This has all the earmarks of a name-change joke:  Like the Jew whose
last name was Fergason because when his father was asked a question he
said "Ich hob fargessen..."  Never happened...

Jules Levin

Alan Gordon writes:

"My second cousin, during an interview I conducted, informed me that his
grandfather, Frank Kanserstein, had his name changed at Ellis Island. 
Frank's was the husband of my great aunt, and I never met him. 
According to my cousin, Frank's real name was "Thomaspol," but when they
asked him what his name was, he replied, "Kanserstein," or "I can't
understand."  Given your combined experiences, does this make any sense?"

No, for several reasons.

1) Nobody would have asked him what his name was, because it would have
been written on his ticket and on the passenger list; the agent's job
was to match the two.

2) In what language would "Kanserstein" mean "I can't understand?" In
Yiddish it would be something like "kann nikht verstehen." This is an
old trope--I grew up hearing stories about people who went abroad and
got the name "Kannitverstahn." And supposedly the kangaroo got its name
from an incident where an explorer or other visitor asked what that
animal was, and was told, "I don't understand."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangaroo#Terminology debunks that story.
(And what language would it have been that was not spoken at Ellis
Island? Mr. KANSERSTEIN would have to have been in a small minority of
speakers of his language on that boat for there not to have been an
agent who could help.)

Roger Lustig

Princeton, NJ USA

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chuck1@...

C Chaykin writes:

"Here's the grain of truth: Someone in the family changed their surname.
Not surprising, since many "last names" were, literally, "son of X," and
changed from generation to generation."

Surnames as we speak of them did not change from generation to
generation. The "son of" formulation is called a patronymic. All
European countries with a substantial Jewish population required fixed
surnames by 1861; most, far earlier.

Roger Lustig

Princeton, NJ USA

Trying to make contact with the family of Rav Yitzchak Abadi who
returned to live in Lakewood NJ in 2009. His wife Chaya Rivka is a
sister of Avraham Leiser and Necha (married Heschek Parnes).

I am looking for family member Sunny BERNARD who came to the United States from Amsterdam in the 1940’s.

I believe we are part of the same Reisfeld / Lewin / Kanner family of Rzeszow and later Berlin.

Sunny had been known earlier as Sonny HOFSTEDE.

I would appreciate any information that would help me find Sunny.


Carol
Surrey, UK

No, it makes no sense.

1. Names were not changed at Ellis Island. Read the previous posts which supplied a reading list.
2. The German would be "Ich kann es nicht verstehen.: or “Kann nicht verstehen”.

Hello

I was contacted by a man named Boris Makalsky from the Ukraine. He found my name in the JewishGen list of people looking for Posternak family in Zhitomir. He claims to have details of my husband's family going back to 1770. He wants to charge me for this information. I am skeptical of accepting a tree from him without proper documentation, which he wants to charge me extra if I ask for individual documents. This can get costly. His note is below:

I have a lot of documents related to your family. Approximately 40-50 documents. About births (Luser had at least 9 brothers and sisters), marriages, divorces and deaths.
Examples.
1. Record of the birth of Luser in 1878. Names of father, mother, both grandfathers.
2. Record of the marriage of Luser with Rukhlya Milman in 1904. Their age, confirmation of the names of the fathers.
3. A record of the birth of their daughter in 1905.
4. Birth records of almost all of Luser's siblings.
5. Luser's father was a retired soldier and appeared in Zhitomir in the late 1860s. Before that, he lived in a completely different city. According to the censuses of this city,

You can trace the history of the family until the 1770s. For each scan from the original document with translation I ask 25.
There is another option. For $ 220, for all the documents I have, I make a tree from the 1770s to 1900.
This is about 60-80 people. This includes 3 any scans with translation. Each additional scan for $ 20.

Has anyone else had experience with Boris Makalsky? What would you recommend that I do?

Rhonda Post
rhonda.post@...

Your second cousin may say whatever he likes, but the names on the Ellis Island ship manifests were copied from the embarkation manifests. 

Stephen, at the risk of stating the obvious, people who claim that their family name was changed at Ellis Island do not mean that it was changed by marriage. This subject is getting old...🥴

His grandson has a shul in Boro Park, Brooklyn.  Supposed to be a very nice guy. Here is the contact info, maybe someone there can help you. 

Minchas Yehuda Stichin
1266 50th St.
Brooklyn, NY 11219
718-436-1166
Rabbi Eliezer Yehoshua Yudkovsky
(contact info from "GoDaven"website)

The following reference is given in JewishGen. Is there any way to look at the original record?


Thanks,
Larry Bassist
USA

I encountered a similar situation with a marriage record. My wife's grandmother, from Nagy Turjajog in subcarpathia. came to NYC in 1905. Her husband was from a town near Serednye and came to the US in 1900. They met in NYC and they were married in NYC in 1907. I have their marriage certificate.

Yet, in researching in the old country records I found a record of their marriage (it was definitely them, no errors) in the Serednye synagogue records dated about 6 months before the NYC marriage and long after she had left Hungary (it was Hungary then) and long after she had arrived in NYC.

I never resolved that mystery. It was not a record of 'engagement' but of a marriage that had not yet happened in the US. I do not think they had even met yet in the us.

Jeff Malka
Researching ORNSTEIN, RIEDERMAN

RESEARCHER:  Can anyone refer me to a researcher who can look for records on my family from Kalarash?   Last name Harol/Kharol.  First name Itzik, Duvid, Ita.  See previous messages which includes some records. Would like to research further including translations.  Rickharold@...

Hello to all,

I’m looking for thoughts and guidance about a family surname, from Gorodische (the location that is supposedly about 100 miles from Kiev). My research has led me to the name Omborow (on the passenger manifest), Homboraw (on the petition for naturalization), Gomborow (used by some family members), and Gomborov (used by other family members). As you can tell, pronunciation played a role in the way the name was documented.

I would like to trace the name and the family further back, but without a better idea about the way the name may have been represented before the passage, it’s a challenge. My question: what could the name have been in an earlier manifestation? I can guess it was more like a gutteral “ch”: Chomborow, but any lead or idea would help. My thanks in advance for your time.

Best wishes,
Em

I am looking to find more about that portion of my family that came from Romania, particularly the parents and siblings of my maternal grandmother, Feiga Singer. My grandmother and her siblings were born in Targu Neamt between 1895 and 1911, but I don’t believe they stayed there. My grandmother left from there in 1921, traveling to Antwerp, Belgium, where she met my grandfather and gave birth to my mother. As far as I can tell the remainder of her family remained in Romania until at least after World War II.

 

Feiga was born in 1898 to Avram Meir and Sura Segal. She was the third of eight children. I do not have dates or locations associated with the death of either of the parents. Of the remaining children this is what I have:

 

Moishe was born in 1895. He married a woman named Frima Avram with whom he had two children: Gina born in 1925 and Itzhak in 1930. I believe he was living in Buzau at the time he became a father. He survived the war having spent some time in a labor camp (I don’t know which one). In 1950, still living in Buzau, he officially changed his name to Marcel Abramovici. He may well have used Abramovici or Abramovitz for quite some time prior to that point. The family moved to Israel at different times in the 1950s.

 

Riva was born in 1896. That is the only information I have on her.

 

Iosub was born in 1900. I have seen several items that make it appear he died in Iasi in 1944, but I can’t be sure that any of them are actually this person or just someone with the same name.

 

Simon was born in 1902. That is the only information I have on him.

 

Rebeica was born in 1904. In 1927 she visited Feiga in Antwerp. The Belgium archives show her name as being Rebecca Abramovici and that she resided in Bezeau. At some point, after returning to Romania in 1928, she married Aurel Creteu (I am not sure of the spelling of either his first or last name). They had a child named Adrian in 1946. They remained in Romania until the 1960s when they emigrated to Israel. Moishe’s grandchildren called her “Aunt Riri”.

 

Zalman was born in 1906. According to information contained in the Yad Vashem database he had at least two children and used the name Abramovici. He died in the Tighina death camp in 1942.

 

Tauba, the youngest of Feiga’s siblings, was born in 1910. She was married and lived in Bucharest. One source says she married Shlomo Hamundis in 1940. Another source says she married Roland Shternberg. She died in the Shoah but I don’t know the location of her death.