As I mentioned briefly in my last post, as I was finishing up my write-up about the handwritten family tree we are calling Emil’s tree, Wolfgang’s mother discovered another handwritten tree. It appears to be written by someone else, but I don’t know who. It covers only the ten children of Jacob Seligmann and Marta/Martha Mayer and their grandchildren so is not as wide or deep in scope as the first one, but it contains some useful extra tidbits that have helped me locate more family members.  (Each page has a letter “b” written in the upper right hand corner.  I have no idea what that means, unless to show these page were about one particular line in the family.)

The cover page lists the children of Jacob and Mart(h)a and also the children of Isaac Seeligmann and Felicia Goetzel, that is, the two sets of Emil’s great-grandparents.  Page 1 simply has Simon Seligmann’s name and that he was from Bingen, and Page 2 just has Isaac Seligmann (son of Jacob and Marta) and that he lived in Gensingen, a town near Bingen.  Martha Seligmann and her children with her husband Benjamin Seeligmann are listed on Page 3. Page 4 (to be posted) covers the family of Moritz Seligmann, my three-times great-grandfather, and the family of Leopold Seligmann is on Page 5.   So far all this information is consistent with what was on Emil’s tree and does not add anything very important.

On Page 6, however, there is some new information about the family of Mina Seligmann.  The first tree reported, as in this one, that she married Leopold Mayer of Oberursel and had a son Adolf Eduard.  Here it is clear that there were two sons, Adolf and Eduard, and also two daughters: Helene, who married Jakob or Jak (or maybe Isak?) Wolf, and an unnamed daughter who died and was not married.

Page 7 also contains some new information.  This page is devoted to Caroline Seligmann, who married Moses Moreau from Worrstadt, another town not very far from Bingen.  Underneath are four names that the creator of this tree originally labeled as the children of Caroline and Moses, but then crossed out and wrote “grandchildren.”  The names are the same as those on the earlier tree—Markus, Albert, Bertha, and Alice.  Next to Markus it says “England,” and next to Albert it says “Amerika.”  I searched for both with the surname Moreau, but so far have had no luck.  Perhaps, however, they were the sons of a daughter of Caroline and Moses Moreau and had their father’s surname and not Moreau.  For Bertha, the notation says that she was the wife of Aschaffenburg (which Wolfgang told me is also a town in Bavaria), and for Alice it says that she was the wife of D. Mastbaum.  But why are the grandchildren listed and not the children? And what are the two names at the very bottom?

The page that has provided me with the most new information is Page 8.  In my last post I talked about the confusing passage at the end of the tree’s notes on Marx Seligmann.  Someone had gone to America later—but who? Was it the children, the ex-wife, or Marx himself?  Well, this new tree provides more clues and led me to more answers.

The first part of Page 8 repeats the information about Marx’s marriage and divorce from Rosina Loeser, and then on the bottom of the page, according to my wonderful helpers in the German Genealogy group on Facebook, it says that Marx (or Max) remarried in New York and that his son married someone named Coppel, and that they had a daughter who married a film agent, but when I went to search for Marx Seligmann in New York, I found this marriage record:

“New York, New York City Marriage Records, 1829-1940,” database, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:2492-DVZ : accessed 8 July 2015), Max Schlesinger and Charlotte Seligmann, 17 Jun 1874; citing Marriage, Manhattan, New York, New York, United States, New York City Municipal Archives, New York; FHL microfilm .

Although this record indicates that Marx Seligmann himself was married Sara Koppel, not a son of Marx, it can’t be just coincidence that someone named Marx Seligmann had a wife named Koppel.  Also, Marx and Sara did have a daughter, Charlotte, and she married someone named Max Schlesinger.  I don’t think, however, that he was a film agent.

If this second family tree is accurate and I am making correct assumptions that this is in fact the same Marx Seligmann who was a son of Jacob Seligmann and Marta Mayer and thus my four-times great-uncle, then this new tree just opened up a huge door to learn about more Seligmann cousins living in the United States.  In my next post, I will write about what I’ve learned about Marx and his descendants.

For now, to finish the second family tree, Pages 9 and 10 add no information about Salomon Seligmann and Babette Seligmann that was not already included on Emil’s tree.  The only thing I can’t decipher here are the faintly written words at the bottom of page 9.

Thus, once again I have been blessed with a treasure from that suitcase in Germany.  What if Wolfgang had not found my blog and contacted me? I would know nothing about all these people.  Sometimes you just have to be thankful for good luck.