Finding Florkiewiczs

"Hi, I just discovered ... "
Ten days ago I received an email via the JewishGen Family Finder beginning: "Hi, I just discovered .... ". It was from a lady called Emily Y, and what she had just found was that her grandfather's brother, Barney Rosenberg, had married someone called Sylvia Florkiewitz, in the 1920s, in New York. "The name seems to be quite rare," she said. "Do you have any information about it?".

Florkiewicz is the family name of one of my cousins, Eva, and no, we knew very little about them. I had listed it on the JGFF in the hope that one day someone like Emily, who seemed to know something we didn't, might spot it and get in touch.

Eva is my Second Cousin, her grandmother Chawa Frankensztajn was a sister of my grandfather Lajb. Chawa’s husband was Elias Florkiewicz, they married around 1914. Our Florkiewicz family stayed in Poland, in the village of Juliszew, near Gombin (Gabin), where the Frankensztajns were living. Elias died in the 1930s, and sadly Chawa and three of her children were killed in the Holocaust. The only one to survive was their daughter Laja, who managed to get out in time and was evacuated to the USSR.

After the War Laja returned to Poland with her husband Josef and their son Henrik. Eva was born a few years later, then when Josef died in the early 1960s Laja and the children emigrated to Israel. All Eva knew of her grandfather Elias Florkiewicz was that he had some sisters who had gone to America. It seems Laja knew nothing more about them. You can see more about Chawa and her family in these posts from a couple of years ago.

Emily's email prompted me to start looking again. Where had I got to with my research into the Florkiewicz family?

Well, it turns out that I had had a pretty good lead a couple of years ago, and that I had not followed it up. The clue is tucked away at the bottom of the Registration Card that Laja filled in when she returned to Poland after the War. 

1: Laja Florkiewicz's Poland Registration Card 1946

The Jewish Community in Poland registered the details of all Jews who had survived, and managed to return to Poland after the War. The Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw has an archive of all these registration cards, but they are not available online. Laja returned in 1946, and was registered in Lublin. When I was researching in Warsaw in 2014, Anna, one of the lovely people at the JHI, found her card for me. 

Section 15 of the card is ‘Relatives Abroad’, and there you will see the following entry (see top of this post):

Name: Florkiewicz Sura

Relationship: Grandmother

Country: USA. 

Here was confirmation that Laja’s grandmother Sura - Elias’s mother - had indeed emigrated to America. Anna had then helpfully located Sura Florkiewicz's Passenger Manifest for us, showing that she had emigrated in 1921. She suggested that Eva should be the one to follow this up, since it was her family - her cousins, hopefully - and Anna thinks people should be involved in their own research. I agreed, and passed the Manifest and the message on to Eva. You can probably guess what happened next - Eva and I both left it to each other, and neither of us followed it up.

Until Emily wrote. 

The first thing I did was to have another look at Sura's Passenger Manifest, which should tell us when she went, who she went with, where from, where to, and possibly other things as well.

2: Mendel Florkiewicz ANT-NYC 1921

This is the document that Anna had found for us. It shows Sura, with husband Mendel and children Chana, Laja and Malka travelling from Antwerp to New York in 1921. Their nearest relative back in Poland is shown as: ’son E Florkiewicz, Juliszow’. That’s their home village, and that has to be Elias. These are his parents and sisters.

3: Mendel Florkiewicz ANT-NYC 1921 p2

The New York Passenger Lists often have a second page. This shows where, and who, they are going to - in this case: ‘daughter L Blumenstock, 468 Hinsdale Street, Brooklyn’. This must be a fourth daughter, but all I knew about her was what is written here - she is married to someone called Blumenstock, and has obviously emigrated earlier. And she, or possibly he, has the initial 'L'. 

Climbing Trees

Then, as I was browsing the usual sites, I came across a Tree on Ancestry.com, put up by David G. His Tree had Mendel Florkiewicz (with a wife whose name is denoted 'Private') and 4 daughters: Pearl, Sylvia, Anna and Minnie. This was almost certainly our family - Mendel is Mendel, Anna is probably Chana, and Minnie could well be Malka, and the dates he has for them are a fairly good match to those on the Manifest. Sylvia could well be the person mentioned by Emily, Pearl is a new name, and he doesn't seem to have Laja; could Laja be the L Blumenstock shown on the Manifest?

Unfortunately for us, the only daughter David had any further information on is Minnie, who was the wife of Morris Schonberg. David turns out to be Minnie's grandson, and like us, he's very keen to share information.

Emily also has a Tree on Ancestry, but the only thing she had on Florkiewicz was the name Sylvia, married to Barney William (Benjamin) Rosenberg. She has a birth date of 1900 for her, similar to the date on the Manifest for Chana. She could possibly be the Sylvia on David's Tree. In which case that would give us 2 daughters who came over to the USA independently from the rest of the family - Pearl and Sylvia - making 5 in all. Elias is developing quite a family.

At this point I came across some Trees in a different part of the forest, on the Geni.com website. They were put up by Roseanne S and Marsha S, descendants of the Blumenstock family who were aware of the Florkiewicz connection. These Trees showed that Pearl Florkiewicz was married to Louis Blumenstock, and so she must have been the daughter 'L Blumenstock' that the family was travelling to in 1921. They also give us the families of Anna, who married Adolphe Feigeles, and Lillian - who must be Laja - who married Charles Eisenberg.

That now gives us families for all 5 of Elias's sisters. The next challenge would be to identify who are the sisters who became Pearl and Sylvia in the USA; we'll have to delve into the Polish records again for that.  

And then, the purpose of the exercise so far as Eva is concerned - to trace their descendants. What cousins does she have? The information we have gathered from the Trees, and the contacts we have made this week, will help us do that. We are in touch with Emily and David, and I have written to Roseanne and Marsha, but I have not yet heard back from them.

Meanwhile, back in Poland - who were Pearl and Sylvia?

4: Florkiewicz Births Warsaw 1915

The prime source for Jewish Family History in Poland is the website of JRI-Poland, who have indexed an enormous number of surviving vital records. I came across the listing in this document some years ago, but until this week did not realise that they are in fact the records of our own Florkiewicz family. The original documents are not available online, but this index shows that Mendel and Sura registered the births of these four children all at once, in 1915, some 10 to 15 years after they were born. I can only think that at this point they were hoping to emigrate, and needed proper documentation to obtain passports. I would not put much faith in the precise dates of birth they give - Chana and Malka are shown as too close together, for a start - but I would think that the order of birth is correct.

The new find is Szejwa, the eldest of the four children appearing here. I was thrown a bit at first by seeing this person listed as 'M' for 'Male'. I had not seen Szejwa as a masculine name before, and indeed Elias used the name for one of his own daughters, Laja's younger sister, born in 1919. I think this is a clerical error, either in the original document or in the transcription for this database.

So who is she? The candidates we have are Pearl and Sylvia, and the similarity of names strongly suggests she will turn out to be Sylvia.

Two further things we learn are that Sura's maiden name was Lipe, and that they all seem to have been born in the Powazki district, in the north of Warsaw. The original documents are held at the Jewish Historical Institute, I will see if I can order copies of them, they may tell us a bit more.

And notice that neither Elias nor Pearl are included here. Elias was already married by 1915, and would be responsible for obtaining his own documentation if he needed it. What about Pearl?

5: Perla Florkiewicz b 1893

The only original birth certificate for this family that I have managed to find through JRI-Poland is this one. It confirms that Perla is indeed a daughter of Mendel and Sura, and is several years older than the other 4 sisters. We don't yet have any document giving a year of birth for Elias, but I would guess he comes between Perla and the others.

Like all records of this period, it’s hand-written and in Russian. Very badly hand-written. However I have managed to decipher that Perla was born on 17 October 1893, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, to Mendel Florkiewicz aged 35 and Sura née Lipe, aged 24. Amongst other things it also gives us the house number: 1659/60, and I have since managed to find out exactly where this building was situated, in the centre of Warsaw.

And the bonus at the end is the signature of the father, in Russian: Mendel Florkiewicz, great-grandfather of Eva and David, and also of Marsha and of Roseanne's husband, if my arithmetic is correct!

We're on a roll now. When did Perla and Szejwa emigrate? Did they go together? Let's see if we can find their Passenger Manifests.

6: Stefania Florkiewicz ANT-NYC 1920

I eventually managed to track down this Manifest for Szejwa (Sylvia), arriving in New York from Antwerp in 1920. She is neither Szejwa nor Sylvia, but Stefania. However, we can identify her by her contact back in Poland: 'mother, Suhra Florkiewicz, Warsaw’. The name ‘Stefania’ is not an Americanisation of her name, as this would not have happened until after she had arrived in the USA, and the Passenger Lists were compiled before they got on the boat in Antwerp. It may have been a name she used in Poland, outside Jewish circles.

7: Stefania Florkiewicz ANT-NYC 1920 p2

Page 2 of her Manifest tells us that she was going to: ‘sister, L Blumenstak, Hunsdale Street 465, Brooklyn’. We now know this was Perla, and her husband Louis. Her passage was paid by: ‘brother-in-law’, ie Louis.

The 1920 US Census for Louis and Pearl Blumenstock shows their eldest child Ruth as 3 years old, which suggests they married before 1917. I'm currently trawling through the New York City Marriage Index, but have not yet found them. The release of this Index, by the way, was obtained by Freedom of Information action taken against the NYC authorities by Reclaim the Records, a not-for-profit organisation set up to "get public data released back into the public domain" - more power to their elbows!

This Census also says that Louis and Pearl immigrated in 1915, and were naturalised in 1918. I have not yet found documentation for either of these events. Did they emigrate together, or separately? Did they marry in Poland, or in the USA? Who were they going to? Did either of them have relatives already there?

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8: Descendant Chart Isadore Florkiewicz 3gen

Using these documents and many others, such as Census records, Birth, Marriage and Death listings, and others, I have put together this Tree. It shows what we currently know of the family from the parents of Mendel Florkiewicz, through three generations down to the children of Elias and his 5 sisters, Perla, Szejwa, Chana, Malka and Laja.

On Mendel’s Death Record his parents are shown as Isadore Florkowitz and Sylvia Zeshnick - but Isadore and Sylvia are not names that were used in Poland, they are clearly Americanisations. Either they emigrated as well, or Mendel used these forms when he spoke of them. Sura appears to have been the informant for this record, so it will have been she who supplied the names to the Registrar. My guess at the moment is that Mendel’s father Isadore would have been Icek (Isaac) in Poland, and his mother Sylvia would have been Szejwa - remember that Mendel's daughter Szejwa became Sylvia in the USA. Further, that his mother would have died some time before the birth of his daughter Szejwa, so that he was able to use the name for the new baby, in her memory.

I do have some names for the following generation, which is where Eva and David make their appearance, but there are a lot of blanks at the moment, which I hope to be able to fill in before too long.

What's in the name?

Going back through my emails, I have just realised that I was approached a couple of years ago, quite independently, by two people, one in Israel and one in France, who have connections to Florkiewicz families, and who may be connected to ours. The name does not appear to have been used by many Jewish families, but was reasonably common amongst gentile Poles, so many people with the name will not be related to us.

In fact one of our good friends in Gombin is Lukasz Florkiewicz, from a Polish Catholic farming family. He is intrigued by the fact that a Jewish community existed in the town for over 500 years; he now maintains the Jewish Cemetery in the town, and has been a tremendous help in our researches. He has researched his own family history back to the 18th Century, and can find no evidence of a Jewish connection. However we now know - from Perla’s Birth Certificate - that our Florkiewicz family was living in Warsaw from at least the 1890s. I will let him know what we have found!

I can only guess at how a Jewish family came to use the name Florkiewicz. Jewish families in this part of Poland were obliged by the Russian authorities to take on surnames in 1821; previously the tradition was to use patronymics - ie, people were denoted as being the son or daughter of their father. So I rather expect any Hebrew text on Mendel Florkiewicz’s headstone will say he was Mendel, son of Isaac. Jews took on all sorts of surnames at that point, often relating to places, people, or occupations; very occasionally they chose common gentile names. Florkiewicz could possibly just be a name that someone felt was rather nicer than some others, when the time came to make a choice.

Siblings

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CERTIFICATE 

The Administration of this municipality certifies that Hawa Frenkiensztejn and Lajzer Finkielsztejn are siblings, children of Jankew Josek and Gitla née Kon, and that this error occurred as a result of the wrong name being written on the birth certificate. 

This certificate was issued to Hawa Florkiewicz on her personal request.

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Finkelsztejn or Frankensztejn?

My grandfather’s brother Lajzer went through most of his adult life using a different surname to that of the rest of his family. He was always known as Finkelsztejn. His father and grandfather were both born Frankensztejn, and the name seems to have been adopted by the family around 1820. His brothers and sisters are all recorded as Frankensztejns. Lajzer and my grandfather Lajb used to tease each other as to which one had the ‘real’ name, but neither of them ever told us when or why this difference arose. Lajzer’s daughter Bracha wrote a family history a few years ago, but he had never explained it to her, and her research didn’t uncover an explanation either.

In the mid-1930s Lajzer’s sister Chawa was hoping to join him in immigrating to Palestine, then under British control. She obtained this document from the local authorities in Poland, certifying that, despite the difference in surname, they are in fact brother and sister. She must have sent it on to Lajzer in Tel Aviv, because Bracha came across it amongst a collection of his papers, just last year.

The ‘wrong name’

The Certificate says that the ‘error’ is due to a ‘wrong name’ on a birth certificate - but it doesn’t say what the error is, or on whose birth certificate it appears. So which is the ‘wrong name’? From other records, it seems that Lajzer was born in the town of Gombin, about 100km north-west of Warsaw, and Chawa in the nearby village of Juliszew. Unfortunately birth records from this area do not seem to have survived, so we can’t check directly. However, as indicated above, other records clearly show that the family name was Frankensztejn. So we still don’t know when, or why, Lajzer became known as Finkelsztejn. 

Immigration requirements

I have not been able to find out what immigration regulations the British authorities had in force at that time, but I presume that Lajzer would have had to show that Chawa, her children and her mother were members of his family, hence the need for this Certificate. He maybe also would have had to show that he would be able to guarantee their accommodation and upkeep, as Chawa herself was the only one of working age. The children were aged 14 and 16, and Chawa and Lajzer’s mother Gitla (my great-grandmother), was 75, although Lajzer entered ’65’ on the Immigration Certificate.

So who was Lajzer Finkelsztejn?

Tracking Lajzer down is proving quite entertaining. We have reason to believe that not only was his surname not really Finkelsztejn, but he wasn’t called Lajzer either, and was actually born several years after he claimed. But that’s a story for another day.

Chawa and her family

This is a Certificate of Residence obtained in Poland in 1935 by Chawa, a sister of my grandfather Lajb Frankenstein. She needed the documentation in order to apply for a passport; she was hoping to follow another brother, Lajzer, in emigrating to Palestine. A year later she wrote to Lajzer to say they weren't able to come at that time - for a discussion of that letter, see my earlier post 'Dear Brother'. Chawa never left Poland, but somehow the Certificate ended up amongst a batch of Lajzer's papers that his daughter Bracha came across a year or so ago. Chawa's grand-daughter Ewa - named for her - brought me a copy when she visited us from Israel earlier this year.

Ewa was keen - to put it mildly - to find out anything we could about her grandmother, and about her own mother Laja, and this document is a mine of information. As is often the case, it raises as many questions as it answers. Here's a brief outline of what we found out from the form.

In the document, issued in the town of Gombin (Gabin), Chawa is named as Chawa Florkiewicz, née Frenkensztejn. She is a widow. This in itself was new information for Ewa, as it implies that her grandfather Elias had died by 1935; she had known nothing of him apart from his name.

My great-grandparents
Chawa's parents are shown as Jankiel Josek and Gitla née Kon. This was the first documentary confirmation we had found of the names of our great-grandparents, and an indication of a family name - Kon - we had not been aware of.

Chawa's birth-date
Chawa is shown as born on 1 January 1891. I am always somewhat suspicious of birth dates from this period that appear as '1 January' or '31 December' - or other first and last dates - as births were sometimes not registered until weeks or months - sometimes years - afterwards. The parents may not have noted the exact day of the birth at the time, and just declared a convenient date for the registration. We don't have any other documentation for her at the moment, so we'll have to accept it until we do.

Juliszew - our ancestral home?
Chawa was born in Juliszew, a place Ewa and I had not heard of. We eventually located it on the map - a small village about 12km to the East of the town of Gombin, which is where we thought they all came from. We were so excited to have discovered what we took to be the family's ancestral home! However, when I mentioned this later to Bracha, and our American cousins, they all said, "Ah yes, Yoolashov, my Dad/Grandad/whoever mentioned that place". Nevertheless, this is our first documentary evidence.

Tylna 4
Other entries on the form show Chawa as a 'worker', Jewish, and of Polish nationality. She lives at 4 Tylna Street, which is the return address she put on the envelope containing the letter to her brother. She has lived in Gombin since 1915; before that, she lived in Juliszew.

Tylna Street now. The street is quite short, but there doesn't seem to be a number 4, and we couldn't work out where it would have stood.

The household
The lower part of the document lists the members of the household. Chawa is living with 4 children, which corresponds with what Ewa had heard from her mother. Her mother Gitla does not appear to be living with her, although she was with her a year later (see the letter to Lajzer). The children were all born in Gombin: Marjem born 1915, Laja (Ewa's mother) 1917, Szejva 1919, and the only boy, Jakub Josek, 1921. We noted that Jakub Josek appeared to be named after Chawa's father, Jankiel Josek - Jankiel is a diminutive form of Jakub. The tradition among Ashkenazi Jews was to name children after recently deceased close relatives, and not after those still living, so this suggests that Jankiel Josek had died by 1921.

What we have learned
We can conclude from the form that Chawa was almost certainly living with her parents in Juliszew until she married in 1915, at the age of 24. She and her husband then moved to Gombin, and raised their family there. Her husband died at some point between 1921 and 1935. Her father had also died, before 1921, leaving her mother Gitla on her own, though we think that Chawa's sister Chaia was probably living with her for some of that time. We can surmise from the letter to Lajzer, written a year later, that Gitla fell ill around 1935, when she would have been in her mid-70s, and came to live with Chawa.

Laja's birth-date
The big surprise to us was Laja's date of birth. Ewa had always understood from her mother that she had been born in 1921. This document puts her 4 years earlier. Another date puzzle!

Laja Florkiewicz, in the centre of the group of members of Hashomer Hatzair, a socialist-zionist youth group, 1934

Then I came across this photo, in the Gombin section of Ada Holcman's web site Zchor (Remember!). The young woman in the middle is named as Lea Florkewicz, and Ewa confirms that it is indeed her mother. The young man to her left is Meir Holcman, Ada Holcman's father. The year is 1934. What do you think? Is Lea 13 in this photo, or 17? Was she born in 1921, or in 1917?

The question is, why did she later - after the War - claim a birth date of 1921? On my trip to Poland in June I came across a couple of documents that take Laja's story a little further; I'll discuss them in a later post.

Laja was one of the few young people in this photo who did not perish in the Holocaust. She was the only member of her family to survive.