As far as I can tell, my father’s maternal family lived in Lithuania from at least about the 1820s-30s, but they had a Germanic surname, Steinberg. I am wondering if there was a mass migration of Jews to the east sometime after surnames were required in Germanic countries and before the early 1800s. If that was so, would there be any way to trace the family back to Western Europe? In Dec 1882 my ggrandfather followed his two oldest children and brought the rest of the family to NYC from Reissen with a letter of introduction from Isaac Elchanan Spektor and Alexander Moses ben Zvi Lapidas.


Estelle Guttman
Reston VA
Ex NewYorker