Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #23 The Slow Road

To the South

Lyubishev
75km to the south-west of Pinsk lies Lyubishev, a small town just across the Ukranian border. There were strong connections between the Jewish communities of these two towns; I know for instance that there were Schreibman families, who may or may not be related to mine, that moved back and forth from one to the other. So it is not surprising to see a Zaturensky link too. Ester Portnoi, the wife of Meer's son Joseph, was born there, as she states on the birth record of their son Maier in 1909:

As we have seen, on her passenger manifest in 1907 it also appears as her last residence before emigrating to the USA, which suggests that she might have been staying there with her parents after Joseph emigrated in 1904.

Moving North

Nesvizh
However, soon after Joseph left, Ester appears to have been living in Nesvizh, which is 160km to the north of Pinsk, and is at bottom right of this map. On her passenger manifest, Ester names the town as the birthplace of their daughter Leia in 1905:

As we have discussed, Nesvizh is the Zaturensky town, the closest urban centre to the original family village Zatur'ya. There may have been family members who had not moved to Pinsk, and were still living in Nesvizh. Maybe Joseph and Ester moved there after they married. Unfortunately, Joseph's own manifest doesn't offer us any of this information. It just says his last residence was London - but then that's what it says for all 30 people on the page. I presume that just means they all arrived in London from wherever, and waited a few days there until they managed to get on this boat from Southampton. Oh, and he had $20 in his pocket.

Baranovichi
The other three places on the map refer to the family of Joseph's brother, Berl/Benjamin. The earliest is for his son 'Charles Henry', who arrived in the US with his mother Friede in 1906. As we have noticed, their names are almost obliterated on the copy of the form that we have, but it looks as though his original name could have been 'Izak'. In some later documents he appears as 'Isadore'. According to the manifest he was 3 years old at the time, so he would have been born around 1903.

When Charles applied for US Naturalisation in 1927, he stated that he had been born in Baranovichi:

Baranovichi is at the bottom centre of the map, and is the nearest substantial town to Nesvizh, some 50km to the west. In fact, we learn from the birth record of their son Morris, b 1910, that Friede - Fanny in the US - had herself been born in Baranovichi:

So in the period 1904-05, both Joseph and Berl - or at least, their wives - were living in or fairly near to Nesvizh, in the centre of Belarus.

Vseliub
Charles, then, was born in Baranovichi in February 1904. A few months later his father Berl is on the boat from Antwerp to New York, saying his last place of residence was "Selip":

The only town I can find that seems to fit is Vseliub, which is about 100km to the north of Nesvizh. It lies between the larger towns of Novogrudok and Lida, and is well out of Nesvizh's sphere of influence. I was dubious about this at first, although Vseliub is the sort of small town that people from elsewhere wouldn't even have heard of - so if someone gives it as their last place of residence they must have a reason for doing so.

Radun
Then I saw his wife's manifest. Friede left a couple of years later, in October 1906, with the 3 year-old 'Charles', travelling from Antwerp to Quebec in Canada. This, by the way, could explain how come, when Charles's wife was the informant on his death certiciate in 1979, she said he had been born in Montreal. On the manifest Friede says their last place of residence was Radun:

Now I've nothing against Radun, and I must admit I know very little about it, but it is probably fair to say it is the least significant place we've yet come across, barring maybe Zatur'ya, our ancestral village. It's a small town right in the north of Belarus, close to the border with Lithuania. It's another 80km north of Vseliub, the place that Berl had given as his last residence 2 years earlier. And it probably trumps Vseliub in insignificance.

The process of emigration
We often wonder how our ancestors got from their shtetls across the length and breadth of the Pale of Settlement - from places like Pinsk, say, or Nesvizh - to emigration ports like Libau, Hamburg, Antwerp or London, before boarding the steamers that carried them across the Atlantic to America.

The big surge in emigration from the Russian Empire began in the early 1880s, and continued up to the start of the First World War in 1914. Our Zaturenskys are slap-bang in the middle of it, small players in a massive movement of people. Something like 3 million made roughly the same journey. Some ended up in Britain or elsewhere in Western Europe, most found their way to America. For the most part their journeys are undocumented, apart from the passenger manifests kept by the transatlantic steamship companies, which as we have seen, can sometimes provide a wealth of otherwise unbtainable information about people's lives.

However, we know very little about these journeys. How did they travel? By train? By horse and cart? Where did they stay on the way? With friends or family? At wayside inns? How long did it take? Where did they eat? How did they carry their luggage? How did they keep in contact with the people they had left behind, and those they were going to? And how did they pay?

The Slow Road
We can get a glimpse of how this all worked for a couple like Berl Zaturensky and his wife Friede Daletisky, from hints dropped in a disparate range of documents over not only the period of their journeys, but across several futher decades.

We see that starting out from Friede's home town of Baranovichi, shortly after the birth there of their son 'Charles' in February 1904, they moved north to Vseliub. We don't know why they went there, but Berl at least did not stay long. He travelled across Europe to Antwerp, where he caught the boat to New York in October, with his $20 in his pocket. His brother Joseph had made the same journey that summer, and Berl was aiming to join up with him in Chicago. Maybe eventually they would join their sister Rochel Leah in Peoria. Their younger sister Sarah must have followed their path soon after, although we have not yet found her travel details.

After Berl's departure from Vseliub, Friede moved on with baby Charles to Radun. Again, we don't know why she went there, or how long she stayed, but she left in October 1906, and followed Berl's path to Antwerp, and on to Chicago via Quebec and Detroit.

For Berl and Friede emigration was slow process, undertaken in stages. It took 2 and a half years for them both to get from Baranovichi to Chicago, with stays in Vseliub, Radun and Antwerp on the way, and who knows where else. We have a few dates and places that enable us to fix some of the key points in their journeys. But we do not really have answers to any of the questions we posed above.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #22 The Pinsk Connection

 

Nesvizh might be the Zaturensky town, and Zatur'ya (orange pin) might be the village they originate from - but most of my Zaturenskys seem to come from Pinsk. However, we have been unable to recognise any members of this family in the available records for Nesvizh, or anywhere else in Belarus, including Pinsk. The information we have comes almost exclusively from what they tell us themselves, after emigration.

This first map indicates the place of birth and/or the last residence before emigration of family members, as shown in their responses to questions in a variety of US documents, such as passenger manifests, birth, marriage and death records and certificates, and military draft documents.

The families of the two brothers, Movsha and Meer, are represented by blue and green pins respectively. As you can see, the blue pins - Movsha's family - congreagate in Pinsk, in the south of Belarus. Some of Meer's greens are in Pinsk, but they are also spread out in a number of other places, and we'll try to track the significance of these places later.

From Zatur'ya to Nesvizh
I suggested in the last post that the family probably moved from the original village Zatur'ya to the nearby town Nesvizh, some time before the imposition of the surname decree in the Pale of Settlement around 1804. The thinking behind this suggestion is that they would not be likely to be called 'Zaturensky' whilst still living in Zatur'ya - it would make no sense, since everyone living there was "from Zatur'ya". If they moved after 1804, they would have already had a distinctive surname - or been given one - as a consequence of the decree. 

Zatur'ya is a small village. People in towns above a certain distance away would not have heard of it. So the designation Zaturensky - 'from Zatur'ya' - would be meaningless to them. The name would only make sense to folk who knew where Zatur'ya was. This is why, in the 19C records, you find very few Zaturenskys in places other than Nesvizh.

And so to Pinsk

Pinsk was a much larger town, and a major centre of Jewish life and culture throughout the 19C, so it is not surprising to see people moving there from smaller towns such as Nesvizh during this period. Our Zaturenskys seem to have been there from at least 1840. The evidence we have for this is indirect, but it is all we have.

Dora

Movsha's daughter Dora died in 1945, and this is from her death certificate. It says that her father was 'Morris Toransky', and that his birthplace was Pinsk. We can estimate that Morris/Movsha would have been born by 1840 at the latest, as his first child (that we know of), my great-grandmother Shprintsa, was born c1858. As with all these records, we have to bear in mind who the informant was, and make a judgement as to how far we can rely on their information. 

In this case the informant was Dora's son Sam, who himself was born in Peoria in 1889, shortly after Dora emigrated. Movsha did not emigrate, so Sam would never have known him. This could just be a case of Sam responding to a question he doesn't know the answer to, and making a best guess - his mother had told him she was born in Pinsk, so let's just say her Dad was too. On the other hand, Sam could just have replied with "Don't know", as people often did on these forms. But he didn't; he said his mother's father had been born in Pinsk. 

Schmul

This is from the death record of Dora's brother Simon (Schmul), who died in Peoria in 1926. His wife - and cousin - Elizabeth (Rochel Leah) had died 3 years earlier, so the informant would be one of their children, who were all born in the USA, and would not have known their grandfather Movsha. By this stage of course Schmul had changed his own surname from Zaturensky to Moses to Morris, and it is this surname that the informant retrospectively allocates to their grandfather. They also call him 'Herman', not Movsha/Morris, although Schmul's headstone clearly calls him 'Schmul son of Moshe Chaim' - so the family knew his Hebrew names. So 'Herman Morris' in this record is the same person as 'Morris Toransky' in Dora's record: Movsha Zaturensky, my great-great-grandfather.

Anyway, the point of interest here is that the document purports to tell us the birth place not only of Schmul's father (Movsha), but also of his mother: both were born in Pinsk. And Schmul's mother is almost certainly Sura, the great-great-grandmother that I have just discovered.

Joseph
We know of 4 children for Movsha: Shprintsa, Schmul, Dora and Joseph. So far we have seen that not only were Movsha and his first wife Sura (both b c1840) probably born in Pinsk, but also 3 of his children, Shprintsa (c1858), Schmul (c1861) and Dora (c1870). The fourth one, Joseph, does not seem to have left us any evidence of his birthplace. He was born around 1872, immigrated in 1891, naturalised in 1895, appeared in 5 Censuses, and eventually died in 1965, well into his 90s. But in all this documentation, he never once tells us where he was born. Nor do any of his children. So while there's no evidence to suggest he was born in Pinsk, there's no reason to believe he was not.

Benjamin Gitelman
There is another person we need to take into consideration. In 1923, Benjamin Gitelman arrived in Los Angeles with his wife and 4 young children. Their last residence was Pinsk, and they are all shown to have been born there, Benjamin in 1885. They were coming to Benjamin's "half-brother" Sam Kawin, who at that point was living with his mother, our Dora. Benjamin and his family moved into a house built in the back-yard of Dora's home, and stayed there for the following 20 years at least. Some time in the 1920s he took on Dora's married surname, Kawin. To all intents and purposes Benjamin appears to be a son of Dora; on his death certificate his mother's maiden name is given as "Terensky".

I wrestled for a long time with this relationship, and finally came to the conclusion that Dora would not have been old enough in 1885 to be the mother of Benjamin and another son Hirsz. Plus, she would have had to leave them both behind in Pinsk when she went off to America to marry Joseph Kawin.

Benjamin's mother
So I would have to "invent" a mother for Benjamin. For the dates and biographies to fit, this mother would have to be a sister to Dora, but slightly older; it would also be quite convenient if she were to be called Beila. In any event, all Benjamin's own evidence points to him having been born in Pinsk in 1885, so whoever his mother was, she was almost certainly a Zaturensky, and must have married a Gitelman, and she must also have been in Pinsk in 1885.

Meer's family

Meer's children are Rochel Leah, the wife of Movsha's son Schmul, and the later arrivals Berl (another who was known as Benjamin in the USA), Joseph and Sarah; all of them took on the name Terensky in America. The closest we get to a place of birth with Rochel Leah (b 1872) is 'Russia' on her death record. Sarah (b 1893) offers us 'Poland' on a Social Security form. Neither mentions a town.

Berl and Joseph are a bit more helpful. When Berl's sons Morris (1910) and Abraham (1914) are born in Chicago, their father's place of birth is given as Pinsk, give or take a vowel:

Similarly, at the birth of his son Maier in in Chicago 1909, Joseph tells us that he himself was born in Pinsk:

It's a fair bet that Meer's two daughters Rochel Leah and Sarah were also born there, though they were both reluctant to tell us so.

It's not all Pinsk

So far, everyone who has indicated a place of birth, has told us: "Pinsk". However, some of their documents indicate that other places also play a part in the family story, and we will look at a few of these in the next post.

The Fourth Ring

The Certificate
The discovery last week of the death certificate of my great-grandmother, Shprintsa Schreibman née Zaturensky, marked a bit if a landmark for me. In the last column of the certificate, she - Szprynca Szrajbman in the Polish spelling - is identified as the "daughter of Movsha Chaim and Sura". So these are my Zaturensky great-great-grandparents. They were probably born around 1835-40.

I knew Movsha Chaim's name - actually I think he's really "Movsha son of Chaim" - from my visit to Pinsk 10 years ago (10 years next week, in fact). The Jewish Community there gave me a few sheets of paper containing handful of references - all they had - to my Schreibman family, including a typed-out list of Szrajbman burials. This list included Szprynca, who died in 1932, and was buried in the Jewish Cemetery in the centre of town - sadly, it was dug up many decades ago by the Soviet authorities, and the land was re-purposed for a primary school.

As is usual in both Russian and Jewish traditions, the entry for Szprynca on this list showed her patronymic name: she was the daughter of Movsha Chaim. Another listing, this time of the birth record for her son Meer in 1897, had given us both her given name: Shprintsa, and her family name: Zaturensky. This was a great stride forward at the time, as we had not been aware of any of these names.

So, putting the two documents together, we knew that her father was Movsha Chaim Zaturensky. But there was no clue anywhere as to the name of her mother. Until last week - 10 years later - when I was trawling through the very few Pinsk records that are available online in the FamilySearch collection.

And there she is: Sura.

The Wheel
I began to enter the name into the family trees I keep in various places. I started with the master Tree I keep on my computer, using the MacFamilyTree software, and thought to myself, how does this look in the fan-chart? Sura will appear in the circle of my great-great-grandparents, four rings out from me - my Wheel of 16. How far have I got with that?

There she is, at the top, just to the left of centre, in a sort of lime-green colour. Hers is the last name to be added to the 4th ring of the circle, meaning that I now know the names of all my great-great-grandparents. Sura completes my Wheel of 16. 

I know there are people who have traced their ancestors - all their ancestors - back a generation or two further than this. 

But for me, this is a major landmark.

The Landmark
When I started researching, 12 years or so ago, I knew the names of 7 of my 8 great-grandparents - that is to say, my parents had known the names of their own grandparents, even though they had never seen most of them. The only ones I had 'met' in person were Barnet and Kate Waxman, as they were called in England, but they had both died by the time I was two years old. The only other one of the eight to emigrate was Mikhlya Levin, who had died in London well before I was born. The others all stayed, and died, in Poland or Belarus. In fact, checking over their dates now, the Waxmans were the only ones who were still alive when I was born.

Of the women - my 4 great-grandmothers - Mikhlya Levin was the only one we had a surname for. For two of them - including Kate - we had their given names but not their maiden names, so we had no idea what their family was, or where they had come from. The fourth one, the one we knew nothing about at all, was Shrpintsa.

And the next generation back - my 16 great-great-grandparents - were a total mystery, not only to me but to my parents and all their brothers and sisters. We couldn't even guess at their names, and even if we thought we knew where they came from, our assumptions have turned out to be mostly wrong.

We now have full names for 13 of the 16, with places of origin for most of them; family names are missing for just 3 of the women (including Sura). This in turn has enabled us to trace some of them back a further generation, to the Fifth Ring, and find out where they lived and something about their lives. And of course every step back creates a starting point for tracing sideways and forwards, towards cousins around now that you never even knew existed.

So to find Sura, and complete my Wheel of 16, really is a landmark.

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.

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: #16 The Person Who Will Always Know

Who is this Joseph?

Whilst researching the members of my Terensky DNA Cluster, I kept coming across documents for a Joseph Teranski (and versions thereof). The Cluster does not include any of his descendants, and I haven't managed to identify any from amongst my AncestryDNA matches. The documents showed him to be following a similar trajectory to my Zaturenskys - Russia to Peoria to Los Angeles - although I couldn't find anything to pin him down as a member of this family. After they moved to LA in the mid-1920s Joseph and his sons Sam and Myer anglicised their surname to 'Trent'.

This alerted me to another clue. In the Tree of Cousin Jennifer, a member of the DNA Cluster and a descendant of Shmuel Zaturensky aka Simon Morris, she shows one branch of the family adopting the surname 'Terensky', and another taking on 'Trent'. She didn't show any descendants of these branches, but at least this shows that her family were aware of the existence of these other branches.

One too many Josephs

Things began to get rather confused when I started looking more closely at a Joseph Terensky who definitely was one of mine - several of his descendants were in my DNA Cluster. This Joseph also followed the family trail from Pinsk via Peoria to Los Angeles. He's a son of Meir Zaturensky, who we came across earlier in this saga as the father of Rochel Leah Teransky. I'll be following this Joseph, and his brother and sister, in later posts.

 

The two Josephs appeared to have different birth dates, and their wives and children appeared to have different names; on the other hand, they were both shoemakers. They made the move from Illinois to California at different times, but there were periods when they were both living in the same town. On several occasions I came across documents and was not sure who I should allocate them to. Were they the same person, leading a very complicated life? We've already seen at least one like that in this family. Or were they two related people with (more or less) the same name? If they were related, how closely? Was this new Joseph Teranski indeed one of my clan?

All you need is a document

I have probably amassed more documents on this Joseph than on any of the other members of this tribe, but frustratingly I have been unable to find any mention of a specific place of birth. I want him to be born in Pinsk, of course - but all I see on Census returns is 'Russia', 'Russ Polish', 'Latvia', and 'Lithuania'. On the birth certificate of his son Samuel, in 1898, Joseph is shown as 'Polish' and born in 'Poland'. This is prescient, as Pinsk did indeed become part of Poland - but only 20 years later, after the First World War and the Polish struggle for independence from the nascent Soviet Union. And Latvia and Lithuania are hundreds of miles away, off the map. No mention of Pinsk.

Nor could I find any mention of Joseph's father's name. Joseph died in 1965, but my online searches have not turned up a death certificate, or a headstone, either of which might, if you were lucky, show a father's name. Ideally I would like him to be a son of my great-great-grandfather Movsha, or failing that, of his brother Meir. Or there could be an as yet unknown third brother.

However, even without confirmation of his place of birth, or his father's name, I was convinced that there was enough evidence in the surnames and the life-journeys, and in Jennifer's Tree, to suggest that Joseph was fairly closely related to my Zaturenskys.

All I needed was a document.

And then I found one.

I was following up Abe 'Albert Allen' Morris, born in 1912 in Peoria, the youngest son of our old friend Shmuel Zaturensky aka Simon Morris. Abe is probably the father of my mystery match, Private Morris. He was drafted into the US Army in 1940, and this is his draft card.

The 'person who will always know your address' is Sam Trent. And Sam Trent is Albert Allen Morris's cousin.

Cousin? Cousin??

Cousin? That implies that one of Albert's parents must be a sibling to one of Sam's.

Albert's parents are Simon Morris aka Shmuel Zaturensky, and Rochel Leah Teransky. Shmuel and Rochel Leah are First Cousins, children of the Zaturensky brothers Movsha and Meir respectively. Sam's father is the new Joseph Teranski. So Joseph should be a brother of either Shmuel, or Rochel Leah. And his father should be either Movsha, or Meir.

Just a minute. Meir already has a son Joseph - the other Joseph, the one we keep getting mixed up with this one.

So this new Joseph must be a son of Movsha, my gg-g'f. And Joseph's grandchildren, if I can find them, will be my Third Cousins.

When we were looking at Dora, we surmised that Movsha was probably married twice, and that his first wife may have been called *Bajla, and his second wife, *Chana. *Bajla would be the mother of my g-g'm Shprintsa, b 1858, and of Shmuel (Simon Morris) b 1861, and appears to have died by 1865. *Chana would be the mother of Bejla b 1866 and Dora b 1870. Joseph appears to have been born somewhere between 1866 and 1872, according to which document you are looking at, so he would probably be a child of *Chana.

As it now stands

So Movsha's family now looks like this:

We have no documentary evidence for either of Movsha's two wives, only that different family Trees suggested different names for their respective gg-g'mothers. The DNA evidence suggests that I am closer to Shmuel's descendants than to the other lines, so I am happy to suggest that he and my g-g'm Shprintsa are children of a first wife, whilst the other three are from a second wife.

We do not have documentary evidence for *Chana's daughter *Beila, but somebody with her name would fit very nicely. DNA evidence suggests that I have a closer connection to Dora's descendants than to *Beila's, so I am surmising that there may be a Kawin link further back, possibly via *Chana, that was reinforced when Dora married Joseph Kawin.

In Joseph Teranski's case, there is fairly good circumstantial evidence in the surname and the family journey from Russia to Peoria to Los Angeles, but crucially there is one document that clinches the relationship. It tells us that Sam Trent is Albert Morris's cousin, and that he is The Person Who Will Always Know.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #14 Dora and Ockham's Razor

The story so far
Dora Zaturensky was the sister - or half-sister, maybe - of my great-grandmother Shprintsa. Their father Movsha may have had 2 wives; Shprintsa was born in 1858, and may have been the daughter of the first wife, and Dora, b 1869, the daughter of the second.

I have identified DNA matches with 2 of Dora's great-grandchildren, Cousin Paul and Cousin David. David is a descendant of Dora's first husband, Gitelman (we don't know his given name), whilst Paul is from her second husband, Jacob Kawin.



The paper trail says I have exactly the same relationship to both Paul and David: half-3rd Cousin. So why is there such a huge difference between the amounts of DNA I share with them? Or, to ask the question another way around: why do I share so much more DNA with a Kawin descendant than I do with a Gitelman one?

I've had a question like this before, in this same family. In that case, it seemed the solution was that there was probably a double relationship somewhere along the line - that Movsha's son Shmuel had married his cousin Rochel Leah, for instance. Is something similar happening here?

For this to be the case, I would have to have a single relationship with David, via Dora, and a double relationship with Paul. This second relationship could occur at any point in the Tree I have researched so far - via Paul's father's family (which I think is most unlikely, having had a quick look at his ancestry), that of his maternal grandmother Alice Cowan (wife of Sam Kawin), which also seems unlikely, or through Jacob Kawin himself. And the implication of this is that Jacob and Dora would have to be be fairly close cousins.

In other words, one of Dora's parents would have to be a sibling to one of Joseph's: either Dora's mother ('2nd wife' in the Tree above) would be a Kawin, ie a sister to Joseph's father Max, or Joseph's mother would be a Zaturensky, a sister to Dora's father Movsha. We don't have any information on Dora's mother, but we do have several references to Joseph's mother as 'Hinda Sandusky'. It is possible that this could be a variant on 'Zaturensky', but the Sandusky name does occur in several places, and in any case it's not a very convincing rendition of Zaturensky. At the moment I'm tending towards Dora's mother being the connection.

A tantalising Tree
Then I came across this tantalising clip from a Tree on the JewishGen 'Family Tree of the Jewish People' (log in required). It was posted nearly 20 years ago, at a time when it was not possible to do much online research, so I'm assuming it's the product of family knowledge, and possibly some archival research in Belarus. I've written to the person who posted it, asking where the information comes from; fingers crossed I'll get a response!


The layout is not 100% clear, but it seems to be saying that Benjamin is the son of a Mosha Lipschitz from Pinsk, who died in 1886, the same year as Benjamin was born. The mother is unknown, but she is not Dora, who seems to be Mosha's second wife. The dates given here suggest Dora must have married at the age of 14, though we have her down elsewhere as born in 1869, which would make her 17 at the time of this marriage.

In addition, if Benjamin is the son not of Dora but of an earlier wife, this first wife would need to be closely related to Dora - preferably a sister - so as to retain my DNA relationship with David (see my draft Tree above).

Fact or fancy?
All this suggests the following scenario:

1 Mosha Lipschitz and first wife have child Benjamin in Nov 1886
2 maybe first wife dies in childbirth or shortly after
3 Mosha remarries immediately, to Dora
4 Mosha himself dies
5 Dora packs her bags and goes off to Peoria to marry Jacob Kawin, leaving her stepson Benjamin behind

- all in a matter of weeks.

Oh dear. There's too much going on here, and it's putting a tremendous weight on Dora's 17-year old shoulders. I'm not happy with it.

Ockham's Razor
At this point I am reminded of the wise words of the medieval philosopher William of Ockham, who is reputed to have argued along the lines of "Don't make an explanation more complicated than it needs to be", or, as expressed by Bertrand Russell, "always opt for an explanation in terms of the fewest possible causes".

So what can we identify as the "fewest possible causes" in this case? Looking at our suggested scenario again, the only things we can take as fact are:

1 Benjamin was born around 1886, probably in Pinsk
and
5 Dora went to the US around 1887, probably from Pinsk

Plus,
6 We have seen that Benjamin brought his own family from Pinsk to Peoria in 1922, and lived for 20 years or so in a house built in Dora's back yard
7 I have the DNA relationship with David and Paul outlined above

Do we really need 2, 3 and 4 to explain 6 and 7?

A closer shave
What happens if we apply Ockham's Razor to this scenario, and shave off the bits we don't need? How about discarding the marriage between Dora and Mosha Lipshits shown in the Tree above? We have no evidence for it, or reference to it, other than this Tree, and this Tree shows no sources, and could be wrong.

The consequences for Dora's story would be:
2 Mosha's wife does not need to die at this point
3 Mosha does not need to remarry, so he does not marry Dora
4 we no longer need to 'free' Dora from the marriage to Mosha, nor do we need to posit his death at this point

That feels better.

Wanted: a sister for Dora
In fact, it feels much better. Applying the razor leaves both of our outstanding queries untouched. Point 6 - Benjamin coming to live next door to Dora in Peoria, and point 7 - my DNA matches with Paul and David, are covered by just one assumption: that Benjamin's mother is indeed a sister of Dora.

This implies that when Benjamin emigrates to Peoria, he is going to live close by his Aunt and Cousins. We know he took on their surname, Kawin, shortly after arriving in the US. And it would not affect my DNA relationship with David. Our Common Ancestor would still be my great-great-grandfather Movsha Zaturensky.

The only problem is, we don't have an eligible sister for Dora.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #12 Dora and the Rabbi

Where did Sarah come from?
At this point, we have found that my great-grandmother's sister, Dora Zaturensky b 1870 in Pinsk, Russia, seems to have had 4 or possibly 5 children, by three different husbands:

1 unidentified Gitelman: Benjamin b 1886 (and possibly Hirsz), both born in Pinsk, Russia
2 Joseph Kawin: Abraham b 1888 and Samuel b 1890, both in Peoria, Illinois; Joseph died in 1897
3 unknown: Sarah b 1901/4, Iowa

We have encountered Benjamin, Abraham and Sam in previous posts. The earliest reference I had to Sarah was when she appeared out of the blue in the 1920 Census, living with Dora in Los Angeles as a fully-fledged 18 year-old daughter. Where had she come from? I couldn't find them anywhere in the 1910 Census. I knew that Abraham and Sam were in LA by 1913, but didn't know when they had got there.

Cardinal sin
And then it struck me that I had committed the genealogist's cardinal sin - I had been looking in the 1910 Census for Dora and Sarah Kawin, as I knew them, and couldn't find them. But I had neglected to do a search on the other members of the family, Abraham and Sam. So I did, and they turned up immediately, in Chicago:



There they were, with their mother and sister. Who are now both Goldbergs.

Goldbergs? Where had that come from? Dora is listed as being in her second marriage (M2). She has been in this marriage for 6 years, and has had 3 children, all living; we presume she is referring to the 3 currently living with her. All this doesn't quite tally with what we think we know (see above), but nothing ever does, and it's not crucial here, so we won't lose any sleep over it for the moment.

However, if Dora has been in this Goldberg marriage for 6 years, and Sarah is a Goldberg and is 8 years old, how does that add up? And if she is married, who is her husband, and where is he?

"I had to go for the doctor"
I soon found out who he was. The State of Iowa has a collection of 'Delayed Birth Records', and this is from 1942:

Sam Kawin attests to the birth of Sarah Goldberg in Oskaloosa, Iowa, on 3 June 1901. The affidavit asks for details of the parents:

The mother is Dora Teranski, as Sam was later to identify her on her death certificate (Toranski). The father is Ephraim Goldberg, a "Jewish Rabbi", some 15 years older than Dora.

Sam also had to attest to the "basis of my knowledge for the answers given above":

"I was 11 years of age at the time of her birth. She is my half-sister, and I resided in Oskaloosa at that time, and remember the incident quite well, as I had to go for the doctor."

The birth is "legitimate" (see above), so there should be a marriage, somewhere, between Dora and Ephraim some time between the Census of June 1900, where she was Dora Kawin, and this birth in June 1901.

And it shouldn't be too hard to pin down a rabbi, should it?

Pinning down the Rabbi
Well, let's get this out of the way first:

Married in Chicago, 14 August 1900. The Census on 2 June had her in Peoria, where she had been living for 12 years or so since immigrating to the USA; now, 2 months later, she's marrying in Chicago, 170 miles away. Maybe Ephraim was from Chicago, so they got married there. At least it shows everything was kosher.

There are still a few questions I'd like answering, though. Why was he not with them in 1910? Where was he? Why have Dora and Sarah reverted from Goldberg to Kawin in 1920? And how did he connect with Dora in the first place?

There's still a bit of work to do to pin down this particular Rabbi.