Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #10 There's more to Dora than meets the eye

No docs for Dora
Key moments of Dora Zaturensky's life appear to be almost totally undocumented, so what follows is an attempt to piece together fragments of disconnected information into what I hope is at least a half-way coherent story.

Some things are certain:
1) I have a strong DNA match with one of her great-grandchildren, Cousin Paul, and a weaker one with another, Cousin David.
2) Her father has the same name as my great-great-grandfather, Movsha Zaturensky, he's from the same town, Pinsk, and was having children at about the same time. I deduce from this and the DNA connection that her father *is* my gg-g'f, that Dora is the sister of my g-g'm Shprintsa, and that Paul and David are 3C to me. There are virtually no documents openly available from Pinsk from this period, and none that mention any members of this family.
3) Dora left Pinsk around 1887 and emigrated to the USA. She came to live in Peoria, Illinois, and married Joseph Kawin either just before or just after emigrating.
4) She had two sons with Joseph, in Peoria: Abraham b 1888 and Samuel b 1890.
5) Joseph died around 1897.

There appear to be no documents available for any of the events described in (3), (4) or (5) - no Passenger Manifests that I can identify as being for either Dora or Joseph, no Naturalisation documents, the 1890 US Census has been destroyed, there's no marriage record, no birth records for the sons, and no identifiable death record for Joseph. All the information presented here is either culled or inferred from later documents.

Dora and the Kawins
The first time I can find Dora on paper is in the Peoria Directory for 1898, as the widow of Joseph, living at 108 Gallatin Street:

As you can see, there is one other Kawin family in town, running a china store. They must be related to Joseph, but I have found no documentation to verify this. They are in Peoria in the 1880 Census, where the head of the family is Max.

Who is Joseph?
A second look at the 1880 Census reveals that one of Max Kawin's sons is a Jacob b 1862.

Now Joseph appears in Peoria Directory listings in 1890 and 1896, and Jacob does not, although several other members of the Kawin family do (see below). Jacob dies in 1897, and as we have seen, Joseph has also died by then - Dora is the "widow of Joseph" in the 1898 Directory.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Joseph is Jacob? Jacob is Joseph?

Or is he??


Not forgetting George
Thinking on this question, and browsing through the Directory listings for Peoria on MyHeritage, I stumbled across a feature I had not noticed there before. You can do a "who else lived at this address" search. It returns matches for the address across all years, but could be very useful for answering questions for the years between censuses, when you have to be a very lucky researcher indeed to locate that information.

So I checked Joseph's entry for 1890:

And then I did the "who else ... " search on his address, 303 Gallatin. I found this in 1891:

George Kawin? Who is he? He's not in Max Kawin's family. He's a peddler, like Joseph the year before. Come to that, where's Joseph? Hmm.

So I followed up on George. There is only one other entry for him on the whole of the internet (trust me), this one for 1892:

He's moved down the street to number 414. And still no Joseph. Hmm again.

Let's try the "who else .. " search again on MyH, and see who turns up in 414:

Hello, hello! It's our old friend Simon Moses! Or Shmuel Zaturensky, as we prefer to call him. And this entry is also for 1892 - so this time we've got two people in the same house at the same time. And they are two people that we know quite well: Shmuel is of course the brother of Dora, and Dora, as we know, is married to Joseph/Jacob Kawin.

Are you thinking what I'm thinking (again)? Is George just another name for Joseph? And are George, Joseph and Jacob all the same person?

Why Peoria?
Once I had reached that, albeit tentative, conclusion, I decided to follow this Kawin family through. I found that Jacob had arrived in the USA aged 8 with his mother Hinda and 4 siblings in 1871. They came from Volkovisk, in what is now western Belarus, about 100 miles NW of Pinsk, and settled in Peoria. Dora was born around that date, in Pinsk, and seems to have emigrated, on her own, around 1887, aged about 16, although as yet I have not found a Passenger Manifest for her. She must have married Jacob/Joseph/George soon after arriving, as Abraham appears to have been born around 1888-89, in Peoria. Bear with me, these dates are crucial.

All this raises more questions. Why did she come to Peoria, specifically? The most likely explanation is that her brother Shmuel was already there - he had obtained US Naturalisation as Simon Moses in 1886, in Peoria, so must have been in the USA for a number of years prior to that. He would have known the Kawin family, who were well established in the town by then, and was a similar age to Jacob/Joseph/George. Did Shmuel suggest she come over to marry his friend? As we have just seen, Shmuel was living with Dora and Joseph/Jacob/George a few years later.

Dora's daughter
In the 1900 Census, 3 years after the death of Jacob/Joseph/George, Dora and her two sons Abraham and Samuel are in Peoria, at 108 Gallatin Street, the same house as in the 1898 Directory.

I couldn't find Dora at first in the 1910 Census (more on this later), but from 1913 onwards they all start showing up in Los Angeles. In several Directories there, she is listed again as "widow of Joseph".

And then, in the 1920 Census, a strange thing happens:

Suddenly, Dora has a daughter, Sarah, aged 18, born in Iowa. 

Oh dear. This causes us all sorts of problems.

If Sarah is 18 in 1920, she would have been born in 1901 or 1902. But Joseph/Jacob/George had died by 1898. If Sarah is Joseph's daughter, she must have been born by 1899 at the latest - so how come she doesn't appear in the 1900 Census?

We seem to have two options. Either:

a) Sarah is Joseph's daughter, was born in 1898, was left off the 1900 Census by accident, and has been falsifying her date of birth ever since.

or

b) Sarah was indeed born in 1901/2, and so is not Joseph's daughter. In which case, whose daughter is she? And why can't I find them in the 1910 Census?

At this point, I am afraid we shall have to hold this part of the investigation for a moment or two, as other matters are about to arise that will complicate Dora's story still further.