A Small Chink in the Wall

Just last week I wrote that I was putting aside for now my attempt to track Lizzie and Ray Rosenzweig, the two youngest children of Gustave and Gussie Rosenzweig. I had hit a brick wall and figured I’d never find them. So I moved on, determined not to keep hitting my head against the wall.

And then I got some clues. First, Joseph’s grandson sent me a photograph of Lizzie, labeled Lizzie Horowitz.

Lizzie Horowitzl

He said that her married name had just come back to him. Then in an email exchange with one of Rebecca Rosenzweig’s grandsons, he mentioned that he knew that his father Irwin had reconnected with Lizzie in Florida. Two clues, and I was off and running, back to ancestry, PeopleFinders, Family Search, etc.

I did not find much, but I did find one 1930 census for a Betty Horowitz whose parents had both been born in Romania. One of my other cousins had mentioned that Lizzie had also been called Betty.

Horowitz Family 1930

She lived in Brooklyn, was married to Julius Horowitz, and had a three year old daughter named Mary Lyn. I asked my third cousins whether either of those names rang any bells, and one wrote that the names Julius and Marilyn did seem familiar and that she remembered a cousin Marilyn who had moved to Florida.

I located Lizzie, sometimes called Betty, and Julius on the 1925 and 1940 census reports as well. They had a second daughter born around 1931 named Harriet.

Now I am in the process of trying to find Marilyn and Harriet or their descendants. I have not yet found a death record for either Lizzie or Julius, but I think I have the birth dates for Marilyn and Harriet from the NYC birth index. Searching by those birth dates, unfortunately, had not helped much. There are many women with those first names born on those dates. I’ve had better luck with Marilyn, and if I limit the search to Florida, I can eliminate a few more. But now what?

Now it’s a game of trying to contact family members of those Marilyns who remain and hope that one of them is the daughter of Lizzie Rosenzweig and Julius Horowitz. To be continued…I hope. Thanks to my newly found third cousins, there is hope.