Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #5 Herman unmasked

Finding Simon
So the challenge now was to find Simon Morris - and any references to his father Herman Turiansky - in the US records. Rebecca's Tree (above) shows a Sam Morris who looks as though he's the same person as Simon, and she also has a wife for him called Elizabeth Bessie, and a son called Al born in 1912. This was as far as her Tree went, so I presume this is probably her own family line and it's all she knows about it. As such, it should be full of clues, even if some of the detail might not quite be fully accurate. Plus, the only locations we have for them are Pinsk in Russia, and Peoria, Illinois.

If you've stayed with this story thus far, you will not be surprised to hear that I could find no suitable Simon Morris in any of the US Censuses in Peoria.

But here's Sam Morris with his family in Peoria in 1920:

Is this our 'Simon'? There are 3 daughters, followed by 3 sons: Herman, Meyer, and Abe. 'Herman' looks promising - is he named after Sam's father? And note that Abe, the youngest, was born around 1913 - could he be the 'Al' in Rebecca's Tree?

From Moses to Morris
Here's Sam in 1910 (the other family members are the same as in 1920, except for Abe, who hadn't arrived yet):

Yes, he's Simon at this point, and the surname is 'Mose'.

And in 1900 he's Simon Moses:

So Turiansky morphed to Moses, which became Mose and then Morris. At least we now know who we're looking for. The Census forms suggest that Simon and Elizabeth were married around 1892, but I haven't found a record for this as yet. Bessie, their first child, appears on the Censuses as born in Illinois in 1897.

Immigration and marriage
Unfortunately the US Census records for 1890 have not survived. We do find a Simon Moses in Peoria who took out US Naturalisation in 1886, which corresponds approximately with the year he gave in later Census returns. If this is the case, when they married in 1892 it was almost certainly in the US. There is also a Simon Moses in Joliet, Illinois in 1880, but he seems to be from Prussia, not Russia, so who knows?

Passenger manifests might possibly offer some information on his place of origin, and enable us to home in on given and family names, as well as confirming a date of arrival. There may even be travelling companions. There are several candidates for 'Simon Moses' in passenger manifests, arriving in the US from the mid-1880s onward, but I've not been able to positively identify any of them. There are none at all for Simon Turiansky/Terensky or similar.

Elizabeth was only about 18 when they married. The Census forms say she was born in Russia; she may have come to the US as a child with her family, or on her own as a later teenager. Either way, we don't know when she came (the Census forms give varying dates), we don't know how her given name would have appeared on the manifest, and we don't have her maiden name either.

This is beginning to look a bit like a brick wall.

Who is Herman?
At this point we need to remember that what we're really looking for is, who is Herman? He's almost certainly a Zaturensky, but where does he fit in?

His son Simon Morris died in 1926, as Simon not Sam, and if we're lucky, the Hebrew inscription on his headstone will identify him by his patronymic name, ie, it will say he is the son of Herman (whoever Herman is).

Here's the headstone:

The stone has been placed by his children - Elizabeth had died a couple of years earlier - so the information on Simon's Hebrew name will probably have come from them. This doesn't guarantee that it's 100% reliable, of course, but close family is a usually a better source for names than most others. All his children are under 30, and several of them had been living in the family home, at least until a few years previously. I think we can trust them, at least for the time being.

The second line tells us he is:

Mr Shmuel son of Mr Moshe Chaim

So Simon is Shmuel, and his father "Herman" is  ... Moshe Chaim.

Well, you must admit that 'Moshe Chaim' sounds a bit more Jewish than 'Herman'. Furthermore, the DNA relationship between Private Morris and myself is such that this has to be my Moshe Chaim, my great-great-grandfather. Herman Czar Terensky really is Moshe Chaim Zaturensky.

Saying "Hello" to the cousins my grandfather probably never knew he had
This in turn means that Simon Morris is the brother of my great-grandmother Shprintsa Zaturensky, and consequently his children were First Cousins to my grandfather Movsha/Morris Schreibman. This is significant to me, as it's the closest I have ever got to my grandfather, apart from his box of cabinet-maker's tools. And some of his DNA, of course. He came to London on his own in 1905, and we have never been aware of him being in contact with any relatives. This is not really surprising in this case, seeing that Simon - Uncle Shmuel - may well have left for America before Movsha was born in 1883.

My grandfather died in 1930, and I don't think my father and his siblings knew anything at all about his family apart from the name and occupation of his father - Nevakh Schreibman of Pinsk, a teacher of religion. I don't think they even knew the given name of his mother - Shprintsa.

So Private Morris and I are confirmed Third Cousins, or possibly one remove away, depending on how many generations down from Moshe Chaim Zaturensky he is. I hope he sees this!

Four more questions
All of which leaves us with at least four more burning questions:

1) Is Moshe Chaim one person or two - ie, is this one person with 2 given names, or should we read this as Moshe, son of Chaim? This question, which has come up previously over the records of my great-grandmother Shprintsa (see #1 Who is Private Morris? and #4 Two for the price of one), is not resolved by Simon's headstone.

2) How, and when, did 'Zaturensky' morph into 'Moses'?

3) The amount of DNA Private Morris shares with me is towards the top end of the range for 3C, and is getting on for 50% greater than I share with any of the other members of the Terensky Cluster, some of whom look as though they are from the same generation as him. This suggests that either:

i) he really is a generation above the others

or

ii) there's some other factor at play

4) And where exactly do all the other members of the Terensky Cluster fit in?

Questions, questions, questions ....

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #4 Two for the price of one

So it looks like my mystery cousin Private Morris and I are related in some way through the families of his ancestor Herman Czar Terensky and of my great-great-grandfather, Moshe Chaimovitch Zaturensky. They have the same surname, they are from the same town, they look like they are from the same generation.

Wading through the DNA
Private Morris and I share 184cM across 12 segments. This gives an average of 15cM per segment, which in turn means that there are probably 2 or 3 segments of over 20cM each, if not more, and possibly one or two substantially bigger ones. Multiple shared segments of this size suggest 3rd Cousin or thereabouts. AncestryDNA puts him at the upper end of my 3C range.

The chart at the Shared DNA Project, which is based on figures for known relationships submitted by thousands of volunteers, suggests that 184cM lies well above the range for 4C. It's at the upper end of 3C, but well above the average, which comes in at 74cM. There are also a number of possibilities in the 1CR-2CR range, but it is clear from the Trees below that this cannot be the case for this relationship. Another part of the chart shows half-relationships, and maybe we'll have to take those into consideration at a later stage.

Peering through the Trees

So where does our shared DNA come from? Who is our common ancestor? Let's put the two Trees, as we have them at the moment, side by side:

Now, bear in mind that I still don't know who Private Morris is. He could be a son of Al Morris, or of an as yet unknown second son of Simon. It is also possible that there could be a further generation between Simon and Al - there appears to be a gap of 50 years between them - in which case he would be a great-grandson of Simon, which would place him in my own generation

My Tree is I hope a bit clearer. If I'm starting off by looking for a 3C, then the common ancestor must be Movsha Zaturensky, or possibly a half-relationship descending from his daughter Shprintsa. Anything further out would not be able to produce the 184cM match. And Shprintsa doesn't seem to have had children with any other husband, so 3C it seems to be.

All I know about Shprintsa is that she was born about 1858, and was the second wife of Nevakh Schreibman, with whom she had a number of children, including this one:

One person or two?
So her father is Movsha-Chaim Zaturensky, who has what looks like two given names. This is the only document we have that mentions him, apart from her burial record. As I discussed in the first post (#1 Who is Private Morris?), he is shown there as 'Movsha-Chaimovitch', which suggests that he is Movsha son of Chaim.

So is Movsha-Chaim one person or two? This could be crucial, because we're hoping to find one or other of these names amongst Private Morris's ancestors.

So far, all we have is Simon Morris and his father, Herman Czar Terensky. They're not in the vestigial Tree attached to Private Morris's DNA results, but they are in Jennifer's Tree and they do seem to belong in mine. So where do they - and he - fit in?

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #3 What's in a name?

Who is Herman?

You will recall that my mystery match, who I am calling Private Morris for the moment (see #1 Who is Private Morris?), has a Tree which suggests he is descended from a Simon Morris b 1864. Then in the following post - #2 The Cluster Club - I included a couple of clips from the Tree of one of my other matches, Rebecca. She has a couple of versions. In one she shows what appears to be the same Simon Morris, with slightly different dates. She also has a Tree which shows a Sam Morris, whose dates are close to the other two. It looks like all three of these are probably versions of the same person.

Rebecca's Sam Morris has a father, Herman Turiansky. Aha. Immediately, several questions rear up. I know many immigrants americanised their surnames after they arrived; in most cases they chose a name that wasn't too far distant from the original. So how did Turiansky turn into Morris? It's nothing like it, not in Yiddish, not in Russian, not in English. It doesn't even begin with the same letter.

How come he's Herman?

And while we're at it, what sort of a Russian-Jewish name is Herman, anyway? For a start, there's no aspirated (breathy) 'H' sound in Russian. Any Yiddish word with this sound is transcribed with the 'G' letter in Russian (a hard 'g' as in 'golly'), so for instance 'Hirsh' gets written, and pronounced, as 'Girsh'. 

The name Herman was certainly used by Jews in German-speaking countries, and 'German' (hard 'g') does exist as a Russian name, but I have never seen it used in Russian-Jewish records. My guess at this stage is that if Herman immigrated to the USA, he may have chosen to adopt the name as part of his new American identity. However, there is no indication anywhere, in the records or the Trees, that he ever came to the US; I can find no reference to him anywhere in official documents such as Passenger Lists, Censuses, City Directories, Death Records, in the US or anywhere else. I don't believe he ever emigrated.

I believe that the information shown for Herman - given name, surname, son's name - is probably based on family information, such as the recollections of parents or grandparents, or perhaps family documentation, such as letters. At this stage, I was thinking that the name 'Herman' may have been what Simon put when he needed to enter his father's name in an official document, such as an application for naturalisation. Simon seems to have naturalised in 1886, but the naturalisation documents do not seem to be available online, apart from an index card with not much on it. So I can't check that, for the moment.

And if Simon emigrated some time before 1886, well they weren't asking for contact information at that point, so his father's name would not appear on his Passenger Manifest. And I can't find that, anyway.

Herman the Czar

And then I found a Tree posted on Ancestry by Rebecca's sister, Jennifer. She hasn't tested with AncestryDNA, so she's not in my original Cluster Club. Her Tree goes a good deal further - and she has a different name for Herman, as you can see above. He's now Herman Czar Terensky.

Czar? Really?? I know that a few Jews - a handful - achieved some form of eminence under the Russian Empire, maybe in the medical or other professions. But I wasn't aware of any Jew rising to the very top of the pile, to rule over lords and peasants as Czar of all the Russias. Not one from Pinsk, anyway.

So where does the 'Czar' come from?

Tsar Terensky
This is one of those where you have to say the words out loud. Bear in mind that 'Czar' is an odd spelling for this word in English - it should be pronounced 'Tsar'. Go to a quiet corner and say "Tsar Terensky" a few times over. Try it. Does it sound a bit like "Zaturensky"?

Zaturensky. That's my great-grandmother's family name. It's taken several weeks of head-splitting DNA analysis, and 3 whole blog posts, but we've finally got there. This is indeed my family, even though neither of us recognised the name the other was using.

When I explained all this to Jennifer, she said "Wow!", and "Oh yes - that's my brother's middle name - Zarterensky".

Now she tells me.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #2 The Cluster Club

Records
I started by trawling through the records, trying to trace my new mystery cousin - the "Private Morris" of post #1. I was hoping that I would be able to find out how he was linked to the Simon Morris who appeared in his Tree. Maybe in the course of this search I would be able to discover how they were related to me. I'll come back to this later, because this line of research was soon overtaken by one that proved to be much more significant.

Clusters
I had just started playing about with Clusters. This is a technique for putting the DNA matches you share in common with someone into groups, in which each member of the group matches each other member, or at least matches most of them. If you're lucky, you could end up with a limited number of clusters whose members match each other more than they match anyone else. If you're really lucky, you might be able to identify each cluster as representing a different branch of your family. So Cluster #1 might be recognisable as your paternal Smiths, cluster #2 might be your maternal Joneses, and so on. If you're really really lucky, you'll get 8 clusters that you can pin onto your 8 great-great-grandparents, one cluster each. Genealogy solved, at a stroke. Simple.

I should be so lucky.

Endogamy
Unfortunately, DNA inheritance is not that straightforward for people of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. We are historically an endogamous community, descended from what was initially a relatively small number of people - maybe only a few hundred at first - who moved eastwards across Europe during the Middle Ages. Later generations continued marrying within the community, each time passing down and recombining bits and pieces of the same original pool of DNA. We end up looking, to the DNA-analysing algorithms at least, as though we are all related to each other.

Nevertheless I gave it a try, just to see what would turn up. Here's what turned up.

My first Cluster run

There were a dozen or so fairly clear clusters, each in its distinctive (randomly allocated) colour, and a host of scattered grey dots that indicate people who were related to a second group in addition to their main one - endogamy in dots, as it were. Scanning through the names - not shown here - I spotted my mystery man, Private Morris. He's in the green cluster near the bottom, along with half-a-dozen other people, and as you can see, it's the most fully-formed cluster of all.

Take a moment to take that in. The green cluster is offering me a group of DNA matches which includes my mystery cousin and 6 others, who are all related to each other - and to me, of course. In other words, it identifies for me a group of people who all share a common ancestor with me. Wow! But which ancestor? Which branch of my family?

Which side are they on?
I already suspected that Private Morris would probably turn out to be on my paternal side, as he didn't match a known 1C1R on my mother's side. Neither did he match a 2C1R on my father's mother's side. So he must be something to do with the family of my father's father, Movsha Schreibman, who were from Pinsk, in Belarus. You may recall that his father was Nevakh Schreibman, and his mother Shprintsa Zaturensky.

Needless to say, I didn't recognise any of the people in the cluster, and could see no clue in their surnames. Three of them matched me at over 100cM, so were possibly 3C; the other 3 were in the range 50-70cM, maybe a generation further out. And as we saw in the earlier post, Private Morris shares over 180cM with me, so he could even be a generation closer. The good news was that all bar one of them had Trees, and this is where the fun really starts.

Fun with Trees
Here we go.

(I'm using my matches' given names here, but not their surnames)

Paul's Tree:

Rebecca's Tree:

and:

Dorie's Tree:

Harvey's Tree:

So, between the four of them, they have:
names: Turnansky, Turiansky, Terensky, Terensky
births: Pinsk, Pinsk, Minsk, Pinsk
dates of birth: 4 different ancestors born between 1863 and 1882
deaths: Los Angeles, Peoria, Houston, Los Angeles

Plus, Rebecca seems to have:
- Simon turning into Sam, with slightly different dates
- Simon/Sam changing his surname from Turiansky to Morris
- Simon's father named as Herman

One family?
At this point it looks like we are looking at four descendants of the same original family, each telling substantially the same story, albeit with minor differences:

i) they all claim descent from some variant of  T*r*nsky
ii) they all reference Pinsk, or Minsk, which could amount to the same thing - it was the regional capital (and is now the capital of Belarus)
iii) two of them - with surnames recalled differently, so possibly from different branches - end up in Los Angeles
iv) the variation in the surname passed down suggests that they may not be as close as 1C to each other, and so may not know each other's stories
v) and the DNA says they are all related to each other, and are all around 3C-4C to me

You know what? I'm beginning to wonder whether there's enough here to suggest that the name T*r*nsky, from Pinsk, might be derived from my Zaturensky, from Pinsk ...

NB: If you have your DNA data on MyHeritageDNA, there is a basic clustering tool available on-site. Otherwise you'll need to go to Genetic Affairs, where the genius that is Evert-Jan Blom has developed a tool that will do clusters - and a whole lot more - for profiles on FTDNA and AncestryDNA.

If you're interested in how Clustering works, MyHeritage has a good explanation. 

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #1 Who is Private Morris?

My great-grandmother was Shprintsa Zaturensky. She was born around 1858, and married to Nevakh Schreibman. They lived and raised their family in Pinsk, Belarus, and she died in 1932. The clip above is from the burial register of the Pinsk Jewish Cemetery, which was given to me when I visited the Jewish Community there in 2011. It's an inconsequential scrap of paper, but it carries just about the only information we have about Shprintsa, apart from the names and dates of birth of her children. One of these was my grandfather Movsha, b 1883, who became known as Morris Schreibman after he got to in London in 1905.

What's in a patronymic?

The document shows her patronymic name - ie, it refers to her father's given name rather than his surname (her maiden name). It tells us that her father was Movsha-Chaimovitch. At first I interpreted this as indicating that my great-great-grandfather would be Movsha Chaim, ie, that he was known by two given names. However, since Shprintsa is female, you would expect the Russian expression to use the feminine form of the patronymic, which would be 'Chaimovna'; this is indeed what happens with the other females in the burial list.

However, the '-vitch' ending used here is the masculine form, which suggests that 'Chaimovitch' is the patronymic for Movsha, indicting that he was a son of Chaim. So, making a working assumption of 25 years per generation (which could of course be way out), it looks like my Zaturensky family might have gone something like this:

Chaim b c1810 > Movsha b c1835 > Shprintsa b 1858

This isn't much, and the dates are far from certain, but at least it gives me something to look for.

Who are the Zaturenskys?

Unfortunately in the 9 years since then, I have found absolutely nothing more. There are some Zaturenskys in the 19C Pinsk records, but none of them seem to match up with mine. There is also a concentration of the name about 100km further north, around the town of Nesvizh, but again, no discernible connection.

DNA to the rescue?

Then, a couple of months ago, I got my AncestryDNA results. There, right near the top of my match list, just below a couple of known close cousins, was this:

The numbers look good - sharing 184cM across 12 segments gives an average of 15cM/seg, which implies that there are probably several segments of over 20cM, and possibly a couple of quite big ones. This in turn suggests a relationship closer to 3C than to 4C. Unfortunately AncestryDNA does not have a Chromosome Browser tool, so there is no way of checking this level of detail (moan, moan). Nor is there a way of seeing whether any of my other matches triangulate with this one on any of these chunky segments, which could possibly point to where their common ancestry lies.

"No" is also an answer

I had no idea who this mystery cousin was, or whereabouts in my family he was situated. I have a couple of Morris-by-marriage cousins, but none that I know of who are directly related to me. This in itself, of course, is useful information. He's almost certainly not from any of the branches that I have well documented, backward over several generations, and outward across as many siblings as I could find. He's probably from one of the branches I know less about.

And crucially, he doesn't show as a shared match with either of the 2 known close cousins who appear above him in my match list - so he's almost certainly not a Frankenstein, a Waksman, an Ilyutovich or a Levin.

So what about his Tree?

Well, he does have a Tree:

Hmm.

So 'Private' has an ancestor called Simon Morris, who was born in 1864. OK, that's a start. There are a couple of other scraps of information. In the Person Profile, Simon is shown as born in Lithuania, and being resident in Peoria, Illinois (USA) in 1969. 1969? He'd be 105 years old. Possible, but not very likely. Is 'Private' the son of Simon? And is 'Private' the person who took the AncestryDNA test?

Plus, one more sliver of information: the Tree has a name. It's the 'elizabeth terensky' Tree.

What I knew, and what I didn't

So, to sum up, at this stage:

- I knew of no direct relative with the surname Morris

- I had no known family from Lithuania - my mother's side are all from Poland, my father's from Belarus

- I had no idea where Peoria was - not until I looked for it on a map, course - it turns out it's near Chicago

- I have no known relatives in the Chicago area, apart from some Ilyutoviches and their DNA does not match Private Morris

- I had never come across the name Terensky

- I could discount at least half my ancestral families

- but the DNA doesn't lie - Private Morris shares enough DNA with me to be a Third Cousin, at furthest

As I tried to think through how to start the search, I wrote to my mystery cousin, via the Ancestry messaging system, which is the only way you have of contacting people. As yet, there's been no response, but I live in hope.

There was nothing for it but to get searching, by whatever means I could.

WW2 commemoration, Gąbin

On 1 September several members of the Gombin Society were invited to attend events in the town to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Nazi invasion of Poland that sparked the outbreak of the Second World War. I was asked to deliver a short speech on behalf of the Society. I started with some general comments, then told the story of how my mother's cousin, Wiejsza Wandt, survived the War.

Speech for WW2 commemoration, Gąbin 1 Sep 2019

On behalf of the descendants of the Jews of Gąbin, my friends and I would like to thank you for including us in this commemoration.   

Today we join together with you in honouring the memory of all those Poles, both military and civilian, of all religions, who risked their lives, and in many, many cases died, in defence of all the citizens of Poland.

Jews lived in Gąbin for several hundred years. There was already a substantial community by the beginning of the 18th Century - for the Great Wooden Synagogue was built in 1710. For over 100 years, up until the 1920s, Jews constituted half the population of the town. Our ancestors lived, laughed and loved here, they studied, worked and played here. They died and were buried here. 

My own grandfather was born here in Gąbin, in 1892. Marlene’s mother was born here in 1917. Vicky’s grandfather was born here in 1890, Scott’s grandmother in 1905. 

1 September 1939 marks a fateful day in the lives of all of us here. In particular, for the Jews of Gąbin, it was a day of no return. Very few of the Jews who were in the town on that day survived to see the end of the War.

My friends and I are very conscious that we are the lucky ones. We are only alive today because our parents and grandparents emigrated before the outbreak of the War. Almost all of our aunts, uncles and cousins who stayed here were killed, including at least 25 members of my mother’s family.

The young Jewish men were sent to the forced labour camp at Konin, and were later killed there. All the others - over 2000 men, women and children - were sent to the extermination camp at Chelmno nad Nerem, where they were gassed to death within hours. Only a handful escaped this fate.

Of course, it was not only the Jews that suffered the Nazi onslaught. The three great prayer houses of Gąbin were all destroyed - the Synagogue was burnt down, and the Catholic and Evangelical Churches were destroyed by bombing.

We would like today to pay a special tribute to those people who risked their own lives to help Jews in danger during the War. They were truly heroes. I will speak of just one such incident, there were many more.

Priest, mayor, council leader and other dignitaries listen attentively

So let me tell you about my mother’s cousin Wiejsza Wandt. It was 1941 or 42, she was 8 years old. She was shot in the street, and badly wounded. We presume she was shot by German soldiers. One of the soldiers carried her home. He told her mother that if she wanted her child to survive, she would need to leave the Ghetto.

“Give me a name and address, and I will take her there”, he said. Wiejsza’s mother gave him the name of a non-Jewish friend. The German soldier put the girl in a bag so no-one would see her, and carried her there. A daughter of this family, about the same age as Wiejsza, had recently died. 

At great personal risk to themselves, this family took the little Jewish girl in as their own child, and gave her their daughter’s identity. Wiejsza became Bronislawa. She survived the War. Her mother did not.

We give our heartfelt thanks to all those who resisted the German occupation, in whatever way they could. Some of their efforts succeeded, some sadly did not. They were all heroes.

We would like to finish with a poem by Rajzel Zychlinski, who was born in Gąbin in 1910. She wrote her poems in Yiddish, the language spoken by the Jews of Poland. Today Scott, who is a descendant of the Zychlinsky family, will read the poem in English, and Wojtek will follow with the Polish translation. [poem to be added]

Thank you.

Two stones: daughter of Yonah

This is Sarah Frankenstein's headstone again, discussed in the previous post Two stones: son of Leib. This time we're looking at the first line of the inscription:

Top line: Sarah, daughter of Yonah

Sarah was married to Israel Jacob Frankenstein, and we don't know her maiden name, so it's nice to at least have her father's given name. But there's more to it than that.

Sarah Frankenstein's family
We first see her in the 1891 UK Census, living at 1 Tewkesbury Buildings, Whitechapel in the East End of London:

She's shown as 40 years old here, which suggests she was born around 1850. With her are 2 daughters Rachel 17 and Dolly 20, and a son Barnett aged 21. She is a widow; all 4 of them are born in Poland. I suspect they were recent arrivals, since Barnett is shown with no occupation, which is unusual for an adult male in this Census.

Frankenstein neighbours
There are 3 families living in this house. The third is another Frankenstein:

This is the family of Jacob Frankenstein aged 33, with his wife Leah, and 5 children: Moses 11, Harry 7, Rebecca 6, Aaron 4 and Joseph 2. Jacob, Leah and the first child Moses are shown as born in Poland, the other four children are born in Shoreditch, which is near Whitechapel. 

The two Frankenstein families are listed as separate households, and there is no indication that they are connected. However, there are only a handful of other Frankenstein families from Poland in London at that point, so it is a bit suspicious to find two of them living in the same building.

Jacob and Leah also appear 10 years earlier, in the 1881 Census, with Moses aged 1½. Here Moses is shown as born in Spitalfields, not Poland; and indeed he seems to be a Londoner - we have his birth certificate, b 4 October 1879 in Spitalfields, registered 1 November. So Jacob and Leah are in London at least from 1879, whilst Sarah and family appear to have come some 10 years later, around 1890. They moved on to the USA in 1904. 

Various documents later on indicate that Jacob and Barnett are indeed brothers - they both name their father as Israel Jacob, and when Barnett's son Jack emigrated to the USA in 1914, his passenger manifest shows him going to Jacob Frank. Another son, Woolf, followed in 1920. They were going to their uncle.

However, there were two things that worried me, which you may already have noticed. 

Sarah's age
First, Sarah's age. In her own 1891 Census entry, she is shown as 40 years old, so born 1851, which is OK for the children living with her, aged 21, 20 and 17. However, Jacob appears as 33, or possibly 38 (the second digit is overwritten) - so born 1853-58. If both their ages are correct, she couldn't be his mother. Jacob's year of birth is pretty consistent through later documents. However Sarah is probably considerably older than appears from the 1891 Census. Her year of birth shows as 1831 in the 1901 Census, and 1842 on her death certificate. These dates would put her in the same age range as the siblings of her husband Israel Jacob (we don't know when he was born himself), and anything up to the late 1830s would make her a feasible age to be the mother of Jacob.

Jacob's father
Second, Jacob's father would be Israel Jacob. This seems to contravene a long-standing and widely-followed East European Jewish naming tradition, according to which sons are never named after their fathers, or daughters after their mothers. The custom, followed almost 100% in Poland in this period, was for children to be named for a recently deceased close family member. For older sons, this usually resulted in names being given for direct ancestors such as a grandfather, or a great-grandfather if the grandfather was still alive.

Exception that proves the rule
I have one case in my own Frankenstein family which at first seemed to be an anomaly. My great-grandfather was Jankel Josek, and his youngest son, born 2 June 1904, appears in the Gombin Book of Residents with the same two given names. How could this be? It was a puzzle, until I noticed a comment against the father's name: died 2 November 1903. My g-g'f Jankel Josek's son was born 7 months later, and was named in his memory. I take this as an exception that proves the rule.

So what about Jacob and his father Israel Jacob? This cannot be the same case as my Jankel Joseks. Jacob cannot have been named after his father, as Israel Jacob was still around 10 years and more later, when his other children, Barnett, Dolly and Rachel, were born. Which leaves the puzzle unresolved.

Barnett's brother
Then two documents came to light. First, Barnett's marriage authorisation from the United Synagogue in 1893, on which he has to name any brothers:

In an entry in Hebrew, he names one brother: Yonah. Not Jacob.

[You may also have noticed that on this certificate Barnett is using the surname 'Finkelstein', not 'Frankenstein'. This is not the only time he did this, and not the only time it happened in our family. There will be another post on this ... ]

So is Yonah the same person as Jacob, or could he perhaps be another brother?

Jacob's name
Jacob died in 1940. He's buried in Stone Road Cemetery, Rochester, New York, and here's his headstone, courtesy of the FindaGrave website:

He is named in Hebrew as Yonah, son of Israel Jacob.

So he is Yonah in Hebrew, anglicised to Jacob in England and the USA. There is no conflict of names, and the tradition is not broken.

The question remains, when did Yonah start calling himself Jacob, and why? It could not have been before his father's death. He was Jacob on the birth certificate of his first son, Moses, in London in 1879, so I presume his father must have died before then. Israel Jacob's youngest daughter Rachel - Yonah/Jacob's sister - was born in Poland around 1874, so that narrows the dates down further. As I've mentioned before, we have no documents whatsoever from Poland on this family. As to why he chose to call himself Jacob, and not Jonah - we have no idea.

Why Yonah?
And who was Yonah named after? Our Frankenstein family were using a fairly restricted palette of names throughout the 19C, the same names are repeated across several family groups, and we can identify the naming ancestor for most of their births. But Yonah does not appear at all, and this has been puzzling me for a couple of years.

Then the other day I received the photo of the headstone of Yonah's mother, Sarah (see above). It tells us her father was Yonah. So Yonah was named after his mother's father, not his father's father. Which makes sense, because his paternal grandfather, Lewek (my 3rd great-grandfather), was still alive - he died in 1876. And his father in turn was Jakub, son of Wolf. So no ancestral Yonahs on that side.

It's all beginning to fit together .....