Dear David:

First of all, please register your interests with the JewishGen Family
Finder. Lots of people read this mailing list, but JGFF has over
200,000 registered researchers, including quite a few for Pleszew and...

"Kashmin" is probably Koschmin, now Kozmin. It's about 15 km WSW of
Pleszew/Pleschen, and halfway between Krotoszyn and Jarocin.

A good source of info would be Heppner & Herzberg, _Aus Vergangenheit
und Gegenwart der Juden und der jued. Gemeinden in den Posener Landen_
(Koschmin and Bromberg, 1909). Dr. Heppner was the rabbi in Koschmin at
the time. pp. 541-553 deal with Koschmin. It's downloadable--anyone
have the URL handy? I seem to have misplaced it.

By the way, the 90% figure ("not naturalized") is problematic. There
are over 5000 names on the naturalization list >from 1834-5. They are
all heads of households or other individuals living independently. Even
using a conservative figure of 3 people per family (4 or 4.5 is more
common), this means that 15000 Jews were naturalized at that time. Did
Posen really have a Jewish population of 150,000? I don't think so.

Finally, there are some LDS films with records >from Pleschen and
Koschmin. Check out http://www.jri-poland.org or
http://www.familysearch.org for more details.

Roger Lustig
Princeton, NJ


BRENERDA@aol.com wrote:

Goal: identify town know as Kashmin on a US tombstone in 1868 as it relates
to the birth of deceased's father about 1795. I have searched JewishGen
sources. See details that follow.

After 30 years, the tombstone of my great great grandfather Sylvester Louis
Levy was found in Memphis, TN where he died in 1868. It reveals, after much
study of a worn stone, that he was the son of Kasrie-l LEVY >from the town of
Kashmin.

The family is of "German" heritage with the various censuses using an
assortment of names that relate to Germany.The family arrived in US about 1857
via NYC (passenger list not yet found.) According to the 1876 NYC marriage
license of Sylvester Louis Levy's daughter Mary, she was born in Pleschen,
Posen, Prussia. Pleschen is both the name of a county (my term) and a city.
In the county, in addition to Pleschen are the towns of Neustadt, Jaroczin and
Mischkow. This information I got >from Edward Luft's book the Naturalized Jews
of the Grand Duchy of Posen, in 1834 and 1835. As luck would have it, my Levy
family was among the 90% not Naturalized and thus not listed. Today, I think
Pleschen is now Pleszew, Poland. This threw me as I always assumed family was

from Bavaria.

So, I seek help in identifying the town of Kashmin and how close it may
be to Pleschen. Keep in mind that there is at least 60 years between
Kasrie-l's circa 1795 birth and Mary's 1856 birth.

I can send the Hebrew transcription of the town >from the stone and an actual
picture of the stone. The person who finally was able to read the tombstone
was a elderly orthodox rabbi and I have little doubt as to his accuracy.

I also seek who or what I could contact for the records of the Jews of
Pleschen for the mid 1800's. Actually, any insight into any of this would be
appreciated. I have fully researched my families US history, this is my first
overseas venture.

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