Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #23 The Slow Road

To the South

Lyubishev
75km to the south-west of Pinsk lies Lyubishev, a small town just across the Ukranian border. There were strong connections between the Jewish communities of these two towns; I know for instance that there were Schreibman families, who may or may not be related to mine, that moved back and forth from one to the other. So it is not surprising to see a Zaturensky link too. Ester Portnoi, the wife of Meer's son Joseph, was born there, as she states on the birth record of their son Maier in 1909:

As we have seen, on her passenger manifest in 1907 it also appears as her last residence before emigrating to the USA, which suggests that she might have been staying there with her parents after Joseph emigrated in 1904.

Moving North

Nesvizh
However, soon after Joseph left, Ester appears to have been living in Nesvizh, which is 160km to the north of Pinsk, and is at bottom right of this map. On her passenger manifest, Ester names the town as the birthplace of their daughter Leia in 1905:

As we have discussed, Nesvizh is the Zaturensky town, the closest urban centre to the original family village Zatur'ya. There may have been family members who had not moved to Pinsk, and were still living in Nesvizh. Maybe Joseph and Ester moved there after they married. Unfortunately, Joseph's own manifest doesn't offer us any of this information. It just says his last residence was London - but then that's what it says for all 30 people on the page. I presume that just means they all arrived in London from wherever, and waited a few days there until they managed to get on this boat from Southampton. Oh, and he had $20 in his pocket.

Baranovichi
The other three places on the map refer to the family of Joseph's brother, Berl/Benjamin. The earliest is for his son 'Charles Henry', who arrived in the US with his mother Friede in 1906. As we have noticed, their names are almost obliterated on the copy of the form that we have, but it looks as though his original name could have been 'Izak'. In some later documents he appears as 'Isadore'. According to the manifest he was 3 years old at the time, so he would have been born around 1903.

When Charles applied for US Naturalisation in 1927, he stated that he had been born in Baranovichi:

Baranovichi is at the bottom centre of the map, and is the nearest substantial town to Nesvizh, some 50km to the west. In fact, we learn from the birth record of their son Morris, b 1910, that Friede - Fanny in the US - had herself been born in Baranovichi:

So in the period 1904-05, both Joseph and Berl - or at least, their wives - were living in or fairly near to Nesvizh, in the centre of Belarus.

Vseliub
Charles, then, was born in Baranovichi in February 1904. A few months later his father Berl is on the boat from Antwerp to New York, saying his last place of residence was "Selip":

The only town I can find that seems to fit is Vseliub, which is about 100km to the north of Nesvizh. It lies between the larger towns of Novogrudok and Lida, and is well out of Nesvizh's sphere of influence. I was dubious about this at first, although Vseliub is the sort of small town that people from elsewhere wouldn't even have heard of - so if someone gives it as their last place of residence they must have a reason for doing so.

Radun
Then I saw his wife's manifest. Friede left a couple of years later, in October 1906, with the 3 year-old 'Charles', travelling from Antwerp to Quebec in Canada. This, by the way, could explain how come, when Charles's wife was the informant on his death certiciate in 1979, she said he had been born in Montreal. On the manifest Friede says their last place of residence was Radun:

Now I've nothing against Radun, and I must admit I know very little about it, but it is probably fair to say it is the least significant place we've yet come across, barring maybe Zatur'ya, our ancestral village. It's a small town right in the north of Belarus, close to the border with Lithuania. It's another 80km north of Vseliub, the place that Berl had given as his last residence 2 years earlier. And it probably trumps Vseliub in insignificance.

The process of emigration
We often wonder how our ancestors got from their shtetls across the length and breadth of the Pale of Settlement - from places like Pinsk, say, or Nesvizh - to emigration ports like Libau, Hamburg, Antwerp or London, before boarding the steamers that carried them across the Atlantic to America.

The big surge in emigration from the Russian Empire began in the early 1880s, and continued up to the start of the First World War in 1914. Our Zaturenskys are slap-bang in the middle of it, small players in a massive movement of people. Something like 3 million made roughly the same journey. Some ended up in Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe, most found their way to America. For the most part their journeys are undocumented, apart from the passenger manifests kept by the transatlantic steamship companies, which as we have seen, can sometimes provide a wealth of otherwise unbtainable information about people's lives.

However, we know very little about these journeys. How did they travel? By train? By horse and cart? Where did they stay on the way? With friends or family? At wayside inns? How long did it take? Where did they eat? How did they carry their luggage? How did they keep in contact with the people they had left behind, and those they were going to? And how did they pay?

The Slow Road
We can get a glimpse of how this all worked for a couple like Berl Zaturensky and his wife Friede Daletisky, from hints dropped in a disparate range of documents over not only the period of their journeys, but across several futher decades.

We see that starting out from Friede's home town of Baranovichi, shortly after the birth there of their son 'Charles' in February 1904, they moved north to Vseliub. We don't know why they went there, but Berl at least did not stay long. He travelled across Europe to Antwerp, where he caught the boat to New York in October, with his $20 in his pocket. His brother Joseph had made the same journey that summer, and Berl was aiming to join up with him in Chicago. Maybe eventually they would join their sister Rochel Leah in Peoria. Their younger sister Sarah must have followed their path soon after, although we have not yet found her travel details.

After Berl's departure from Vseliub, Friede moved on with baby Charles to Radun. Again, we don't know why she went there, or how long she stayed, but she left in October 1906, and followed Berl's path to Antwerp, and on to Chicago via Quebec and Detroit.

For Berl and Friede emigration was slow process, undertaken in stages. It took 2 and a half years for them both to get from Baranovichi to Chicago, with stays in Vseliub, Radun and Antwerp on the way, and who knows where else. We have a few dates and places that enable us to fix some of the key points in their journeys. But we do not really have answers to any of the questions we posed above.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #22 The Pinsk Connection

 

Nesvizh might be the Zaturensky town, and Zatur'ya (orange pin) might be the village they originate from - but most of my Zaturenskys seem to come from Pinsk. However, we have been unable to recognise any members of this family in the available records for Nesvizh, or anywhere else in Belarus, including Pinsk. The information we have comes almost exclusively from what they tell us themselves, after emigration.

This first map indicates the place of birth and/or the last residence before emigration of family members, as shown in their responses to questions in a variety of US documents, such as passenger manifests, birth, marriage and death records and certificates, and military draft documents.

The families of the two brothers, Movsha and Meer, are represented by blue and green pins respectively. As you can see, the blue pins - Movsha's family - congreagate in Pinsk, in the south of Belarus. Some of Meer's greens are in Pinsk, but they are also spread out in a number of other places, and we'll try to track the significance of these places later.

From Zatur'ya to Nesvizh
I suggested in the last post that the family probably moved from the original village Zatur'ya to the nearby town Nesvizh, some time before the imposition of the surname decree in the Pale of Settlement around 1804. The thinking behind this suggestion is that they would not be likely to be called 'Zaturensky' whilst still living in Zatur'ya - it would make no sense, since everyone living there was "from Zatur'ya". If they moved after 1804, they would have already had a distinctive surname - or been given one - as a consequence of the decree. 

Zatur'ya is a small village. People in towns above a certain distance away would not have heard of it. So the designation Zaturensky - 'from Zatur'ya' - would be meaningless to them. The name would only make sense to folk who knew where Zatur'ya was. This is why, in the 19C records, you find very few Zaturenskys in places other than Nesvizh.

And so to Pinsk

Pinsk was a much larger town, and a major centre of Jewish life and culture throughout the 19C, so it is not surprising to see people moving there from smaller towns such as Nesvizh during this period. Our Zaturenskys seem to have been there from at least 1840. The evidence we have for this is indirect, but it is all we have.

Dora

Movsha's daughter Dora died in 1945, and this is from her death certificate. It says that her father was 'Morris Toransky', and that his birthplace was Pinsk. We can estimate that Morris/Movsha would have been born by 1840 at the latest, as his first child (that we know of), my great-grandmother Shprintsa, was born c1858. As with all these records, we have to bear in mind who the informant was, and make a judgement as to how far we can rely on their information. 

In this case the informant was Dora's son Sam, who himself was born in Peoria in 1889, shortly after Dora emigrated. Movsha did not emigrate, so Sam would never have known him. This could just be a case of Sam responding to a question he doesn't know the answer to, and making a best guess - his mother had told him she was born in Pinsk, so let's just say her Dad was too. On the other hand, Sam could just have replied with "Don't know", as people often did on these forms. But he didn't; he said his mother's father had been born in Pinsk. 

Schmul

This is from the death record of Dora's brother Simon (Schmul), who died in Peoria in 1926. His wife - and cousin - Elizabeth (Rochel Leah) had died 3 years earlier, so the informant would be one of their children, who were all born in the USA, and would not have known their grandfather Movsha. By this stage of course Schmul had changed his own surname from Zaturensky to Moses to Morris, and it is this surname that the informant retrospectively allocates to their grandfather. They also call him 'Herman', not Movsha/Morris, although Schmul's headstone clearly calls him 'Schmul son of Moshe Chaim' - so the family knew his Hebrew names. So 'Herman Morris' in this record is the same person as 'Morris Toransky' in Dora's record: Movsha Zaturensky, my great-great-grandfather.

Anyway, the point of interest here is that the document purports to tell us the birth place not only of Schmul's father (Movsha), but also of his mother: both were born in Pinsk. And Schmul's mother is almost certainly Sura, the great-great-grandmother that I have just discovered.

Joseph
We know of 4 children for Movsha: Shprintsa, Schmul, Dora and Joseph. So far we have seen that not only were Movsha and his first wife Sura (both b c1840) probably born in Pinsk, but also 3 of his children, Shprintsa (c1858), Schmul (c1861) and Dora (c1870). The fourth one, Joseph, does not seem to have left us any evidence of his birthplace. He was born around 1872, immigrated in 1891, naturalised in 1895, appeared in 5 Censuses, and eventually died in 1965, well into his 90s. But in all this documentation, he never once tells us where he was born. Nor do any of his children. So while there's no evidence to suggest he was born in Pinsk, there's no reason to believe he was not.

Benjamin Gitelman
There is another person we need to take into consideration. In 1923, Benjamin Gitelman arrived in Los Angeles with his wife and 4 young children. Their last residence was Pinsk, and they are all shown to have been born there, Benjamin in 1885. They were coming to Benjamin's "half-brother" Sam Kawin, who at that point was living with his mother, our Dora. Benjamin and his family moved into a house built in the back-yard of Dora's home, and stayed there for the following 20 years at least. Some time in the 1920s he took on Dora's married surname, Kawin. To all intents and purposes Benjamin appears to be a son of Dora; on his death certificate his mother's maiden name is given as "Terensky".

I wrestled for a long time with this relationship, and finally came to the conclusion that Dora would not have been old enough in 1885 to be the mother of Benjamin and another son Hirsz. Plus, she would have had to leave them both behind in Pinsk when she went off to America to marry Joseph Kawin.

Benjamin's mother
So I would have to "invent" a mother for Benjamin. For the dates and biographies to fit, this mother would have to be a sister to Dora, but slightly older; it would also be quite convenient if she were to be called Beila. In any event, all Benjamin's own evidence points to him having been born in Pinsk in 1885, so whoever his mother was, she was almost certainly a Zaturensky, and must have married a Gitelman, and she must also have been in Pinsk in 1885.

Meer's family

Meer's children are Rochel Leah, the wife of Movsha's son Schmul, and the later arrivals Berl (another who was known as Benjamin in the USA), Joseph and Sarah; all of them took on the name Terensky in America. The closest we get to a place of birth with Rochel Leah (b 1872) is 'Russia' on her death record. Sarah (b 1893) offers us 'Poland' on a Social Security form. Neither mentions a town.

Berl and Joseph are a bit more helpful. When Berl's sons Morris (1910) and Abraham (1914) are born in Chicago, their father's place of birth is given as Pinsk, give or take a vowel:

Similarly, at the birth of his son Maier in in Chicago 1909, Joseph tells us that he himself was born in Pinsk:

It's a fair bet that Meer's two daughters Rochel Leah and Sarah were also born there, though they were both reluctant to tell us so.

It's not all Pinsk

So far, everyone who has indicated a place of birth, has told us: "Pinsk". However, some of their documents indicate that other places also play a part in the family story, and we will look at a few of these in the next post.

The Fourth Ring

The Certificate
The discovery last week of the death certificate of my great-grandmother, Shprintsa Schreibman née Zaturensky, marked a bit if a landmark for me. In the last column of the certificate, she - Szprynca Szrajbman in the Polish spelling - is identified as the "daughter of Movsha Chaim and Sura". So these are my Zaturensky great-great-grandparents. They were probably born around 1835-40.

I knew Movsha Chaim's name - actually I think he's really "Movsha son of Chaim" - from my visit to Pinsk 10 years ago (10 years next week, in fact). The Jewish Community there gave me a few sheets of paper containing handful of references - all they had - to my Schreibman family, including a typed-out list of Szrajbman burials. This list included Szprynca, who died in 1932, and was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in the centre of town - sadly, it was dug up many decades ago by the Soviet authorities, and the land was re-purposed for a primary school.

As is usual in both Russian and Jewish traditions, the entry for Szprynca on this list showed her patronymic name: she was the daughter of Movsha Chaim. Another listing, this time of the birth record for her son Meer in 1897, had given us both her given name: Shprintsa, and her family name: Zaturensky. This was a great stride forward at the time, as we had not been aware of any of these names.

So, putting the two documents together, we knew that her father was Movsha Chaim Zaturensky. But there was no clue anywhere as to the name of her mother. Until last week - 10 years later - when I was trawling through the very few Pinsk records that are available online in the FamilySearch collection.

And there she is: Sura.

The Wheel
I began to enter the name into the family trees I keep in various places. I started with the master Tree I keep on my computer, using the MacFamilyTree software, and thought to myself, how does this look in the fan-chart? Sura will appear in the circle of my great-great-grandparents, four rings out from me - my Wheel of 16. How far have I got with that?

There she is, at the top, just to the left of centre, in a sort of lime-green colour. Hers is the last name to be added to the 4th ring of the circle, meaning that I now know the names of all my great-great-grandparents. Sura completes my Wheel of 16. 

I know there are people who have traced their ancestors - all their ancestors - back a generation or two further than this. 

But for me, this is a major landmark.

The Landmark
When I started researching, 12 years or so ago, I knew the names of 7 of my 8 great-grandparents - that is to say, my parents had known the names of their own grandparents, even though they had never seen most of them. The only ones I had 'met' in person were Barnet and Kate Waxman, as they were called in England, but they had both died by the time I was two years old. The only other one of the eight to emigrate was Mikhlya Levin, who had died in London well before I was born. The others all stayed, and died, in Poland or Belarus. In fact, checking over their dates now, the Waxmans were the only ones who were still alive when I was born.

Of the women - my 4 great-grandmothers - Mikhlya Levin was the only one we had a surname for. For two of them - including Kate - we had their given names but not their maiden names, so we had no idea what their family was, or where they had come from. The fourth one, the one we knew nothing about at all, was Shrpintsa.

And the next generation back - my 16 great-great-grandparents - were a total mystery, not only to me but to my parents and all their brothers and sisters. We couldn't even guess at their names, and even if we thought we knew where they came from, our assumptions have turned out to be mostly wrong.

We now have full names for 13 of the 16, with places of origin for most of them; family names are missing for just 3 of the women (including Sura). This in turn has enabled us to trace some of them back a further generation, to the Fifth Ring, and find out where they lived and something about their lives. And of course every step back creates a starting point for tracing sideways and forwards, towards cousins around now that you never even knew existed.

So to find Sura, and complete my Wheel of 16, really is a landmark.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #21 Sura cited

Up until last week, I had no documentary evidence for either of what I take to be the two wives of my great-great-grandfather Movsha Zaturensky. My working assumption was that the first wife was called *Beila, and that she was the mother of Shprintsa and Schmul. This is the name that was suggested in the Tree of one of my DNA Cousins; it seemed to fit the naming patterns, and it was all I had to go on.

Shprintsa's mother

However, a few days ago I found this:

It's the death certificate of my great-grandmother Shprintsa (Szprynca in Polish), who died in Pinsk in 1932. In the final column she is identified as:

"Szprynca Szrajbman, daughter of Movsza-Chaim and Sura, registered in Pinsk"

I came across this document whilst trawling through the Pinsk records available on the FamilySearch website. I already had the date of her burial, and her father's name, from a typed-up list of Szrajbman burials given to me when I visited Pinsk in 2011. However, this is the death record, and it carries one extra piece of vital information: the name of Shprintsa's mother, and Movsha's first wife: Sura.

My great-great-grandmother.

Movsha's two wives

Sura is probably also the mother of Schmul, Movsha's second child. There then follows a gap of 5 years or so before the next child, who I believe to be a *Beila, and who I am positing as the mother of Benjamin Gitelman. The evidence at the moment suggests that Sura died at some point between 1861 and 1865, and Movsha re-married. Some of the family trees suggest that this second wife was called *Chana, and she would be the mother of Movsha's other children:  *Beila, Dora and Joseph.

The Sura Lines

Shprintsa's husband was Nevakh Schreibman. She was his second wife, and she had 4 children with him that we know of. The first was a son, Movsha - my grandfather, born in 1883. The second was a daughter: Sora, born in 1885. We have looked several times at the Ashkenazi custom of naming a child after a recently deceased close relative. For a son, it's often the father who gets to choose the name - Nevakh's father was Movsha Dovid, so we presume that he had died some time before the birth of my grandfather Movsha in 1883, so the name was available for the new baby. For a daughter, it would be the mother's choice, so Shprintsa names the first baby girl after her own mother, who we think had died some 20 years earlier: Sora.

Now let's check how Shprintsa's brother, Schmul, and his wife Rochel Leah, name their children. They are all born in the USA, so all are known by English-language names. In accordance with the tradition, the first daughter's name is chosen by the mother: she is named 'Bessie', after the anglicised name used by the family to refer to Rochel Leah's mother. The second daughter, born in 1898, is called Sarah - and with our latest discovery, we can now surmise that this child too could be after Schmul's mother: Sora.

The end of the *Beila Hypothesis?

So *Beila is now Sura. This of course has major implications for my *Beila Hypothesis, which I will now have to go back over, and re-fashion. A genealogist's work is never done.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #20 Zatur'ya

The Zaturensky town

Zaturensky in the Belarus records

If you go to the Belarus database on JewishGen and do a search of Revision Lists for the name "Zaturensky", the results are quite striking.

Zaturenskys in Belarus: 102

. . . of which in Nesvizh: 98

. . . . . . . . and elsewhere: 4

The name is almost unique to the small town of Nesvizh, more or less in the centre of the country.

These Revision Lists were compiled periodically across the Russian Empire, in an attempt to keep track of the population for the purposes of taxation and conscription. The Lists we have for Nesvizh cover most of the 19C, up until the 1870s. Here, as in many places, they are more or less the only records we have, as vital records - birth, marriage & death - are scarce across the whole of Belarus. There are just a handful of late 19C Zaturensky birth records from Pinsk, and I have not been able to identify any members of our family from them. Most of these Pinsk records indicate that the father is registered in Nesvizh, signifying that he was originally from there. This reinforces the impression we get from the Revision Lists  - that Nesvizh is the Zaturensky town.

There is a good reason for that.

The Zaturensky village

Just 15km from Nesvizh (present population 14,000) is a little village called Zatur'ya (pop 450). The name "Zaturensky" signifies "a person from Zatur'ya". Remember that until the end of the 18C, most Jews in the Russian Empire did not have fixed surnames. They generally used patronymic names, identifying themselves as the son or daughter of so-and-so, such as Movsha Khaimovich - Movsha son of Khaim.

However, if someone moved from their native place to a different town or region, their new neighbours would sometimes refer to them by their place of origin. So for example, in a town like Nesvizh, Movsha Khaimovich from down the road in Zatur'ya could be distinguished from Movsha Khaimovich the shoemaker who has always lived round the corner, by calling him Movsha Khaimovich Zaturensky. My great-great-grandfather.

The village is named for a nearby river called Tur'ya - "Za Tur'ya" means "on the Tur'ya". In 1587 it is mentioned in a tax record as an estate belonging to the Radziwills, a powerful Polish noble family. Jews first came into the area from Poland during this period, often brought in by the Polish nobles to act as estate managers and tax collectors. This did not necessarily endear them to the local peasantry.

Our village?

There is a fascinating website called 'Our Village' maintained by a local teacher from a nearby village (Yushevichi/Rakovichi on the map), dealing with local history. It highlights the way the lives of Jews and Belarussians were intertwined in these villages throughout the centuries. They each kept their respective religious and social customs, and never intermarried, but they lived side-by-side, and they were economically interdependent. Their languages, Yiddish and Belarussian, borrowed words and turns of phrase from each other, and even jokes and insults. The website is in Belarussian, but Google Translate does a wonderful job!

From the satellite view, you can see that the village of Zatur'ya consists of a single main street - "Central Street" - with one other street parallel to it for part of its length. I would hazard a guess that the original settlement, in the days of the Radziwill estate, is located just above the crossroads to the left of the photo, with the River Tur'ya just to the left of that. The Jews who worked for the Radziwill estate in the 18C may well have lived just there.

My guess is that some time before the surname decree, ie by the turn of the 19C at the latest, my ancestral family moved from this village to Nesvizh, where they became known as "Zaturensky" - "from Zatur'ya" - and the name stuck.

Leib and his horse

Here's the story of Leib and his horse, from the 'Our Village' website mentioned above.

Sketches of the past: Leib's horse

To this day, when a good horse doesn't want to work, the villagers shout at him that he's like "Leib's horse", and they do not spare the whip. 

In fact, the Jew Leib once had a heavy Belgian horse, to the envy of all the neighbours, very strong, but quite stubborn and slow. Often older people, looking at the coat of their own horse, recalled: "Wow, that was some horse that Leib had!".

Leib loved and respected his horse. Even when it got old.

"Leib, how old is your horse?"

"Twelve."

The following year, Leib was asked again:

"Leib, how old is your horse?"

"Twelve."

And so again for years to come. 

Since then, when an elderly person is confused, they say: "You're as old as Leib's horse!"