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Original name of Joseph FROOS, arrived in New York 1904 #names #usa

Paul Silverstone
 

I am trying to find records of Joseph FROOS in 1910 or earlier.
His name was originally FROSHINSKY or PROSHINSKY.    In 1917 he gave his birth date as 15 Jul 1889 born in Pinsk.   In the 1920 census he said Warsaw.   I found Josef Prushinsky arriving in NY 10 Mar 1904 on the Graf Waldersee, with a brother.  I also found a Joseph Froshinsky (or Troshinsky)  in the 1910 census working in New Jersey living as a lodger.   
However in 1908 he and his wife Ida Cummins had a daughter named Minnie (later Mildred).   
I cannot find his wife and daughter in the 1910 census.   They are in the 1915 NY census with Joe under the name Froos.
It may be there were two men with this name.   It is not clear when he adopted the name Froos.
Joe Froos died in 1961.  An obituary of a brother gave the name as Troshinsky.   The variation of the name is its first letter is confusing, this may be bad handwriting or even a confusion of Hebrew lettering.
Any ideas as to how to clarify this confusion of names would be helpful.

Paul Silverstone
West Vancouver, BC
paulh@...
 

Michele Lock
 

My great grandmother was Rochel Frieda Trushinski/Troshinski/Trosinski/Trisinski of Dotnuva, Lithuania, Russian Empire. This is a surname that I have looked into in all its various spellings, trying to find any relatives who immigrated to the US.

Firstly, although there are a few Jewish families that possess this surname, there are also Polish Catholic families who have the same/similar name as well. Just to be clear - are you looking for a Jewish person, or a Polish Catholic person?

Across the US, there are likely to be more than one Joseph Troshinsky (with all its various spellings), maybe Jewish and maybe not.

The Joseph Troshinsky that you found living as a lodger in Passaic, New Jersey in the 1910 census says he is from Austria and only speaks Polish – so this can’t be a Jewish person from Pinsk or Warsaw, cities that were in the Russian Empire at the time.

The Josef Prushinsky that you found arriving in NYC in 1904 with his brother – he is also an ethnic Polish person, going with his brother Leonhard and his uncle Modislaw Jarshenbeck (or something similar) to an uncle Vincenty in Riverhead, NY. Their last residence looks like Sambrowa, within the Russian Empire. US ship passenger lists of the time were very clear about whether a person was Hebrew (Jewish) or some other ethnic group; they would not list a Jewish person as Polish, even if the person lived within the traditional borders of Poland. Look at line 1 on that same list, for Chaim Brederman, a Hebrew from Russia.

The record for a Joseph Froos/Joseph Troshinsky on Ancestry, which gives a birth date of 15 Jul 1886 in Pinsk, is a Social Security Application record extract. It is rather strange, in that it says it is for a female, rather than a male. I think the only way you could sort this out is to order a copy of this application [https://www.legalgenealogist.com/2020/11/16/ordering-the-ss-5-2020-style], to see who this person was, and where they were living. I have found that the letters ‘T’ and ‘F’ can be mixed up in record extracts, so the Joseph Froos may actually be Joseph Troos.

As for my Trushinski/Troshinski/Trosinski/Trisinskis – the only one I found was Benzion/Ben Trosinski, who immigrated to Hartford, Connecticut, where he became Ben Tryson.

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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

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