David Oppenheim

David Tsvi called David Hersch called Dawid son of Issachar called Ber called Bernhard.

Franziska Frischmann

Feigale called Franziska called Fanny daughter of Ber  called Bernhard.

Jacob Shayzaf

I've been following the exchange with a lot of interest because it touches the identities of three relatives I'm trying to trace. 

I have two mystery relatives listed in the family tree passed on to me, siblings of my great-grandmother Dora Koshkin, one a sister, Mayna and the other a brother, Munya.  The Koshkins came from Snovsk, Chernigov, Ukraine.  Most of the family emigrated in the early 1900s but, as far as I know, neither Mayna and Munya came to the US.  I have no records or documents of their lives and for awhile wondered if they were actually one person whose name was transcribed incorrectly in the family tree.  I've since found family photos with Munya and Mayna labeled separately.  :-)

I also have a 2x great-grandfather whose name is recorded as Manis on his son's marriage license and מאניש on the same son's gravestone.  The son, my great-grandfather Joseph Schwartz, is listed on a couple of other family trees where it says his father's name was Emanuel.  A number of posts in this thread suggest that Manis is a derivative of Emanuel but I've always assumed that it was the other way around: that Emanuel was a Westernized rendering of whatever Manis stood for, probably Menachem. I don't know where Manis or Joseph came from but my best guess, at the moment, is Ternivka, Ukraine.

Lee

--

Lee David Jaffe

Surnames / Towns:  Jaffe / Suchowola, Poland ; Stein (Sztejnsapir) / Bialystok and Rajgrod, Poland ; Joroff (Jaroff, Zarov) / Chernigov, Ukraine ; Koshkin / Snovsk, Ukraine ; Schwartz (Schwarzman?, Schwarzstein?) / ? ;  Rappoport / ? ; Braun / Wizajny, Suwalki, Poland,  Ludwinowski / Wizajny, Suwalki, Poland

Yes! In the case of my grandfather's brother, he did not actually embrace another religion. I do not know any of the specifics, but his granddaughter stated that he did the formal conversion for, as she said, business reasons. You are making a good point that it could be a tax reason. Or a political reason. Or a social reason to expand his business, whatever it was. He was married to a Jewish woman and has Jewish descendants. Do not know if his wife converted. No one is around with first-hand knowledge but particular actions can be researched by someone in Russia. I suspect that Jews were taxed at a higher rate or more frequently, paid more to get licenses, etc. I do know the family had several businessmen.

Here is a Rostov-on-Don entry for a business that I believe was of his son: (This may be the son Moshe/Michael who immigrated to Palestine in the 1920's)

Business directory 1910

 

AMCHISLAVSKY M. I.  bed manufacturing, Bolshaya Sadovaya ulitsa 115

From Linda Cohen Morzillo, Saratoga Springs, NY

Thank you, Andrea. These are my great-great-grandparents, so I actually would love a translation of all the details, if you or anyone else is up for it. I'd be happy to pay for your/their time. 

Laurie Budgar
Longmont, CO, USA

Long-time Skierniewice and area researchers will be pleased to learn that Jewish Records Indexing - Poland has undertaken a huge new “Phase 3” project to fully extract all surviving Skierniewice birth, marriage and death records from 1826 to 1917.  To carry out this major initiative, we also have acquired scans (digital images) of all surviving Skierniewice records in the Łódź and Grodzisk Mazowiecki branches of the Polish State Archives.

 

As Town Leader, it would be my pleasure to send you a full description of the project and explain how you will be able to obtain the extracts of your family records as they become available and before they go online.

 

I look forward to hearing from you.

 

Joe Ross

Town Leader, Skierniewice Phase 3 extraction project.

Hii
Does anyone have details on the Laniado family in Livorno?
Regards
Avi laniado

SOLVED. Thank you.   This turns out to be Ludza (Lutxin in Yiddish) in present day Latvia.  Thank you.

Steven Granek

One branch of my family is the Recu family originally from Bacau in Romania.  The article cited in the heading refers to a Simion Recu who fought in the Romanian Independence War in 1877.  Does anyone know if there is someone who worked on or contributed to this article that might be able to tell me where this information regarding Simion Recu was found?  I am hoping that it can lead to information on my family.  The article was originally published in 1995, and I believe the author (I. Kara) is deceased, but there are people mentioned on the cover that include Paul Litman (editor), Harry Green (project coordinator) and Prof. N. Cajal (author of the forward).
--
Perry M. Shorris

For my Lithuanian forebears, I have found that about 70-80% lived within the same district for most of their lives, prior to coming to the US. By that, I mean only moving to neighboring towns, not more than about 20 miles away. 

But I have also come across some individuals, either young men or young couples, who had moved quite far away from their home districts, to other places within the Russian Empire. Some I found had moved to a neighboring uyezd, say 30-50 miles away from their home base. In the late 1800s, I found two couples who had moved from northern Lithuania to Riga, Latvia. One of these couples later moved to the US. Another couple moved to the city of Kaunas, prior to moving to the US. I even found one family who moved from northern Lithuania to Revel (now Tallinn) Estonia for several years, prior to coming to the US. So, there were some persons who did move about, and it has been worth it for me to look farther. I have also used results from AncestryDNA to weave together some of these disparate families, based on likely relationships amongst us descendents.
--
Michele Lock

Lak/Lok/Liak/Lock and Kalon/Kolon in Zagare/Joniskis/Gruzdziai, Lithuania; Lak/Lok/Liak/Lock in Plunge/Telsiai in Lithuania
Trisinsky/Trushinsky/Sturisky and Leybman in Dotnuva, Lithuania
Olitsky in Alytus, Suwalki, Poland/Lithuania
Gutman/Goodman in Czestochowa, Poland; Lavine/Lev/Lew in Trenton, New Jersey and Lida/Vilna gub., Belarus

Rosalie's obit. in addition to listing children Joseph and Susan lists grandchildren Erik and Jared.  I could not find an obit for Harold.  Suggest you contact the cemetery/funeral home since Harold died more recently (2006) and see if they have a family contact listed w/ address.  You might try Facebook, especially for young people and contact all individuals that match the name until you hopefully find the right one.
Johanna Becker
Newport, RI

War, pestilence, and famine haven't been mentioned. A cousin of mine who came to the US from Augustow, Suwalki gubernia said, on his naturalization papers (both sets) that he was born in Marseilles. Evidently the parents fled the rebellion, cholera, and famine - then went back to Russia.

Sally Bruckheimer
Princeton, NJ

I bookmarked it, it's not available from the main museum site.
https://dbs.anumuseum.org.il/skn/en/c6/BH
Scroll down to the bottom of the page. Click on Jewish Genealogy to search for names.
It's got a big search field at the top, not much in the way of refining the search.

Laurie Sosna
San Francisco, CA

Manya is a nickname for Maria in Russian and Ukrainian and possibly some other Slavic languages.  It's likely that the full name was Mariem, Maria, or similar.

Mike Vayser

It's quite likely, based on your additional record and lack of Efroimovich last names in the area, that this is the same family and the last name was just missed in the 1854 marriage record.  It's not out of the realm of possibility, that this couple had a child born 20 years after they were married.

Mike Vayser

Chloe asks a good question,   Around 1900 both scenarios would have been common: some stayed put, some moved.

There are many reasons why our very mobile ancestors moved within the Russian Empire.  These include (and this is not an exhaustive list):

1.        Marriage:   Shtetl level data for Salakas marriages  - about 38 km down the road from Utena - for the period 1886 to 1910 shows that while most men married locally in the district or nearby districts, some married far more distantly.  Recall there were customary reasons why often men moved to their wives' home towns. A summary of the data is at http://zarasai.blogspot.com/2009/08/more-on-marriage.html.  

2.       Conscription:  Veterans often retired far away from their home towns.

3.       Business success:  First and second class merchants could live in the major cities:  so one can perhaps find relatives born in St Petersburg and Moscow.

4.       Opportunity:  within the Russian Empire there were projects such as Shchedrin for farming which attracted Jewish settlers from some distance.

5,        Education:  whether secular or religious.   At various times it was possible to get a University education.

Most of my Utianer relatives had emigrated by 1900 :  South Africa, the US and UK were the typical destinations.  There was an Utianer society in Johannesburg.   It may be easier to find related Fishers abroad rather than elsewhere in Russia.   

In any case, Chloe may want to first consider the odds of evidencing any link to Utian Fishers with any random Fisher she finds in Russia or elsewhere.  A unified search for Fishers across the Jewishgen databases has more than 87,000 hits - while Fisher + Utena is only 78.  "Fisher" may be too common to make fishing for them in the wider sea a profitable exercise.   

The problem with searching for "Fisher" + Utena on most other databases is that the town name used in the record may not have been regularised for indexing, may look quite different and may therefore not be easily picked up -  I have found documents that have Ootsyany, Utsiany, Utian, Utyan, and more  - and random transcription makes this even more problematic. 

An approach that combines documents and DNA might be most effective, if there are enough known Fisher cousins to test today to create a good benchmark for the DNA side.     

--
Paul Hattori
London UK

SHADUR, SADUR, SHADER, SADER, CHADOUR, SADOUR, SHADOUR,  SZADUR from Salakas, Lithuania
MINDEL, MINDELL from Utena and Vyzuonos, Lithuania
FELLER from Pabrade, Lithuania

My father in law's family was from Zinkov, Ukraine, but his uncle wound up in Riga, Latvia.

When my mother and her nuclear family left Ukraine for New York, they visited relatives in Europe all along the way.

So I would say moving distances was quite common.

Daniel Nussbaum II, M.D., FAAP
Retired Developmental Pediatrician
Rochester, New York

--
ZOLOTOROV (Chernigov, Ukraine; Kiev, Ukraine);
SLOTOROFF (Kiev, Ukraine)
CHARKOVSKY or SHARKOVSKY(Ukraine);
LEVINE (Ukraine and Minsk, Belarus);
GLUSKIN (Ukraine)
LIMON (Berestechko, Volynia, Ukraine)
TESLER (Horochiv, Volynia, Ukraine)
ZYRO (Zabolativ, Ukraine) 
TAU (Zalolativ, Ukraine)
PISTERMAN (Ukraine)
ROTH / ROT (Ataki, Bessarabia, Moldova)
BLAUSTEIN (Chernigov, Ukraine or Minsk, Belarus)

I've been following this discussion with some interest as one of my great-grandmothers apparently had a sister named Manya (or Mani). I've been wondering if that's a variant of Muni/Munya. Or perhaps it's the same and the person who translated my ggm's letters wrote "a" instead of "u".

Gary

--
Gary Ehrlich
Rockville, MD
SCVIRSCI, Zhivotov, Ukraine; WASHLIKOVSKY/WASHALKOWSKY, SATER, Bialystock, Poland;
LIFSHITS/LIFSHITZ, GOROVITZ, HOROVITZ, Lvov, Ukraine; Ufa and Moscow, Russia
YAGUDA, Albany, NY