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.