Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #7 The Morris Men

So how did Shmuel Zaturensky become Simon Morris? And how come his father gets referred to as 'Herman'? Not to mention 'Czar Terensky', which we have already dealt with.

I believe the answers lie in these two records, which we have come across in earlier posts:

Simon's headstone: Shmuel, son of Moshe Chaim

His sister's burial record: Shprintsa, daughter of Movsha Chaimovitch, ie Movsha son of Chaim

Hanging on patronymics
The answer hangs on the use of patronymic names. The father of Shmuel and Shprintsa was called Moshe, both records agree on this. On Shmuel's headstone, it looks as though he has 2 given names: Moshe Chaim. In Shprintsa's burial record, 'Chaim' is clearly not Movsha's second given name, but the name of his father.

Who's the informant?
I think we need to take into account the circumstances in which these two records were compiled. By the time Shmuel/Simon died, he had been living in the USA for over 40 years. His father did not emigrate, so Shmuel's children, all born in the USA, would never have known him. Shmuel's wife Rochel Leah was his cousin, the daughter of Moshe's brother Meir, so she would have known Moshe and his patronymic - but she had died 3 years previously. So the informants for Shmuel's headstone would probably have been his children.

One possibility is that the children - by now teenagers or young adults - would have heard their grandfather referred to as Moshe Chaimovitch, but were not aware of the significance of the patronymic ending, and just assumed the name was Moshe Chaim. Or maybe there just wasn't room on the stone for any more explanatory lettering ....

Exceptions to the Rule
My preference, however, is that what we are seeing is a custom that I am now realising was quite established, if not all that common. In Ashkenazi Jewish tradition, a son is never given the same name as his father, nor a daughter that of her mother. Children are usually named after a deceased family member, the closer and more recent the better. So a boy might be named after a deceased grandfather or great-grandfather, or uncle of some sort - but never after his father.

What I am thinking is happening here would be an exception to this rule, which may happen in exceptional circumstances. This is for a son to assume the name of his father after his death, as a way of honouring him. I have two documented cases of this happening elsewhere in my family, where the father died shortly before the birth of a male child, and the baby was given the name of the father.

I also have another, intriguing case, where an adult son appears to have adopted the name of his father after the latter's death. In this case, I spent years wondering how come Jacob Frankenstein could be the son of Israel Jacob Frankenstein. Then I came across Jacob's headstone, and found that his Hebrew name was Jonah. We don't have any records from Poland for either the father or the son, but by the time Jonah got to London in 1879, he was Jacob, so I assume his father had died before then.

So maybe in this case, after Chaim died, his son Moshe adopted his father's name as a second given name, calling himself Moshe Chaim thereafter.

Retrospective anglicisation
This decision was not without consequences. His son Simon's descendants seem to have retrospectively anglicised Moshe/Moshe Chaim to 'Herman'. Now I have seen 'Chaim' morph into 'Herman' before, so that's not a problem. What's a bit odd is that his name is not really 'Chaim' in the first place. He's Moshe, son of Chaim, as we have discussed above. You'd have thought they'd refer to him as 'Moses', or 'Morris', like all the other Moshes in the world.

Passenger - manifest thyself!
I have not been able to locate passenger manifests for the immigration journeys of any of the members of this family, so as yet I am not able to see what names they were using when they left Russia for the USA. Once in the USA, they used a variety of versions of (Za)turensky, dropping the 'Za-' and becoming Terensky, Turansky, or similar. All of these names appear in the immigration databases, but I have not been able to identify any of these records as members of this family.

How are they managing to escape us? I can only surmise that they were all using a version of their name that somehow the search engines are not recognising. However, this is difficult to accept, as there are at least 6 of them coming over individually over a period of 25 years, from the around 1882 to 1908, and they are hardly likely to have kept that consistent - in a foreign language - over that length of time. But so far I haven't found a single one of them.

So I don't know whether Shmuel Zaturensky travelled as 'Simon Moses' when he emigrated around 1882, or whether he adopted the name after arrival - but this was the name he naturalised under in 1886:

As you can see, there's no age given, and no date or port of arrival to follow up. There is another Simon Moses floating around Illinois at this time, but he's not in Peoria, so I'm pretty sure this is our man. As we have seen, by 1920 he had adopted 'Morris', and his family has kept this name ever since.

Hitting on Moses
So how did he hit on 'Moses' in the first place? I think that once again the answer lies in the patronymic tradition that we were looking at above. His father was Moshe Zaturensky, so Shmuel would be referred to as Shmuel (ben) Moshe - Shmuel (son of) Moshe - Zaturensky. Drop the Zaturensky because it causes too many problems, and you're left with Shmuel Moshe. Anglicise that and you get Simon Moses. Hey presto - two names! Never mind that they're both given names. If they ask you for a surname, give them the second one: Moses. When, after 35 years, you realise that that sounds a bit too biblical, change it to Morris.

QED

A new Shreibman

I've found a new Shreibman! Well, he's new to us, but he's quite old really - he's the earliest Shreibman we know of. Meet Movsha Shreibman, born - we suppose - sometime around 1740.

Yesterday I came across the 1816 Russian Census ('Revision List') for the town of Pinsk on the JewishGen website - I don't know why I hadn't spotted it before - and there they were - father and son, Girsh and Movsha (here, Movsha Dovid). We already had their names, and a date of birth for Movsha Dovid, from later Censuses. This, however, takes us one step further back into the past, thanks to the Russian - and Jewish - custom of patronymic naming, as in 'Movsha Dovid, son of Girsh'. Thus the Census gives us not only the names of the people it is recording, but as part of the identification it also gives us the names of their fathers. As we can see, Girsh's father is also a Movsha.

Girsh's age is given as 50, which suggests a date of birth of 1766. This in turn allows us to guess that his own father Movsha may have been born around, say, 1740.

It is interesting to see that the surname Shreibman was already being used by the family in 1816; we can't tell from this census record whether it dates back to the previous generation as well. Most Jews in Eastern Europe used patronymics until around the beginning of the 19th century, when the Russian authorities began requiring them to use surnames.

The name 'Shreibman' means 'writer', or 'scribe', and we can assume that the first use of the name would be a reference to that person's occupation. Was Girsh the first 'Shreibman' in our family? Or his father Movsha, perhaps? Or were they from a line of scribes maybe, who were already being referred to as such before the formal adoption of surnames?

Notice also the given names, repeated across the generations, usually at one remove:

Movsha (b abt 1740) - Hirsh (1766) - Movsha Dovid (1798) - Hirsh (1827).

There was  - maybe there still is - a tradition amongst Ashkenazi Jews of naming children after deceased relatives, especially recently deceased close relatives such as grandparents, and although we don't know the dates of death of these Shreibmans, we can see the pattern in their names.  

Another of Movsha Dovid's sons was Nevakh, or Noah. Nevakh used 'Dovid' and 'Movsha' for two of his own sons. And then this latest Movsha - my grandfather - named his first son - my father - David. And although my parents were not observant Jews, they continued with the tradition: my Hebrew given name, so they told me, is 'Moishe'.

You can see this pattern of naming in the revised version of the family tree.

So, Movsha Shreibman the First, born around 1740 - welcome to the family!