I have now written about all the children of my three-times great-grandparents Seligmann Goldschmidt and Hinka Alexander who immigrated to the US; their only child who did not immigrate was their daughter Betty (also known as Behla and Beilchen). She was born in Oberlistingen in November 1829, their third daughter and fifth child.

Not only did Betty never leave Germany, she never lived anywhere but her birthplace of Oberlistingen because she married her first cousin, Jacob Goldschmidt, who was also from Oberlistingen. Jacob Goldschmidt was the son and apparently the only child of Lehmann Yehudah Goldschmidt and Ranchen or Rinia Frank. Lehmann Goldschmidt was the younger brother of Seligmann Goldschmidt, making Jacob and Betty first cousins. Lehmann was also my 4x-great-uncle, making Jacob my first cousin, four times removed.

So I can in a sense kill two birds with the next set of posts: finish the story of the descendants of my three-times great-grandparents Seligmann and Hincka (Alexander) Goldschmidt and tell the story of Seligmann’s brother Lehmann Goldschmidt and his descendants.

I could not find a birth record or marriage record for Lehmann nor for his wife Ranchen/Rinia, but only their death records. According to Lehmann’s death record, he was born in Oberlistingen and died there when he was 80 years old on July 15, 1865, meaning he was born in about 1785. His wife died in Oberlistingen on March 5, 1854, when she was 75 years, two months, and three days old, meaning she was born January 2, 1779.  I don’t know, however, where she was born.

I also was not able to find a birth record for Lehmann’s son Jacob Goldschmidt. However, I was able to find the record of Jacob’s marriage to Betty Goldschmidt, which reports that Jacob was 28, Betty (Beilchen here) was 22 when they married in July, 1851 in Oberlistingen. That would indicate that Jacob was born in about 1823 and Betty in 1829, as is consistent with her birth record above. That means that Jacob’s mother was in her forties when he was born and may explain why he was their only child.

Betty Goldschmidt and Jacob Goldschmidt would have eight children, including a stillborn daughter delivered on April 13, 1853:

The other seven children were Levi (1855),¹ Pesach Berthold (1858),² Meier (1861),³ Recha (1863, presumably named for Ranchen/Rinia Frank Goldschmidt, Jacob’s mother who died in 1854),⁴ Hinka (1866, presumably named for Betty’s mother Hinka),⁵ Hedwig (1868),⁶ and Lehmann (1872, presumably named for Jacob’s father, Lehmann, who died in 1865).⁷ I have birth records for all seven of these children, but unfortunately for five of them, those are the only records I can locate, and I have no information about what happened to them after their births.

The only children for whom I have later records are Pesach Berthold and Hinka. Hinka died on September 27, 1867. She was only one year, two months, and twenty days old.

Thus, Pesach Berthold is the only child of Betty and Jacob Goldschmidt for whom I have adult records. Was he the only one to survive to adulthood? What happened to the others? I don’t know.

Pesach Berthold Goldschmidt was born on October 31, 1858, in Oberlistingen:

From their children’s birth records I know that Pesach Berthold married Mathilde Freudenstein, daughter of Bernard Freudenstein and Johanna Kugelman. Mathilde was born on June 16, 1868, in Rosebeck, Germany,⁸ a small town less than ten miles from Oberlistingen. Berthold (as he is named in the children’s birth records) and Mathilde probably married by 1893 because their first child Paul was born on September 1, 1893:

Jacob Goldschmidt died on March 6, 1895, according to the inscription on what I think is his gravestone. That gravestone came to my attention after my friend Julia Drinnenberg contacted me in June, 2018, asking if I knew who this Jacob Goldschmidt could be, as he was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Liebenau and there was no Goldschmidt family in Liebenau. Liebenau is almost 120 miles from Oberlistingen where my Goldschmidt family lived.

Julia sent me these photographs of the gravestone.

The German inscription on the gravestone translates as “Here lies Jakob Goldschmidt from Oberlistingen.” The Hebrew transcription refers to him as “Yakov (Jacob) son of Yehudah.”

At first I did not think this was Lehmann’s son since he was referred to as son of Yehuda. But then I found a transcription of Lehmann’s grave which refers to him as Lehmann known as Yehuda.

Thus, I believe that the gravestone depicted in the photographs from Julia is the gravestone of Jacob Goldschmidt, son of Lehmann and husband of Betty.

What neither Julia nor I nor anyone else I consulted could understand was why Jacob Goldschmidt was buried in Liebenau when he was a resident of Oberlistingen 120 miles away. Unfortunately, neither Julia nor I could locate a death record for Jacob in Liebenau, Oberlistingen or elsewhere. Was he perhaps in Liebenau when he died?  Since traditional Jewish practice required that the deceased be buried within 24 hours of death, maybe getting the body back to Oberlistingen that soon was problematic. Did he therefore have to be buried in Liebenau for religious reasons? And why was he in Liebenau in the first place? I don’t know.

UPDATE: I sent this post to Julia, and she wrote back to tell me that the Liebenau where Jacob is buried is only about 6 km from Oberlistingen; apparently there are two towns with that name. So there goes my theory that they couldn’t get the body home in time to bury him in Oberlistingen….

When Jacob’s wife Betty died on March 16, 1909, in Oberlistingen, she was buried in the cemetery for Oberlistingen Jews, and her gravestone inscription described her as Jacob’s widow. There is no gravestone for Jacob there.

Thus, Jacob and Betty Goldschmidt were buried 120 miles apart in two different towns. They appear to have been survived only by their son Berthold, who attested to his mother’s death. Berthold’s heartbreak was only beginning in 1909.

To be continued….