The Bleichröder Connection
In August 1991, my uncle Andreas FREUND (1925, Breslau - 1996, Paris) finished the original version of his "Chronique Familiale", a family history of the FREUND, IMMERWAHR, SILBERSTEIN, BACH, PERL and associated collateral families -- written in French for the primary benefit of our French cousins. I am no longer certain, but I think it took me a couple years before I noticed this sentence at the start of two paragraphs about Gerson von BLEICHRÖDER (p.19):
"Les célébrités reliés aux Freund par une parenté plus ou moins lointaine via l'une ou l'autre des branches citées, comprennent encore, au siècle dernier, le baron Bleichröder qui, un peu comme les barons Périere à Paris auprès de Napoléon III, fut le banquier au roi de Prusse Guillaume 1er, futur empereur de toute l'Allemagne."
I do not recall whether I ever asked Andreas about the family story that there was a connection to the famous Gerson BLEICHRÖDER (1822-1893). I do not think I did. Even if there were no other details to back up the story (I would guess there were none), I regret not asking about the source of the story -- was it his father / my grandfather, or some other member of the FREUND or IMMERWAHR family?
By 1997, I had put a note in the family tree under Marie GUTTENTAG, wife of Otto IMMERWAHR (1836-1867): "sister (?) of bank director Gerson Bleichroder". That was close to the beginning of my interest in the GUTTENTAG families of Breslau and Silesia.
It was not until 2002 that I found the first helpful clue (well, it must have been the second clue after the tip that Marie GUTTENTAG was a part of the story). That was when I reviewed the "Bleichroeder Family Collection" in the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute in New York (file no. AR 6410). There, I learned that Gerson BLEICHRÖDER's wife was Emma GUTTENTAG from Breslau. Her parents were the Breslau banker Loebel GUTTENTAG and Fanny WIENER
I must not have known Emma's birth year because I speculated that it was about 1825 (since Gerson was born in 1822), and I speculated that Marie was born about 1840, since her husband Otto was born in 1836. Adding speculation on top of speculation, I wondered whether Emma and Marie would turn out to be aunt/niece or sisters.
In 2003, in Breslau Jewish community birth data, I found information on the family of Loebel GUTTENTAG and Fanny WIENER. There was information on 4 other children, Bertha, Ida, Agnes and Julius. Emma's birth was not mentioned in the birth lists -- and neither was Marie.
The next step came in 2009 when Don and I visited the Schönhauser Allee Jewish cemetery in Berlin. We went there after learning at the Weissensee cemetery that Dorothea MARCUS geb. SILBERSTEIN (1805-1887) was not buried there, but in the Schönhauser Allee cemetery. The burial information for Dorothea did not give the grave location, so when we got to the Schönhauser Allee cemetery, we just wandered all around. Among the gravestones we saw where those for Gerson and Emma BLEICHRÖDER. This only added her birth and death dates -- showing that Emma was either a twin sister to Bertha (or for some reason Bertha (Blume) became known as Emma).
With Emma born in 1830, the likely age gap between Emma and Marie dropped from about 15 years to only 10 years. That is where things stood until last Sunday.
Back in January 2012, thanks to a cousin and friend in Dallas, I learned about a great initiative underway in Europe to digitize and post online archival files from Judaica collections across the continent, called Judaica Europeana. One of the participating archive is the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw (JHI - ZIH in Polish) -- which has scanned and posted its files from the Breslau Jewish community.
The file I opened last week was "Legat des Löbel Guttentag" (file no. 105_0762c). Löbel’s will lists his wife Fanny, geb. Wiener and children Bertha Sachs, Emma Bleichröder, Marie Immerwahr and Julius. There was the answer I had been hoping to find for over 15 years, and which had caused me to pay special attention to GUTTENTAG family information all that time. Marie and Emma were sister after all (and Emma and Bertha were not the same person).
With that confirmation, the connection of my family to Gerson von BLEICHRÖDER was really rather close; particularly from the perspective of Andreas' father / my grandfather who might have been Andreas' source for the story. For Dr. Walther FREUND (1874-1952), the link was as close as his uncle Otto's sister-in-law's husband.
Mystery solved.
(The phrase "Andreas' father / my grandfather" is used in tribute to my uncle Andreas who liked to sprinkle his conversation with such references, particularly, "my sister / your mother".)
"Stammbaum der Familie Falk"
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| "Stammbaum der Familie Falk", Paul Dobrin (Breslau 1937) |
The first knowledge of the Falk Stammbaum came to us before the "me part of us" was aware of family history beyond, perhaps, the fact that the family had lived in California before I came along. Back then in the mid 1960s, my brother Don's interest in genealogy was budding and getting support from our aunt Eva WULKAN geb. FALK (1911-2005) in Chicago. Eva knew that her second cousin Max LEVY (1893-1970) had a copy of the Falk Stammbaum, and in response to specific questions from Don, she would write to Max and convey the answers to Don. The fate of Max LEVY's copy of the Falk Stammbaum is not known.
When our great uncle Siegfried FALK ("Onkel Siegfried") (1888-1969) died in Wellington, New Zealand, his widow Tante Lo sent oil portraits of Siegfried's parents Emanuel FALK (1832-1906) and Johanna KALISCHER (1845-1929) to my father, and I believe that Onkel Siegfriend's copy of the Falk Stammbaum arrived with the portraits.
I do not know what Don did with the Falk Stammbaum when it first came to our home, and to him as the family genealogist, but I remember paging through it, wondering what a "Kapitel" was, learning its organization system (which always seemed cumbersome), finding the page with my father, his sister and their parents, and noticing a few things:
* the Meyer - Wilhelm - Meyer- Wilhelm naming pattern that turned out to lead from R. Jacob Jehuda Loebel FALK's son to Wilhelm (Ze'ev) FALK (1923-1998) of Jerusalem;
* that the last child in Kapitel 1, Aidel FALK, with no birth date, could not be among the last children (births in the 1830s) because she had a son in 1827; and
* that my father was 43 when I was born, and his father was 44 when he was born, and his grandfather was 43 when his father was born, and his great grandfather was 64 when his grandfather was born.
If there are any loyal readers, I would refer them to the blog entry of 8 May 2011 which contains my history with the Stammbaum der Familie Falk. One thing not included there is the story which my beloved cousin Prof. Dr. Ze'ev W. FALK told me on his first visit to us in Wayne, Pennsylvania about the origins of the Falk Stammbaum. According to Ze'ev the Stammbaum was commissioned by the wealthy KROCH banking family as a means of keeping track of the whole FALK family, in order to send family members, annually, writings of the late R. Jacob Loebel KROCH (1815-1897), wife of Bertha FALK (1816-1904), daughter of the Dyhrenfurther Rav.
But another part of the story of the Falk Stammbaum is what became of all the copies which were distributed to family members back in 1937. There was Max LEVY's copy - where is it now? There was Onkel Siegfried's copy (now in Wayne, PA). My recollection is that Ze'ev had the copy of his father Dr. Meyer FALK (1891-1972).
The first new copy I saw (I think) was in Brooklyn when I met R. Dovid BIRNBAUM in 1999. He received his copy from his father Daniel BIRNBAUM who received it from cousin Gerhard GLUSKINOS who received it from his father Willi GLUSKINOS (1881-1965). This was not a formal book version, but whole-punched pages with a metal binder, in a fitted cardboard box. I believe it was a typed version.
The next copy was in Jerusalem with the KADMON family. I believe that this is a handwritten copy with information from as late as 1938. I assume that this was the copy of Martin WOLFSOHN (1890-1970).
I suspect that I am currently not remembering some of the other copies that have come to light in the last 16 years of research.
But the most recently learned of copy was (along with Don) the prompt for this blog entry. Don told me today that when he met our cousin Ariel in Buenos Aires a couple weeks ago, Ariel said that he has his mother's copy of the Falk Stammbaum -- a black-bound typed copy like ours. I assume that this was the copy of Hans Meyer KROCH (1887-1870).
(It is probably not significant that so many original holders of the Falk Stammbaum died in the short period from 1969 to 1972... But even the not-noteworthy can be noted.)
There must be more copies out there yet to be seen.
Twenty years ago, on my Mac SE, I entered the whole content of the "Stammbaum der Familie Falk" into the then-current version of the Reunion (v 2.0 ?) genealogy software. The significantly updated family tree is still maintained in the significantly updated Reunion program (v 9.0), just waiting for a slightly fuller sense of completion to publish it in some form on the internet.
Jaroslaw's and the JAROSLAWs - History of a Family and a Corporation
In November 1996, thanks to Simon S. in Berlin, I learned about an entirely "new" branch of my family -- the SCHREIBER family descended from the sister of my great great grandmother Sara FALK geb. NAUMBURG (ca.1787-1851), Hinde SCHREIBER geb. NAUMBURG (ca.1784-ca.1818) and R. Benjamin SCHREIBER (1779-1839), rabbi in Schrimm and Grätz. That tree included their son Meier SCHREIBER, married to Ernestine (Ester) MITTWOCH, who had a daughter Friederike (Frieda) who married David JAROSLAW and had the children Hedwig and Benno.
That is where things stood for over a decade.
In 2010, from a partial list of gravestones of the Lohestrasse (ul. Slezna) Jewish cemetery in Breslau, I learned that Friederike died on 18 August 1875, at the age of just 32.
And, that is where things stood until last week.
My last blog entry described learning that my grandmother Gertrud FALK geb. RAPHAELSOHN (1886-ca.1943) had been put into forced labor for the firm Scherb & Schwer KG. That led me to try to learn about the company that had taken advantage of my grandmother (and so many others) during the last year or two of her life, before she was deported to Auschwitz and murdered.
A website on the components used to make the Enigma machine ("Hellschreiber") included information on Scherb & Schwer as one of the component manufacturers. The firm Scherb & Schwer was the "Arjan" successor company to the formerly Jewish-owned company Jaroslaw's Erste Glimmer-Waren Fabrik.
The history of Jaroslaw's can be traced, in a limited way, through Berliner Adressbücher entries:
1882 - no entry
1883-1891 - Inhaber C. Jaroslaw [seems to be Clara Jaroslaw, geb. Fürst]
1892-1897 - Inhaber D. Jaroslaw
1898-1903 - Inhaber D. Jaroslaw & Dr. B. Jaroslaw
1904 - Inhaber [not given] (entries for David and Dr. Benno)
1905-1909 - Inhaber [not given] (entries for Ww. Clara and Dr. Benno)
1910 - Inhaber Jaroslaw'sche Erben (entry for Ww. Clara; and a Bernhard)
1911-1912 - Inhaber [not given] (entries for Ww. Clara and Dr. Benno)
1913-1925 - Inhaber Jaroslaw'sche Erben (entry for Dr. Benno)
1926 - Inhaber Jaroslaw'sche Erben (entry for Ww. Else geb. Lobrina)
1927-1930 - Inhaber [not given] (entry for Ww. Else geb. Lobrina)
1931-1940 - Inhaber [not given] (no Jaroslaw family entries)
1941 - no entry [see, Scherb & Schwer KG]
After Friederike died (1875), David JAROSLAW got remarried to Clara FÜRST. It is not clear who formed Jaroslaw's since the earliest directory entries list Clara as the proprietor. An entry in "Handelsblatt der Chemiker-Zeitung" by Georg Krause (Vol. 6) (Coethen 1882) mentions the company as being in Berlin, but with "Inhaber" Clara Jaroslaw, geb. Fürst being in Breslau. The family seems to have moved to Berlin around 1883. (The family was living in Breslau from at least 1870 when David JAROSLAW is listed: Gold- u. Silberarb., Schwedn. Straße 45 I. -- they are not listed in the 1868 directory.)
The confirmation that the JAROSLAW family of Jaroslaw's was the same as the family of David JAROSLAW and Friederke SCHREIBER came from the "Vita" section at the end of Benno JAROSLAW's published dissertation, "Bestimmung der Löslichkeit von Jod in einigen organischen Flüssigkeiten" (1895) [Determination of the Solubility of Iodine in Organic Liquids]:
Another connecting and confirming clue, was the 1905 passenger list from a trip that Dr. Benno JAROSLAW took to the US. He traveled from Dover, England to New York, NY on the S.S. Hamburg on 19 May 1905. He is listed as a 32-year-old (b.ca.1873) single man, a "manufacturer" living in Friedenau near Berlin.
This ties in nicely with the information in the National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1861-1941, with information on the death of David JAROSLAW:
"JAROSLAW David of "Friedenau" 60 Frege-strasse Berlin Germany died 19 November 1903 Administiration (with Will) (Limited) London 8 October to Leopold Van der Velde merchant the attorney of Clara Jaroslaw widow Effects £1765 11s. 2d."
The Berliner Adressbücher entries further suggest that Benno was married to Else LUBRINA and that Benno died in 1925 or early 1926.
Based on British patent office records, the "Jaroslaw'sche Erben" seem to have included not just David's widow Clara and son Dr. Benno JAROSLAW, but also two other women. This bibliographic data from one British patent, for example:
- Title: "Method of Manufacturing Plastic Masses from Albuminous Substances, Like Casein" Patent No.: GB272947
Assignees: Schröder, Richard, Schröder, (née Jaroslaw), Meta, Jaroslaw, (née Labrinus), Else, and Levis, (née Jaroslaw), Sophie, (trading as Jaroslaw's Erste Glimmerwaren-Fabrik in Berlin). June 17, 1926
So, far I have not uncovered what became of Benno's sisters and I do not know if he and Else had children. There was a Sophie LEVIS (b.ca.1879) who sailed to England in 1934 on the S.S. Barrabool; her last permanent residence was given as Palestine. But for now, the information on the JAROSLAW family that owned the company that later came to "employ" my grandmother, essentially ends with the expropriation of their business.
That was then. This is now.
In May 2008, in Berlin, after visiting the deportation memorial at the Grunewald Station, I learned that Gertrud FALK, geb. RAPHAELSOHN (1886-ca.1943), my grandmother (mother of Eva and my father) was not deported from that location. Rather, Transport 27 left from the Berlin-Moabit freight station under the Putitzbrücke. (As I have since learned, Transport 27 arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau on 30 January 1943 at 10:58 am, after a 17½ hour journey. Immediately upon arrival, 140 women and 140 men were separated and interned in the Camp, and 724 were murdered in the gas chambers of Birkenau. We still do not know which group our grandmother was in, though I tend to assume she was part of the latter set.)
When the S-Bahn loop trains pass the area of the Putitzbrücke, you can see the huge "Siemensstadt" a bit further to the north. This seemed to fit the family narrative with Gertrud in forced labor for Siemens and then deported from a location not far the Siemens factories. That was then.
The first seed of doubt about the Siemens angle came a few years ago when I contacted Siemens to learn whether they had archival records regarding the people used for forced labor. I learned they did have such records, but when they looked for information about Gertrud, her name did not appear in their records. This was not conclusive, but it opened up the possibility that our family memory was not correct.
When my brother Don and I were in Berlin in late October 2011, we made great discoveries about Gertrud's mother, our great grandmother Ida RAPHAELSOHN, geb. JACOBSOHN. Learning where Ida was living when she died on 12 Feb 1939 - Duisburger Straße 8 (Wilmersdorf) (with her son Hugo and her youngest daughter Else), Don and I went by that address on the Saturday before our date with cousins Katja and Barbara in Berlin-Westend. Fresh with our discoveries, we told Katja and Barbara all about it. Katja mentioned that her archivist friend Sonja might be able to provide more details about our RAPHAELSOHN family members who had lived in Wilmersdorf. I jotted down the names and last-known addresses of Hugo, Gertrud (FALK), Helene (JACOBY) and Else and left them with Katja.
Six weeks later, I received information from Sonja via Katja about Hugo, Helene and Else. The new information included the fact that Helene and Else had been in forced labor for a company called Elektro Glimmer und Presswerke Scherb & Schwer KG in Weißensee. The company manufactured capacitors and other 1940s electronic components. The plant at Lehderstraße 34/35 was just over 1 km west of the Weißensee cemetery.
There was no new information about Gertrud, since she had lived in Schöneberg, not in Wilmersdorf. Nevertheless, I immediately wondered whether Gertrud had worked at the same place as her sisters. There may have been something reassuring about the possibility that she was with, or relatively near, her sisters during this increasingly difficult period of forced labor.
Sonja was kind enough (among all her kindnesses) to forward my inquiry about Gertrud to her colleague Hannelore (another kind soul) who works with the Stolpersteine project in Berlin-Schöneberg. This led to the easy decision to request a Stolperstein to be prepared and laid in the sidewalk outside Motzstraße 47, Gertrud's last address before she was deported. And that unleashed the formidable research energy, skill and determination of Hannelore in the service of uncovering details about Gertrud's life in Berlin. Just yesterday (19 March 2012), Hannelore's research led to this note:
I had now access to the records of your grandmother Gertrud in the so-called Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv. Among the files there is the so-called "Vermögenserklärung" (Declaration of Property) your grandmother filled in. Now we have full evidence that your grandmother was forced to compulsory labour in the same company like her sister Helene as you already supposed. She writes in the column "Last employment": "Scherb & Schwer Weissensee at a wage of 16,-- RM a week".
This is now -- another puzzle piece found. Siemens has culpability for its Nazi-era actions, but they are not directly implicated in crimes against my grandmother Gertrud. That honor falls on Scherb & Schwer and its successors in interest, including Richard Jahre GmbH which acquired Scherb & Schwer in 1979.
*****
A new question: Was this Dr. Benno JAROSLAW the same person as Benno JAROSLAW, son of David JAROSLAW and Friederike SCHREIBER (1842-1875)? Friederike was a second cousin of Gertrud's husband Dr.med. Hermann FALK (1875-1932), my grandfather.
The JACOBSOHN Search
Friday was going to be spent with cousins at the lectures and lunch and dinner related to the 100th anniversary of the Fritz Haber Institut (formerly, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut). We planned to be there at 9:30, in Dahlem in southern Berlin. The Weissensee Friedhof is in northern Berlin. But we had to try to find Ida's gravestone.
The cemetery opens at 7:30 am, and we got there in the early morning darkness. We took a first stab at finding Feld B-VII, Reihe 8, Grab 100147, but we could only guess from which side to start counting the rows. As it would turn out, we were only one or two rows off. We went to the office and the always helpful Herr Pohl provide us with a plan of Feld B-VII and instructions where to start counting to find row 8 and the 20th grave, no. 100147 -- and he told us there was a gravestone that had been placed in 1941. We still missed it. But after some "re-orientating", we worked our way back down row 8 to a space that first appeared to represent 5 missing graves fairly close together. The middle one should have been no. 100147, but it was just a low mound of ivy. Poking around at one corner, I found the edge of a stone, but no inscription. I then poked around the middle of the stone, and also found no inscription. Don started pulling the ivy off the grave. Then, with one of Cookie's unused poop bags on my hand as a glove (a bag i had been carrying around in my pocket through Poland and Germany), I started to remove the earth under the ivy from the middle of the gravestone. There, an inscription started to be visible. While Don made a video using his iPod Touch, I cleaned off the gravestone. We had found the grave of our great grandmother which had almost certainly not been seen by anyone in the family for close to 70 years. (And we got to "the Fritz" only a few minutes late.)
The Sunday before all this, we had finally made a visit to Auschwitz, where all four of Ida's children were murdered.
On Tuesday, on the way to the Gesundbrunnen station, we passed through the Westhafen S-Bahn station, under the Putlitzbrücke, where Gertrud and Helene and Else were put on a train to Auschwitz (part of Transport 27).
The next Sunday, we flew home from Berlin to London to Chicago to Philadelphia on Gertrud's 125th birthday, 30 Oct 2011.
This trip had become a memorial to our grandmother Gertrud FALK, geb. RAPHAELSOHN (1886-ca.1943) and her mother Ida.
Finding Renate
Thirty Years to Find My Third Cousin Micheline
(I hope MyHeritage.com and Family Tree Magazine will select me to win a family reunion with my long-lost French cousins.)
My IMMERWAHR family tree always contained an interesting branch -- but one that seemed to peter out in the early 20th century. The IMMERWAHRs originated in the small Prussian town of Kreuzburg in Upper Silesia (now Kluczbork, Poland). By the 1830s, they were living in Breslau (now Wroclaw), the capital of Silesia, where David IMMERWAHR (1796-1861) became a successful merchant. He and his wife Lina SILBERSTEIN (1811-1883) had 9 children. The second youngest was my great grandmother Clara IMMERWAHR (1845-1914). The youngest child was Mathilde Marie Ottilie IMMERWAHR (1847-1929).
Considering that she came from a German Jewish family, the story of Mathilde was always very interesting and surprising -- because she married a non-Jewish Frenchman, who was a career soldier. Col. André Albert LAFFITTE-ROUZET fought in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871 and became a prisoner-of-war. As a POW, he was garrisoned in Breslau. Somehow, Mathilde and the Colonel met, and presumably fell in love. They were married in 1873 on her uncle's estate, Malkwitz.
Col. LAFFITTE-ROUZET and Mathilde settled in France. They had 2 children, Charles and Gabrielle. In about 1890, my grandfather traveled from eastern Germany to France to visit the LAFFITTE-ROUZET family when he was just a teenager. Gabrielle was my grandfather's favorite cousin, and 30+ years later, he named his daughter (my mother) Gabrielle.
From the family tree that I first saw in the 1970s, we knew that Charles followed in his father's footsteps and also rose to the rank of colonel in the French army. We knew that Gabrielle married a CLERC (or CLERONE) -- first name not known -- and had three sons, one of whom had a son who was a dentist. That was about it. And that is where things stood.
In 1998, I got in contact with another cousin from the IMMERWAHR family who still lived in Germany. His father had been a colonel in the German army -- until 1936 when he was given the options of divorcing his wife (from the Jewish IMMERWAHR family) or ending his military career. To his credit, he chose to retire. Colonel DOHNE and the younger Colonel LAFITTE-ROUZET were in contact, and had met on a few occasions. They cancelled their last planned meeting in the 1930s because of concern that their meeting would be misconstrued by the Germans, or the French, or both, as espionage.
In 1999, I thought to write to the archives of the French army, "Service Historique de l’Armee de Terre." I received files on both French colonels, including information on Col. André Albert LAFFITTE-ROUZET's time as a POW, and his marriage to Mathilde. The file did not help me track down their descendants, but it did contain a clue that eventually led to new information -- that André Albert LAFFITTE-ROUZET died in Valence, France.
In 2006, through the network of Jewish genealogy researchers, I saw a note from a man in Valence and thought to ask him how I could learn if there were LAFFITTE-ROUZET burials there. He contacted the cemetery, and learned that my great great aunt and her husband were buried there. I wrote to the cemetery and in mid 2007 received an e-mail with information about André Albert and Mathilde, about Charles and his wife, about Gabrielle and her husband, and about their three sons, all buried in the LAFFITTE-ROUZET family tomb in Valence. The information brought my research up to 2002, when Gabrielle's grandson, the dentist Jacques CLERC died in Paris. Learning Jacques' last address led me to believe that I would finally find a living member of this branch of my family. I did, but unfortunately, the contact did not lead anywhere.
In 2009, a different cousin in Germany sent me the 1970 death notice of Gabrielle's son Jean François CLERC. I learned the name of Jean François' two grandsons and one granddaughter. Within a day, thanks to the ubiquity of Facebook, I had found and "friended" my new third cousin once removed Marie-Astrid. She got me up to date on my CLERC cousins, including her father's two first cousins, brother and sister, living in the south of France.
The very next day, I received an e-mail with an amazing photograph. My brand new cousin Maurice who sent me the photograph knew that the younger man on the right was his father André CLERC, but he did not know who the older man on the left was.
Since then, my mother and I have had a great correspondence with our new French cousins -- with lots of talk about trying to arrange to meet. Cousin Micheline is now 89, and has failing eyesight. She has urged me to come to meet her while she can still see me; something I truly hope to be able to do. So far, it has not happened, but perhaps the MyHeritage.com contest will make it possible.
Discoveries - No. 1 in a Series - FEIGE / STENZEL
One of the things I have wanted to do on this blog is to make a record of the discoveries and process of discovery that added new ancestors to the family tree. Here is one from 18 months ago.
4 December 2009
On 4 December 2009, I received an e-mail from my cousin Jonathan PERL with the sad news that his mother Ann PERL, née MESIANO, had died the day before. Looking at the family tree, I noticed Ernst PERL's middle name Salo in a way I had not before -- seeing the connection to Ernst's grandfather, my great great grandfather Salo (Seelig Salomon) PERL, who supposedly died in 1907, supposedly in Kattowitz -- just in time for Ernst to have gotten the name Salo in 1908 in memory of his grandfather.
From Salo PERL, my eye moved up the tree to his mother-in-law Mariane FRIEDENSTEIN, geb. FEIGE, my great great great grandmother who was just a name at the top of one line in the family tree. A year earlier (29 September 2008), I had found an entry in the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR) database full of question marks:
"FRIEDENSTEIN?, Mariane?", buried in the Kozilska Street Cemetery in Kattowitz; Reg. Page 48, Line 855, who died in "1904?"
Seeing this earlier note, which had contained too much uncertainty to act on, I did a simple internet search on: Mariane Friedenstein Katowice. This time, the first hit had the heading "Katowice – Grobowiec Mariane Friedenstein". When I clicked on the link, I was on a webpage of www.sztetl.org.pl -- the Virtual Shtetl website of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews -- looking at a beautiful photograph of the gravestone of my great great great grandmother Mariane FRIEDENSTEIN, geb. FEIGE, with her full birth date and death date, and in clear Hebrew, her name and the name of her father -- my newly discovered great great great great grandfather Aron FEIGE. The photograph:
It was good timing. The photograph was posted 5 months earlier. The same search 6 month earlier would have just led to the same old uncertain information.
A little easy digging, mostly in the JRI-Poland database, led to information on Aron FEIGE's death, his father Jisheja(hu), his wife Rosel (Reisel) STENZEL, three other children, and their descendants (tying together some prevously unconnected FEIGEs). So, overall, this led to:
great great great great grandfather Aron FEIGE (ca.1772-1849)
great great great great grandmother Rosel (Reisel) STENZEL (d.1845)
great great great great great grandfather Jisheja(hu) [FEIGE]
including a new family surname to ponder (STENZEL) and a new family town (Beuthen),
a new line of FEIGE cousins which happened to lead to Marion KRONER, geb. LEDERMANN (1913-2004), my mother's third cousin once removed, already in the family tree as the wife of my father's first cousin,
a possible new line of cousins descended from Rebecca FRIEDMANN, geb. STENZEL (b.ca.1795), who might have been Rosel's sister,
and another possible new great great great great great grandfather, if the Joseph STENZEL living in Brzezinka, Kreis Tost in 1812 turns out to be Rosel's father...
So, Jonathan's e-mail about Ann's death, led to considerations of the origins of Ernst's middle name Salo, which led to Salo PERL and then, just-because, to his mother-in-law Mariane FEIGE, and to an internet search which had great results because of the activity of people in Poland documenting the Jewish history of towns, including Kattowitz / Katowice.
Anne Elizabeth FEILER - in memoriam - 1960-2011
FALK + OTWELL @ 25 Years + 1
Now, the tiara and pin are back on the road, waiting for the next Silver Wedding Anniversary among the descendants of Wilhelm Salomon FREUND and Clara IMMERWAHR -- or a wedding or other appropriate occasion.
Visions of Grandmother in the Mountains of New Mexico (near the Sanctuario de Chimayo...)
17 May 2011
A long-weekend, looking at photographs and papers of the GRAETZER family ended on the 83rd birthday of my second cousin Marianne YANCEY, geb. GRAETZER (1928-2005). The papers she thought to keep gave us a great birthday present.
On Friday night, my brother Don picked me up at the airport in Albuquerque. He had driven that day from Austin, TX, a middle leg on his journey from Chapel Hill, NC back to Point Roberts, WA. I had flown in from Philadelphia. We were teaming up to descend on our cousin Margaret and her husband Gordon in Truchas, NM, about 2 hours north.
After a wonderful breakfast meeting with a photographer and documentarian (eggs from her chickens), and a picnic lunch on the edge of the Santuario de Chimayo along a rushing stream, we arrived on Saturday afternoon at Tooley's Trees in Truchas. We had come there to look at boxes and boxes of family papers and photographs which had passed from Marianne YANCEY to her son Will, and then to his sister Margaret, moving from New Mexico to Texas and back again -- after having traveled with Marianne's parents, and then Marianne, from Breslau to New York, and then to Michigan, Ohio, Massachusetts, back to Ohio, and finally to New Mexico.
Before going back to help Gordon with tree customers, Margaret set us up with the first box with two photo albums, one from the 1920s, the other from the 1950s. The old one started around the time of her parent's marriage in 1927 and quickly moved on to their first child Marianne. The occasion of Marianne's christening led to a family photo without the baby Marianne, but showing the new parents Günther GRAETZER and Klare, geb. MILCH, and her parents the Breslau banker Fritz MILCH and Lisbeth, geb. FREUND. Some of the other faces were unfamiliar; presumably members of the GRAETZER family. One man, who we thought might be Günther's father Max, could not be, since Max had died two years earlier.
Then Don noticed that a man on the right side of the gathering was our grandfather Dr. Walther FREUND. It took us a few more minutes, maybe even a second look at the photograph, before we realized that the woman on his right (our left) was our grandmother Ellinor, geb. BACH.
This discovery was very exciting. We have only ever seen 3 or 4 small images of our grandmother -- very small ones, or enlarged and fuzzy versions thereof. Now, we had added a new image to the scarce gallery, and one of full length, at a happy gathering, and with her husband by her side. (My mother pointed out that it is the only photo she has seen of her parents together.)
I took a photo of the photo with my iPhone so that I could walk to the top of the tree farm where there was said to be cellphone reception so that I could e-mail a copy to my mother. I had made a photo of the entire photograph, and a second one zooming in on her parents. We told her it was coming, so she got it using her iPad. Unfortunately, since we did not have regular e-mail access, we did not see her note for a couple days. She enjoyed this new image of her parents at least as much as we did.
Later, we ran across photographs of our mother with her brother and cousins when they visited the GRAETZER's "Rittergut" in Langenau outside of Breslau. In one, she was playing in a sandbox (I did not see edging, so it might have been a sand "area"). In another, the children were playing on a huge hay pile -- photographic evidence to corroborate stories we had heard about from time to time.
We also saw lots of interesting documents - birth, marriage and death certificates, emigration documents, property records - and learned more about the GRAETZER family, filling in some missing pieces of information, and learning new things that led to new questions to answer (e.g., the relationship of three FUCHSs who married three GRAETZER siblings). It was a great weekend of fun and family and discovery in a most unexpected, and beautiful location.
The Search for Max BORINSKI - The "Begins" -- The births and development of ideas: Being begets Begins
Where to begin. When I first saw the black cloth-bound "Stammbaum der Familie Falk" (Breslau 1937), prepared by the genealogist Paul DOBRIN (1886-1942, Theresienstadt), I do not think it immediately occurred to me that that work, ending as it did in pre-War Nazi Germany could be, or needed to be, updated. But I was probably 10 years old, or a bit younger, when those thoughts did not occur.
Where to begin: At some point, I ran across the striking family line of Meyer FALK who had a son Wilhelm FALK who had a son Meyer FALK who had a son Wilhelm FALK. I enjoyed the pattern without appreciating the tradition of naming a child in memory of a deceased grandparent, and without appreciating that that meant that each of these grandsons could never have known their grandfather.
Where to begin: At some point, probably in the 1980s, maybe only after my father Hans FALK died in 1985, the Falk Stammbaum seemed like a sad book. I knew about all the descendants of the youngest son Emanuel FALK (1832-1906), my great grandfather -- who was now where, who had been murdered in the Shoah. But the rest of the book, the other 10 branches of the FALK Family descended from Emanuel's 3 brothers and 7 sisters who lived to adulthood and created their own thriving clans by the 1930s, those parts I simply assumed had been killed.
Where to begin: Eventually, by the early 1990s, I wanted to try to update the Falk Stammbaum. By chance, through seeing an interview of Prof. Wilhelm Ze'ev FALK (1923-1998) on television in Chicago, my aunt Eva WULKAN, geb. FALK (1911-2005) had gotten the address of the very Wilhelm at the end of that chain of Meyers and Wilhelms. He was interested in family history, but also very busy. After some correspondence (by postal letter in those days), we arranged to meet when he came to New York. I went armed with my family's copy the Falk Stammbaum. Ze'ev and I paged through the book, and he would say, "This family is in Tel Aviv. That family is in Petach Tiqva." It was a revelation of sorts. The Falk Stammbaum was not almost exclusively a book of the dead; it was a guide to the living. When I wrote Ze'ev after our meeting to request addresses of the cousins he knew about, they were not forthcoming. Not until early 1996.
Where to begin: I think Ze'ev must have finally retired from some of his teaching duties at Hebrew University, because in 1996, he sent me addresses for cousins in Israel, and a few outside of Israel. That was the impetus for the start of a massive letter writing campaign. Using those addresses, new addresses received in response to the first and subsequent rounds of letters, and addresses found on a CD-compilation of US residents, I started findings hundreds of new members of the greater FALK family. I tried to find the family of Max BORINSKI who was born in 1923 and could still (then and now) have been alive.
Where to begin: Over time, the family tree springing forth from R. Jacob Jehuda Loebel FALK (ca.1767-1838) and his third wife Sara NAUMBURG (ca.1787-1851) came to number about 5000, and almost every branch and twig of the family had been contacted and updated. Some details remain (still) to be gathered, and the family keeps on growing at one end (and shrinking at the other), but there were only a few missing twigs or leaves, among them prominently, the BAREINSCHEKs and the BORINSKIs.
Where to begin: The searching continued. In 2004, I made contact with a British family descended, in part, from BORINSKIs of Upper Silesia. Ultimately, the families turned out to be linked, but they did not know about Max BORINSKI, or his grandfather Max BORINSKI, the direct link to the rest of the clan. (See, http://www.gen.scatteredmind.co.uk)
Where to begin: In 2006, I created a website with the URLs www.familiymemory.org and www.mischpochologie.org. I included my best guesses about the origins of the FALK family of Breslau, brief comments about the 11 branches of the family, and a short list of the inpenetrable search targets, Max BORINSKI, among them.
Where to begin: In 2007, I visited the graves of Max LEVY (1893-1970) and Irma LEVY, geb. JONAS in the Neue Jüdischer Friedhof in Frankfurt am Main. I left a card with my contact information. Max LEVY was a half first cousin of Max' father Alfred BORINKSI. I hoped an unknown member of Max BORINSKI's family might visit the grave and contact me. Max LEVY had had one of the copies of the Falk Stammbaum.
Where to begin: Last night, I checked the "spam filter" of my e-mail account and saw an e-mail from two days earlier with the subject line "Borinski Family". I read it, found it very interesting, but did not know if it contained information about my cousin Max BORINSKI. The e-mail from an Israeli member of the greater BORINSKI family, described a young Zwi BORINSKI who did not fit in her known BORINSKI family tree, but who was from Breslau, made aliyah in 1935 where he continued his schooling, joined the British Army in Palestine in 1941, became a member of Haganah, and died from cancer on 2 November 1948. There was no mention of his birth date, the names of his parents, or how he came to be called "Zwi" in Palestine. I wrote a quick acknowledgement, and went to sleep intrigued by the prospects.
Where to end: This morning, after a more thoughtful acknowledgment of the information about Zwi, I tried doing some internet searches to see what I could learn. Having no success, I wrote to a friend in Israel hoping he might find more information about Zwi BORINSKI. In about 15 minutes I had an exciting reply. He had information, but not from any fancy database. With Yom haZikaron, Remembrance Day about to start, and having read about Zwi's involvement in the military, he went straight to the (Hebrew only) Yizkor website of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, where a search for Zwi BORINSKI brought the answers (www.izkor.gov.il/HalalView.aspx?id=90238), and even a grainy photograph of Sgt. Zwi (Max) BORINSKI (http://www.izkor.gov.il/HalalKorot.aspx?id=90238). With birth date, birth place, parents' names, death date and grave location, this information confirmed what a kind stranger had suggested a few days before.
Where to end: Having come of age during the Second World War, being in the military for all his adult life, and dying from an illness at the age of only 25, I currently assume that Max (Zwi) BORINSKI did not marry and did not have children. He was the last prospect for descendants to continue this smallest branch of the FALK family. He was an only child. One of his uncles, Ernst, died in the First World War, and the other, Leo, married, but had no children. His father and uncles had two "half" first cousins, Max LEVY mentioned above, who made aliyah in 1936, but returned to Germany after the War, and his sister Lina who worked at the Zionist organization in Breslau and was deported to Theresienstadt where she died in 1942.
Max BORINSKI - in memoriam - 1923-1948
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| Max Borinski (1923, Breslau - 1948, Israel) |
He can now return to the memory of his family, us.
Six Degrees of Connection -- Spirals of Georg SIMMEL
1 May 2011 -- Yom haShoah - 27 Nisan 5771
This week the genealogy research went in a few different directions.
The main thrust was a result of Don seeing a book on Ray's bookshelf, "Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age" by the sociologist Duncan J. Watts. In that book, Don found reference to Prof. Georg SIMMEL (1858, Berlin - 1918, Strasbourg), a "father of sociology" (not sure how many father's that field has...). According to information on one website, Georg SIMMEL's studies" pioneered the concept of social structure, and he was a key precursor of social network analysis." That is entirely apt to this work in general (mine, not his), and to the waves of connections flowing from even a superficial exploration of his life.
Don quickly learned two things about Georg SIMMEL that created "connections" -- defined in our work as a link to someone already in the ever-expanding family tree. A third connection appeared a bit later. A fourth is only a connection precursor.
1) The first link comes from the story of Georg SIMMEL's early life. Georg was the youngest of seven children of Edward SIMMEL and Flora BODSTEIN. Edward SIMMEL, who had a successful chocolate business in Berlin, died in 1874. Although the family was apparently financially secure, Georg seems to have been taken under wing by Julius FRIEDLAENDER, a family friend who was owner of a Berlin music publishing house.
This appears to be the same Julius FRIEDLAENDER whom I have been researching since February. He was the owner of the music publisher C.F. Peters, a Leipzig based enterprise that he acquired in 1860. Based on the following entry in Jacob JACOBSON's “Die Judenbürgerbücher der Stadt Berlin” (p. 443), Julius was the uncle of my great great grandmother Lina IMMERWAHR, geb. SILBERSTEIN, who is gazing down at me from her portrait hanging over the fireplace. The entry:
Nr. 2388 - 8.4.1845: Friedländer, Julius Carl, Disponent - Buch- u. Musikalien-hdlr., Werderscher Markt 6, geb. Breslau 14.6.1820, Konz. 29.3.1845, 9 Rtl. 239 f. N.B.H., Inhaber eines Musikalien-Leih-Instituts, Fa. Stern & Co.
V.: Buchhdlr. = Marcus Friedlaender
(Angabe über Marcus Friedländer nach brieflicher Mitteilung von Dr. Brilling aus dem Geburtsregister der ehem. Synagogengem. Breslau.)
If JACOBSON and BRILLING were correct in identifying the Julius FRIEDLAENDER in Berlin as the one born to Marcus FRIEDLAENDER (and Philippine SCHWEITZER), then it was our cousin who was a family friend of the SIMMELs, and who looked after Georg SIMMEL. If some of the internet sources are correct, Georg's inheritance from Julius FRIEDLAENDER enabled him to pursue his academic career.
(Some webpages that have dates 1813 to 1884 for this Julius FRIEDLAENDER seem to be confusing him with Eduard Julius Theodor FRIEDLAENDER, the son of Benoni FRIEDLAENDER (1773-1858), son of David FRIEDLAENDER (1750-1834) of Berlin -- unless the confusion is mine... That other Julius FRIEDLAENDER may have been the numismaticist.)
2) The second link comes from a later chapter in Georg SIMMEL's life. In 1890, he married Gertrud KINEL. However, there was a second important Gertrud -- the art historian Gertrud KANTOROWICZ (1876, Posen - 1945, Theresienstadt), with whom he had a daughter in 1904. She was a first cousin of the historian Ernst Hartwig KANTOROWICZ (1895, Posen - 1963, Princeton) -- who found his way into the extended family tree since his father is descended from the KALIFARI family and his mother is descended from the HEPPNER family.
3) The third link is that a scholar of Georg SIMMEL's was the philosopher Prof. Michael LANDMANN (1913, Basel - 1984, Haifa). Not only does Michael LANDMANN happen to be a third cousin of my father (through the KALISCHER family), in Basel in the 1940s, he was a friend of my mother. He told her she should marry someone Jewish, and said that if she did he would give her coffee pot. (She did, but since she did not report that news, she did not receive the coffee pot.)
A recurring theme among these people is that they were members of the George-Kreis, a circle of historians, writers and other intellectuals attracted to the writings (and/or the person) of the poet Stefan GEORGE (1868, Bingen - 1933, Locarno). This applies to Georg SIMMEL, his wife Gertrud KINEL, Gertrud KANTOROWICZ, her cousin Ernst KANTOROWICZ, and Edith LANDMANN, geb. KALISCHER (mother of Prof. Michael LANDMANN). (Another member of the George-Kreis was Percy GOTHEIN, a possible distant cousin, and the subject of research in early April -- to be subject of a future blog about past research.)
4) A possible fourth link related to Georg SIMMEL is still a work in progress. Both his father and his mother were born in Breslau, with family roots in the Breslau Jewish community. Edward SIMMEL is said to have been born in Breslau, ca.1810 (although he does not appear in the available birth records). Georg's mother Flora BODSTEIN was born in Breslau in 1818. More work will be needed to see if there is a connection between Edward's father or grandfather Isaac SIMMEL and the Isak Itzig SIMMEL whose son Israel Isser SIMMEL married in Breslau in 1797. I have been in contact with one of Georg SIMMEL's grandsons in an attempt to explore this unanswered question.
The exploration of these disparate connections seems very fitting as a tribute to Georg SIMMEL, and the field of social network analysis.
LEUBUSCHER - WACHSMANN (WAXMAN)
25 April 2011
A rough blog posting.
Unsendable e-mail correspondence from the weekend started to arrive today – to and from the niece of Walter Leubuscher’s wife whom I tried to reach on Friday (see Post No. 1). She did have contact with Walter’s niece Jolante SONNTAG, who had no children and may have been unmarried, lived in Santa Monica, CA, and died probably died quite some time ago (b.ca.1914).
I tried to find information on Jolante (Jola) using Ancestry.com and other sources with no success.
Since her mother must be a LEUBUSCHER, I tried to find her in the California Death Index just using mother’s surname as the search criteria. I still did not find her, but I did get two hits. One was for a Rosalie WACHSMANN (1866-1949) who was born in Peiskretcham in Upper Silesia – she might even be in the tree already, or in a separate tree I might have made to keep record of unconnected LEUBUSCHERs. (She is not in the tree (yet), but her mother Johanna PERL, geb. LEUBUSCHER is.
When I checked for her in New York Passenger Lists, I found her arrival, with husband Otto, in 1940, sailing from Genoa. She listed a son Fritz in Oppeln as her contact back in Germany, and she heading for a Franz WACHSMANN at an address in Hollywood.
A search on Franz WACHSMANN quickly found that he was a successful Hollywood composer, under the name Franz WAXMAN, with Academy Awards, and involvement in lots of major movies.
He was married twice, and had a son from his first marriage. He also had several siblings:
Paul (1895-1982)
Elfriede (Frieda) (1896-1988)
Fritz (1897-1945)
Max (1898-1918)
Dorothea (1902-1903)
Ernst (1904-1966)
Alfred (1905-1906)
and they could have some descendants.