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.
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