Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #21 Sura cited

Up until last week, I had no documentary evidence for either of what I take to be the two wives of my great-great-grandfather Movsha Zaturensky. My working assumption was that the first wife was called *Beila, and that she was the mother of Shprintsa and Schmul. This is the name that was suggested in the Tree of one of my DNA Cousins; it seemed to fit the naming patterns, and it was all I had to go on.

Shprintsa's mother

However, a few days ago I found this:

It's the death certificate of my great-grandmother Shprintsa (Szprynca in Polish), who died in Pinsk in 1932. In the final column she is identified as:

"Szprynca Szrajbman, daughter of Movsza-Chaim and Sura, registered in Pinsk"

I came across this document whilst trawling through the Pinsk records available on the FamilySearch website. I already had the date of her burial, and her father's name, from a typed-up list of Szrajbman burials given to me when I visited Pinsk in 2011. However, this is the death record, and it carries one extra piece of vital information: the name of Shprintsa's mother, and Movsha's first wife: Sura.

My great-great-grandmother.

Movsha's two wives

Sura is probably also the mother of Schmul, Movsha's second child. There then follows a gap of 5 years or so before the next child, who I believe to be a *Beila, and who I am positing as the mother of Benjamin Gitelman. The evidence at the moment suggests that Sura died at some point between 1861 and 1865, and Movsha re-married. Some of the family trees suggest that this second wife was called *Chana, and she would be the mother of Movsha's other children:  *Beila, Dora and Joseph.

The Sura Lines

Shprintsa's husband was Nevakh Schreibman. She was his second wife, and she had 4 children with him that we know of. The first was a son, Movsha - my grandfather, born in 1883. The second was a daughter: Sora, born in 1885. We have looked several times at the Ashkenazi custom of naming a child after a recently deceased close relative. For a son, it's often the father who gets to choose the name - Nevakh's father was Movsha Dovid, so we presume that he had died some time before the birth of my grandfather Movsha in 1883, so the name was available for the new baby. For a daughter, it would be the mother's choice, so Shprintsa names the first baby girl after her own mother, who we think had died some 20 years earlier: Sora.

Now let's check how Shprintsa's brother, Schmul, and his wife Rochel Leah, name their children. They are all born in the USA, so all are known by English-language names. In accordance with the tradition, the first daughter's name is chosen by the mother: she is named 'Bessie', after the anglicised name used by the family to refer to Rochel Leah's mother. The second daughter, born in 1898, is called Sarah - and with our latest discovery, we can now surmise that this child too could be after Schmul's mother: Sora.

The end of the *Beila Hypothesis?

So *Beila is now Sura. This of course has major implications for my *Beila Hypothesis, which I will now have to go back over, and re-fashion. A genealogist's work is never done.