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.

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?