Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Ancestors Who Migrated a Long Way

This challenge makes me think of a song:  "I'm a travelin' man, I've made a lot of stops all over the world . . . ."

This week for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun Randy Seaver asked about our most well traveled ancestors:

1) Many of our ancestors migrated to a distant place.  Which one of your ancestors migrated the furthest?  Or the furthest in North America?  It could be in one big move, or in several smaller moves over their lifetime.  How far did they travel?  Do you know the route they took?

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

My immigrant ancestors came from either western Europe (including the British Isles) or eastern Europe, so whichever ancestor traveled the furthest had to be one from eastern Europe.  After looking at distances for Krustpils, Latvia; Porazava, Belarus; Kamyanyets Litovsk, Belarus; and Chisinau, Moldova from Ellis Island, the winner is Kamyanets Podilskyy, Ukraine.  (I used Google to determine all my distances.)

I know my great-great-grandfather Avigdor Gorodetsky (later Victor Gordon) was in Kamenets Podolsky.  I have a photograph of him taken there.

From Kamenets Podolsky, Avigdor moved his family to Kishinev, Russia (now Chisinau, Moldova), a distance of 224 miles.

From Kishinev, he traveled to to Rotterdam, The Netherlands, to take a ship to the Goldene Medina, the United States, 1,374 miles.

The ship's journey from Rotterdam to Ellis Island was 3,637 miles.

After arriving at Ellis Island, Victor lived in Brooklyn, a mere 12 miles further, until his death.

Adding all of that up brings a total of 5,247 miles that my great-great-grandfather traveled from the first place I know he was to where he died.

My great-grandfather Joyne Gorodetsky (Joe Gordon) followed the same path to the United States, including departing Europe from Rotterdam, so his total was also 5,247 miles.

There is a possibility that Avigdor began his life in Orinin, Russia (now Orynyn, Ukraine).  Every Kishinev record I have found that mentions him indicates he was "from" Orinin.  That means his family was registered there officially, but not necessarily that he actually lived there.  If he did, I can add 10 more miles to his travels, the distance between Orinin and Kamenets Podolsky.

A very well traveled person in my database is my cousin's mother.  Just the basic information I know is that she was born in Fremantle, Western Australia; immigrated to the U.S. at some point and married in Reno, Nevada; moved to Key West, Florida, where she had two children; came back west to San Jose, California, where she had another child; and died in Redding, California.  That comes to 15,230 miles, almost three times as far as my great-grandfather traveled.

I worked out my rough mileage also.  I was born in Los Angeles, California, and moved with my family to Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.  When we returned to the U.S. we went to Niceville, Florida.  I moved back to Los Angeles to go to college and then moved to Oakland, where I now live.  The total for that is 20,434 miles but covers only the places I've lived, not my other travels.

My mother beat me by a few thousand.  She was born in Brooklyn, New York; moved to Miami, Florida; married and crossed the country to Los Angeles; moved to Australia and then to Niceville; and then moved to San Antonio, Texas and back to Florida.  That leaves out a few minor regional moves and still comes to 23,484 miles.  Her nickname of "the wandering Jew" was well earned.

I think my father is the champ, however.  He was born in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.  I know I've forgotten a few moves to New York and back to Jersey, but at some point the family moved to Mount Holly, New Jersey.  From there my father and his mother moved to Sanford, Florida (where he graduated high school) and then on to Miami.  Following that came the cross-country trek to Los Angeles, moving to Australia, and returning to the U.S.  From Florida he and his third wife moved to Ohio (Cleveland, I think), then San Antonio, and then back to the Niceville area.  I'm missing several regional moves, and his total is still 25,161.

I feel tired just adding it all up.

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Update:

Randy Seaver used this theme again for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun on September 18, 2021.  I found the list my grandfather created of everywhere he had lived and added the miles for the years my father lived with him to my father's tavels, so he now totals 26,184 (25,161 + 1,023) and is definitely still in the lead in my family for most traveled.  I'm still not accounting for short local moves.  (Maybe I'll add them if Randy uses this theme a third time.)  Those additional locations were:

Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey
Babylon, New York
Great Bend, New York
Sackets Harbor, New York
Watertown, New York
Bordentown, New Jersey
Columbus, New Jersey
Browns Mills, New Jersey
Mount Holly, New Jersey

I Found Two Possible Siblings of My Great-Great-Grandfather!

Possibly Gersh Wolf Gorodetsky

One of the great advantages of searchable electronic databases is their ability to show you information you wouldn't have thought to look for.  Even if you had considered looking, the time required might not have been practical.

Many years ago, I rented several rolls of microfilm of Jewish metrical records from Kishinev, Russian Empire (now Chisinau, Moldova) from the Family History Library.  I was trying to find information about my great-grandfather's family, which I had been told moved to Kishinev from the Kamenets Podolsky area some time soon after his birth.

My search was very successful.  I found the birth registrations of five of the six younger children in the family, the death record for my great-great-grandmother, and the index entry for my great-great-grandfather's second marriage (the church did not have the full marriage record on film).  I learned that this branch of my family was probably reasonably well educated, because when those five siblings immigrated to the United States the birthdates they used were surprisingly close to the actual dates.  I also learned my great-great-grandmother died one month after the birth of her youngest child, and that my great-great-grandfather did not remarry until two and a half years later, even though he had a one-month-old child.

I still have those microfilms on extended loan at my local Family History Center in Oakland, because I know it can be helpful to go through these types of records and look for other people with the same name and from the same place, as they might be related.  As these records were in Russian handwriting from the 1890's to the early 1900's, however, I kept putting it off, because I didn't want to slog through the 100+-year-old Cyrillic.

But now we have the Internet and searchable databases.  Several volunteers have transcribed many of the FHL microfilms of Kishinev records, and the transcriptions are now online in one of those databases.  I was recently doing research for someone else and ended up searching in the database that includes the Kishinev metrical records.

I didn't find any relevant information for the family I was researching, but I really thought there should be something.  To test the database, I searched for my family name, Gorodetsky, to see what kinds of results I would get.

The first thing I did was look for the information I had already found on microfilm.  All of it was there — that was a good start.  In these records my great-great-grandfather was consistently listed as being from Orinin, and his father's name as Gersh Wolf.  Then I glanced over the other results from the search.

I noticed a minimal death listing with my great-great-grandfather's name as the father.  I found another listing with more information about the same death and discovered that my great-great-grandmother had had at least one more pregnancy beyond the eight children I knew of, but this one apparently had sadly ended in a miscarriage.  I didn't know that miscarriages could be included in the death registers, but at least this one was.

Then I saw a second Gorodetsky whose father was also Gersh Wolf and who was from Orinin.  This man was potentially a brother of my great-great-grandfather!  He had three children listed in the database results.  Based on the birthdates of his children, he was probably a little younger than my great-great-grandfather.

I also found the death of a woman with the same father and from the same town, but she's quite a bit older than my great-great-grandfather.  She might be a sister!  It appears that she was not married.

Looking at the range of ages for these possible siblings made me wonder about my third-great-grandfather.  If these three were siblings, I wonder how many wives/mothers there were.  It's plausible, though on the extreme end, that all three could be children of the same mother.  Unfortunately, these records give only the father's name; the mother's name is not included.

I also began to think about Gersh Wolf's possible age.  I realized that none of Gersh Wolf's eight grandchildren I know about and the three potential grandchildren from the database had that name.  It was a common practice among many Eastern European Jews at this time, including my family, to name children after deceased ancestors.  In fact, my great-grandfather and three of his siblings named their first daughters after their mother; three of the siblings named their first sons after their father.  Admittedly, I know the names of only eleven possible grandchildren, but those births extend to 1910.  I'm starting to consider whether my third-great-grandfather was still alive as of that year, and that's why no one had yet named a child after him.  If Gersh Wolf was the father of the woman whose death I found, however, he had to have been born by around 1818 at the latest, so that would make him at least 92!  Of course, it's also possible that his children didn't like him, and that's why they didn't name any sons after him . . . .

Obviously, I need to follow up on all of these potential new clues.  And all this because I decided to poke around in a database!

IAJGS Conference Preliminary Program Online

It's time to start planning your schedule for the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies conference in Boston this August!  The preliminary program has been posted online.  Besides simply browsing the complete list, you can search by topic, geographical focus, speaker's name, date, and more.

I already have a busy conference planned for myself, with sessions marked in almost every time slot.  Some of the priority sessions I've marked are "Interpreting 19th Century Russian Language Documents" on August 4 (even knowing how to read Russian, these are hard to work through), "Researching Your Ancestors' Food" on August 5 (what can I say, I like to eat), "Kishinev: History of Jews and Genealogy" on August 7 (my great-grandfather's six younger siblings were born in Kishinev, and the family lived there for more than 15 years), "Early American Jewish Research: Before 1870" on August 8 (I'm still trying to prove the connection of an 18th-century Jewish man in Virginia to his possible brother in Charleston and then to the family's origins in Germany), and "A Very Short Course in Hebrew for Family Researchers" on August 9 (I *really* need to learn Hebrew!).  The most important item on my schedule is my own talk on August 6 on finding and using online historical Jewish newspapers!

The conference runs August 4-9 and is being held at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel & Towers.  While I'm in the area, I found research I can do in person.  I have cousins who live near Boston, and we're going to get together and talk about our family.  In addition, I realized that Brockton is not far away, and I need to visit some cemeteries there.  I'm going to have a week crammed full of family history!

Can you OD on genealogy?