had a junior high school assignment to trace my family back four generations.  I still have that purple mimeographed piece of paper and the notes I took at the time while interviewing family members.  That assignment is what got me hooked.  I think being open to the stories and then starting so young, when I had so many older relatives who were still alive and could tell me information themselves, was a rare combination.

14.  Do you intend to write about your genealogy/family history findings?

You mean like a book?  Oh, heavens, no!  I hate writing.  But I do manage to post to my blog on a (semi)regular basis and share a lot of the family stories and discoveries that way.  And I have shared family trees with so many cousins I lost count.  If I could find someone who wanted to do the writing after I did all the research, that would work much better for me.  And then I could edit the manuscript, because I love editing.

15.  Did you ever make a genealogy mistake that caused you to have to prune your family tree?

One mistake, and one discovery via DNA.  The mistake was relying on the information in the IGI to identify my great-great-grandmother Lippincott's parents.  I happily researched the parents that were listed and went back quite a ways.  But as more records became readily available and I did more research, I discovered that there were two girls of almost the same age with almost the same name, my great-great-grandmother and another one.  That, of course, meant that I had to fully research both women.  I was finally able to determine through church records that the parents listed in that IGI record were those of the other Lippincott, not mine, even though the marriage date and husband were correct for mine.  Someone accidentally combined info from two records!  So out went the one line of Lippincotts and I began work on the correct one, which I have not been able to document as extensively, but at least I'm pretty sure they're actually mine.  The two lines will probably end up connecting some generations back, because you can't go anywhere in New Jersey without tripping over a Lippincott because they've been there so long and are interrelated, but I'm not worried about that yet.

The other "pruning" came when I demonsrated through DNA testing that my grandfather's biological father was not the man his mother married.  I actually haven't taken those people out of my family tree, because Elmer Sellers was the only father my grandfather knew, and I put years and years of work into that research.  But I have discontinued further research in that direction and now focus on determining just who my grandfather's biological father was.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Best Genealogy Research Find in May 2018

Randy Seaver appears to have taken last weekend off for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, probably because he was so busy with everything going on at Jamboree.  We do have a new challenge this week, however:

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music), is:

(1) What was your best genealogy "research find" in May 2018?  It could be a record, it could be a photograph, etc.  Whatever you judge to be your "best."

(2) Tell us about it in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or in a Facebook or Google+ post.


To explain why this is a great research find, I have to provide a little bit of background information.

Three of my Jewish family lines go back to an area that was formerly called Grodno gubernia in the Russian Empire, which is now the Hrodna region of Belarus.  During World War II, the Nazis and their collaborators were incredibly thorough in destroying almost all archival records relating to the Jews of the area.  There's practically nothing left.  It's entirely possible that the earliest record I may find relating to my great-great-grandfather, who was born about 1858, is a voter list from the early 1900's.

Given that situation, I latch on to any records from this area with glee, just on the off-chance that I might find something about a family member.

While I was on a recent trip to the Washington, D.C. area to give talks to two genealogical societies, I visited the library at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and asked the librarian (hi, Megan!) about records from Grodno.  She told me about a collection of records from 1940–1944 that had been microfilmed by the museum and which were available to look at digitally there in the library.  I could even download the files if I wanted to.  I was practically jumping with joy!

Of course, I didn't have a flash drive with me that day, but I came back a couple of days later and downloaded as many as could fit on my drive (I ran out of room), along with the detailed finding aid for the collection.  And a friend has volunteered to go to the library and download more of the digitized files for me.  So even though I don't know yet what I might find, I'm thrilled to even have these kinds of records available to search.  I'm hoping that I find something about some, even one, of the family members who, as far as we know, perished in this area during the Holocaust.  And just that possibility makes this a great research find.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your Genea-Bucket List

Wish lists are always fun to create, because you can really go nuts with what you would like to do.  And that's what Randy Seaver is asking us to do for this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun:

For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I challenge you:

Knowing that a "Bucket List" is a wish list of things to do before death:

(1) What is on your Genealogy Bucket List?  What research locations do you want to visit?  Are there genea-people that you want to meet and share with?  What do you want to accomplish with your genealogy research?  List a minimum of three items, more if you want!

(2) Tell us about it in a blog post of your own (please give me a link in Comments), a comment to this post in Comments, or a status line or comment on Facebook.

Think big!  Have fun!  Life is short - do genealogy first!

Ok, here's mine:

1.  Locations I want to visit:
• Burlington County, New Jersey for an extended research visit, because that's where most of my father's family was from:  Armstrong, Gauntt, Gibson, Sellers, Stackhouse, and other families
• Trenton, New Jersey, because it's the location of the New Jersey State Archives
• Research repositories in New York City and extended area, because that's where most of my mother's ancestors lived after they immigrated to the United States
• Kamenets Litovsk (now Kamyanyets), Porozowo, and Kobrin (minimum), Belarus, all locations from which members of the Meckler and Nowicki branches of my family came
• Kreuzburg (now Krustpils, Latvia), the (claimed) origin of my Brainin family line
• Kamenets Podolsky (now Kamyenets Podilskiiy, Ukraine) and Kishinev (now Chisinau, Modolva), where Gorodetsky family members were born and lived
• Khotin, now in Ukraine (I think), where one branch of the Gorodetsky-Kardish family lived
• Manchester, England, home to my Dunstan line for several generations
• County Cork, Ireland, particularly Ballyvourney, home to my stepsons' paternal ancestors on the mother's side
• Punjab, India, particularly Khatkar Kolan and Patiala, home to my stepsons' paternal ancestors on the father's side

That's the short list.  I can come up with even more if I try.

2.  People I want to meet and share information with:
• Any relatives I can find in the above-mentioned locations :)
• Relatives with whom I am in electronic contact but whom I have not yet met
• Relatives whose names I have from previous research but whom I have not yet met
• Anyone else I find I'm related to
• After I determine who my grandfather's biological father was (see below), people from that branch of the family

3.  What I want to accomplish with my genealogy research:
• Determine who my grandfather's biological father was
• Meet as many relatives as possible
• Collect photographs of as many ancestors as possible
• Learn as much as possible about my ancestors and other relatives as individuals
• Create books or other collections to share with family members
• Document family members who perished in the Holocaust for Yad Vashem
• Find someone else in the family to carry on my work after I'm gone, because I'm going to assume I can't resolve all the questions before I go

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Which Ancestor Moved the Furthest?

There's another genealogy meme with a lot of questions going around, but rather than use the whole thing, it looks as though Randy Seaver will be choosing one question at a time to post for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun.  That's ok by me!  It will make the fun last even longer!

For this week's mission (should you decide to accept it), I challenge you:

(1) The Family History Hound listed 20 Questions about Your Ancestor, and I'm going to use some of them in the next few months.

(2) Please answer the first question:  "Which ancestor moved the furthest from their home?"

(3) Write your own blog post, make a comment on this post, or post your answer on Facebook or Google+.  Please leave a link to your answer in comments on this post.

My Ancestors

For my ancestors, I looked at the side of the family that came from Eastern Europe.  Since Google Maps has problems determining distance when you cross oceans, I used Distance Between Cities for my numbers.

• My ancestors who appear to have moved the furthest distance were my great-grandfather Joe Gordon (~1892–1955) and great-great-grandfather Victor Gordon (~1866–1925).  Although I have yet to verify the information, both are said to have been born in Kamenets Podolskiy, Russian Empire (now Kam'yanets'-Podil's'kyi, Ukraine).  Distance Between Cities gives a result of 4,602.20 miles between Kamenets Podolskiy and Brooklyn, New York, where both men immigrated.

• The next furthest distance for a move appears to be my great-grandparents Morris Meckler (~1882–1953) and Minnie (Nowicki) Meckler (~1880–1936), who immigrated from Kamenets Litovsk, Russian Empire (now Kamyanyets, Belarus) to Brooklyn.  Distance Between Cities shows that was 4,358.40 miles.

Collateral Relatives

If I look at the collateral lines in my tree, there is one clear winner.  Betty Ellett (1935–2006), the mother of a second cousin once removed, moved from Fremantle, Western Australia, Australia to Reno, Nevada, a leap of 9,340.41 miles.  Not quite as far as Linda Seaver's great-great-grandmother, but a pretty impressive distance all the same.

Personal Research Projects Seeking Information and Participants

Usually the projects I write about are posted on public Web pages, often by organizations rather than individuals.  These, however, are smaller scale, people who sent messages to e-mail groups I'm in.  I checked with each of them beforehand to see if a little extra publicity about the projects might be helpful.

The Dora

Joke Stans is a graduate student at the University of Antwerp, Belgium, currently writing a Master's thesis about a Jewish refugee ship named the Dora.  This ship sailed from Amsterdam (with a stopover in Antwerp on 17 July 1939) to Palestine and arrived on 12 August 1939 at Sheffaym Beach.  The research is on the passengers who embarked in Antwerp and on the organization of the illegal Zionist undertaking (from the Belgian perspective).

The hope is to find more information concerning contacts between the Belgian authorities/leaders and the Palestinian, British, and Dutch embassies (a lot of organization on account of the Dutch Jewish Committee) or other representatives in the case of the Dora.

Perhaps information exists about contacts between Belgian Jewish committees (Belgian Zionist Federation, Jewish relief committees in Antwerp and Brussels) and governmental authorities or between different Jewish organizations (Hagana, which organized the trip; HICEM; Mossad l'Aliyah Bet; the Joint; Dutch Jewish committees).  So far five pages have been discovered in the State Archives in Brussels, but that is all.

The Belgian government offered assistance for the trip but denied its part in the undertaking to British emmissaries.

It is unknown so far who took the lead in this in Belgium, but perhaps Max Gottschalk had a role in the organization of the trip.  In addition, the Torczyner and Kubowitsky families were involved in one way or another.

Joke is also searching for databases and information about the places where the passengers on the ship prepared for the trip (hachshara).  Already known is a database for training farms in Germany.

Some people did their hachshara in Villers-la-Ville, Belgium.  Because a lot of the passengers on the Dora came to Belgium from Austria and Poland, they might have done their hachshara in Poland and Austria, so a list of those locations would also be helpful.  Probably the majority of the passengers did the hachshara somewhere, but this is not definitely known.

If you know of any information which could be helpful to Joke's research, please contact her at stansjoke@hotmail.com.

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The father of SFBAJGS board member Preeva Tramiel created a shelter for Jews to hide in toward the end of World War II, somewhere near Munkacs or Kaschau or in between.  She is looking for names of and information about people he saved.  Does anyone have parents who escaped the camps by hiding in a building used by the Germans to repair vehicles?  Or have you heard a story about the shelter?  If so, please contact Preeva at preeva@sfbajgs.org.

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Stephen Ankier is conducting research on the massacres in Słonim, Belarus during World War II.  He would like to hear from anyone who was a witness to the massacres in Słonim, who has relevant reliable information or documents about those events, or who has information about events that occurred in Słonim prison.  He is particularly looking for documents and photos that can be shared showing the names of any voluntary auxiliary policemen who worked for the Nazi SS in Słonim — in the prison or transporting prisoners from the prison to the death pits or active executioners — during the period 1941–1944.

Any assistance is appreciated, as even one small fragment of information can often lead to others.  If you can help, contact Stephen Ankier at sia@medreslaw.com.

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Michael Waas, a Master's candidate in Jewish history at the University of Haifa, is looking for individuals to participate in a study of Western Sephardi paternal DNA lineages.  Thanks to a generous grant, testing kits will be provided at no cost to participants.  Eligible men are those who are direct paternal-line descendants of the Western Sephardi community.

What is the Western Sephardi community?  The Western Sephardim were arguably the original transnational people in the age of Imperialism and Colonialism, transcending religious boundaries and empires.  Western Sephardim had significant communities in Amsterdam, London, Livorno, Venice, Bordeaux, and Southwest France and their daughter communities in the New World in Curacao, Suriname, and North America.  Western Sephardim also went to the Ottoman Empire, most notably to Izmir, Salonika, and Tunis.

Anyone who is of direct paternal descent from those communities is eligible.  Michael himself is part of the testing cohort, representing the Vaz Lopes family of Bordeaux and Amsterdam.  As part of the testing, he will also need an accurate paternal genealogy, with as much information as each participant can provide.

The goal of this project is to try to shed light on the origins of the Western Sephardi community and to establish a strong dataset of DNA results, grounded in strong archival research and results that could lead to further intensive studies of Sephardim.

The aim is to have at least 50 men tested for the project.  It is planned to publish the results of the study.  Participants' privacy will be protected.

Please contact Michael if you are interested in participating or know someone who might be eligible.  He is happy to answer any questions!  His e-mail address is mwaas1989@gmail.com.

Wordless Wednesday

Easy Custom Genealogy Maps beyond North America

A few weeks ago, for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, Randy Seaver asked readers of his blog to create custom maps of U.S. states and Canadian provinces they had visited, and then to create maps of where their ancestors had lived in some given year.  This was a fun exercise, and it was interesting to see the results.  I was disappointed, however, that I was unable to map several of my ancestors, because they were not living in North America.

Surprisingly, Facebook came to my rescue.  One of my friends posted a link to MapLoco, a site that creates custom world maps of places you've visited.  They're not as detailed as the maps from the first site — you can only indicate visited or not, as opposed to the four levels of visits available on the other site.  The world map site also doesn't have an option to export a graphic file of your map.  Instead, you can generate a URL to a page that shows the countries you marked.  But the site does give me a quick, easy way to map the rest of my ancestors' locations!

For the SNGF exercise I used the locations of my ancestors in 1865, which I had generated the week before, and mapped those in the U.S.  For this new map I took those same locations, added the European ones (the only other continent where I had ancestors in 1865), and clicked those places on the world map site.  The site then automatically generated a URL for my custom map.  Instead of using the URL itself, you can do a screen capture of the map and use the image.  The map the site shows when you use the URL looks like this:

You can see that the title is "Countries I've Visited", and underneath that it lists the countries "I've been to."  There's no way to change the title, which for this map should be "Countries Where My Ancestors Lived in 1865."  The legend on the left indicates Not Visited and Visited.  If you're doing a screen capture, you could easily cut out the "Countries I've Visited" banner, but the text below that is helpful because it lists the countries, which might be difficult to recognize from the map alone.

You actually have two options for images, though.  While you're making the map, it looks like this:

The advantage here is that the Not Visited/Visited legend and "I" text aren't part of the map.  On the other hand, you don't get the list of countries spelled out.

Something I noticed when mapping my ancestors was that due to border changes, I had to fudge a little.  Many of my ancestors lived in the Russian Empire, but that no longer exists.  So I marked the modern countries (Belarus, Latvia, and Ukraine) that control the specific areas where they were.

You might think of that as being a problem relevant mostly to 19th- and early 20th-century research, but I even had the same situation when I created a map of the countries I have visited myself:

Quite a few border changes have occurred during the latter part of the 20th century.  Two of the countries I have visited are the USSR and the Panama Canal Zone.  Neither one exists today.  For the USSR I marked the countries corresponding to the Soviet republics I visited.  But the Canal Zone is just gone, incorporated into the country of Panama, which I visited separately from the Canal Zone.

Hey, wouldn't it be cool if there were a site that could generate maps for any given year, with the appropriate corresponding country borders?