Learning More about My Cousin Billie

I've written previously about the photo bonanza that my sister sent to me after her niece had scanned thousands of photographs that were left in the house after our father passed away.  I've made many discoveries and unearthed several childhood memories by going through the photos, and I still have a long way to go to identify all of them.

Now that bonanza has to compete with another one.

About a year and a half ago, I was contacted out of the blue by a woman named Wendi Shaw, who looks for family items for sale in auctions and the like.  She called herself an heirloom hunter, which she does as a hobby.  She goes through the items, puts them in binders, does some research, tries to find family members, and offers to send the items back to them.

She told me she was trying to reach the Brainin family, because she had acquired several of Billie Brainin's items.

I recognized the name right away.  Billie was the daughter of David Brainin, a younger brother of my great-grandmother Sarah Brainin.

Wendi included four photos of the pile of letters.  Three photographs were visible in the collection.

So I shouted out loud, jumped up and down, did the genealogy happy dance, and told her I would love to have the items.

I discovered that she had found me through my blog (this one!), where I had written about Billie a couple of times.

I sent her my address and looked forward to receiving this new family history bonanza.  I even posted the photo of Billie that she had sent me.

And I waited.

After several months, I sent another message, asking if something had happened.  Which it had:  Real life had interfered.

But Wendi was glad I had written again, because she apparently had lost my contact information.  And said she would be sending me the items soon, with one catch:  She wanted me to confirm when I received everything (I already did that) and to let her know when I blogged about this discovery.  And hey, that's what I'm doing now!

It was clear when I started looking at all the items that Wendi had already done some sorting and that they were not in the order in which they had been in the storage unit; she had told me that she had gone through them and put them into plastic sleeves.  So I did not feel compelled to keep them in the order in which I had received them, something that should be considered from an archival perspective.  Since the original order was already lost, I have chosen to put everything in chronological order as much as possible.  So far I have found six items with no dates on them.  Two of those (a music program and a piece of a newspaper) I have determined the dates by searching for text that appears.  That leaves me only four undated items:  two cards and two letters.  Maybe I'll be able to figure out where they fit by context.

The earliest item is a funeral bill from 1924.  The most recent so far is a letter from 1964.

I've only begun to go through the items and actually read them.  Some of what I have found already in this amazing gift:

I learned that Billie, the only name I had ever heard for my cousin, was not actually her given name at birth!  A couple of the letters were addressed to Mildred Brainin, and when I looked for that name in the New York City birth index on Ancestry, I found her.  Totally news to me!  I had not searched for her birth previously because Billie was born late enough that I know New York City won't send me a copy of her birth certificate, even though she died more than 30 years ago.  They're just not a friendly jurisdiction to work with.

Among the letters were four from my cousin Sam Brainin (whom I knew personally) to Billie, his sister, while he was in the Navy.  I have been in contact with Sam's children for several years, so I wrote to one of them to ask if she would like to have the letters.

I'm looking forward to reading all of the letters and learning more about Billie.  I don't know yet how personal any of the information is, so I can't tell how much I might feel comfortable posting.  But it's going to be a fascinating adventure, I'm sure.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: What Genealogy "Rabbit Hole" Did You Go Down Recently?

Tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun topic from Randy Seaver is a favorite of genealogical researchers everywhere.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  What genealogy "rabbit hole" did you go down recently?  Did you have genealogy fun?  How did it help your genealogy research?

2.  Share your response on your own blog or in a Facebook post.  Please share a link in Comments on this post if you write your own post.

What?  Genealogists falling down rabbit holes?  Who would have thought such a thing could happen?

The most recent rabbit hole I went down was totally the fault of Reclaim the Records, that scrappy little nonprofit that's filing lawsuits all over the country when records jurisdictions don't follow Freedom of Information rules, even their own, and then sharing all the records they acquire freely and publicly through the Internet Archive.  I love them!  (And I remember when Brooke Schreier Ganz started the whole thing!)

I don't remember when the various New Jersey indices were posted, and RtR doesn't put dates on a lot of its posts, but a couple of months ago I started poking around.  They have New Jersey Marriage Index, 1901–2016; New Jersey Death Index, 1904–2017; New Jersey Birth, Marriage, and Death Indices, 1901–1903 and 1901–1914; and New Jersey Geographic Birth Index and Delayed Birth Index, 1901–1929.

I have a lot of New Jersey relatives.  For many of them I did not have specific birth, marriage, or death dates.  My father and both of his parents were born in New Jersey, and I had their information, but between multiple relationships on both sides and half-siblings all over the place, I didn't have documentation for everybody else.  So I decided one evening to start looking.

I think it started innocently enough.  All I wanted originally was to find the birth dates of three of my grandfather's siblings, for whom I had only "about" and a year.  And then I figured while I was looking, I should find all of the siblings in the birth index, just to verify that I had the correct dates.  Oh, and maybe I should look up all their marriages.  Oh wait, some of those siblings didn't live to adulthood, so I should look for them in the death index.

Several hours later . . . .

I had lots of fun, but I still don't have everyone!  I found one of the birth dates, but two are still missing.  The birth index showed a different date for one of the siblings for whom I already had a date.  I can't find death dates for three children.  And three marriage dates are still hiding from me also (although it's possible one or more of those might not have taken place in New Jersey; lots of people in Jersey went to good old Elkton, Maryland, as my aunt did).  Or maybe some of those couples didn't actually get married.

One amusing discovery was finding the original index entry for my grandfather and then a handwritten one based on his amended birth certificate.

I wrote several years ago about my frustrating and fruitless search for my grandfather's birth certificate and how it took my sister going in person to the New Jersey State Archives to discover that he had been recorded as a girl on his birth record, explaining why I had been unsuccessful in three attempts at finding a birth certificate for a boy.  The lovely archivists had also unearthed an amendment to the original birth certificate, filed by my great-grandmother 37 years later, changing Grampa from a girl to a boy.

Well, both of those records are reflected in the state birth index.

Birth index showing Gertrude Armstrong (bottom), born April 6, 1903, page 7173
(edited image)

Birth index showing Bertram L. Sellers (bottom), born April 6, 1903, page 7173
(edited image)

And in a very strange coincidence, the handwriting for the entry for the amended birth certificate strongly resembles my grandfather's handiwriting.

But That Doesn't Add Up Right

I posted last month about finding my great-great-grandparents' marriage record and several other family records in a recent data upload by the Ukraine Research Group on JewishGen.org.  But now I have to worry about how accurate the years are on those records as they are indexed.

I found a Russian birth record for one of my cousins, Dvorah Kardish, the daughter of Moishe Kardish and Rivka Polatnick.  The index entry shows Dvorya Kardish, daughter of Moshe, son of Chaim Duvid, and Rivka, daughter of Leyb.  This certainly sounds like my family member!  The entry indicates she was born January 21, 1899.  I clicked on the image link.

Record #9
Birth record for Dvorya Kardish
January 21 / 12 Shevat
Father Moshe Chaim-Duvid, mother Rivka daughter of Leyb
Kamenets Podolsky, Podolia, Russian Empire
(image has been edited to crop out some of the other records on the page)

But when I went to enter this information in my family tree, I noted a few inconsistencies.

There is a note on the page for the record above Dvorya's that refers to 1897.  How could there be a note about something that happened to a child in 1897 if the child wasn't born until 1899?

Second, I have found Dvorya enumerated with the Kardish family in an 1895 Russian revision list (kind of like a census).  If she wasn't born until 1899, that just couldn't happen (that's a really big twinkle in someone's eye).

Third, Dvorya's first child (at least the first I know about) was born in 1915 (I found her birth record in this upload), which would make Dvorya only 16 years old at the time.  Not a deal-breaker, but not likely.  (Yes, I realize the year could be wrong on her daughter's record.)

And not as definitive, but still important to take into account, an 1899 birth would change Dvorya's position in the accepted birth order of the children in that family.  I often tell people that before knowing your exact birth date was an important fact in everyday life, most people didn't know precisely when they were born, but they did usually know who was the oldest child, who was second, etc., down to the youngest.  And the birth order that I was told matches that in the revision list.

So now I had four data points pointing to the possible inaccuracy of the birth year quoted in the JewishGen index.

Obviously, this required further investigation.

The page with Dvorya's birth record does not have a year written on it anywhere I could see to indicate when these births had taken place or were recorded.  I looked several pages before and after but none of them has a year written on it to indicate when the births occurred.  The only one that has a year on it, a few pages before the page in question, has a big block of text in the middle of the page and the year 1898 at the end of the text.  It looks to be some kind of "this is wrapping up the end of the year" note.  I considered that maybe the indexers had used it as an indication that the pages following were for 1899.

Working on the hypothesis that the page with Dvorya's birth had somehow fallen out and been [re]placed out of order in the record book, I looked at the information on the sheet that I probably could rely on:  that she had been born on January 21 on the Christian calendar, which equaled 12 Shevat on the Jewish calendar.  The months were abbreviated at the top of the page, and while I don't know the names of the months in the Jewish calendar well enough to recall them, I could see that the month started with "sh", so I Googled "Jewish months", and only Shevat starts with that.

To try to resolve the problem, I went to SteveMorse.org, clicked on Steve's handy Jewish Calendar Conversions in One Step page, changed the readout to the 57th century in the Jewish era so I could see years for the 19th century, changed the Christian date to January 21, and started going year by year through the Jewish years until I got January 21 and 12 Shevat in the same year.  Yay, it's 1891 (5651 on the Jewish calendar)!

Except I then remembered that the Russians were still on the Julian calendar in the 19th century, but the Jewish calendar was going by the Gregorian dates and Steve's page shows Gregorian by default.  Oops.

So I went back, changed the readout to Julian, set my date as 12 Shevat, and scrolled through years on the Christian calendar line.

Aha!  The year in which 12 Shevat and January 21 were the same day in the Julian calendar then became 1890 (5650 on the Jewish calendar).  That resolved the three concrete inconsistencies and kept Dvorya's birth order in the family the same.

Hooray!

It appears that the pages in the birth registration book are out of order, but that's how they are now and how they were filmed.

I fixed my date question, but how do we correct that problem?  How many more pages in this book are out of order?  How many people will have enough information beforehand, as I did, to realize that there's a problem?  And how many more of the digitized record books might have the same problem?

And what does the note from 1905 on the left side of Dvorya's birth record say?

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: How Long Ago Was Your Last "Genealogy Happy Dance"?

Here's tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver:

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  One of the goals of every genealogy researcher is to solve difficult name and relationship problems — and traditionally we do a "genealogy happy dance" when we succeed.

2.  When was the last time you did a "genealogy happy dance" after solving one of your difficult problems?

3.  Share your story on your own blog or in a Facebook post.  Please share a link in Comments on this post if you write your own post.

Well, my last big "genealogy happy dance" has already been celebrated in my blog, and for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun no less.  That was when I posted two weeks ago about finding the marriage record for my great-great-grandparents Vigdor Gorodetsky and Esther Leya Shnayderman.  This was exciting not only because of the record itself but because it corroborated six hypotheses I had made during my research.

But I mentioned in that blog post that I had found several other records for my family and related lines in the same batch of records.  And I did genealogy happy dances for many of those also.

One in particular I am still excited about is the birth record for my cousin's great-great-grandfather.  Again, very cool just to find the record and have an exact birth date, but it provided his mother's name, which we did not have previously.  We learned that we had the wrong town for his birthplace.  And it is the oldest record I have from the Russian Empire for anyone in my family.

Record #20
Birth record for Aizik [Isaak] Belder
March 5, 1848 (Julian calendar; March 17 on Gregorian calendar)
Father Shimshon, mother Rivka
Proskurov, Proskurovsky Uyezd, Podolia, Russian Empire

So, yeah, I did the happy dance for this record too.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: When Has Someone Helped You Find a Record or Solve a Mystery?

How could we get by in genealogy without people who help us find things?  That's the focus for tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver.

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.

1.  We all need, and usually enjoy, a little help from our genealogy friends.  This week's challenge is to share a time when a genea-friend helped you find a record, or even solve a mystery.  It could be a recent help, or something from long ago.

2.  Tell us about them in a comment on this post or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

For one of the most important records that someone helped me find, it wasn't a genea-friend who stepped up, it was my sister.

I had requested a search for my paternal grandfather's birth record from the state of New Jersey a few times, and I had failed every time.  I tried with his name as I knew it, with no given name, and under his mother's maiden name.  Fail, fail, fail.

But my sister had offered to help with the family research, and I took her up on the offer.  I did the previsit legwork:  checked with the archives on their procedures, verified their hours, etc., etc., etc.

So when my sister went in to search manually, she was successful!  And the lovely archivists even had found when my great-grandmother had amended the birth certificate 37 years after my grandfather was born.

The original birth certificate of my grandfather, whom I knew as Bertram Lynn Sellers, was made out in the name of Gertrude L. Armstrong, female, born April 6, 1903.

We're never going to be able to explain the mystery of how a mistake was made on the sex and name of the child, but 37 years later, his mother had it corrected.

And with the help of my sister (who I guess is also my genea-friend!), we now have the documentation to show it happened.

Coincidentally, today is April 6, my grandfather's birthday.

Could "Bertram" and "Bertolet" Be Named for the Same "Bert"?

Bertolet Grace Sellers birth certificate, March 6, 1921, father "unknown"

I've written previously about how I proved that the man my great-grandmother married was my grandfather's adoptive father.  Of course, once I did that, my new task became the search for my grandfather's biological father.

The starting point for this search has been going back over some of the information that led me to suspect in the first place that Elmer might not have been Grandpa's father:

• no father's name was listed on Grandpa's birth certificate

• father's name was added to Grandpa's amended birth certificate in 1940, 22 years after Elmer (the supposed father) had died

• my grandaunt told me that my grandfather, Bertram Lynn, was named after a close family friend, even though he was the oldest son

• my great-grandmother had a daughter three years after her husband had died and named her Bertolet

The last two in particular have really had my mind whirling.  Not only do Bertram and Bertolet have "Bert" in common, let's face it, "Bertolet" isn't exactly your garden-variety, everyday name.  I started thinking, Hey, maybe this guy's name really was Bert-something (maybe Bertram?), and Laura and he got together again after Elmer died.  That's why she named her daughter Bertolet, after him.

I figured the most direct way to try to find the answer was obtaining Bertolet's birth and death certificates.  Makes sense, right?  So when my sister told me she was going to Trenton again to visit the state archives, I asked her to look for Bertolet.

She found both of the certificates.  But . . . Laura foiled us again.  Neither certificate lists the father!  So much for the easy route.  That woman sure liked to keep her secrets.

Bertolet Grace Sellers death certificate, January 11, 1927, father "not known"

While there could be several reasons why Laura declined to state that particular piece of information (twice!), I'm leaning toward him being married.  My sister, on the other hand (who is named after our great-grandmother), came up with a really complicated theory:

What if our great-grandfather was a married man (most likely) and wanted to name his child Bertram.  Laura gets pregnant and "Papa Lynn" insists he'll take the child away from her . . . IF it's a boy.  Laura doesn't want the child taken away from her, so declares the child a female and names "her" Gertrude on the birth certificate.

Actually calling/naming Grandpa Bertram Lynn was thumbing her nose at Papa Lynn, even though she corrected the BC years later.

In the meantime, Papa Lynn goes on with his life and Laura marries Elmer.

Papa Lynn HAS his baby boy and names him Bertram.
 
But wait . . . Papa Lynn was NOT a married man, but Laura's childhood sweetheart from an affluent family!  She was their domestic!  He was a few years younger and his family frowned upon the older Laura.  The family threatens to take her male offspring, so she names him Gertrude and then marries Elmer.

Elmer dies and Laura reaches out to Papa Lynn to confess her secret.  They rekindle the flame and create Bertolet.

How's that for melodrama?

Whatever the reason was, we didn't get the answer we were hoping for.  Now I'm working on the Y-DNA angle.  My father has a match at 111 – 4 markers, which means something like 6th cousins.  Luckily, the guy has a bare-bones family tree on FTDNA.  I'm working it backward and bringing every male line forward in time, hoping to find someone who plausibly could have been in Burlington County, New Jersey (or Philadelphia as a reasonable second possibility) in 1902.

In a funny coincidence, the man who matches my father has an Irish name.  Maybe that Ancestry DNA test will prove to be right about my Irish ancestry after all?

They're Not Mine; Are They Yours?

Herschel Kosewen and
Maria Wiernicka
marriage license (top)

I'm sure that everyone who does family history research has at some time ordered a record (probably more than once!) for a person that turned out not to be a family member.  What to do with these?  They aren't doing me any good.  I've accumulated a few of these at this point, so I thought I'd post about them in the hope that other researchers who can use them might read about them here before ordering them.  It's easy to spend a lot of money doing research; helping someone else save some money is a good thing.  These are all high-resolution scans, all but one from microfilm.  All are from New York City except one marriage license from Cuba.

Edwin Carroll Atwood and Margaret Victoria Andren marriage license, Manhattan, New York, May 9, 1931

Alex Blumenkranz and Leah Citron marriage license, Bronx, New York, December 1, 1934 (first page only)

Julius Fitzgerald and Margaret Andrew marriage license, Manhattan, New York, January 21, 1937

Herman Greenberg and Dorothy C. Itzkowitz marriage license, Bronx, New York, May 21, 1935 (first page only)

Jerome V. Heim and Margaret C. Andrews marriage license, Queens, New York, September 5, 1931

Jerome Klosenberg and Edith Posnick marriage license, Bronx, New York, June 9, 1935 (second page only)

Herschel Kosewen and Maria Wiernicka marriage license, Havana, Cuba, March 19, 1937

Irving Strauss and Rebecca Kshonz marriage license, Bronx, New York, November 24, 1934 (second page only)


Dora Sandals birth certificate, Manhattan, New York, February 23, 1899

Beckie Sandler birth certificate, Manhattan, New York, March 11, 1895

Joseph Sandlowitch birth certificate, Manhattan, New York, May 23, 1893


Margaret (Webster) Morrison death certificate, Bronx, New York, November 27, 1923 (first page only)

John O'Brien death certificate, Bronx, New York, November 27, 1923 (second page only); wife Mary O'Brien

An Administrative Change of Sex

I have tried three times in the past to obtain a copy of my grandfather's birth record by mail.  He had claimed several different years at different times but always used the date of April 6.  He eventually settled on the year of 1903.  The first time I wrote to the New Jersey State Archives in Trenton and requested a search for Bertram Sellers, giving a range of 1903 ± 5 years.  No luck.

The second time I tried "male" Sellers, thinking that maybe the given name had not been formalized yet when the birth was registered, still with the range of 10 years.  "Sorry, no record was found . . . ."

My third attempt was after I had acquired a copy of my great-grandparents' marriage record.  They were married on November 7, 1903.  I thought, Hmm, if he really was born in April 1903, before the marriage, maybe he was registered under his mother's maiden name.  So I sent in a request for Bertram or male Armstrong.  Still nothing!  This was becoming annoying!

I finally decided it was going to require someone going in person to actually browse through the records.  As my sister lives in Pennsylvania, she's the closest relative to Trenton, and she had told me once she would be willing to go look for records to help with the family history research (silly girl!).  So I hit her up, and she agreed to go.  Of course, she keeps a very busy schedule, so it took her a while, but she was finally able to go to Trenton today.  And what did she find?  A record for a female child, *Gertrude* Armstrong, born April 6, 1903, mother's name Laura Armstrong.  No father was listed, merely the socially disapproving abbreviation "OW" (out of wedlock).  With the correct birth date and mother's name, this certainly seemed to be the record we wanted, but Gertrude?  Female?  Was this perhaps a heretofore unknown twin of my grandfather, and his birth was still hiding?

But the lovely people at the archives found a second record.  In 1940, my great-grandmother filed a form to correct or amend a birth certificate.  She said that the child listed as female had actually been male, and instead of Gertrude L. Armstrong, the name really should have been Bertram Lynn Sellers.  Oh, and by the way, since it wasn't on the original record, the father's name was Cornelius Elmer Sellers, and here's the marriage date.  (And I finally understood why the archives had not been able to find the record before.)

So at the age of almost 37, my grandfather had a sex change — on paper.

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!