Searching for information about Blanka Rosenberg, the first child born to Rebecca Blumenfeld and Mendel Rosenberg, revealed a mistake and a gap in my earlier research, and I am indebted to my cousin Richard Bloomfield for helping me to correct that mistake and find accurate information about Blanka and her family.

So let me take you down my crooked path. When I started searching for information about Blanka, I easily found her birth and death records on Ancestry.  I knew it was the right death record because the birthdate and birth place matched Blanka, and I could see on that death record that Blanka had married someone named Blumenfeld.

But I could not find a marriage record for Blanka. I noticed that several Ancestry trees had her married to Hugo Blumenfeld—which I couldn’t decipher myself from the death record— but even with his full name, I couldn’t find a marriage record.

I had a Hugo Blumenfeld on my tree; he was the son of Abraham Blumenfeld III and Friedericke Rothschild and the grandson of Isaak Blumenfeld I and his first wife, Frommet Kugelmann. But when I’d researched that Hugo, I had concluded that he never married or had children. I now realized I might have been wrong if those Ancestry trees for Blanka Rosenberg were right.

But since I don’t trust the trees on Ancestry without corroboration with actual records or at least reliable secondary sources, I was reluctant to add Hugo Blumenfeld as Blanka Rosenberg’s husband. I turned to my cousin Richard Bloomfield for help, and he first pointed out that Blanka’s death record revealed that her husband’s name was in fact Hugo. This was another time that my struggles with reading the German script hampered the progress of my research.

So I was now persuaded that Blanka had married a man named Hugo Blumenfeld, but was it the same Hugo whom I had concluded had never married? And where was their marriage record? I had assumed that Blanka would have married in Rosenthal where her family lived since almost all the German Jewish marriages I’d researched took place where the bride’s family lived, but my search through the Hessen archives for Rosenthal did not turn up a marriage record.

Richard, however, located the marriage in the records for the town of Frankenau, which is fifteen miles from Rosenthal. They were married there on July 23, 1907.  And that record confirmed that Blanka was the daughter of Rebecca Blumenfeld and Mendel Rosenberg and that Hugo was the son of Abraham Blumenfeld III and Friedericke Rothschild.

Blanka and Hugo were, of course, therefore related. They were both grandchildren of Isaak Blumenfeld I, but only half-first cousins since Hugo’s father Abraham III was Isaak’s son from his first marriage and Blanka’s mother Rebecca was Isaak’s daughter from his second marriage.

With Richard’s help, I was able to locate three children born to Blanka and Hugo, all born in Frankenau. Julius was born on March 7, 1908. Erwin Jacob was born on May 29, 1911, and Martin was born January 6, 1913 (all found on the same page in the Frankenau birth records).

Blanka died before any of her sons were married. She was only fifty years old when she died on July 24, 1932, in Witzenhausen, Germany, which is about sixty miles northeast of Frankenau. From the death record (seen above), it appears that she and Hugo were living in Witzenhausen at the time of her death. According to a document Richard located, Hugo was teaching in a Jewish school there.¹

Blanka’s middle son Erwin Jakob Rosenberg married Martha Schoendelen on September 21, 1938, in Hannover, Germany. Martha was born on June 17, 1915, in Krefeld, Germany. Erwin and Martha escaped from Nazi Germany and immigrated to the US on April 1, 1940.²

They settled in New York City where, at the time of the 1940 census, Erwin was looking for work as an auto mechanic.³ When he registered for the draft on October 16, 1940, he was working for A.E. Littman.

Erwin entered the US Army on June 25, 1943, and was stationed at Fort Meade in Maryland, where he petitioned for and was granted naturalization on December 15, 1943.

In 1950, Erwin was working as a buyer for a wholesale clothing business, and he and Martha and their daughter were living in New York City.⁴ Erwin was 63 when he died on August 27, 1974.⁵ He was survived by his wife Martha, who died on November 6, 2006,⁶ and their daughter.

Blanka’s two other sons immigrated to Palestine/Israel in the 1930s. Julius arrived on August 23, 1934, and married Ettel Helfgott on March 26, 1940, in Haifa. On his naturalization application, Julius reported that his occupation was a well borer.

I don’t have an exact date for Martin’s arrival, but he married Carna Weinberg in Petah Tikvah on December 19, 1939, so must have arrived sometime before then. I have no further information about either Julius or Martin or their families at this point.

UPDATE! I now have some additional information about Julius. See my post here.

Although all three of his sons escaped from Nazi Germany in time, Hugo Blumenfeld himself was not as fortunate. He had remarried after Blanka died; his second wife was Frieda Stern, who was born on May 31, 1896, in Zimmersrode, Germany.⁷ I wrote back on February 8, 1922, that Hugo “was deported from Frankfurt to Theriesenstadt on August 14, 1942, and then to Auschwitz on October 16, 1944, where he was killed.” I did not know then that he was accompanied by his second wife Frieda and that she was also killed at Auschwitz.⁸ I also did not know that he was survived by three sons, all of whom had escaped from Nazi Germany.

I am so grateful to Richard Bloomfield for helping me not only to find information about our cousin Blanka Rosenberg, but also for helping me find information to correct and complete the story of our cousin Hugo Blumenfeld.