Mystery Photos: Part I

Posted on June 29, 2015 by Amy

In Fred Michel’s album there are a number of photographs that are either unlabeled or labeled with names that we (Wolfgang, Suzanne, and I) cannot match to a person. I am hoping to get some input from all of you to help us in this endeavor. Please leave your thoughts in the comments so others can respond.

First, this photo of two women appears to be labeled either Anna or Minna (on the left) and Franziska on the right. I cropped and enlarged the face of Franziska. First: Is it Anna or Minna? Anna makes more sense since there is no Minna in the family as far as I can tell.

And is the woman on the right the same woman as the woman in the two photographs below it? That woman is Franziska Seligmann Michel, Fred Michel’s mother.

Fred Michel and Franziska Seligmann Michel
Courtesy of the Family of Fred and Ilse Michel

Franziska Seligmann Michel

If it is Anna and Franziska, then the Anna could be Franziska’s sister Anna, who married Hugo Goldmann, and whose family including their three children were all killed in the Holocaust. Perhaps the little girl in the photo is their oldest child Grete, who was born in 1913.

Next mystery set. The first photograph is of Emil Ochs and his wife Bettina Erlanger Ochs, discussed in my last post; I then cropped just to Bettina’s face. Is the woman in the photo below, which is unlabeled, the same woman?

Emil Ochs and wife, daughter of Mathilde Erlanger geb Seligmann

Bettina Erlanger Ochs

Unknown—is it Bettina Erlanger Ochs?

The men do not appear to be the same man, do they? If it’s not the same woman, there certainly is a strong family resemblance, but Bettina did not have a sister, as far as I’ve found.

Finally (for now), there are these two photographs. The first is definitely Bettina Seligmann Arnfeld, the daughter of Hieronymous Seligmann:

Bettina Arnfeld nee Seligmann

The same dog appears to be in this photograph. But is it?

Uncle Adolf and Grandmother Gau Algesheim

Who are these people?

According to Wolfgang, the label on the bottom right says Grandmother Gau Algesheim, so perhaps this is Babetta Schoenfeld Seligmann. Here is Babetta in an earlier photograph:

Courtesy of the Family of Fred and Ilse Michel

Could these both be the same person?

I think they could both be the same person. Do you? I don’t know when Babetta died, but she was born in 1810. Even if she is 80 years old in the later photograph, the photograph would have been taken by 1890.

If so, who are all those other people? The man above Babetta is labeled Uncle Adolf, I think. The only Adolf I’ve found in the family is Adolf Arnfeld, the husband of Bettina. That might have made sense, given the dog appearing in both the family picture and the portrait of Bettina. But Bettina was born in 1875, and she didn’t even marry Adolf until 1900. And the woman next to Adolf does not look like Bettina. And the name over her head appears to be Anna Oppenheimer.

And I don’t think the woman on the left is Bettina either. Here’s a close up of that woman.

Is this Bettina Arnfeld?

Finally, the names in the left hand margin. The man appears to be labeled Uncle Jakob, and I can’t read at all the name for the woman sitting below him—-Tante (aunt) something? Ends with an I? Not a clue. I can’t find an Uncle Jacob or anyone to match the Aunt he is paired with. More on this photo in the next post.

As for the dog, if Bettina Arnfeld was a young woman when holding that dog, what year would this be? Bettina was born in 1875, so if she is twenty in that photo, this could be around the same time as the large group photo with what appears to be the same dog. I am confused!

So…please do share your thoughts with me. It often takes a fresh set of eyes to see what I may be missing.

My Ever-growing Seligmann Family Tree

Posted on June 26, 2015 by Amy

Of all my family lines, I have had the best luck with my Seligmann line. First, early on I found my cousin Pete, Arthur Seligman’s grandson, who had a wealth of information about the New Mexico Seligmans. Then I was lucky to find people in Germany who provided me with the copies of vital records for Moritz Seligmann and his family as well as a book about the Jews of Gau-Algesheim. From those sources, I learned the names of many of my German ancestors.

Then my cousin Wolfgang found my blog, and he has provided me with invaluable information and documents as well as his continuing help in deciphering and translating what he found in his cousin’s suitcase. From there I was able to find my cousin Suzanne, who has provided me not only with more information and more documents but also with priceless photographs of many of my Seligmann relatives.

And now I have connected with two more cousins: George, an American descendant of Hieronymous Seligmann, a brother of my great-great-grandfather Bernard, and Davita, a descendant of Adolph Seligman, also my great-great-grandfather’s brother, who also settled in Santa Fe.. And from George and Davita I hope to learn even more about the family.

Right before I left and then while I was away, Wolfgang and Suzanne sent a bunch of new documents and new photographs that I want to share. I am not even sure where to begin. I think I will start with the newly discovered Westminster Bank document revealing the names of all the children of Hieronymous Seligmann; it answered some of the questions left open by my posts about the list of heirs to the estate of English James Seligman.

Westminster Bank family tree for Hieronymous Seligmann

This must have been the family tree that Elsa Oppenheimer had found erroneous as described in her letter of July 9, 1984. She had asserted that Hieronymous did not have a daughter named Johanna or Elizabeth (Bettina, on the tree), as the Bank’s tree indicated. But Elsa also said that Moritz did not have a son named Adolph, and she was wrong about that. I now think she was also wrong about Johanna and Bettina. How do I know she was wrong? Because there are pictures of both of these women in the photograph album that belonged to their cousin, Fred Michel.

First, here is a picture of Johanna Seligmann Bielefeld from the Michel album. Despite Elsa’s protestations, Johanna was clearly the daughter of one of the Seligmann sons, and there is no reason to think that she was not a sibling of Jack, Rosina Laura, and Mathilde, as indicated on the Bank tree, and thus a daughter of Hieronymous.

Johanna Bielefeld nee Seligmann

As I posted earlier, Johanna married Alfred Bielefeld, and they had two children, Hans and Lily, both of whom immigrated to the United States. Alfred and Johanna were both deported to Terezin, where Alfred died. With the help of the archivist at Terezin, I was able to locate Alfred’s death certificate.

Albert Bielefeld death certificate from Terezin

Alfred Bielefeld death certificate from Terezin

From what I can interpret here, Alfred died from myocardial deterioration and cellulitis. Johanna did not die at Terezin, but was later transported to Auschwitz, where she was killed.

As for Bettina, this beautiful photograph appears in the Michel photo album.

Bettina Arnfeld nee Seligmann

Wolfgang located a page in German for the stolperstein placed in her memory in Muelheim-Ruhr.

Stolperstein for Bettina Seligmann Arnfeld By RalfHuels (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

According to this page, Bettina was born in Gau-Algesheim on March 17, 1875, the daughter of Hieronymous Seligmann and Anna Levi. She attended school in Bingen and married Adolf Arnfeld in 1900. Adolf was in the fabric and clothing business in Mulheim-Ruhr, and he and Bettina were living there when their son Heinz was born in 1902. Adolf died in 1927, and Bettina was still living in Mulheim when she was deported to Terezin on July 21, 1942. She died six months later at Terezin from pneumonia. Here is yet another chilling death certificate issued by the Nazis.

Bettina Seligmann Arnfeld death certificate from Terezin

Unfortunately, I was not able to locate these death records while at Terezin so was unable to locate the specific gravesite where Albert Bielefeld and Bettina Arnfeld were buried.

Bettina’s biography also discussed her son Heinz. After initially working for his father’s company, Heinz became an attorney and worked as a clerk in the court system until dismissed in 1933 under the anti-Semitic laws adopted by the Nazis. He was imprisoned for a period of time in 1938 at Dachau (mostly likely in the aftermath of Kristallnacht), but was released. He immigrated to England in 1939, where he married Liselotte Schondorff in 1945. Heinz died in England on May 4, 1961. I have not located any descendants.

Based on the photographs and the other information and documentation, I think it is quite evident that both Johanna and Bettina were the daughters of Hieronymous Seligmann, the younger brother of Bernard Seligman, my three-times great-grandfather.

There were two other names I was not certain about when I wrote about the list of heirs to the estate of English James Seligmann: Anna Wolf and Bettina Ochs. I think I now have answers for those as well, with the help of Wolfgang and the photographs from Suzanne.

The list of heirs to English James Seligman’s estate had listed Anna Wolf right below Johanna Bielefeld and Bettina Arnfeld and referred to Johanna as her aunt. It also indicated that Anna had died in December 1935 in Mulheim-Ruhr, the town where Bettina had lived.

On the Hieronymous family tree from the Westminster Bank, depicted above, one of his daughters, Mathilde Wolf, is listed as having a daughter Anna, who died in 1935. This certainly seems to indicate that the Anna Wolf on the list of heirs was the daughter of Mathilde, sister to both Johanna and Bettina. That assumption is further supported by this photograph of what appears to be a stock certificate with the name Mathilde Wolf geb. (born) Seligmann written upon it. I don’t know what happened to Mathilde or her husband or why she herself is not listed as an heir instead of her daughter Anna.

There are several photographs of unidentified couples from the Michel album. Perhaps one of these is Mathilde Seligmann Wolf and her husband; perhaps one is a photograph of Bettina Seligmann Arnfeld and her husband. I don’t know. I will post some of these in a subsequent post and ask for help from all of you.

As for Bettina Ochs, I had been quite perplexed by her name on the list of James Seligman’s heirs. As I wrote, she is listed as Frau Bettina Ochs from Milan, Italy. Ochs thus appeared to be her married name, so I had thought her birth name must have been Seligmann or Oppenheimer, but the list names her brother as Arthur Erlanger, suggesting that Bettina’s birth name was Erlanger. So who was she, and how was she related to the Seligmanns?

I was stumped.

Until I saw this photograph:

Emil Ochs and wife, daughter of Mathilde Erlanger geb Seligmann

It says “Emil Ochs and wife, daughter of Mathilde Erlanger nee Seligmann.” So Bettina Ochs was the daughter of a Mathilde Seligmann, who had married someone named Erlanger. But which Mathilde Seligmann?

Thanks to Wolfgang, I now have an answer. Wolfgang found a page on Geni.com, another genealogy website, for Mathilde Erlanger nee Seligmann, which identified her as the daughter of Moritz and Babetta Seligmann. I looked back at my notes for the children of Moritz and Babetta, and sure enough there was a daughter named Mathilde for whom I had had no information beyond her birth date of January 31, 1845, which came from the records I’d obtained from Gau-Algesheim. Now from the Geni page, the list of heirs, and the photograph, I know her married name and the names of her children, Bettina and Arthur, and I know Bettina’s husband’s name, Emil. Unfortunately, however, I do not know what happened to Mathilde, her husband, Arthur or Bettina and Emil. I don’t know why Bettina was listed as living in Milan or why she had an English lawyer, according to the list of heirs. I don’t know why her brother was only listed as a secondary heir.

The only other record I have for Bettina so far is from the JewishGen database labeled “Switzerland, Jewish Arrivals 1938-1945,” which includes a listing for “Bettina Ochs-Erlanger (Bettina Oberdorfer).” That listing says her nationality was Italian and that she arrived in Switzerland on August 5, 1944. Where did she go from there? Why is she also listed as Oberdorfer? What happened to Emil? I don’t know.

So as always, some questions have been answered, leading to more to be answered. Next post I will look at some of the other photographs from the album of Fred Michel.

Walking in the Shadows of My Brotman Great-Grandparents

Posted on June 14, 2015 by Amy

My third day in Poland was undoubtedly the highlight of the trip for me. Visiting the town where my great-grandparents lived was the initial motivation for going to Central Europe in the first place. The stops in Prague, Budapest, and Vienna were the icing on the cake, but the cake was Poland and, more specifically, Tarnobrzeg. (I finally learned how to pronounce it, thanks to our guide Tomasz: TarNOBjeg.) I had high and emotional expectations; they were exceeded by the reality.

First, some background. When I first started doing genealogy research, I had no idea where my maternal grandmother’s family had lived in Europe other than they were Galitzianers—from Galicia. My mother had no idea what town in Galicia had been their home, and for a long time the only location given on the records I could find was Austria, which made sense since Galicia was part of the Austria-Hungary Empire when the Brotmans lived there.

Then a few pieces came together—first, I obtained my great-uncle Hyman Brotman’s naturalization application giving his home town as Jeekief, which is a decent phonetic spelling of Dzikow, once a separate village but later incorporated into Tarnobrzeg, a much larger town. Then I found a ship manifest for Yossel Brod, most likely my great-grandfather, from Tarnobchiek, another phonetic spelling, this time of Tarnobrzeg. The ship manifests for my great-uncles Abraham and David Brotman gave their home town at Grebow, a small village less than ten miles from Tarnobrzeg. It seemed clear to me that Tarnobrzeg was the area where my Brotman ancestors had lived in Galicia. And I had to go there.

SelectedU.S.NaturalizationRecords-OriginalDocuments1790-1974ForHermanBrotman

Hyman Brotman’s Naturalization Application (Click twice to zoom in.)

David and Abe Brodmann on the Portia 1889

Joseph Brotman ship manifest

I had originally hoped that there might be some records left in Tarnobrzeg that had not yet been digitized and put on line by JewishGen, Gesher Galicia, or JRI Poland, but our guide Tomasz warned me that he believed that whatever records still existed had in fact been found already and that we would not find any more in the town. I adjusted my expectations accordingly, and I decided to enjoy the trip for the experience of being there rather than as a research opportunity.

Tomasz picked us up at our hotel at 9 am that morning, and we got to meet my recently found cousin Phyllis for the first time. Phyllis and I had connected through DNA testing, which showed us as third cousins and showed her aunt Frieda and my mother as second cousins. By comparing our family trees we had reached the conclusion that the likely connection was through my great-grandmother Bessie Brot Brotman and her grandmother Sabina Brot, whose father we believe was my great-grandmother’s brother. Sabina’s home town in Galicia was Radomysl nad Sanem, another town about ten miles from Tarnobrzeg, which we would also visit that day. The common surname and the proximity of residences seemed to support our hypothesis. We quickly connected in person, chatting excitedly about our research, our travels, and our hopes for that day.

As we drove from Krakow to Tarnobrzeg, Tomasz spoke about the history of Jews in Poland. By the 19^th century Jews made up 10% of the population of Poland, and they lived all over the country—in the cities and in small towns and in villages. The land we drove through was mostly rural even today, and Tomasz said that Jews were often invited by the kings or the aristocracy to live in the towns to support the local economy; Jews had the education and the skills to provide bookkeeping, trade, banking, and other economic necessities to the farmers who lived in these regions. In Tarnobrzeg it was the Tarnowski family that owned the land and invited the Jews to come live there.

Castle of the Tarnowski family in Tarnobrzeg

When I asked him about the level of religious observance of the Jewish residents who lived in places like Tarnobrzeg, Tomasz said that there was a diverse range of religious observance—-from Hasidim to more traditional Orthodox to more liberal Jews and to secular Jews. Other sources point out that Tarnobrzeg was an important Hasidic center with well-regarded Hasidic leaders and rabbis.

Tomasz also spoke about the fact that Tarnobrzeg was one of the leading Jewish population and industrial centers in Galicia outside of Krakow. The main industry aside from agriculture was the production of sulfur, a product that it still important to the local economy of the region. Tarnobrzeg is located where two rivers meet—the Vistula (which also runs through Krakow) and the San, and thus was an important trade location. It also is very close to what was once the border with the Russian Empire, and when Russia obtained that land, families were often separated, some living in Austria-Hungary, some in the Russian Empire. In the 19^th century when my great-grandparents lived there, the population of Tarnobrzeg was more than 75% Jewish. There were about 2800 Jews living there in the 1880s when my great-grandparents decided to leave.

I asked Tomasz why people like my great-grandparents would ever have left a place like Tarnobrzeg, where Jews were doing well and treated well and were more than a majority of the town’s residents. He said that in the late 19^th century, there was both an economic crisis in Poland and a significant increase in the population. (There was also a great deal of anti-Semitism in Poland, as other sources describe.) Jews and non-Jews left for greater economic opportunities. When I pondered how a family would be able to tear themselves away from their home, both emotionally and financially, Tomasz explained that there were emigration agents facilitating these departures. They would circulate brochures touting the advantages of going to America, and the fact that many others were leaving made it easier for a family like mine to make a similar choice. I asked how they would actually leave, and Tomasz said there was a train that came to Tarnobrzeg that would take them to one of the port cities, like Gdansk or Hamburg, where they would catch a ship for America. It would be costly, but the potential benefits made it all seem worth the risk.

Finally we arrived in Tarnobrzeg itself. It was not exactly what I expected, as it is a large town, not a little shtetl, and it is a thriving town—lots of people, lots of stores, lots of cars. Not a quiet little romantic village out of Fiddler on the Roof at all. There was even a Lego store right on the main square.

Lego store on main square in Tarnobrzeg

But once we got out of the car and started to walk around, I felt some almost eerie connection—that this was a place where my great-grandparents had walked, had shopped, had worked. Many of the buildings that surround the square were there back in the 1870s and 1880s when my great-grandparents and their children lived there. Maybe one of those buildings contained a shop where my great-grandfather worked (on that ship manifest his occupation was given as “kaufmann” or merchant). Maybe my family lived in one of them.

Main square in Tarnobrzeg

I stood in that square, imagining it 150 years ago as a place filled with families like my own, Jewish families of all sorts, living in a safe and comfortable way in a safe and comfortable place. I could imagine my great-uncle Chaim who became Hyman and then Herman and my great-aunt Tema who became Tillie, just small children, holding their mother’s hands as they walked through that square. I could block out the Lego store and the ugly modern supermarket and see just the old buildings as they might have looked in the 1880s.

Our guide Tomasz Cebulski leading the way in Tarnobrzeg

Tomasz took us to the building which was once the synagogue. According to the official Tarnobrzeg website, it was heavily damaged by the Nazis and used to store grain. It was renovated in the 1970s into a public library, and there is almost no sign today that it was ever a synagogue building. The windows were changed, and inside where there was once a prayer hall and aron kodesh are now stacks filled with books. When we asked in the library whether they had any photographs or books or records about the synagogue or the former Jewish community, all they could find was one copy of a brochure that had only been created a few years ago.

IMG_2659 where the prayer hall stood, now a library

Space where the prayer hall once was in the Tarnobrzeg synagogue

Exterior of building where the synagogue entrance had been

Tarnobrzeg Synagogue (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Here are some photographs of the building when it was a synagogue:

murals inside synagogue http://www.kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/Tarnobrzeg/html/synagogue.htm

Exterior of synagogue http://www.kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/Tarnobrzeg/html/synagogue.htm

The only visible sign that the building was built as a synagogue is a small plaque on the exterior of the building in a location that almost no one could ever see or read if they were not looking for it. We had to walk around the building through the lawn to get this photograph. The only small comfort was that the building was being used for books and education, not for commerce or worse.

IMG_2660 marker on library marking it as location of synagogue

Memorial plaque on the former synagogue building

Tomasz also pointed out that the first Jewish cemetery was located just a block away, but was now a parking lot for the shopping area that now exists there. According to this video prepared in 2008, the Nazis destroyed the synagogue and used the headstones to pave a road. (I suggest downloading the hi-def version and watching it; it will give you a better sense of the town and its history.)

We then drove to the other Jewish cemetery in Tarnobrzeg, which was opened in the 20^th century and where there is still an ohel with a Star of David. Sadly, the cemetery is not maintained at all, and there are just a handful of headstones still standing, most covered with weeds and snails. I took photographs of as many as I could and now hope to get these translated.

After visiting the cemetery, we went to a small museum Tomasz knew about, where we met with an incredibly helpful woman who did not speak any English, but when Tomasz explained why I was there, she was very excited and anxious to help. She provided us with some books with drawings and photographs of Tarnobrzeg before World War II.

The woman at the museum also explained where Dzikow had been located before it merged into Tarnobrzeg, so we drove there and saw some very old homes, built almost like log cabins. I was enchanted and wondered whether one of these buildings had once been my great-grandparents’ home.

As we left Tarnobrzeg, Tomasz told us what had happened to the Jews there during the Holocaust. Many were shot and killed just outside of town and buried there. Many others were taken to the San River and shot, their bodies falling into the water. The rest were eventually transported to a concentration camp or a death camp. If any survived, they have not returned to Tarnobrzeg. There are no known Jews living there today. What would my great-grandparents, both of whom died before the Holocaust, have thought if they returned to their hometown today? It would no longer be the place they knew in almost any way, except for the old buildings that survive.

Nazis rounding up the Jews of Tarnobrzeg 1939

Nazis rounding up the Jews of Tarnobrzeg near the San River 1939

I could have stayed and wandered around Tarnobrzeg for hours, but we had two more stops to make: Radomysl nad Sanem and Grebow. We headed first to Radomysl nad Sanem, where Phyllis’ grandmother had lived. It is on the other side of the San River and is a very small little town with a small town square and municipal building and perhaps fifty homes, if that many. Its Jewish population before World War II was less than 400 people, and the village was mostly Jewish. We drove from one end of the town to the other, and it took only a few minutes. Even more so than in Tarnobrzeg, there is no sign that there were ever Jews there. Phyllis was able to obtain some brochures about the town from the library there, but nothing that discussed the former Jewish community.

Our last stop was a quick one in Grebow, a town even smaller than Radomysl nad Sanem where there was not even a library we could visit. I don’t know whether this was where Abraham and David Brotman were born or simply where they were living at the time they emigrated. Perhaps they had moved here for greater opportunities than they could find in Tarnobrzeg. I don’t know. It’s such a tiny village that all I can do is imagine them living there and then wonder what they must have thought when they landed in a place as large and crowded and dirty as late 19^th century New York City’s Lower East Side.

We then headed back to Krakow. I was exhausted and emotionally drained and filled with thoughts and feelings. We were taking another night train that night, this time to Budapest. As we ate a quick dinner at our hotel, I found myself overwhelmed with emotion in a way that surprised me. My eyes filled with tears—tears for the people who had been killed, tears for my great-grandparents who had left this country for better things, tears of gratitude that they had done that, and tears of sadness that I was leaving a place that part of me truly felt was my homeland.

Home Sweet Home

Posted on June 2, 2015 by Amy

We are back from our trip, and I have so much to say that I don’t even know where or how to start. Traveling to a different place can change your whole view of the world, of your place in the world, and of yourself. This trip did that in so many different ways. I have hundreds of photographs to sort and label, a lot of notes to transcribe and ponder, and so many thoughts and memories floating through my head that I need to write them all down before I forget them. So I can’t just start blogging in detail about the trip right away. I will certainly report about the parts of the trip that related directly to my own family—the trip to Poland in particular—once I have it all digested.

For now I have these overall thoughts and a few photographs to share. First, standing in the former Jewish quarters in Prague, Krakow, Budapest, and Vienna, some of which still have several synagogues (a few even still in operation), is a chilling and horrifying experience. For me, these places that once bustled with Jewish grandparents, mothers, fathers, and children, going to work and going to school and going to shul, were a graphic and vivid reminder of what the world lost in the Holocaust. Had it not been for the Nazis, these Jewish communities could and likely would still exist, adding to the culture and economy of these places and of the world just as they did for hundreds of years before their Jewish citizens were murdered.

A street in the former Jewish Quarter of Krakow

Nothing made this more painfully vivid for me than standing in Tarnobrzeg, the town where my Brotman great-grandparents lived, a town that was once 75% Jewish and where not one Jew lives today. The only signs that there were once Jews there were a small plaque on the library, a building that had once been the synagogue, and a Star of David near the gate to the neglected Jewish cemetery, where only a handful of headstones remain.

gravestone on the ground in the Jewish cemetery in Tarnobrzeg

Second, every person, Jewish or not, should visit Terezin and Auschwitz. I cannot say more. The places say it all. You cannot go to these places and not be changed. No matter what you may have read or seen or heard about the Holocaust, you cannot be prepared for what you experience walking in those places of terror and death. I have only two photographs of Terezin and no photographs of Auschwitz. I could not bear to think about taking a photograph while standing where so many were slaughtered.

Terezin

Third, I had little idea what life was like under Soviet domination in the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary until we met several people who had lived during that era. We were lucky to have guides in Prague, Poland, and Budapest who had witnessed the changes and were able to describe to us how different life was before and after the Soviets left in the late 1980s, early 1990s. Today all these places are clearly capitalist, for better in many ways, for worse in others. Seeing Starbucks and McDonalds and KFC everywhere amidst the old buildings in these gorgeous cities is jolting, but much better than seeing empty store windows and children forced to march at rallies to support the “state.”

Old Town Square Prague

Despite all the sadness that we felt as we learned about the past in these places, overall we experienced these cities as places of joyfulness, liveliness, and overall comfort. Yes, there were beggars and homeless people, especially in Budapest, and I am sure that outside the areas where tourists congregate there is plenty of poverty and misery. But each of the cities we visited were beautiful places filled with incredible and fascinating architecture, a huge number of cafes and restaurants and bars, museums teeming with people, cobblestone streets crowded with tourists and tour groups, and the sounds of happy, excited people. There was music everywhere—in the streets, in the churches, and in the concert halls.

Dohany Synagogue in Budapest

We had an incredible time. Our tears and sadness were well-balanced with times of pure joy—climbing the tower to see all of Prague, clapping to Klezmer music in Krakow, walking along the river in Budapest, and eating unbelievable pastries in Vienna. We heard music in every city, we stood in awe in Gothic cathedrals, we watched people laughing and drinking and eating in the cafes, and we walked and walked and walked until our feet were numb. We had an incredible time.

Musikverein in Vienna

One for the Road: How I Found Another Brotman

Posted on May 17, 2015 by Amy

This will be my last post before we leave on our trip. I wanted to leave on a high note with a new discovery—a Brotman line I’d not discovered until the last week or so. Perhaps this is a good omen for what I might find when in Poland. I might post a bit while away—depends on internet access, time, and energy. But I will report on the trip either as it unfolds or after I return, so stay tuned.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Radomy%C5%9Bl+nad+Sanem,+Poland/Tarnobrzeg,+Poland/@50.6192387,21.705365,11z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m13!4m12!1m5!1m1!1s0x4722cc10211176a5:0x42126b9a45e07902!2m2!1d21.9449344!2d50.6810623!1m5!1m1!1s0x473d4a0dd8824db1:0xc70875667fbbaaf3!2m2!1d21.6790698!2d50.5729079

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In my last post I reported on the conflicting results of my search through the records of the families of Moses and Abraham Brotman of Brotmanville, New Jersey. I was looking for any shred of evidence that might reveal where they, and thus perhaps my great-grandparents, had lived in Europe. What I found was that some records said Moses was born in Austria, some said Russia. Same for Abraham. And not one record named a town or city. Thus, I had not gotten any closer to any answers.

But while reviewing the documents I had and checking and double-checking my tree, I did find something somewhat anomalous. In doing my initial research of Moses’ family, I had not been able to find them on the 1920 census, as I mentioned in my last post. In trying to find the family, I had searched for each of the children separately, and I had found a Joseph Brotman living in Davenport, Iowa, according to the 1915 Iowa state census. I admit that I had not looked very carefully (BIG mistake) and had jumped to the conclusion that Moses’ son Joseph had been shipped out to Iowa to live with another family since I couldn’t find Moses or Ida or any of the siblings listed on that census. (This is one reason I keep my tree private on Ancestry—I’d hate to mislead someone else while I am doing preliminary research.)

But in now reviewing my original preliminary research, this just struck me as strange. So I went back to look more carefully. First, I pulled up the census record for Joseph. Instead of being a list or register as with other census reports, Iowa had separate cards for each resident. Here is the one for Joseph Brotman:

Joseph Brotman 1915 Iowa census
Ancestry.com. Iowa, State Census Collection, 1836-1925 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007.
Original data: Microfilm of Iowa State Censuses, 1856, 1885, 1895, 1905, 1915, 1925 as well various special censuses from 1836-1897 obtained from the State Historical Society of Iowa via Heritage Quest

You can see why I made that initial mistake. He was born the right year (1902) and the right place (New Jersey). He was Jewish, his father was born in Austria, mother in Russia. All those facts certainly seemed to suggest that he was the son of Moses and Ida Brotman. So I had entered this record for Joseph on to my tree in Ancestry.

But this time I took the next step—were there other Brotmans in Davenport on that census? First I saw a Lillian Brotman. I thought, “Hmmm, maybe two siblings were sent to Iowa?” Remember—Moses had a daughter named Lillian, as did Abraham. So I looked at Lillian’s entry in the 1915 census.

Lillian Brotman 1915 Iowa census
Ancestry.com. Iowa, State Census Collection, 1836-1925 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007.
Original data: Microfilm of Iowa State Censuses, 1856, 1885, 1895, 1905, 1915, 1925 as well various special censuses from 1836-1897 obtained from the State Historical Society of Iowa via Heritage Quest.

She was living at the same address as Joseph, was also born in New Jersey, and had a father born in Austria, a mother in Russia. Like Joseph, she had been in Iowa for three years. So I thought that this had to be Joseph’s sister. But this Lillian was 16 years old, and Moses’ daughter Lillian was born in 1892, so she would have been 23 in 1915. Could it be Abraham’s daughter Lillian? She was the right age, but somehow that just didn’t make much sense.

I decided to go through the cards in the census by flipping backwards from Joseph’s card and then found several other Brotmans at the same address: Albert (2), Eva (37), and May (10). May also had been born in New Jersey, Albert in Iowa, and Eva in Russia. Who were these people? Were they related to MY Brotmans in some way? I assumed Eva was the mother of these four children, but who was the father? And where was he?

So I searched for the family by using Eva’s names and the names of the children, and I found them on the 1910 census living in Philadelphia. The husband’s name was Bennie, wife Eva (32), and four children: Lily (11), Florence (10), Joe (8), and May (6). These ages lined up with the ages of the children on the Iowa census five years later, but the census record said these children were born in Pennsylvania, not New Jersey. The father, Bennie, was 33, born in Austria with parents born in Russia, and had immigrated in 1894, according to the census. He was a cutter in a clothing business. He and his wife had been married for 12 years or since 1898.

Bennie Brotman 1910 census
Source Citation
Year: 1910; Census Place: Philadelphia Ward 1, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Roll: T624_1386; Page: 11B; Enumeration District: 0019; FHL microfilm: 1375399

What had happened to their daughter Florence? And where had they been in 1900? Were they related to my Brotmans? I first searched for their missing daughter, and I found an entry in the Iowa, Select Deaths and Burials 1850-1990 database:

Name:	Flora Brotman
Gender:	Female
Marital Status:	Single
Age:	13
Birth Date:	1900
Birth Place:	Philadelphia
Death Date:	23 Aug 1913
Death Place:	Davenport, Iowa
Burial Date:	24 Aug 1913
Father:	Ben Brotman
Mother:	Eva Siegel
FHL Film Number:	1480948
Reference ID:	p186 r59

This document provided me with Eva’s birth name and Flora’s birthplace. I thought that the family must have been living in Philadelphia in 1900 if that is where Flora was born, but I could not find them on the 1900 census living in Philadelphia. I searched again for Flora, and this time found a birth record—not in Philadelphia or even in Pennsylvania, as the death record and 1910 census had reported. Rather, she was born in, of all places, Pittsgrove, Salem County, New Jersey, on July 19, 1900, to Benj. Brotman (born in Austria) and Eva Sigel (born in Russia). Once I saw Pittsgrove, my heart beat a little faster. This more and more seemed like a member of the Brotmanville Brotman family—someone I had not ever located or researched before. Who was he? How was he related, if at all, to Moses and Abraham?

Name:	Flora Brotman
Gender:	Female
Birth Date:	19 Jul 1900
Birth Place:	PIT, Salem County, New Jersey
Father’s name:	Benj Brotman
Father’s Age:	24
Father’s Birth Place:	Aug.
Mother’s name:	Eve Sigel
Mother’s Age:	22
Mother’s Birth Place:	Russia
FHL Film Number:	494247

I searched for them on the 1900 census again, but this time in Pittsgrove, New Jersey. It took some doing, but finally found Benjamin listed as Bengeman Brotman, listed at the very bottom of the same page as Moses Brotman, just a few households away. The census reported that he was 24, a cutter, and married for one year. It stated that he and his parents were born in Austria, that he had immigrated in 1888, and that he was a naturalized citizen. At the top of the next page were the listings for his wife Eva and daughter Lilly, just a year old. The other children had not yet been born.

Bengeman Brotman 1900 US census

Ben Brotman’s family 1900 census
Year: 1900; Census Place: Pittsgrove, Salem, New Jersey; Roll: 993; Page: 18B; Enumeration District: 0179; FHL microfilm: 1240993

From this census, I knew that Benjamin Brotman had lived in Pittsgrove right near Moses Brotman, had married Eva Siegel and had had at least two children in Pittsgrove before moving to Philadelphia, where they were living in 1910. By 1913, the family was living in Davenport, Iowa, where their daughter Flora died. But where was Benjamin in 1915 when the Iowa census was taken? And was he related to Moses Brotman?

Looking one more time, I found him listed in the 1914 Davenport, Iowa, directory as a peddler, living with his wife Eva at the same address where she and the children were listed in the 1915 Iowa census. I also found him in the 1915 directory at that address, but with no occupation listed, and in the 1918 directory at a new address, 1323 Ripley, the same address given for his son Joseph, listed as a chauffeur, and his daughter Lillian, listed as a bookkeeper. A very similar series of entries appears in the 1919 directory. In both Benjamin still had no occupation listed. If he was living in Davenport in 1914, 1915, 1918 and 1919, why wasn’t he in the Iowa census?

One more search of the I0wa 1915 census produced this result:

Benjamin Brotman 1915 Iowa census
Ancestry.com. Iowa, State Census Collection, 1836-1925 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007.
Original data: Microfilm of Iowa State Censuses, 1856, 1885, 1895, 1905, 1915, 1925 as well various special censuses from 1836-1897 obtained from the State Historical Society of Iowa via Heritage Quest.

At first, I didn’t know why this card was separated from the family’s cards. Looking at this card, however, revealed the reason: Benjamin is described as an invalid, and under “Remarks” it says, “Tuberculosis Hospital.” He was not living with his family. Benjamin was sick with the dreadful disease that caused suffering for so many and their families. Perhaps that is also what killed his daughter Flora. Of note on this card is that his birthplace was Austria and that he had been in the US for 27 years, that is, since 1888, consistent with the 1900 census though not the 1910 census. Also, as with the other members of the family, Ben had been in Iowa for three years or since about 1912.

But what happened to Ben after 1915? Did he recover? Is that why he appears in the 1918 and 1919 directories? On the 1920 census Ben is listed with Eva and three of their surviving children, Lillian, Joseph, and Albert, and a new son Merle, only four years old. It would seem that Ben had not only recovered, but had returned home and fathered another child.

Benjamin Brotman 1920 census
Year: 1920; Census Place: Rock Island Precinct 4, Rock Island, Illinois; Roll: T625_402; Page: 16A; Enumeration District: 128; Image: 1078

The family was living in Rock Island, Illinois, right across the Mississippi River from Davenport, Iowa. Ben was not employed, but Lillian was a bookkeeper and Joseph a salesman at a general store. Their daughter May was listed on the 1920 census as an inmate at the Institution for Feeble-Minded Children in Glenwood, Iowa, over 300 miles away from Rock Island. She was still there ten years later according to the 1930 census.

English: Downtown Davenport, Iowa looking across the Mississippi River from Rock Island, Illinois (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As I followed the family forward into the 1920s, Benjamin seemed to have died or disappeared. In the 1921 Rock Island directory, Eva Brotman is listed as a widow. And in the Illinois, County Marriages 1810-1934 database on FamilySearch, I found a marriage listing for Eva Brotman and Abe Abramovitz on July 26, 1923, in Rock Island. In 1930, Eva was living with her second husband Abe and her two youngest sons, Albert (listed incorrectly as Abe) and Merle (listed incorrectly as Muriel), who were then 18 and 15, respectively. They were all still living together ten years later, according to the 1940 census.

Eva Siegel Brotman Abromovitz and sons 1930 census
Year: 1930; Census Place: Rock Island, Rock Island, Illinois; Roll: 553; Page: 5B; Enumeration District: 0084; Image: 716.0; FHL microfilm: 2340288

It seemed I had reached the end of the line for Benjamin Brotman, but I had no death record, and I still had no idea whether he was related to me or to the Brotmanville Brotmans. I kept searching for a death record, and instead I found this:

Ben Brotman World War I draft registration
Registration State: Colorado; Registration County: Denver; Roll: 1544482; Draft Board: 1

A World War I registration for a Ben Brotman born in 1876, no birthplace listed, living in Denver, Colorado. I might not have given it much thought but for the name given as his nearest relative: Moses Brotman of Alliance, New Jersey, his father. Moses Brotman of Alliance is the Brotmanville Moses Brotman (Alliance was the name of the community where the Brotmans settled, part of Pittsgrove, now called Brotmanville.). This Ben Brotman was his son. The age fit exactly—the Ben Brotman living in Pittsgrove in 1900 was 24, thus born in 1876, just like the Ben Brotman living in Colorado in 1918, son of Moses. I had no child listed for Moses named Benjamin, and if this was in fact his son, he was born before Moses married Chaya/Ida/Clara Rice. That is, this could be Abraham’s full brother from Moses’ first wife, whose name I did not know.

But could I be sure that this was the Ben Brotman who had lived in Pittsgrove, then Philadelphia, then Davenport, Iowa? And if so, what was he doing in Colorado in 1918 when this draft registration was filed? After all, Ben Brotman, Eva’s husband, had been listed in the 1918 and 1919 Davenport directories.

The draft registration listed the Colorado Ben Brotman as a porter at Oakes Home in Denver. I googled that name and found that Oakes Home in Denver was an institution for patients suffering from tuberculosis. Was Ben really an employee there or was he a patient? There is no indication on his draft registration that he was in poor health and not able to serve in the military. Had he gone there as a patient and recovered sufficiently to be employed but not yet enough to return to Iowa?

As you might imagine, I was now more than a bit confused. If this was the same Ben, had he then returned to Iowa at some point in 1918, been there in 1919 and 1920, and then died by 1921, as Eva’s listing in the 1921 Rock Island directory suggested? I needed to find his death certificate, and I had no luck searching online in Iowa, Illinois, or Colorado. As I’ve done before, I turned to the genealogy village for assistance.

I went to the Tracing the Tribe group on Facebook and found a number of people who volunteered to help me. One person found an entry on Ancestry from the JewishGen Online World Burial Registry for a Bera Brotman who died on January 4, 1922, who was born about 1877, and who was buried at the Golden Hills Cemetery in Lakewood, Colorado. It seemed like a long shot. Was Bera even a man? The birth year was close enough, but if Eva was a widow in 1921, the death date was too late. There was a phone number for a contact person at the cemetery listed on the entry, so I called him.

Name:	Bera Brotman
Birth Date:	abt 1877
Death Date:	4 Jan 1922
Age at Death:	45
Burial Plot:	10-097
Burial Place:	Lakewood, Colorado, United States
Comments:	No gravestone
Cemetery:	Golden Hill Cemetery
Cemetery Address:	12000 W. Colfax
Cemetery Burials:	3839
Cemetery Comments:	Contact: Neal Price (303) 836-2312

The contact person checked the cemetery records and confirmed the information listed on JOWBR, but gave me one more bit of critical information: Bera’s last residence was the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society in Denver. By googling the JCRS, I found that JewishGen had a database of records from there, and when I searched for Ben Brotman on the JCRS database, I found this record:

JCRS record for Ben Brotman from JewiishGen

This Ben Brotman had to be the one who had been at one time living in Pittsgrove, New Jersey, and then had moved to Davenport, Iowa. This was the Ben who had married Eva and had six children. He had twice been a patient at the JCRS. First, he’d been admitted when he was 41 or in 1917, when he listed his status as married, and then he’d been admitted again when he was 45 or in 1921, when he listed his status as divorced. The pieces were starting to come together. Perhaps Ben had in fact been in Denver in 1917, recovered enough to register for the draft there in 1918, then returned to his family in Davenport sometime in 1918 through 1920. He then had to return to the JCRS in Denver in 1921, where he died in January, 1922. By 1921 he and Eva had divorced, and Eva had listed herself as a widow in the directory, as many divorced women did in those days when divorce was stigmatizing.

I emailed the cemetery contact person and explained that I thought Bera was really Ben, and he agreed to change the records. But I still had some nagging doubts. Was the Ben Brotman who had died in Colorado in January, 1922, and who had lived in Davenport also the one who was the son of Moses Brotman, as indicated on the draft registration? I needed the death certificate to be sure, and perhaps it would also tell me where Ben was born, helping to answer the question that had started me down this path in the first place.

I ordered the death certificate, and it finally arrived just the other day.

Benjamin Brotman death certificate

Ben Brotman died on January 4, 1922, of pulmonary tuberculosis at the J.C.R.S Sanitorium. He was 45 years old and born in 1876, and he had been a tailor. He had contracted TB in Davenport, Iowa, and had had it for ten years, or since 1912, which would mean around the time the family had moved to Iowa. (That makes me wonder even more whether his daughter Flora had also died of TB, since she died in 1913.) The doctor at JCRS who signed the death certificate said that he had attended Ben since September 7, 1921, which must have been when he was admitted the second time. The certificate stated that Ben had been a Denver resident for three months and 28 days, indicating that he had been elsewhere before returning in September. It also reported his marital status as divorced. Finally, his place of birth was given as Austria, and his parents were also reported to have been born in Austria.

And then the answer I’d been seeking: his father’s name was Moses. This was then most definitely the same Benjamin Brotman I had traced from Pittsgrove to Philadelphia to Davenport to Denver to Rock Island and back to Denver. This was the son of Moses Brotman, my great-grandfather’s brother.

And then the (hopefully accurate) big revelation: his mother’s name was Lena. For the first time I had a record of the name of Moses’ wife prior to Ida/Chaya/Clara Rice. Lena. She very well might have been the mother of Abraham Brotman. I don’t know. There is a big gap between Abraham’s presumed birth year of 1863 and Benjamin’s birth year of 1876. There must have been other children in between, I’d think. Or perhaps Lena was Benjamin’s mother, and Abraham’s mother was an even earlier wife of Moses. But since both Abraham and Benjamin named their first daughters Lillian and at around the same time, I think that both of these girls were named for their grandmother Lena, who must have died before 1884 when Moses married his second wife Chaya.

I made one more look back at the records I had for Moses and for Abraham and realized that I had not re-checked the 1895 New Jersey census. Since it only listed names, not ages or birthplaces, I had not thought it important in my search for where they’d lived in Europe. Moses and his family are listed on the page before Abraham and his family on that census. Abraham is listed with Minnie and their first three children, Joseph, Samuel, and Kittella (presumably Gilbert).

Abraham Brotman 1895 NJ census
Ancestry.com. New Jersey, State Census, 1895 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007.
Original data: New Jersey Department of State. 1895 State Census of New Jersey. Trenton, NJ, USA: New Jersey State Archives. 54 reels.

Moses is listed with Clara and the five children they had had by 1895: Sadie, Katie, Lillie, Samuel, and “Abraham.”[1] But also listed with Moses is a name I had overlooked during my preliminary research: Bennie. He was listed in the 5-20 year old category, and if this was the Ben Brotman of Iowa and Denver, he would have been 19 years old in 1895. There he was—Benjamin Brotman, the son I had overlooked and who very well could have been the full brother of Abraham Brotman.

Moses Brotman 1895 NJ census
Ancestry.com. New Jersey, State Census, 1895 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2007.
Original data: New Jersey Department of State. 1895 State Census of New Jersey. Trenton, NJ, USA: New Jersey State Archives. 54 reels.

What I don’t know and will likely never know is why Ben and Eva left New Jersey. Why did he go to Davenport, Iowa?[2] The whole story is rather sad. He doesn’t even have a headstone at the Golden Hills cemetery. I have identified some of his descendants, and perhaps when I return, I will try and contact them.

Although I was very excited to find this lost Brotman, unfortunately I still don’t have any record identifying a specific town or city where the Brotmanville Brotmans lived in Europe. But soon I will head off to Tarnobrzeg, Poland, the town I still think is the most likely ancestral home of my great-grandparents Joseph and Bessie Brotman.

[1] I found this very strange—did Moses really have another son named Abraham? The Abraham listed on the 1895 New Jersey census was five years old or younger, meaning he was born in 1890 or later. Samuel was born in 1889, but must not yet have turned five; Lily was born in 1892. The only other child born between 1890 and 1894 was Isaac (who became Irving), not Abraham, so I assume this entry on the 1895 census was a mistake and that “Abraham” was really Isaac.

[2] In doing this research I kept tripping over another Brotman family—a family living in Rock Island that owned the theaters in town. However, they do not appear to be related. The patriarch of that family, Jacob Brotman, was born in 1848 in Minsk, Russia, and had lived in London before emigrating to the US sometime after 1901. Since Joseph and Moses were born around the same time but somewhere in Galicia, it seems unlikely that Jacob was a close relative. But anything is possible.

My Brotmanville Cousins: Searching for Answers

Posted on May 14, 2015 by Amy

One thing I have been trying to do as part of my preparations for our visit to Tarnobrzeg and the surrounding towns is a last ditch effort to find some other clues as to where my Brotman ancestors lived. I have gone back through the research I’ve done on my great-grandparents and their Galician born children, Abraham, Max, David, Hyman, and Tillie, and have found no new clues. Then I realized that now that I have some DNA confirmation that my great-grandfather Joseph was the brother of Moses Brotman of Brotmanville, I needed to go through their records as well to see if I could find some new clues. I had done an initial search a few years ago, but had not yet gone back and checked it more thoroughly.

Moses Brotman courtesy of his granddaughter Elaine

What I already knew was that Moses Brotman had had many children, some born in Europe, some born in the US. His oldest (known) child was his son Abraham, who was born in Europe. Abraham Brotman had originally settled in New York City and established a cloak factory there, but was invited by those who created the Alliance Colony in Pittsgrove Township, New Jersey, to start a factory there to employ the residents when the farming season ended. Eventually, a section of Pittsgrove was named Brotmanville in his honor.[1]

At this point I will not tell the full story of the Brotmanville family in America; that will have to wait. My immediate objective in reviewing my research of the Brotmanville Brotmans was to see if I could find any records that revealed where Moses and his family had lived before arriving in the US. So I had to focus first on those who had been born in Europe, not those who were born in the US, although that meant also looking for records for the children born here to see if those records revealed the birthplaces of their European born parents

What I knew from the descendants and from my earlier research was that Moses had been married twice and Abraham had been the child of his first marriage. Although the census records for Abraham are in conflict about his birthdate, the earliest to include his age, the 1900 census, reported his birthdate to be November 1863, long before Moses married Ida, the woman with whom he immigrated to America.

1900 US Census for Abraham Brotman Year: 1900; Census Place: Pittsgrove, Salem, New Jersey; Roll: 993; Page: 17A; Enumeration District: 0179; FHL microfilm: 1240993

Looking at the 1900 census report for Abraham, by 1900 he and his wife, Minnie Hollender, had been married for 13 years and had had six children, five of whom were still alive. All six children were born in the US. Abraham reported that he had arrived in the US in 1884, three years before marrying Minnie. Their children as of 1900 were Joseph (10), Samuel (7), Gilbert (6), Nephtaly (later Herman) (4), and Leah (2). They were living in Pittsgrove, New Jersey, and Abraham was working as a manufacturer.[2]

The 1910 census for Abraham and his family is only somewhat consistent with that of the 1900: his age is 47, still giving him a birth year of 1863, but now his birthplace is reported as Russia. He and Minnie now reported that they had had eleven children, nine of whom were still alive. In addition to the five listed above, there were three more daughters and one more son.

Abraham Brotman 1910 US census Year: 1910; Census Place: Pittsgrove, Salem, New Jersey; Roll: T624_908; Page: 15B; Enumeration District: 0154; FHL microfilm: 1374921

The 1920 census reported one more child and once again had Abraham’s birthplace as Austria. However, he now claimed to be 48, thus born in 1872, not 1863 as previously reported. Later records also made him ten years younger than had been reported on the 1900 and 1910 census reports. Genealogists generally assume that the records closest in time are more likely to be accurate than those later in time (and people are more likely to make themselves younger as they get older), so I am inclined to assume that Abraham was born in 1863. It also makes more sense that he was 21 when he immigrated, not 11. But where was he born? Austria? Russia? And in what city or town?

Since both the 1930 and the 1940 census reported his birthplace as Austria, I am inclined to discount the 1910 and assume that the 1900, 1920, 1930 and 1940 census reports indicating his birthplace as Austria are more accurate. And, of course, “Austria” meant within the Austria-Hungary Empire, just as it did for my great-grandparents and many other immigrants from that region, including Galicia.

But then where more specifically was he born? Unfortunately, I’ve not been able to find a death record for Abraham, and the death records I have for his children are no more specific. For example, the death certificate for his oldest child, Joseph, only reports that his father’s birthplace was Austria.

Joseph Brotman death certificate
Ancestry.com. Pennsylvania, Death Certificates, 1906-1963 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014.
Original data: Pennsylvania (State). Death certificates, 1906–1963. Series 11.90 (1,905 cartons). Records of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, Record Group 11. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Samuel’s death certificate says that his father’s birthplace was Russia.

Samuel Brotman death certificate
Ancestry.com. Pennsylvania, Death Certificates, 1906-1963 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014.
Original data: Pennsylvania (State). Death certificates, 1906–1963. Series 11.90 (1,905 cartons). Records of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, Record Group 11. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Abraham’s youngest child, Aaron, who was born in 1911, died as a young man in 1939 from heart disease. His death certificate indicates that his father was born in Austria.

Aaron Brotman death certificate
Ancestry.com. Pennsylvania, Death Certificates, 1906-1963 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014.
Original data: Pennsylvania (State). Death certificates, 1906–1963. Series 11.90 (1,905 cartons). Records of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, Record Group 11. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Those were the only sources I have located so far that reflect anything about where Abraham was born. I also had no records of what his mother’s name was nor did I have any indication of full siblings for Abraham, only the half-siblings born through his father’s second marriage. So I then turned to Abraham’s father Moses and his children to see if there was more to learn through their records.

The earliest record I had found for Moses was his petition for naturalization, filed in 1894. It had his birthplace as Russia. It also said that he had arrived in the US in 1885.

Moses Brotman Petition for Naturalization “New Jersey, County Naturalization Records, 1749-1986,” images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/pal:/MM9.3.1/TH-1971-29863-26750-98?cc=2057433&wc=M73R-4NL:351145001,351187001 : accessed 14 May 2015), Salem > Petitions for naturalization 1888-1895 > image 95 of 96; county courthouses, New Jersey.

The 1900 US census reported his birthplace and date as Austria in November 1844. It also reported that he had immigrated in 1886 and that he was a farmer. Like his son Abraham, he was living in Pittsgrove, New Jersey with his wife “Chay” (probably Chaya), to whom he’d been married for sixteen years. (Abraham was already 37 in 1900, indicating that Abraham was not Chaya’s son.) Moses and Chaya had had eight children, seven of whom were alive, according to the 1900 census. The seven were Sadie (16), Katie (13), Samuel (10), Lilly (7), Isaac (5), Bessy (2), and Lewis (three months)[It is spelled “Lewis” on the census, but according to his grandson, his name was actually spelled “Louis.”] The youngest four were born in New Jersey, Katie in New York, and Sadie and Samuel reportedly in Austria. Of course, that made no sense to me—if Katie was older than Samuel, how could he have been born in Austria if she was born in New York? Had Moses and Chaya returned to Europe at the time Katie was born? Or was the census just in error? If they really had immigrated in 1886 and if Samuel was 10 in 1900, he must have been born in the US.

Moses Brotman 1900 census Year: 1900; Census Place: Pittsgrove, Salem, New Jersey; Roll: 993; Page: 18A; Enumeration District: 0179; FHL microfilm: 1240993

The other thing that struck me as very strange about this report was the fact that Moses had a son named Samuel as did his son Abraham. In 1900 Moses’ Samuel was ten; Abraham’s was seven. So Abraham’s son Samuel had an uncle three years older with the same name. When I turned to the 1910 census report for Moses and his family, that became even stranger, as now Moses had had another child, a son named Joseph, who was seven as of 1910. Abraham also had a son named Joseph, who was seventeen in 1910. So Abraham’s son Joseph had an uncle Joseph who was ten years younger than he was. In addition, both Moses and Abraham had daughters named Lilly or Lillian; Moses’ daughter was born in February 1892; Abraham’s daughter was born September 5, 1898. Why would Moses and Abraham have given their children the same names? Perhaps they were named for the same ancestors, but it must have been awfully confusing in Pittsgrove to have two Samuel Brotmans., two Joseph Brotmans, and two Lilly Brotmans running around that small community. It sure doesn’t help genealogists either.

The 1910 census report for Moses now had his wife’s name as Ida, which was a common Americanization of Chaya. Moses was now working as a presser in a clothing factory, presumably the one owned by his son Abraham. As with the 1900 census for Abraham, Moses’ birthplace is now given as Russia, not Austria. He and Ida had six of their children living with them: Samuel (20), Lilly (15), Isaac (14), Bessie (12), Lewis/Louis (10), and the above-mentioned Joseph (7). The birthplace for all the children was New Jersey, except for Samuel, whose birthplace was reported as Russia, same as his parents. Sadie and Katie were no longer living with their parents. Unfortunately, I have not yet found any records for what happened to Sadie or Katie, although their father’s obituary revealed their married names and their residence as of 1935 in Philadelphia.

Moses Brotman 1910 census Year: 1910; Census Place: Pittsgrove, Salem, New Jersey; Roll: T624_908; Page: 15A; Enumeration District: 0154; FHL microfilm: 1374921

It took me forever to track down Moses Brotman and his family on the 1920 census, and although I am not 100% certain this is the right family, I am fairly certain that it is. The head of household is Morris Brotman, wife Clara—another common Americanization of Chaya. Morris was reported to be 70 years old, so born around 1850, not far off from his birthdate on the 1900 census. Birthplace is given as Russia for Morris, Austria for Clara, and it reported that immigrated in 1887, close to the 1886 reported in 1900. The most convincing support for this being the right family are the names and ages of the children: Lillian (21), Louis (20), Bessie (19), and Joseph (17). Although Lilly would have been 25 and Bessie 22, the sons’ ages are accurate; maybe they lied about the daughters’ ages to make them appear more “marriageable.” The family was now living in Philadelphia, not New Jersey, which at first I found odd.

Moses Brotman 1920 US census
Year: 1920; Census Place: Philadelphia Ward 32, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Roll: T625_1634; Page: 12B; Enumeration District: 1095; Image: 530

But then I checked for the older sons, Samuel and Isaac (now Irving) and found that both had married between 1910 and 1920 and were living in Philadelphia. Although I still have not located the two older daughters Sadie and Katie, perhaps they also had married by then and moved to Philadelphia. Maybe Moses and Ida/Clara/Chaya also moved there to be closer to all their children.

Thus, I now had conflicting birthplaces for Moses—one census said Austria, two said Russia. I looked at the 1930 census, and once again there was a conflict. Now Moses’ birthplace was reported as Austria-Hungary, then crossed out with “Europe” written above it. His parents’ birthplace, however, was given as Austria-Hungary. Moses was now 80 years old, and he and his wife (now Ida again) and their youngest son Joseph (28) were living in Vineland, New Jersey, near Pittsgrove. So as with Abraham, the birthplace for Moses fluctuated back and forth between Russia and Austria with no specific town or city mentioned. Perhaps Moses really did not know where in Europe he was actually born.

Moses Brotman 1930 US census Year: 1930; Census Place: Vineland, Cumberland, New Jersey; Roll: 1327; Page: 13A; Enumeration District: 0060; Image: 434.0; FHL microfilm: 2341062

Moses died on September 23, 1935. His death certificate said he was born in Austria in 1847 and that his parents were named Abraham Brotman and Sadie Berstein, also born in Austria. His grandson Aaron Brotman was the informant, Abraham’s youngest son who would die himself just a few years later. Moses’ wife’s name was given as Rachel Rice. This has caused considerable confusion for the family. Was this a third wife? A mistake?

In the obituary for Moses, it says he was survived by his widow, but did not name her. It did, however, name all his children (including the married names for Sadie and Katie, as indicated above) and their residences.

Moses Brotman obituary Courtesy of his granddaughter Elaine, source unknown

I found the death certificate for his youngest child, Joseph, who died less than a year after his father on July 26, 1936, from bacterial endocarditis. He was only 34 years old. On his death certificate, Moses’ birthplace is once again given as Russia, and Joseph’s mother’s name is reported to be Rachael Rice. The informant was Joseph’s half-brother, Abraham Brotman.

Joseph Brotman (Moses’ son) death certificate
Ancestry.com. Pennsylvania, Death Certificates, 1906-1963 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014.
Original data: Pennsylvania (State). Death certificates, 1906–1963. Series 11.90 (1,905 cartons). Records of the Pennsylvania Department of Health, Record Group 11. Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Since Moses’ wife on the 1910 census was Ida and since Joseph was born in 1902, it would seem likely that Ida was Joseph’s mother. Or could Chaya have been Rachel Rice and then died after Joseph was born? Was Ida a third wife? And was she the same woman as Clara, the wife listed on the 1920 census, or was that a fourth wife? My own personal hunch was that Rachel, Chaya, Ida and Clara are all one and the same person.

Although I was able to find the death certificate for Irving Brotman, it had no information for the name of his mother, had his father’s name as Morris, and had no information for their birthplaces. I was, however, able to find the following entries in the New Jersey, Births and Christening Index on Ancestry.com for two of Moses’ children:

Name:	Liza Brotman
Gender:	Female
Birth Date:	2 Feb 1892
Birth Place:	Pit, Salem, New Jersey
Father’s name:	Moritz Brotman
Mother’s name:	Chai Reis
FHL Film Number:	494224

Name:	Brotman
Gender:	Female
Birth Date:	12 May 1897
Birth Place:	Pit , Salem, New Jersey
Father’s name:	Moses Brotman
Father’s Age:	45
Father’s Birth Place:	Austria
Mother’s name:	Clara Rice
Mother’s Age:	30
Mother’s Birth Place:	Austria
FHL Film Number:	494236

Notice that the mother’s name was Chai Reis on the first, then the more Americanized Clara Rice on the later one. These were both created before the 1900 census listing of Moses’ wife as Chaya, the 1910 listing as Ida, the 1920 listing as Clara, or the 1930 listing again as Ida. Notice that the surname is Reis/Rice, the same surname given for Moses’ wife on his death certificate in 1935 and that of his son Joseph in 1936. I find this last bit of evidence enough to conclude that Rachel Rice was the same woman who married Moses in 1884 or so, immigrated with him and their first two children, and gave birth to and raised nine children from Sadie, born in 1884, through Joseph, born in 1902. In 1940 after Moses had died, Ida (aka Chaya-Clara-Rachel) was living with her son Lewis/Louis and his wife Jean and their daughter Elaine in Vineland, New Jersey. According to Elaine, Ida died about three years later. Unfortunately I have not yet located a death record or obituary for Ida.

Lewis Brotman 1940 US census Year: 1940; Census Place: Vineland, Cumberland, New Jersey; Roll: T627_2327; Page: 10B; Enumeration District: 6-76

Lewis/Louis Brotman 1940 US census
Year: 1940; Census Place: Vineland, Cumberland, New Jersey; Roll: T627_2327; Page: 10B; Enumeration District: 6-76

Thus, reviewing all the records I had found had not brought me any closer to learning exactly where Moses Brotman or Abraham Brotman had been born or where they had lived in Europe. But while searching, I stumbled upon something else. I will report on that as my last post before I leave for my trip.

[1] Relatives of the Brotmanville Brotmans say family lore is that the family was from Preszyml, a town about 90 miles from Tarnobrzeg, Grebow, and Radomysl nad Sanem, the other ancestral towns where possible family members lived. But I have not found any record supporting that family lore.

[2] A few geographical facts are necessary to understand the locations discussed in this post. Brotmanville is an unincorporated community within the township of Pittsgrove so Pittsgrove is listed on the census records, not Brotmanville. The colony where Baron de Hirsch and others created the farming settlement for poor Jewish immigrants was called the Alliance Colony. Vineland is a neighboring community where many of the Brotmans lived over the years.

A Difficult Life: Julius Seligmann

Posted on May 8, 2015 by Amy

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/158503169

Julius Seligmann, son of August and grandfather of Wolfgang, lived a life filled with conflict. As I’ve written previously, he was shunned by his family for converting to Catholicism and marrying Magdalena Kleisinger, a Catholic woman. Since their first child Walter was born in February, 1925, I assume that Julius and Magdalena must have married by 1924. According to family lore, he had to pay his family a substantial sum of money, causing him great financial distress.

Since writing previously about the challenges Julius faced, I’ve learned a bit more, thanks to Wolfgang and some documents he was able to find. One thing that Julius tried to do to address his financial condition was to secure some money from the estate of his uncle, the James Seligman who moved to England and died in 1930. Although we now know that James’ widow had control over the estate for the duration of her life and the principal was not to be distributed for over another fifty years, Julius was obviously in great need of money and hoped to be able to get some of what must have been a substantial amount of money.

In April, 1931, he wrote the following letter to the lawyers handling the estate of his uncle James:

As translated by Wolfgang, in this letter Julius was asking the bank how to contact James’ widow in order to ask her for some money. He wrote that he was having a lot of financial problems after the bank closed down and that he had had to apply for a “Vergleichsverfahren,” which is apparently a method used by debtors that is somewhat like a bankruptcy proceeding. Julius told the lawyers he was looking for a thousand Reichsmarks in order to take care of his most urgent debts.

In June, 1932, Julius received the following letter from his cousin Moritz Oppenheimer. Moritz, who I wrote about here, was both a successful businessman and a horse breeder with a large stud farm.

From this letter, as translated by Wolfgang, it would appear that Julius had asked Moritz to go to England to see if they could resolve their claims against the estate of James Seligman. Moritz had responded that he thought such a trip might be successful and that it was only necessary for one person to go. (It’s not clear who he thought should go.) But Moritz also wrote that he was traveling and not at home and that Julius should contact him and he would be glad to help. He also wrote that he was not available on Sundays as he was at the races—horse races, I’d assume.[1]

In September, 1932, Julius wrote the following letter to the German embassy in London, seeking a lawyer there to help him with his claim against the estate of his uncle.

According to Wolfgang, Julius wrote in this letter that he had been notified that since his uncle had not had any children, he and other relatives were to inherit 150 to 300 pounds as their inheritance. He asserted that the widow had promised to pay this money, but had never done so, and that now neither she nor her attorneys were responding to his requests for payment. He commented that his economic situation was not good and that they needed to do something quickly.

I do not think anything came from any of these attempts to get money from the estate back in 1932 as we know that Julius eventually was forced to close his store in Gau-Algesheim in 1935 and move to Bingen in 1939.

Both the Hellriegel book about Gau-Algesheim and Wolfgang suggested that the chief of police in Bingen had extended protection to Julius and his family despite knowing that Julius had Jewish roots. Wolfgang recently spoke with someone who knew his father Walter during the war; he told Wolfgang that everyone in the community knew that Julius had come from a Jewish family, but that no one cared. This man’s father, like the prior in the Rochus chapel I wrote about last time, spoke out against Hitler and the Nazis. It would appear that there were a good number of people in Bingen who were opposed to the Nazis and did what they could to protect the Jewish citizens. Sadly, however, it was not enough.

Deutsch: Rochus-Kapelle in Bingen am Rhein/Deutschland (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

****

[1] Wolfgang also found some discussion of Moritz Oppenheimer on a German internet horse-racing enthusiast’s forum back in 2010. The participants were discussing the history of the stud farm once owned by Oppenheimer and how he had been driven to bankruptcy by the Nazis, forced to sell the stud farm for a price far below its value, and then died either by his own hand or executed by the Nazis. http://www.galopper-forum.de/viewtopic.php?f=50&t=2473

Some Perspective on my Nusbaum and Dreyfuss Ancestors

Posted on May 4, 2015 by Amy

Right now I am pretty absorbed in following up on the Seligmann trail in Germany and the US and in preparing for my trip, both in terms of travel details and in terms of trying to find as much information as I can about the Brotmans. I’ve been spending time going back over the Brotmanville Brotmans, hoping to find some clues I missed before the DNA results corroborated the family story that Joseph and Moses Brotman were brothers.

But before too much time goes by, I want to reflect a bit on my Dreyfuss and Nusbaum ancestors. In many ways they typify the German Jewish immigrants who arrived in America in the 1840s and 1850s. They started as peddlers, they eventually became the owners of small dry goods stores in small towns, and for many of them, they remained dry goods or clothing merchants. Unlike my Cohen relatives, who were pawnbrokers for the most part, or my Seligman relatives, who started as merchants, but became active in politics and civic and military matters in Santa Fe and elsewhere, my Dreyfuss and Nusbaum ancestors began and stayed Pennsylvania merchants, even into the 20^th century.

Harrisburg Market Square with Leo Nusbaum store

In addition, the Dreyfuss and Nusbaum families almost all stayed in Pennsylvania where they started. There were some who went to Peoria, though most returned to Pennsylvania, and a few who went to Baltimore, but overall the Dreyfuss and Nusbaum families started in small towns in Pennsylvania and in Harrisburg and eventually moved to Philadelphia. As far as I’ve been able to find them, many if not most of their descendants also stayed in the Philadelphia area.

But beneath what might appear to be a very consistent and predictable pattern of living was a lot of turmoil. These were families who endured terrible tragedies—many children who died young from disease or from accidents, and many children who lost a parent at a very young age. Tuberculosis ravaged the family, as did heart disease and kidney disease. One member of the family died in the Great Fire of San Francisco. There were also a tragic number of family members who took their own lives.

In addition, this was a family that went from poverty to comfort and then suffered financially when the 1870 Depression struck, causing many of the stores to close and forcing family members into bankruptcy. Yet the family in general rebounded, started over, and once again became merchants with successful businesses in most cases.

The other pattern I’ve noticed in the Nusbaum and Dreyfuss lines is assimilation. Although there were certainly examples of intermarriage and conversion among the Cohen and certainly the New Mexican Seligman lines, that tendency to assimilate and move away from Judaism seemed even more widespread among the Dreyfuss and Nusbaum descendants. There were fewer people buried at places like Mt Sinai in Philadelphia, fewer indications of synagogue membership or other participation in the Jewish community. Perhaps those early years in the small towns where they were likely the only Jews in town took a toll on the role that Judaism would play in their lives and their identities.

Overall, these two lines were very hard to research and write about. Not because they were hard to locate, although the Fanny Wiler mystery kept me going for quite a long time. But because there was just so much unhappiness, so much suffering. When I think back to their roots, coming from two small towns in Germany, Schopfloch and Hechingen, I wonder whether those early immigrants ever questioned their decision to leave Germany. I assume they left for economic opportunities and freedom from the discrimination they faced as Jews in Germany. Presumably they believed they had found both when they arrived and as they settled into life in Pennsylvania. And in many ways they had. They were free to worship, or not worship, as they saw fit. They were able to make a living, own property, even own businesses. They survived.

Schopfloch

Hechingen Synagogue
http://www.alemannia-judaica.de/images/Images%2050/Hechingen%20Synagoge%20533.jpg

But all the tragedy and loss they endured had to wear on them in many ways. Many of the family lines ended without any descendants. I have had more trouble finding current descendants than I’ve had with the other lines I’ve researched. I don’t have one relative with the name Nusbaum, aside from my father, whose middle name is Nusbaum. The family seems to have disappeared, blended into other names, other families, other traditions.

For that reason, as hard as it was, I am happy that I was able to document and tell their story: where it began in Germany, how it continued in Pennsylvania, and what happened between their arrival in the 1840s and in the century that followed.

Where Am I? Where Am I Going? Tarnobrzeg

Posted on May 1, 2015 by Amy

Polski: Tarnobrzeg, Panorama nocna osiedla Serbinow (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s time to take stock and figure out where I am and where I have been and, of course, where I am going next. I have “finished” my research on the Dreyfuss and Nusbaum families, and when I say “finished,” I know that as with all my family lines, I am never finished. I always have more to do—whether it is trying to go back further in time or trying to connect with descendants. There are a number of unanswered questions, as there always are and always will be. I will write up something to bring some closure to what I know about these two family lines within the next several days. But for today, I just want to think about where I am more generally.

I have now done many of my father’s paternal lines. Starting with the Cohens, I’ve also covered the Seligmans, the Schoenfelds, the Nusbaums, and the Dreyfusses (Dreyfi?), and, of course, all the other names that came with later generations: Sluizer, Weil, Selinger, Bacharach, Wiler, Simon, Meyers, Dinkelspiel, Hano, and so on. I’ve also missed a few lines. I haven’t yet focused on the line that starts with Hart Levy Cohen’s wife, Rachel Jacobs, or with Jacob Cohen’s wife, Sara Jacobs. I haven’t looked at all at the line that begins with Voegele Welsch, wife of Amson Nusbaum. And I am sure there are other maternal lines I need to explore. Of course, those are often the hardest because the names have disappeared from the family, and each of those ancestors dates back close to 200 years ago. But eventually I will get there.

And next I will explore my father’s maternal lines, the Schoenthals and Katzensteins: more German Jews who came to Pennsylvania in the 1840s or so. Who knows what stories, what adventures, what heartbreaks I will discover along the way.

But before I turn to the Schoenthal and Katzenstein families, I have several other questions to research and address. The Seligmann family tree continues to grow both backwards in time and horizontally, thanks to my cousin Wolfgang and all the research he has done. Their stories continue to fascinate and also horrify me. I am also in touch with the daughter of Fred and Ilse Michel, and she has shared stories and photographs with me.

There are also lingering questions regarding the Goldschlagers, now that I’ve found two other families with that name and roots in Romania. We are hoping to hire a Romanian researcher to help us learn more.

And finally, there are those ever elusive Brotmans. Although I am not putting any more hope (or much time) into using DNA as a tool to find my Brotman ancestors, I still have hope that something will turn up. Just this past week someone contacted me, asking about Chaye Fortgang, Joseph Brotman’s first wife and the mother of the first four Brotman children, Abraham, Sophie, David, and Max. He has Fortgang family from Grebow, a town less than ten miles from Tarnobrzeg and also the town that David and Abraham Brotman gave as their home on the ship manifest when immigrating to the US. Perhaps by researching the Fortgang family, I will also learn about Joseph Brotman and his family. In addition, I am focused on the Brotmanville Brotmans, hoping that that line will lead to more answers.

English: Gmina Grębów COA Polski: Herb gminy Grębów (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In addition, I will be visiting Tarnobrzeg in person in just about a month. We will be hiring a guide who also does genealogy research, and we will be joined by my newly-found cousin Phyllis, the niece of Frieda, the woman who matched my mother as a close cousin through DNA testing. Phyllis and I have chosen to believe that our grandmothers were in fact first cousins, and we are hoping to find some evidence to corroborate it. So although I am not writing about it on the blog, much of my time right now is spent researching for this trip. Once I am there, I will share my experiences on the blog, so stay tuned.

Photograph of Tarnobrzeg Main Square. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Too Many Missing Pieces: Part II

Posted on April 29, 2015 by Amy

In my last post, I wrote about the list of English James Seligmann’s heirs that my cousin Wolfgang found in his family’s papers. There were 21 principals named as heirs on that document, and I had discussed all the easily identified ones and some of those that were more difficult to figure out. I had discussed Numbers 1, 2, 6-13, 15, 16, 19-21. That left Numbers 3-5, 14, 17, and 18. Here again is the list of heirs:

So let’s start with Number 3, Johanna Bielefeld, the one whom Elsa Oppenheimer had claimed was not a daughter of Hieronymus Seligmann in her July, 1984 letter.

Perhaps Elsa was wrong; after all, she was wrong about Adolph Seligman not being the child of Moritz and Babetta, as discussed last time. Or maybe Johanna was the daughter of Benjamin Seligmann. I am not sure yet, but I do know that she was born in Gau-Algesheim. Wolfgang found this registration card for her, dated January 12, 1939, issued by the police in Mainz. It gives her birth name as Seligmann, her birth date as March 15, 1881, and her birthplace as Gau-Algesheim. I have written to my contact in Gau-Algesheim, asking him to see if he can find a birth record for Johanna so I can determine who her parents were. Notice also the large J on her card, indicating that she was Jewish.

http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/sonst/aj/STANDREG/FFM1/PDF/B_5.1_Abt_IV_0748.pdf

Here is the companion card for her husband Alfred Bielefeld:

http://www.uni-heidelberg.de/institute/sonst/aj/STANDREG/FFM1/PDF/B_5.1_Abt_IV_0402.pdf

The list of heirs provided the names of Johanna and Alfred’s children, Hans and Lili (or Lily). It indicated that Johanna had died as had Hans, he in 1948. Then it provided a married name for Lili, Mrs. Fred Hecht, and an address on West 97^th Street in New York City. Searching for Hans Bielefeld brought me to someone with that name on the 1940 census, living in Cleveland, Ohio. He was working as an insurance agent, was 37 years old, and had been residing in Mainz, Germany, in 1935.

Year: 1940; Census Place: Cleveland, Cuyahoga, Ohio; Roll: T627_3221; Page: 5A; Enumeration District: 92-451

Further searching found an index listing in the Ohio Deaths database on Ancestry for Hans Bielefeld, indicating he had died on September 13, 1948, the same year of death given on the list of heirs document. On Fold3.com, I then found naturalization papers for Hans Ludwig Bielefeld, indicating that he was divorced, that he was born on July 1, 1902 in Maine (sic), Germany, and that he had arrived in the US on the SS Gerolstein on July 14, 1938.

Publication Number: M1995
Publication Title: Naturalization Petition and Record Books for the US District Court for the Northern District of Ohio, Eastern Division, Cleveland, 1907-1946
Content Source: NARA
National Archives Catalog ID: 1127790
National Archives Catalog Title: Naturalization Petitions, compiled 1867 – 1967
Record Group: 21
Partner: NARA
State: Ohio
Court: Northern District, Eastern Division
Catalog Keywords: Petitions Naturalization Immigration Citizenship
Fold3 Publication Year: 2008

That led me to a passenger manifest for the SS Gerolstein, where I found Hans listed as a divorced merchant from Mainz. It seemed like this could be the son of Johanna Seligmann Bielefeld, but I couldn’t be sure.

So I searched for his sister Lili. I first searched for her as Lili Hecht, but had no luck, so I searched for Lili Bielefeld and found her first on an English ship manifest dated September 18, 1940, from Liverpool bound for Montreal, Quebec. Lili was listed as 36, having last resided in London, but born in Germany. Her occupation was given as a domestic. The age, birthplace and name seemed correct, so I considered it likely that this was the right person.

Ancestry.com. UK, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890-1960 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012.

Then I found her listed with the same information on a US manifest for passengers entering the United States from Canada. But since Lili did not arrive until September, 1940, she is not listed on the 1940 census, making it extremely difficult to find her in the online databases on Ancestry. There were a number of Fred Hechts, but how would I know if any of them were married to Lili?

So I turned to Google and entered “Lili Bielenfeld Fred Hecht,” and once again I hit the jackpot. Like Fred and Ilse Michel, Fred Hecht and Lili Bielenfeld have papers in the collection at the Leo Baeck Institute entitled “Hecht and Gottschalk Family Collection; AR 5605.” In the biographical note included with this collection, I learned that Fred Hecht came from a German Jewish family with a long history. I will quote here only the sections relevant to Fred, Lili and Hans:

Jakob and Therese Hecht had a son, Siegfried Max Hecht (alternatively Fritz, later Fred, 1892-1970). Siegfried Hecht became a merchant and served in the German military during World War I. Siegfried and his wife Emma née Cahn divorced in 1939, and he immigrated to the United States in 1940, where he took on the name Fred. He settled in New York City and became a jewelry salesman. In December of 1944, he and Lili née Bielefeld (1904-1977) were married.

The Bielefeld family can be traced back to the late 18th century. The family lived in Karlsruhe, Mainz, and Mannheim until the 1930s, when some members immigrated to the United States. Lili Hecht née Bielefeld was the daughter of Alfred Bielefeld, a wine merchant, and Johanna Bielefeld née Seligmann. Despite efforts to procure passage to the U.S., both Alfred and Johanna perished in the Holocaust. Alfred died in Theresienstadt, and Johanna was deported from Theresienstadt to Auschwitz, where she perished.

Lili Hecht née Bielefeld’s brother Hans Ludwig Bielefeld (1902-1948) was a merchant. He married Lilli née Kiritz in 1933, and the couple divorced in 1936. Hans Ludwig immigrated to the United States under the sponsorship of his cousin, Irma Rosenfeld, and settled in Cleveland, Ohio, where he worked in insurance. After his death, his sister Lili Hecht née Bielefeld was the sole heir to the Bielefeld family property, which she claimed in the 1960s alongside restitution for her parents’ deaths.

Thus, from these papers and this biographical note, I was able to find out a great deal about what had happened to Johanna Seligmann Bielefeld, her husband, and her two children, Hans and Lili. I will write more about them in a separate post once I have a chance to examine the LBI collection more carefully and obtain translations where necessary.

Number 4 on the list, Bettina Arnfeld, was more difficult to locate, but I found a Bettina Elizabeth Arnfeld listed on FindAGrave with the notation, “Body Lost or Destroyed.” Her birthdate was given as March 17, 1875. This may have been the “Elizabeth” whom Elsa claimed was not a child of Hieronymus Seligmann. I then looked for and found Bettina Elizabeth Arnfeld in the Yad Vashem Database. The entries there confirmed that her birth name was Seligmann, that she was born on March 17, 1875, and that she had resided in Muelheim Ruhr in Germany at the time she was deported. She was exterminated at Thieresenstadt on January 23, 1943.

The list of heirs indicated that Bettina had a son, Heinz Arnfeld, living on 22 Gloucester Square in London, and he was not difficult to locate. I found several entries for Heinz and Liselotte Arnfeld at that address in London, England, Electoral Registers on Ancestry. I also found Heinz and Liselotte listed in the England & Wales Marriage Index on Ancestry. They were married in Doncaster, Yorkshire West Riding in 1945. Heinz is also listed as a survivor of the Holocaust in the Shārit ha-plātah database on JewishGen.

Heinz died in 1961 and left his estate to Liselotte; she died in 1988. I do not know whether they had any children. Since they were married in 1945 when Liselotte was 37, it does not seem likely.

That brings me to Numbers 17 and 18 on the list, putting Numbers 5 and 14 aside for now. Who were Eva Hansu and Rosa Reisz? If these were nieces of English James Seligmann, then they had married and changed their surnames, so how could I find them? Since they were listed right after Emil and Eugen, sons of Carolina Seligmann and Siegfried Seligmann, I went back to the list of Carolina’s children and realized that she had daughters named Eva and Rosa. Thus, I assumed that Eva became Eva Hansu and Rosa became Rosa Reisz.

I had good luck searching for Rosa Seligmann Reisz. I knew her daughter’s name was Hedwig Neter from the list of heirs, and that seemed unusual enough that I decided to search for it first. Sure enough the name came up on a passenger’s manifest dated August 31, 1940, for the ship Cameronia departing from Glasgow, Scotland, for New York. Sailing with Hedwig was her husband Emil Neter and her mother Rosa Reis. Emil was a 61 year old manufacturer, Hedwig a 48 year old housewife, and Rosa was 73 without occupation. They all had last been residing in London and said the US was their intended permanent residence.

Ancestry.com. UK, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890-1960 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2012.

According to FindAGrave, Rosa Seligmann Reis died on January 29, 1958, and is buried at Hauptfriedhof in Mannheim, Germany. Her son-in-law Emil Neter died on July 8, 1971, in Washington, DC, and is also buried at Hauptfriedhof in Mannheim, as is her daughter Hedwig Reis Neter, who died on May 28, 1979, in Washington. I found it very interesting that after living in the United States all those years, Rosa, Emil, and Hedwig chose as their burial place the country they had escaped so many years before. A little more searching turned up Hedwig’s birth certificate and a family record from 1891, both of which revealed that Rosa’s husband’s name was Ludwig Reis, son of Callman Reis, a merchant.

Ancestry.com. Mannheim, Germany, Births, 1870-1900 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014. Original data: Personenstandsregister: Geburtsregister Standesamt Mannheim und Vororte 1876-1900, Stadtarchiv Mannheim, Mannheim. Deutschland.

Hedwig Reis Birth Certificiate Ancestry.com. Mannheim, Germany, Births, 1870-1900 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014.
Original data: Personenstandsregister: Geburtsregister Standesamt Mannheim und Vororte 1876-1900, Stadtarchiv Mannheim, Mannheim. Deutschland.

Ancestry.com. Mannheim, Germany, Family Registers, 1760-1900 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014.
Original data: Polizeipräsidium Mannheim Familienbögen, 1800-1900. Digital images. Stadtarchiv Mannheim — Institut für Stadtgeschichte, Mannheim, Germany

Searching at Hauptfriedhof on FindAGrave, I found that Ludwig had died in 1928 and had been buried at Hauptfriedhof. It seems that Rosa and her daughter Hedwig wanted to be buried where Ludwig had been buried years before. With the help of Matthias Steinke in the German Genealogy group on Facebook, I was able to locate the headstone for all four of them at the Stadtarchiv Mannheim website.

https://www.stadtarchiv.mannheim.de/jh/Bilder_08/B2-A-07-07/B2-A-07-07a.JPG

https://www.stadtarchiv.mannheim.de/jh/Bilder_08/B2-A-07-07/B2-A-07-07e.JPG

At first I couldn’t find anything about Eva Hansu, Number 17. I couldn’t find her husband’s first name, and although the heirs’ list gives her daughter’s married name as Alice Kauffman of France, I had not been able to find her either. Then after Matthias introduced me to the Stadtarchiv Mannheim website where he had found the headstones for Rosa and her family, I decided to search for all people with the birth name Seligmann and found Eva as Eva Seligmann Hanau, not Eva Hansu as I had mistakenly read it on the list of heirs. It provided the same birth date I’d already found for Eva, March 18, 1861, and it reported her date of death as March 18, 1939. Her husband was Lion Hanau, born May 24, 1854, in Altforweiler, Germany, and he died February 7, 1921. The archive also included photographs of their headstone.

https://www.stadtarchiv.mannheim.de/jh/Bilder_08/D1-MGr-18/D1-MGr-18.JPG

As for their daughter, now that I had the correct spelling of her birth name Hanau, I was able to find her marriage certificate for her marriage to Ernst Kaufmann on August 10, 1911.

Ancestry.com. Mannheim, Germany, Marriages, 1870-1920 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014. Original data: Personenstandsregister: Heiratsregister Standesamt Mannheim und Vororte, Stadtarchiv Mannheim, Mannheim. Deutschland.

I do not know what happened to either Alice or Ernst during or after the war.

So that leaves me with only two names on the list of heirs for whom I as yet have no answers: Anna Wolf, Number 5, and Bettina Ochs, Number 14. Anna Wolf is listed as a fraulein, so that is her birth name, not a married name. It says that Johanna Bielfeld was her aunt, so presumably Anna’s mother was a sister of Johanna. If, in fact, Johanna was a child of Hieronymus Seligmann, she had two sisters, Mathilde and Auguste and perhaps Bettina. I don’t have any information about them aside from what was listed in Elsa’s letter, posted above. More work to be done.

And Number 14, Bettina Ochs, is even more of a puzzle. I’d have assumed that Ochs was her married name, Seligmann her birth name. But the note on the document mentions a brother as her next of kin, and his name was Arthur Erlanger. That would suggest that Bettina Ochs was born Bettina Erlanger, not Seligmann. So how is she related? Who was her husband? Which one is the blood relative of English James Seligmann? I found one listing on JewishGen.org for Bettina Ochs-Erlanger with a secondary name as Bettina Oberdorfer. She was born May 7, 1870, and her nationality was Italian, consistent with the Milan address provided on the heirs list. She was listed in the Switzerland, Jewish Arrivals, 1938-1945 database; I can’t see the original document, but the index indicates that she arrived in Switzerland on August 5, 1944.

It’s amazing how much information I could mine from this one little document. Unfortunately, although I should have gotten great satisfaction from finding so many people and so much information, I ended up feeling very sad and very drained as I added all these names of my cousins to the list of those killed in the Holocaust. It is beginning to overwhelm me. So much loss, so much evil. Incomprehensible.

Brotmanblog: A Family Journey

Adventures in Genealogy

Category Archives: Family Names

Mystery Photos: Part I

My Ever-growing Seligmann Family Tree

Walking in the Shadows of My Brotman Great-Grandparents

Home Sweet Home

One for the Road: How I Found Another Brotman

My Brotmanville Cousins: Searching for Answers

A Difficult Life: Julius Seligmann

Some Perspective on my Nusbaum and Dreyfuss Ancestors

Where Am I? Where Am I Going? Tarnobrzeg

Too Many Missing Pieces: Part II

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