A Romanian Surprise

Posted on April 4, 2014 by Amy

I am in NYC for the weekend and looking forward to meeting my Brotman cousins. Pictures and stories to follow.

But first, a little Romanian surprise. I received a few more documents from my Romanian researcher, Marius Chelcu. One in particular surprised me. It is a birth record for Sura Rosentvaig, born June 7, 1888, daughter of Ghidale and Ghitla Rosentvaig, of Iasi, Romania.

Sura Rosentvaig birth record

The first surprise was that Gustave and Gussie were still living in Iasi as of June, 1888. According to his naturalization papers, Gustave arrived in the US on April 12, 1887.

naturalization petition gustave rosenzweig

Before 1906, the government did not require strict proof of arrival, and obviously Gustave fudged it a bit. But when did he actually arrive? I still have not found a ship manifest for him or Gussie or the children, but this will narrow down the dates of my search by assuming they left Romania after June 7, 1888, and arrived before February 12, 1889, when I believe Abraham was born.

One inconsistency here is that according to earlier Romanian records, Gustave was born in 1856 and Gussie in 1864.

translation of marriage record

On Sura’s birth record dated 1888, it says Gustave was 25, making his birth year 1863, and Gussie was 22, making her birth year 1866. I guess it just goes to show that Romanian records are no more reliable than American records. Gustave and Gussie’s birth records, however, were created at the time of their marriage, not at their birth, whereas Sura’s was created at the time of her birth so presumably is more reliable in terms of her birthdate.

The second surprise is that Sarah, their second daughter, was born in Iasi, not in New York City. Every census indicates that she was in fact born in New York. This explains why I could not find a NYC birth record for Sarah, but why is she listed on the census as US-born? Lillie is listed (with one exception) as born in Romania. Why not Sarah?

Rosenzweig children 1900 census

Gustave Rosenzweig family on the 1905 NYS census

Rosenzweig family 1910

Kurtz family 1920

kurtz family 1930

Sam and Sarah Kurtz 1940 census

I am still searching for Sarah’s descendants and know their names, but have not yet been able to contact them. I wonder if they know she was born in Romania, not in the US.

Have a good weekend, everyone!

A Small Chink in the Wall

Posted on April 3, 2014 by Amy

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.

English: A crack in the wall, Newbridge on Usk This crack is in the east parapet of the road bridge at Newbridge on Usk. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

More Manna from Heaven: Of Bessie, Joseph, Max and the Brotmanville Brotmans

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Amy

As I wrote yesterday, the notes of the conversation with my Aunt Elaine about the family history are remarkably accurate. Although much of what was in there I had learned either from my mother or brother or cousins or from my own research, there were a few stories in the notes, a few comments, that revealed something I had not known for sure before. Keeping in mind the overall accuracy of the information that my aunt gave to Joel, it is very interesting to think about this additional information.

For example, there are some details about Bessie and Joseph that were revealing. According to the notes, Bessie and Joseph were first cousins. Although family lore did say that Joseph and Bessie were cousins, I did not realize that they were first cousins. Since both Joseph and Bessie had the surname Brotman or Brot, it seems that their fathers must have been brothers. What’s odd about this is that it means that Joseph’s father Abraham had a brother who was also apparently named Joseph, if the records are accurate. It seems unlikely, given Jewish naming patterns, that Abraham would have named his son the same name as his brother, unless the brother had died. Since Bessie was younger than Joseph (her husband), that is not possible. The other possibility is that Bessie’s father and Joseph were both named for the same ancestor. And, of course, the final possibility is that the records that indicated that Bessie’s father’s name was Joseph were incorrect.

Joel’s notes also indicate that after Joseph’s first wife died, leaving him with four children, “they decided” that Bessie should marry Joseph to help with the children. The notes don’t indicate who made the decision, but it probably was not Bessie. It’s sad to think of my great-grandmother being put in that situation, and it certainly takes the idea of any romance out of the equation. But Joseph and Bessie went on to have five children of their own, so I’d like to assume that although it may have started as an arranged marriage for the convenience of Joseph, that love grew with time and the shared experiences and children that Joseph and Bessie had. Call me a romantic. I know that I am.

After Joseph himself died in 1901, the notes report that Bessie did laundry work to make money to support herself and her children, including Sam, who was just an infant, Frieda, Gussie, Tillie, and Hyman. Tillie and Hyman were working in sweatshops, so Gussie, my not-yet-seven year old grandmother, stayed home to take care of Frieda and Sam. Not long after, out of desperation, Bessie married “the shoemaker Moskowitz,” who my aunt reported to be very stingy. He had five children of his own.

I assume that my aunt’s source for these stories was my grandmother, who obviously resented Philip Moskowitz and chose to live with her sister Tillie in Brooklyn instead of staying with her mother and Sam and Frieda when Bessie remarried, so I know I have to consider the source. My great-grandmother Bessie lived with Philip for many years, more years than she lived with Joseph, and she was buried near him, not Joseph, when she died. As with her marriage to Joseph, her relationship with Philip may have started out of need and convenience, but it also must have developed into something more. Or at least I hope it did.

Bessie Brotman

Of course, it is also possible that the source of this information was Bessie herself. Bessie did not die until 1934, when my aunt was seventeen years old. Knowing my aunt’s interest in the family history, I assume that she must have talked to her grandmother Bessie herself as she grew up, so perhaps the stories are not just my grandmother’s version of the facts, but Bessie’s version as well.

One other comment from these notes is a rather sweet one that I hope Max Brotman‘s grandchildren and great-grandchildren will appreciate:

Obviously, Max, who was probably the most successful businessman of the Brotman children, was also a very generous man. He provided food to my mother’s family during the Depression. Here is a great-uncle I’d never even heard of, someone my mother was too young then to remember, who helped out my grandmother and her family in a time of need. Thank you, Max.

Max Brotman

The final tidbit from the notes from Joel’s conversation with my aunt is this one:

In case you cannot read that, it says, “Brother came to America landed in NJ started a chicken farm. So successful that they named the town after him.” The quote points back to Joseph. This is obviously a reference to Brotmanville. Although it is not entirely accurate—Brotmanville was named for Abraham Brotman, who started a manufacturing business to employ the residents whose farms were failing, not for Abraham’s father Moses, who had the chicken farm—the note nevertheless provides support for the claim that we are in fact related to the Brotmanville Brotmans. As you may recall, Moses Brotman also had a father named Abraham, as revealed by his headstone and death certificate.

He was born in 1847 in Galicia, making him a contemporary of Joseph, my great-grandfather. I cannot rely on these notes alone to assert with any certainty that Moses and Joseph were brothers, but given the overall accuracy of what my aunt told Joel, it is enough evidence for me to start once again to try and find a connection. If we can find that connection and also learn where Moses Brotman lived in Galicia, it will help to answer a number of lingering questions.

He certainly has the Brotman cheekbones. Could this be what Joseph looked like also?

The Brotmanville Brotmans

Finding the Ruby Slippers and Getting Back Home to Where It Started: The Brotmans

Posted on April 1, 2014 by Amy

[for my aunt, Elaine Goldschlager Lehrbaum, 1917-1995]

Elaine 1933

Many of you who are more recent followers of the Brotmanblog may wonder why the blog is called the Brotmanblog. In the past several months I have barely mentioned the name Brotman because I have been focused on searching for my grandfather’s family, the Goldschlagers and Rosenzweigs. But if you go back to the beginning of the blog, you will see that my original search focused on my grandmother’s family, the Brotmans. That’s where I started my genealogy adventures. It made sense. My grandmother Gussie Brotman Goldschlager, my mother’s mother, was the grandparent I knew best, the only grandparent I knew as an adult. She was the only grandparent my husband ever met, though she died a year before we were married. It was only natural that I would start my journey trying to learn as much as I could about her and her siblings and her parents. Once I had found as much as I could find about the Brotmans, I then moved on to my grandfather’s family. The next chapter will be my father’s family. But it all started with the Brotmans.

Why do I bring that up now? Because this weekend I will finally get to meet a number of the Brotman cousins I only learned about through doing this research. There will be over thirty of us gathering in NYC to meet and eat and to visit the Lower East Side, where our grandparents and great-grandparents (and for some, great-great grandparents or parents) lived in New York. We will walk to 81/85 Ridge Street where the Brotmans first lived, now a public school, once a tenement building, and then we will tour the Tenement Museum to learn more about what life was like for all of them.

If you have not read any of my posts about the Brotmans, I have provided links here and below to some that will capture the essence of their lives. Even if you once did read them, you may want to re-read them if you are joining us this weekend and want to remember some of the details and themes I wrote about months ago. The Brotman story is the classic Jewish American immigration story, a story of poverty and heartbreak as a family moved from Galicia to NYC in the late 1880s to a story of assimilation and success as the future generations built businesses, moved beyond the Lower East Side, became professionals, and moved to the suburbs after World War II. My Brotman great-grandparents were hard-working realists who did what they needed to do to survive.

Although I was able to piece together a fair amount about their lives through census reports and other documents and through some stories my mother remembered about her grandparents, aunts, uncles and mother, at first there was no one else besides my mother and my brother to whom I could turn for information. My cousins shared stories about their grandparents, but they also knew little about the early lives of their grandparents and had no one left to ask either. So mostly I relied on documentation to learn what I could. I was able to put together a fairly complete history of the Brotman family in America and decided to move on to my grandfather’s family.

Then, like a gift of manna from heaven, about a month ago my cousin Jody sent me some notes that her husband Joel had taken from a conversation he’d had with my Aunt Elaine years ago about her family. I’ve referred to one part of those notes before—the story of how my grandmother Gussie met my grandfather Isadore on Pacific Street in Brooklyn, where my grandmother was living and where my grandfather’s cousins the Rosenzweigs were living in 1915. In the next day or two I’d like to share a few more tidbits from Aunt Elaine, via Joel’s notes.

But before I do, I want to point out that these notes are incredibly accurate. Although the conversation Joel had with my aunt must have taken place in the early 1980s, my aunt’s memory for details was astonishing. For example, she refers to the fact that Hyman’s son Emanuel worked for Kislack Realty. I checked with Manny’s children, and they confirmed that in fact Manny was President of J.I.Kislak Mortgage Corporation in Newark, NJ., which was a subsidiary of J.I.Kislak, Inc., a large residential and commercial Realtor based in Jersey City. Also, my aunt knew that David Brotman worked in the coat industry, that Max was in the cigar business, and that Abraham worked for a deli in Coney Island.

All of these are facts that are backed up by my research.

On the Goldschlager side as well, my aunt’s facts are corroborated by the information I found in my research. David Goldschlager lived in Scranton, PA, for some time and was in the hat business. Betty married a man in the dry goods business and moved to Arizona. I point out how accurate this information is to demonstrate how remarkable my aunt’s memory was and also so that you will trust the other statements she made and their accuracy when I report on those in upcoming posts.

In some ways finding these notes was frustrating. If I had found them last summer, much of the time I spent trying to figure out who Max was or whether Abraham was related to us or whether there were any other children would have been unnecessary. My aunt knew it all, and it is in these notes.

But as Glinda the Good Witch tells Dorothy at the end of The Wizard of Oz (the movie) when she reveals to Dorothy that the ruby slippers could take her home and the Scarecrow asks why Glinda had not told Dorothy that from the beginning:

Glinda : Because she wouldn’t have believed me. She had to learn it for herself.
Tin Man: What have you learned, Dorothy?
Dorothy: Well, I – I think that it – that it wasn’t enough just to want to see Uncle Henry and Auntie Em. And that it’s that – if I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with. Is that right?
Glinda: That’s all it is!

And then when the Tin Man, Lion and Scarecrow all say that they should have helped Dorothy figure it out, Glinda replies:

She had to find it out for herself.

And so I did as well. If I had started with Aunt Elaine’s notes, I never would have worked as hard to learn how to research and find these things for myself. I would never have felt the amazing sense of satisfaction I’ve gotten from putting pieces together and from finding cousins who could help me put those pieces together.

Having my aunt confirm through these notes what I have learned and what I have done is a real gift. She was someone I adored and miss dearly. It’s like having her here with me again, hearing her say, “You see, Amy Kugel, I always knew you could do anything you wanted. And I knew some day you would want to know more about your history, your family.” But, as Glinda told Dorothy, she knew I had to find it out for myself.