The Crazy Quilt of Selig Goldschmidt’s Family

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As I move on now to the next child of my four-times great-uncle Meyer Goldschmidt, his fifth child and second son Selig Goldschmidt, I admit to some trepidation. I’ve been working on my Goldschmidt line for almost three years now, and Selig has one of the biggest branches.

The overall Goldschmidt clan is so large and so entangled. There are eleven men named Jacob Goldschmidt/Jacob Goldsmith on my tree, six named Meyer Goldschmidt/Goldsmith, six women named Helene/Helena/Helen Goldschmidt/Goldsmith, six named Hedwig Goldschmidt, and nine women named Clementine (including three named Clementine Fuld) within the Goldschmidt family. And then there are all the cousins who married cousins, adding more confusion and twists to the family tree.

And Selig Goldschmidt’s family only adds to all that entanglement. Just a quick overview to give you a sense of what I mean by entanglement. Sources and details to follow.

Selig Goldschmidt married Clementine Fuld. She was the sister of Salomon Fuld, the husband of Selig’s niece Helene Goldschmidt, daughter of Selig’s brother Jacob Meier Goldschmidt.

Salomon Fuld and Helene Goldschmidt’s daughter, also named Clementine Fuld like her aunt, married David Cramer, the son of Jakob Cramer. Selig’s daughter Hedwig Goldschmidt married David Cramer’s brother Hirsch Cramer. And Selig’s son, Meyer Selig Goldschmidt, married Selma Suzette Cramer, a first cousin of Hirsch and David Cramer.

Two of Selig’s other children, Flora and Recha, married men with the surname Schwarzschild. I’ve not yet found records establishing a connection between the two Schwarzschild husbands, but I bet there was one.

Finally, Selig’s youngest and sixth child, Johanna Goldschmidt, married Abraham Stern, the son of Sarah Goldschmidt, Selig’s older sister, or Johanna’s first cousin. Fortunately I’ve already told the story of Johanna and Abraham when I wrote about Sarah Goldschmidt’s family so that particular web has already been untangled. I hope.

But as you can see, of Selig’s six children, one married a first cousin, two married spouses who were related to each other (first cousins), and two may have married spouses who were related in some way. Only Selig’s oldest child, Helene (yes, another Helene Goldschmidt) married someone who seems otherwise unconnected to someone else in the family.

And so, with that introduction to the family of Selig Goldschmidt and Clementine Fuld, I now will turn to this next branch of my Goldschmidt family tree. Once I finish Selig’s branch, there will be only one more Goldschmidt branch to cover, that of Selig’s brother Falk Goldschmidt. His line is also a crazy patchwork of intrafamily marriages, but I’ll address that when I get to that branch of the tree.

22 thoughts on “The Crazy Quilt of Selig Goldschmidt’s Family”

  1. One half of my family tree is nice, normal, branches every generation. The other branch is rooted in the Deep South. At one point, when I was first starting out in genealogy, I ran a relationship calculation between myself and my father. 13. I’m related to my father 13 different ways. Because everyone married everyone else, regardless of relations. My 3rd great-grandfather was widowed when his children were nearly grown. A year later, he married the young woman next door, proceeded to have more children. Then three of his grown children married their stepmother’s siblings! As I was reading your blog post today, I had to wonder if you’d just replaced “Strickland” and “Padgett” with “Goldschmidt” and “Fuld”!

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  6. And here I thought I had it bad because my dad and brother had the same first name. LOL! My brother goes by his middle name so it’s not too bad, certainly nothing like what you have here. Good luck!

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    • It’s not quite as bad because they got to the US pretty early. But there are certainly many Abraham Goldschmidt/Goldsmiths, two Milton Goldsmiths, several Edwin Goldsmiths, and so on, on “your” side. There are few intrafamily marriages for sure though—living in bigger cities with lots of Jews made it easier to find an unrelated partner.

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  10. Thanks for preparing us, lol…you got me thinking with eleven Jacobs – I wonder how many Francesco and Vincenzo’s I have with my Italian side. I am lucky I haven’t run into this on the Jewish side too. Ready and waiting for your next posting

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  11. Pingback: Selig Goldschmidt, Part I: Loving Son, Husband and Father | Brotmanblog: A Family Journey

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