The discussion of why some nice Jewish boys appear in records with
numbers after their names (like Lazarus Isaak II) raises another
important point.

In little towns where there were more than one (and sometimes many)
people with the same name, it often happend that some people adopted
different names so as to avoid confusion.

For 35 years my great grandmother's family was a brick wall for me because
her father was one of many men in his family called Moses MOSES.
In the town of Beerfelden in the Odenwald (Hessen) the MOSES family was huge.
Sorting out my MOSES family tree is like trying to put socks on an octopus.

What some of the Beerfelden MOSES did to avoid name confusion created
a different kind of confusion for later genealogists. Some dropped
the MOSES surname and adopted either ROSENTHAL or SONDHEIMER even before 1800.

See "Die Beerfeldner Juden 1691 - 1942" by Dr. Uri Kaufmann 2003
Herausgeber: Stadt Beerfelden
Gesamtherstellung: Druckberatung Walter M=FCller, Hetzbach
Druckerei Krauth, Eberbach
ISBN-Nr.: 3-00-011532-3

John Paul Lowens (geb. Loewenstein) Suburban NYC JPL25@Cornell.edu
Write to me about MOSES family genealogy at: BeerfeldenGE@aol.com