Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #18 The Cousins Arrive

The Zaturensky family
The current state of my knowledge is that my Zaturensky family derives from two brothers who lived in Pinsk in Tsarist Russia in the late 19C, sons of Chaim. They were Movsha and Meir, and several of their children emigrated to the United States. My own great-grandmother Shprintsa is the only one of their children known to me who did not leave Russia. There may be more brothers or sisters, there may be more children who stayed, and more who emigrated.

Most of the story so far has concerned the children of Movsha, my great-great-grandfather: Schmuil (who became Simon Morris), Dora, and latterly Joseph. We were introduced to Meir when we realised early on that Schmuil had married his cousin Rochel Leah, daughter of Meir. However, Rochel Leah is not alone. She has three siblings who we can trace back to the same father, Meir: Benjamin, Joseph, and Sarah.

All of the emigrants followed the same over-arching route, from Pinsk to Peoria in Illinois; some dallied for a while in Chicago, and they all - or their children - eventually found their way over to Los Angeles. I'll trace their journey across the USA in a later post, and I'll also be having a closer look at where they came from in Russia - you'll see some hints of this below, in some of their passenger manifests.

Let's look first at their emigration stories, more or less in chronological order. The first to appear is Movsha's son Schmuil.

Movsha: Schmuil
In 1881 Schmuil Zotoranski, aged 20, and his wife Pesia (18), arrived in New York aboard the ss Suevia from Hamburg. This Schmuil may have been the Schmuil who was a brother of my great-grandmother Shprintsa Zaturensky, the man who appears at the beginning of our story as 'Simon Moses'. I can't be sure, as I have not found any further documents showing this couple. On the other hand, I have not found an immigration record for any other Schmuil who could fit the bill.

We know that 'Simon Moses' applied for US naturalisation in 1886 in Peoria, Illinois, where much of our Zaturensky story unfolds, but the actual application document is not available online, so we don't know what further information it may hold, such as place of birth, or date and means of arrival in the USA. So, as of now, this Schmuil Zotoranski is our best bet.

I have found no further mention of his wife Pesia, under any likely surname, but I presume she died sometime during the following few years, as by 1893 Schmuil/Simon is married to 'Elizabeth', and they are having their first child, Bessie. 

Meir: Rochel Leia
Elizabeth turns out to be Rochel Leah Teransky, born c1872, and like Simon she is from Pinsk in Russia (now Belarus). She appears to have arrived around 1891, though I haven't yet found a manifest for her. If you think 'Teransky' sounds suspiciously like 'Zaturensky', you're spot on. Rochel Leah's father is Meir Zaturensky, and I am as certain as I can be that Meir is a brother of Schmuil's father Movsha (my own great-great-grandfather, if you're following). In other words, Schmuil and his new wife are First Cousins. I discussed the implications of this at some length in earlier chapters of this saga.

Movsha: Dora
Schmuil was followed over by his younger sister Dora, who must have come around 1888, though I have not been able to find a manifest for her. By the end of that year she had married Joseph Kawin, and was having her first child Abraham in Peoria.

Movsha: Joseph
Then a brother Joseph arrived around 1891. I was hoping to find him coming over together with his cousin Rochel Leah, who came around the same time, and was to marry Schmuil. Or maybe with his sister Dora, who came over a couple of years earlier. No such luck, however - Joseph seems to have come on his own. I have several candidate manifests, with names and dates approximating to his, but I'm not convinced by any of them. Joseph applied for US naturalisation in 1895, under the name 'Torensky', but of course this doesn't have to be the name that appeared on the passenger list 4 or 5 years earlier.

Joseph and Dora were probably half- rather than full-siblings to Schmuil and my g-g'm Shprintsa, ie, same father, different mothers. Shprintsa was the only one of Movsha's children to stay in Pinsk (she died there in 1932). Her son - my grandfather - Moshe Schreibman, did not follow his cousins to Peoria. He came to England in 1905.

Throughout the 1890s these three couples - Schmuil and Rochel Leah, Dora and her husband Joseph Kawin, and Joseph and his wife Sarah - raised their young families, and tried to make their living, in Peoria. And I still don't know why they headed straight (more or less) for Peoria in the first place. 

Meir: Joseph

And then Rochel Leah's siblings started arriving. These are the children of Meir, brother of Movsha. First off the boat was Joseph - not to be confused with the other Joseph, his cousin, who we have just been looking at - on 6 August 1904:

He's 26, married, and a shoemaker. And his name's spelt right!

Meir: Berl
Then his older brother Berl arrived on 7 December:

He's 28, married, and also a shoemaker. And his name's also spelt right - well, nearly. Berl's manifest shows him as coming from a place called "Selip", which may or may not be Vselub, a small town in the north-west of Belarus, halfway between Novogrudok and Lida. This is quite a way from Pinsk; it may be where his wife Fanny Daletisky comes from. We'll take a look at the places mentioned by the Zaturenskys in a later post.

Both of them are going to relatives in New York, Joseph to a cousin Eze Kolodny and Berl to a brother-in-law D Bleicher. I have not been able to trace either of these two relatives; so far as I can see, their surnames do not correspond any known Zaturensky-linked families, or to the families of the wives of the two brothers. The brother-in-law bit is intriguing - this would have to be either the husband of Berl's own sister (no - unless there's another sister we don't know about yet), or his wife's brother (wrong surname), or possibly his wife's sister's husband. Whichever way round, I've drawn a blank - there doesn't seem to be a D Bleicher around anywhere at that time.

In any event, neither of them spent much time in New York - they both seem to have headed straight on to Chicago.

Berl's wife Fanny

And then, in 1906, a 23 year-old married woman, surname Zaturenski, from Radun in Russia, with a 3 year-old male child, stepped off the boat in Montreal, Canada. They are at the bottom of the page, and as luck would have it, the corner of the page is torn off, and their given names have been obliterated. However, we learn that she is going to her husband Berl Zaturensky in Chicago; this must be Fanny, Berl's wife, and their first child, who became 'Charles Henry' in America.

Radun, by the way, is even further to the north than Vselub - it's north of Lida, right near the Lithuanian border. Is this where Fanny's family was from?

By 1908, when their son Nathan is born, Berl is calling himself 'Ben', and he's Benjamin Terensky thereafter, except on his death certificate in 1955, where he has anglicised the surname to 'Terence'.

Joseph's wife Esther
Joseph's wife Esther arrived in February 1907, with their daughter Leia.

Leia is shown as 10 months old, but this can't be right. As my father would have said, just do the vulgar fractions: 10 months back from Feb 1907 gives a birth date of April 1906, and yet Joseph had left Russia in July 1904. The 1910 Census shows her as 5 years old, ie a birth date of late 1904 or early 1905, which makes much more sense.

Their last place of residence is shown as Lubischow, which is to the south of Pinsk, across the border in present-day Ukraine. I wondered whether this was where Esther's own family - Portnoi - came from, except that the right-hand column (not shown here) says both Esther and Leia were born in Nesvizh, which is some way to the north of Pinsk, half-way to Minsk. Nesvizh happens to be the place whose records show the largest concentration of the name Zaturensky. There are not many Zaturensky births in Pinsk in the records we have, but several of those that do exist have the note, "father from Nesvizh". None of these records are identifiable as ours, but I do suspect that eventually we'll be able to trace our people back to Nesvizh.

Oy vey! What a plethora of places. I'm beginning to feel the need to have a proper look at the geography of this family. It's not all Pinsk, you know. Watch this space.

Meir: Sarah
The last to arrive seems to have been Sarah, the younger sister of Berl and Joseph. I haven't found a manifest for her yet, but she must have arrived by 1908, because she married Adolf Hartenstein in Chicago in 1909. Adolf had arrived in 1907 from Austria, so they would not have known each other before Sarah came to Chicago.

Next up: our families up sticks again, across the United States from Peoria and Chicago to Los Angeles.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #11 Dora's four by three

1920 - Dora and her daughter
When we found Dora Kawin (née Zaturensky) in the 1920 Census in Los Angeles, she was living with her son Sam, and her new - to us, at least - 18 year-old daughter Sarah. They were living at 468 West 46th Street, and there is no-one else registered at that address. Looking down the page, it looks like a street of one-family houses, rather than apartment blocks - and a quick check on present-day Real Estate websites confirms this. In fact several of them say the present building dates from 1922, so perhaps Dora was in an earlier building on the same plot in 1920?

Her other son, Abraham, is not there, because he had been called up for military service in 1917, and sadly was killed in action in France in October 1918, just a few weeks from the end of World War 1.

1910 - a mystery
Intrigued by the unexpected appearance of Dora's daughter Sarah in 1920, I looked for them in the previous Census, in 1910, when Sarah would have been around 8 years old. I couldn't find them. Where could they be? Maybe there was a spelling change that the searches were not picking up.

1930 - a surprise
So I looked at the next Census, in 1930, and found them this time, at the same address in LA:

Wow!

Two Kawin households, next door to each other! In the first one, at 468, is Dora, together with Sarah, who appears to have married, had a child, and divorced since the last Census. I'm itching to get on to 470, the the house next door, to see who the other family are, but before we do that, let's have a quick look at the dates suggested in the entries for Dora and Sarah:

Dora: age 61, so born 1869, Russia; first marriage at 17, so married 1886
Sarah: age 26, so born 1904, Iowa; first marriage at 18, so married 1922; looks like she has retained her married surname, Garbus.
Albert: age 7, so born 1923, California

Notice that Dora's date of birth seems to be creeping backwards at every count - I think the first estimate we found was 1872. And as I've suggested before, these details could be crucial.

And next door is ...
So who's this next door in 470? Benjamin Kawin and family? Kawin?? My genealogical antennae are twitching. Whenever I see two families with the same surname living in the same or adjacent dwellings - especially if there's no-one else in town with the same name, who I can't already account for - I immediately start wondering how they're related. And I'm wondering how come I've not spotted them before, either in LA or Peoria.

And then I notice (not shown here), that Benjamin and all his family were born in Russia, and immigrated in 1922. Let's just make a note of his dates:

Benjamin: age 43, so born 1887 Russia; first marriage at 23, so married 1910 Russia; immigrated 1922.

Thinking cap on.

Who is Benjamin Kawin?
We've seen that Dora's husband Joseph Kawin was born in Pinsk in 1863, and came to the USA in 1871, with his mother and all his siblings. His father Max had gone before. So Benjamin, born in Russia in 1887, cannot be a sibling of Joseph. And he's almost certainly not a son, because Joseph has been in the USA since 1871. Maybe he's a Kawin-side cousin, son of a brother of Joseph's father, Max?

So let's see if we can check his Passenger Manifest, maybe we'll see who he was leaving behind in Russia, and who he was going to in America. It shouldn't be too hard to find - as we've seen, Kawin is not that common a name. It turns out that it's so uncommon, that it's not there at all. There's no record of a Benjamin Kawin, any spelling, arriving in the USA in 1922. Or any other year.

Thinking cap on again.

No, really. Who is Benjamin Kawin?
He claims to have naturalised. Let's look for that. You've guessed. There's no record of a Benjamin Kawin, any spelling, naturalising in the USA between 1922 and 1930. Or any other year.

Then we stumble upon his Draft Registration Card from 1942:

Benjamin Kawin Gitelman, with the Gitelman struck through! So he was a Gitelman, and changed his name to Kawin. Why? And how come he's found his way to the house next door to Dora?

And can we now find a Manifest for him, and his Naturalisation documents, under his new, sorry make that his old, name?

Benjamin Gitelman, Manifest thyself!
Of course we can. The whole family sailed from Antwerp to New York on 23 November 1922. He's 36, so born in 1885/6. And who is his nearest relative in Poland (Pinsk was in Poland between the Wars)?

His brother Hirsz Gittelman in Pinsk. And he's heading for Los Angeles. Who is he going to, in LA?

Why, to his brother - sorry, make that his half-brother - Sam Ravin (known to us of course as Sam Kawin), of 468 West 46th Street, Los Angeles.

Wait a minute .... Half-brother? That must mean they share one parent, not two. Which one? Let's check what we have on these two at the moment:

Benjamin: born 1885/6 in Pinsk, father a Gitelman
Sam: born 1890 in Peoria, father Joseph Kawin

It's not the father.

It must be the mother.

Dora's new son
Dora has a new son. Well, she had him 36 years ago, but he's new to us. And he's brought his family all the way from Pinsk to Los Angeles, to live next door.

All this is confirmed in Benjamin's death record:

It's as our thinking cap has suggested - his mother was a Terensky, or as we know her, Zaturensky. He was born in Pinsk in 1886, when Dora was 17 years old; his father was a Gitelman, but we don't as yet have his given name. Dora left for America shortly after Benjamin was born, leaving him in Pinsk. The next thing we know of him is his arrival in New York in 1922.

Dora's Timeline
Let's have another look at Dora's dates, as best we can judge them at this point:

1869: born Dora Zaturensky in Pinsk, daughter of my great-great-grandfather Movsha
1882: brother Shmuel (Simon Morris) emigrates to USA; he naturalises in Peoria in 1886
1886: Dora marries a Gitelman in Pinsk
1885/6: son Benjamin Gitelman born in Pinsk; possibly a second son Hirsz as well, if he's a full brother to Benjamin (if he's a half-brother, he would have a different mother)
1888: 25 Dec, son Abraham Kawin born in Peoria, Illinois
1890: 23 Nov, son Samuel Kawin born in Peoria
1897: husband Joseph Kawin dies
1900: Dora and the boys living in Peoria
1901/04: daughter Sarah Kawin born in Iowa; but she can't be Joseph's daughter, he's been dead too long - so who is her father?
1910: (haven't found them yet)
1913: Dora, Abraham and Sam now living in Los Angeles
1918: Abraham killed in France
1922: Benjamin arrives from Pinsk with his family, and moves in next door

Dora's 4 by 3
And here's Dora's Tree, as we have it so far - it may help to have a different visualisation:

She has 4 children, by three different fathers, born in 3 different places, in two different countries. We have no marriage records at all, no birth records for any of the children, and no passenger manifest for Dora's immigration. We don't know the given name of Benjamin's father, or who brought the baby up in his mother's absence. And we have no idea at all of the identity of Sarah's father.

And most intriguing of all, we have no idea why 18 year-old Dora left her baby Benjamin behind in Pinsk and travelled 5,000 miles across the ocean to marry a friend of her brother's that she had never met.

So plenty of fun ahead!