Hello Fellow Galitzianers,

I have recently subscribed to Gesher Galicia SIG mailing list and
plan on becoming a member of the Galitzianer SIG although 5 months
later I would have to pay the yearly fee again? Many years ago
after the funeral of my mother's sister in Boston, my mother and
cousins were reminiscing about relatives and my mother called them
Galitzianers. I didn't remember this conversation until a month
or so ago, and it shed some light on my maternal grandfather's
birthplace in Sokolivka. My mother only told me that her father
Max Herman, AKA Mordechai Meyerov Halevi HERLICHMAN although the
surname ERLICHMAN, appears on my grandfather's manifest and
Petition of Naturalization. There is no H consonant, I was told,
in the Russian alphabet, and wonder why my mother pronounced the
name with the H sound. The root is erlich meaning "honest man".
The name sounds like it was German, but it was also in Yiddish
as well.

I determined that the Sokolivka was probably the one 89 miles or
so >from Kiev, and alternately called Justingrad, because my
maternal grandmother Rivke FERTMAN and my mother and 3 siblings
were born in Lysanka, in the Kiev Gubernia, Zvenigorod District.
These towns were not far apart >from one another. I can't quite
figure out how the family ended up in the Ukraine, which wasn't
the usual pattern of people coming >from Galicia.

Some years ago I posted a message on JewishGen regarding unusual
given names. My mother's Hebrew name was Breina, sounding like
Bryna, but she pronounced it as Brana. The manifest shows it as
Brone. A linguist responded to my message saying that Breina
would have been pronounced as Brana in Galicia, though that
doesn't mean that the family didn't come >from some other place
originally.

So - putting this all together, I now consider that the family
origins were in some part of Galicia, which my mother called
Prussia, and I would like to know if any of the Sokolowkas in
the JewishGen data bases was close enough to Sokolivka in the
Kiev Gubernia to be considered the ERLICHMAN family's origins?

Thank you.

Annette Stolberg,
Rochester, NY

Moderator's Note:
Gesher Galicia's membership year runs >from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30.
Regardless of when in the year they join, 2008-2009 members
will receive all issues of Volume 16 (2008-2009) of The
Galitzianer plus the 2009 Gesher Galicia Family Finder.