My grandfather Meyer Greenburg came to America in 1905, then returned to his hometown in present-day Belarus, and then returned permanently to America in 1909. He was a member of the Kohanim. The story that has been told in my family is that his surname was originally Kaplan or Caplan and that he “bought the name Greenburg in order to emigrate to America.”

I am interested in obtaining information as to WHY his surname may have needed to be changed and information about the practice of “buying” a surname in particular with the chief purpose of emigration from Russia.

I would be happy to supply any further information if needed to help answer these questions.

Thank you.

Alice Greenburg Forsythe
Boise, Idaho

--
Researching: CHARNAM/CHANAM(?), SOBEL, PASTERNAK/ POSTERNAK, GLECKEL, STUTMAN, WILLIK- Belozerka, Ukraine; GREENBERG/ GLASS- Grodno, Belarus; CRYSTAL, KRISTAL- Latvia/Lithuania (Riga/Sirvintos/Zagare?); SHERMAN- London, England: Pasvalys, Lithuania; Bauska, Latvia; Melbourne, Australia; Brooklyn, NY; Baltimore, MD; Chicago, IL, Los Angeles, CA; KAPITNIK- Belarus; KATZENBURG- South Africa; LEVINSON- Ventspils; STEINGRUB- Latvia/Lithuania; FEINSTEIN/ GOODMAN- Lithuania/Latvia (?); TUKATCH/ TKACZ Lithuania/Belarus

https://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/belozerka/

https://iijg.org/maps-of-jewish-communities/

My grandfather and grandmother were married in the Russian Empire. He took her surname because he was eligible to be drafted into the Tsar's army and feared  it would interfere with his desire to emigrate. 

David Rosen
Boston, MA

On 1/19/2023 2:22 PM, alicemforsythe@... wrote:

Hi Albert,
I found your thread and suggested book interesting as this is something that I'm looking into.
My mother was raised RC in Poland pre-war. Her and her parents had typically Polish names. However my DNA has since revealed that they were 100% AJ. I do know that the family of a polish friend of my mum's moved from Rivno further west in 1930's and changed their names in the process.
Knowing now that my maternal family were AJ and having, at present, exhausted trying to find documentary evidence of them in Poland, pre-war, I am considering the name change possibility but can find little concrete evidence of this. 
Does anyone have any insight into this area? 
Noreen Clark (England)
(Szczepanski + Morzowska -  possibly false names!)

I’ve written about this topic before but haven’t learned the answer yet. My maternal great-great-grandparents, Reb Yossel (a rosh yeshiva) and Zelda, (a commission merchant for Polish nobles) Weinstein lived in Vilna. My grandmother, Fannie Weinstein Margolin, lived with them after her father, their oldest son, Moshe Aaron, an auditor of liquor sales, died young from TB, leaving his wife, Malke (Mollie) Eilperin Weinstein with 6 children and twins born after he died. Grandma Fannie, who immigrated at about the age of 12, said that the family name was originally Romm, the same name as the printing family. Weinstein was the name of a childless relative, and the “adoption” of Yossel or Moshe Aaron was to avoid conscription into the Czar’s army. I have found Yossel and Zelda’s marriage date, 1842, and the record of Moshe’s bris, 1845, but no last name. Also, the marriage record says that Yossel was both a widower and divorced, another puzzler. He was 26, and Zelda was 17. Zelda’s father seems to have been Leyba. Iosel’s father was Movsha, interestingly the name of his first child.
Is there any way to learn more about the name change and history of both families prior to 1842 and how Zelda became such a wealthy businesswoman? I have more information about my grandmother’s older sister, Celia, who was a governess who spoke 7 languages fluently and who married Itzak Pollack, owner of a cotton plantation in Tashkent. Friends visited her in Moscow after WW II. The rest of the family immigrated to the U.S.

Susan Kurtin Sorkenn (researching Weinstein from Vilna, Kurchin/Kurtin from Lyachavichi, Margolin from Gomel)
sorkennwellness@...

How could all the above people have changed their names?  Didn't they need identification papers to leave the RE, and then to cross the border of the country containing the port, and then to make it through Ellis Island?  Where did they get identification papers (passport or other) in the new, false name?  

I'm assuming that there was some rigor to the system then.  Nowadays to even buy a train ticket from L'viv to Kyiv, a trip that does not leave Ukraine, one must go in person to the station and show one's passport to a uniformed train clerk who scrutinizes the passport photo and your face and begrudgingly sells you the ticket.  The process with the clerk takes ten minutes and not less.  It is not brief or cursory.  Was it possible during the 100 years between 1850 and 1950 for our ancestors to not only buy domestic train tickets but to cross multiple national borders with nothing more than a wink and a nod?
--James Hannum

According to this website no papers of any kind were required of immigrants entering the USA, at least until after 1907.
https://www.history.com/news/immigrants-ellis-island-short-processing-time

David Rosen
Boston, MA

We know the masses of immigrants were preyed for many unscrupulous characters.
Could someone have "sold" your grandfather this name similar to selling him the Brooklyn Bridge?
But if that were the true story I don't know that the family would want to pass it on...

==========
Robert Roth
Kingston, NY
rroth@...

In 1906-07, the US Immigration Bureau had an official named Cowen go to Russia, to investigate the large immigration of Jews from Russia to the US. The report that Cowen wrote is available at the following site, though it looks like each page must be downloaded separately:
https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/cowen-report

On p.77 begins a description of the paperwork process that immigrants had to navigate to get passports to leave. However, it was the local shipping agent who procured the passports at the local police station. And if difficulties arose, the police could be bribed by the shipping agent. 

On p.79 is an explanation of how unrelated persons ended up on the same passport. It saved the shipping agent money if he could get unrelated individuals all on one passport, since a single passport covered an entire family. Since back then, persons did not carry any government-issued IDs, it was easy to just declare individuals as all related. I suspect that this is one way in which a person entered the US bearing a name other than their own. Once in the US, an immigrant did not have to use the name on the Russian-issued passport, which would have been in Cyrillic letters anyway, and unreadable by US officials. 

It should be remembered that back before WW I or thereabouts, individuals in the US also did not possess government-issued IDs. You could call yourself whatever you wanted, as long as a name change was not for fraudulent reasons. Having to stick with using one name began with the advent of drivers licenses and Social Security cards, which I believe came about in the 1930s.

--
Michele Lock

Lak/Lok/Liak/Lock and Kalon/Kolon in Zagare/Joniskis/Gruzdziai, Lithuania
Lak/Lok/Liak/Lock in Plunge/Telsiai in Lithuania
Rabinowitz in Papile, Lithuania and Riga, Latvia
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

Here is the link to download the Cowen report as a single pdf:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/NARAprodstorage/opastorage/live/84/6029/602984/content/dc-metro/rg-085/559947/Cowen_Report.pdf
--
Michele Lock

Lak/Lok/Liak/Lock and Kalon/Kolon in Zagare/Joniskis/Gruzdziai, Lithuania
Lak/Lok/Liak/Lock in Plunge/Telsiai in Lithuania
Rabinowitz in Papile, Lithuania and Riga, Latvia
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

On Sat, Apr 15, 2023 at 06:42 AM, <rroth@...> wrote:

We know the masses of immigrants were preyed on by many unscrupulous characters.
Could someone have "sold" your grandfather this name similar to selling him the Brooklyn Bridge?
But if that were the true story I don't know that the family would want to pass it on...

I would think that if they paid good money for the name they would pass it on.  Even if someone told them later that they had "bought" something that cannot be sold, if they had used the name for years with no bad consequences why not continue to use it, rather than discard it and have the disturbance of going back to their old name?  They didn't want their old name and wouldn't want to take it back. 

It seems to me that there is a good chance that no one ever told them that the "sale" was fraudulent.  Who would tell them that?  Their friends were not lawyers, and they probably didn't disclose the "sale" to many people.
--James Hannum

The "buying a surname" issue has puzzled me for a long time.

My ancestors came to the United States from Lithuania in the 1880s
(pre-Ellis, pre-passports).  The story is that they bought their papers
from someone named Goldberg; the father and two of his sons adopted that
name; the third son and his three very small children became Plotkin,
allegedly because a clerk transposed the letters of their prior surname,
which was Plotnik. I have yet to find ship records for any of them.

I have found very few records in the Lithuanian databases, and those
seem to indicate that the family surname was Fridman.

I've seen a few explanations for the "buying a surname" legend but none
that fit with the (few) facts I've got

JoAnne
--

 

I was unclear, I meant if they were fleeced like this -- and came to realize it -- they might not have kept telling the STORY.  Or maybe they would have, self-deprecating humor has a long history with us.

==========
Robert Roth
Kingston, NY
rroth@...

I have a copy of my great-grandfather's Russian passport from 1897, when he entered the USA with several of his children. I can't say definitely that this country required it, but apparently Russia did.
--
Barbara Sloan
Conway, SC

I don't want to divert attention from the original question, but I have an issue of different names that has some of the same elements--and I wonder if the same explanation might apply.  I always knew my grandmother's maiden name as Grossman, and all records I've found in the U.S. show that name.  But a year or so ago, someone tracked down what appears to be an immigration record for my grandmother, her 5 siblings and her mother, under a totally different name--something like Penesuch or Pencsuch.  Her father came separately, and we've found no record. 

None of the explanations I've heard seem to fit this situation.  It's the mother and young children traveling, so it isn't a name change to avoid the draft.  It is a group of 7 people whose names, genders, and approximate ages match my family, so it's unlikely there was another family with the same makeup and they bought the ticket from them.  I've read that people who only had religious marriages were not considered married and often used the mother's maiden name for the children, but my great-grandmother's maiden name was Schneider, not Penesuch. 

So, are there other possibilities for the name change that haven't been raised yet that apply to Alice's case or mine?  (In case it matters, my grandmother came from Poland, probably Lomza, in 1895.)

Gail Marcus
Bethesda, MD

I think that it is statistically quite likely that there was a second family with-the same number of children with the  same spacing travelling from Europe to America,  If I were you, I'd ignore this record as a red herring unless they were travelling to a known relative, whom you can check out-and connect with your family.

Eva Lawrence, St Albans, UK.

--
Eva Lawrence
St Albans, UK.

My ancestor Anselm Ungar travelled from Cologne via Antewerp to New Orleans in 1852.  His journal described the formalities at the Prussian border at Verviers and   at  Belgian t Antwerp. At Verviers their luggage was cursorily examined ("not in the manner of Prussian tax-rats")  At Amtwerp,the party had to go to the local police station and each had to show their identity papers prior to the voyage, However, one of the party, a political refugee,  did no have any.papers."so I cobbled together some gobbledegook as a certificate, and franked it ceremoniously with our seal  . It was meekly accepted and visa'd for New Orleans" Another member of the group offered his children's vaccination certificate, wich was also visa'd without question.

t New Orleans there was no passport control at all, but obviously a record of immigrants was kept. since I found Anselm Ungar's name on a quarterly list  I assume the captain of the ship handed in the passenger list, which I was later thrilled to find on Ancestry..

So it seems that Prussia which encompassed a large part of Eastern Europe, was exceptionally strict about passport controls and people's identity in the 19th century,  

Eva Lawrence.

St Albans, UK.

--
Eva Lawrence
St Albans, UK.

My husband's great grandparents and their first-born daughter emigrated from Lithuania in the early 1880s. Samuel Levin married using another man's ID, Shloma Levin b Movsha from Sirvintos, and their daughter had the same on her birth record. Descendants, including my husband, were given the middle name of Gordon to keep the real family surname alive. Fortunately for the family, Samuel Levin's real name was recorded in family records as well as the given names of his parents. However, there was no record of where in Lithuania he had been born. I was never able to find him in Lithuanian records until after a strong DNA match to two Gordon siblings, but that is another story. I was able to find his "other self" in Lithuanian records, and that might teach you something about searching records - don't take English transcriptions literally when it comes to names. When the real Shloma married, his wife was called Rivka, but in the birth records of their children, she was called Elka. In some records Shloma is listed as Shloma-Movsha b Aron while in others he is Shloma b Movsha-Aron. Sometimes just Shloma b Movsha. In the three revision lists of his father, he is always listed as Movsha Aron b Eliyas, but in 1851 his surname is Joseliovich Levin. I will attach the records so you can see what I mean. The father of the man whose ID he used, Movsha, had died in 1867, well before the "buying" of his son's ID circa 1880 or possibly before. Shloma, still young, probably needed the money. Shloma never appeared in his family's revision lists however, only a daughter. When I finally learned where my husband's g grandfather's parents were registered through their death records from Odessa, I searched for the family in Moletai, Lithuania. For them too, I only found a daughter in the revision lists, but I know they had at least two sons. Also, in both families, the daughters' years of birth changed from one list to the other. It was not uncommon to dress sons as daughters as long as they could get away with it.
I am certain that I found the 1884 manifest for Samuel Levin's wife, daughter, and her sister from Hamburg to NYC, but I don't know when Samuel left. I did find an 1881 manifest for S. Lewin from Hamburg, but can't be sure it is his. If it is, he left a few months after marriage but before his daughter was born. He was eager to avoid conscription. His wife and daughter stayed with her family until he could bring them over. Eventually the whole Berger family emigrated;
Samuel Levin used his adopted name until death. However, he wanted his correct name on his matzevah. It say Yechezkel b Mordecai, and instead of Samuel in English, the stone says Charles S. He never used Charles on any US record. His brother, Solomon, arrived in NYC from Odessa about 20 years later. We have no idea if they ever found each other. Solomon named his third-born son, who was born in 1878, Charles/Yechezkel, possibly because he did not know if he'd ever see his brother again. I don't know when the family moved from Lithuania, but their father Mordecai died in Odessa in 1888. The real Shloma married in 1871, nine years before Samuel Levin married.  He most likely was older. Samuel used the year 1857 as his birth. His brother Solomon used 1849, but who knows when they were really born.

Roberta Jaffer
Massachusetts

My father's family name in  Poland was Nimerzhanski. His older brother was the first of the family to immigrate, arriving in 1904..  His ship manifest has that name.   The name was too ethnic, and too hard to pronounce or to spell in English.  Once in the USA he changed it to Rosen. Word got back to Poland.  My father arrived in 1913 as Rosen  He was Rosen on the Hamburg departure manifest and he was Rosen on the Liverpool to Boston manifest. He did not have to buy the name.  If he could do that why would anyone else have to buy a name?

David Rosen
Boston, MA