Category Archives: Genealogy

This Made My Day!

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Yesterday was one of those winter days where I didn’t leave the house all day.  I read the paper, did the crossword puzzle, and played on the computer.  It was quiet, relaxing, but not exciting.  Then late yesterday afternoon, I received an email from Judy, Max’s granddaughter, that made my day.  Attached to the email was a document that Judy’s sister, Susan, had found while going through some old papers.  It’s a family tree sketched out by hand by Renee Brotman Haber, one of Max Brotman’s daughters and Roz, Susan and Judy’s mother.

Take a look at it:

Image

If you now compare this to the family tree on the blog for Abraham and his descendants, you will immediately realize that Renee had written out the family tree of her father’s brother Abraham.  Judy and Susan don’t know when she did it or where, but this is definitely written by Renee and it is definitely Abraham’s family.

Paula Newman, Abraham’s granddaughter, commented on the blog a couple of months ago that she believed she had met Rosalie and Dick Jones in Florida years ago when she was there with her parents.  Rosalie was Renee’s sister, and Judy said that both families used to go to Florida every year at Christmas time.  Perhaps it was during one of those vacations that Paula’s family met with Renee and Rosalie’s families and provided Renee with the information she sketched out on the family tree.

This is the third piece of evidence that supports the conclusion that Abraham and Max were brothers and that Abraham, like Max, was Joseph’s son from his first marriage.  First, we have the fact that Max was the witness on Abraham’s naturalization papers.  Second, we have the fact that Abraham’s Hebrew name was Avraham ben Yosef Yaakov, named for his grandfather Avraham whose son was Yosef Yaakov.  (Recall that Joseph’s Hebrew name was Yosef Yaakov ben Avraham.  Also, Abraham named his son Yosef Yaakov shortly after Joseph died, as did Hyman and Tillie.) And now we have evidence that Renee met or spoke with Abraham’s daughter or granddaughter to write down this family tree.  I don’t know how they found each other, or , more sadly, how they had all lost each other beforehand and then afterwards.

I guess you can tell how much this all means to me that receiving this document made me so happy.  Who cares about snow and sleet and cold when there is a new discovery linking our families!!

This should also be an inspiration to the rest of you to look for things like this—old letters, cards, postcards, pictures. You never know what you will find. Come on, make my day!  

Tillie’s Death Certificate

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I received Tillie’s death certificate yesterday, and as I expected, it did not contain any new information about where our family lived in Galicia.  It does, however, confirm that she was the daughter of Joseph and Bessie Brotman (not that I had any doubts) and was born in Austria. Of course, it has a different birthdate from other documents; some documents say she was born in 1884, some 1887, and this one says 1882. The ship manifest which lists her as a passenger in 1891 has her age as six years old, giving her a birth year of 1884 or 1885.  The month of her birth is also inconsistent. The 1900 census said her birthday was in February; the death certificate says August.

Tillie Ressler's death certificate

Tillie Ressler’s death certificate

Interestingly, the death certificate itself has two different ages listed for Tillie at her death.  On the left side (filled out by her son Joseph, as far as I can tell), it says she was born in 1882 and was 73 years old at the time of her death, i.e., February 1956, which would be consistent with a birthday of August 23, 1882.  It also says she was a resident of NYC for 71 of those years, however, meaning she arrived when she was two years old, i.e, in 1884.  Well, we know she came in 1891, so that can’t be correct. On the right side, typed in by the hospital, it says her approximate age was 70 years old at the time of her death, meaning she would have been born in 1886.  So…let’s compromise and say she was born in February, 1884, which is what her own parents told the census taker in 1900.

What the certificate really confirmed for me, however, is what an excellent memory my mother has.  She had just told me over Thanksgiving that Tillie had lived on the Grand Concourse with her sons Joe and Harry and that she had died at a hospital on Welfare Island.  I have to say that when I saw both those facts confirmed in the death certificate, I was very impressed (though not surprised) that my mother had remembered such specific details, especially since I often can’t remember things that happened much more recently.

I was curious about Bird S. Coler Hospital where Tillie died because my mother had very sad memories of visiting her aunt there.  It had opened in 1952 as a public hospital on Welfare Island (now called Roosevelt Island) as a rehabilitation and long-term nursing facility, so it was a relatively new hospital at the time Tillie was there.  It still exists today, now called Coler-Goldwater Specialty Hospital and Nursing Facility, and still functions as a public chronic care facility.

I am now just waiting for Hyman and Sophie’s marriage certificate, and I think I will have all the American “vital records” that exist for Joseph and Bessie and their seven children.

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A Call to Israel!

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Just to show that I never give up, I thought I’d report on a phone call I made this morning to Shmuel Brotman of Kiryat Tivon in Israel.   Renee, my mentor, made the suggestion that I look for any Brotmans who had lived in Dzikow by checking both JRI-Poland and the database at Yad Vashem.  Both sources found one family, the family of Shmuel and Zipporah Brotman, who had resided in Dzikow/Tarnobrzeg.  It looked like the entire family had died in the Holocaust, but Renee suggested I contact the person who had submitted the names to Yad Vashem, Shmuel’s daughter-in-law Chana Brotman.

I then had to track down Chana Brotman.  I knew from the Yad Vashem submission that she had lived in Kiryat Tivon in 1997 when she submitted the names of Shmuel and his family, and so I made a request on both the JewishGen website and on Gesher Galicia for help in locating the family.  By this morning I had several responses, including two that gave me phone numbers, one for Chana and one for her son Shmuel.  The person who provided me with Shmuel’s number had just spoken with him and said he was awaiting my call.

I jotted down some notes and then called Shmuel.  He’s about my age and fluent in English.  He was very happy to help me, and we spent about half an hour, comparing notes and trying to figure out whether there is a connection between our families.

At the moment I still don’t know what the connection is, but it seems likely that there is one.  His grandfather Shmuel Brotman was born around 1888 in Dzikow, and his great-grandfather’s name was Moshe.  I don’t yet know where Moshe Brotman was born.  He could even be the same Moses Brotman who ended up in Brotmanville.  We still have to sort more things out.

He did tell me that he has done some research and believes that the Brotman family originally came from Georgia in the former Soviet Union and left to escape the pogroms.  He believes they changed their name to Brotman to get across the border.  According to Shmuel, some Brotmans went to the US, some to Romania, and some to Poland, including his family.  Whether our ancestors were also part of that family I don’t yet know, but it is a possibility.

So just as I was about to give up hope of finding more traces of our family, I received a glimmer of hope this morning from Israel.  No matter where this goes, it was another one of those uplifting experiences where strangers helped me find someone and that someone ended up being welcoming and hopeful that we are related.

Research update: Bad News, Good News, Bad News

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As you may recall, on October 31, I sent a request to the USCIS  for the naturalization papers for Max Brotman in the hope that they would reveal where Max and thus the other family members were born in Galicia.  According to the automated message on the USCIS phone, it could take at least 90 days to get a response.  Well, I figured the news wasn’t going to be good when I received a response yesterday only 35 days after making my request.  And it wasn’t—they had no records for a Max Brotman who fit the dates I had submitted.  In fact, all their naturalization records start in 1906, and I should have known that Max was naturalized before 1906 since he was the witness for Abraham in 1904.

I then went back to ancestry.com and rechecked my search of their naturalization records where I had been able to find records for both Abraham and Hyman.  I checked and rechecked pages and pages of indices, searching for anything that might relate.  I found one for a Max Bratman born in Germany who worked as a conductor for the railroad and emigrated in 1882, but dismissed it because the name, place of birth, and date of immigration seemed wrong.

Max "Bratman" Naturalization Card

Max “Bratman” Naturalization Card

Then I went back to the records I already have for Max, including several census reports, his marriage certificate and his death certificate.  While reading through the 1900 census, I noticed that it said Max was a conductor.  At that time he and Sophie were just married (the census was taken in June; they had married in April) and were living at 113 East 100th Street in Manhattan.  When I saw the entry that he was a conductor, I knew it rang a bell, but at that point I could not remember where else I had seen it.

1900 US Census Report for Max and Sophie Brotman

1900 US Census Report for Max and Sophie Brotman

I began to search through the naturalization records again and could not find any reference to a Max Brotman who was a conductor.  I started thinking that I was losing my mind! Then I remembered that there had been a Max BrAtman and searched for him, and lo and behold, found the naturalization card again for the conductor.  I looked at the address on that form and sure enough, Max Bratman was living at 113 East 100th Street in Manhattan in 1900 when he filed this application.  Obviously this was the same person, our Max, but why did he spell his name wrong? Why did he say he was born in Germany and emigrated in 1882? The birth dates also did not exactly line up, but I am used to the fact that no one ever reported their birthday consistently.

When I looked at the handwritten application, I saw that the signature was definitely Max BrOtman, not BrAtman.

Max Brotman naturalization petition

Max Brotman naturalization petition

My guess is that the clerk who filled out the card just could not decipher the handwriting.  As for the wrong date, I have no guess except that Max was confused, wasn’t clear, or was trying to make it seem he’d been in the US for more than just 12 years.  As for why Germany? I wish I knew.  I know from Joseph Margoshes’ book that secularized, modern Jews were referred to as “German” in Galicia. Perhaps that’s why Max said Germany.  Perhaps the clerk thought he was German because of his name, accent and use of Yiddish and suggested it to him and Max just agreed? I have no clue.

The census form was filled out just a month earlier than the naturalization form.  The census says his place of birth was Austria as does every other document listing Max’s place of birth.  The census says he emigrated in 1888, which is also consistent with almost all the other forms.  It would have made little sense for Max to have emigrated in 1882 when he was only four years old.  So once again, we have evidence that forms are unreliable, that our ancestors were not too reliable, and that much must be left to conjecture and speculation.

So where does that leave us in terms of identifying where our family lived in Galicia? Hanging on the thin thread of Hyman’s own unreliable documents, our best guess is Dzikow near Tarnobrzeg.  I contacted Stanley Diamond who manages the archives of documents for JRI-Poland, and he sent me a list of all the records of all Brotmans and Brots from that area.  They are almost all of people born after 1900, and Stanley said that the records for that area are rather limited.  He said it would probably take a trip to archives in a few cities in Poland to learn if there is anything else and that that is probably a long shot.

And thus, my cousins and friends, I think that for now I have hit a wall. I am still waiting for Tillie’s death certificate and Hyman’s marriage certificate, but I am not putting any hope into finding out more information about their place of birth from those documents. I am in touch with a researcher in Poland, and I am hoping to travel there perhaps in 2015, but for now I guess we have to accept that the best we can do is hang our hopes on Hyman’s references to Jeekief and Giga and assume that Dzikow near Tarnobrzeg is our ancestral home.

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A Brief Introduction to Genealogical Research

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Some of you might be interested in how to do genealogical research yourselves, so I thought I’d provide a very brief introduction for those who might want to try.

I would start (and did start) with ancestry.com.   You can get a short free trial subscription (14 days) just to see if you are intrigued. (And no, I don’t get a kickback from ancestry if you subscribe!) Ancestry provides digital copies of many documents including all US census reports up through the 1940  census (the later census reports are not yet available), except for the 1890 census which was destroyed in a fire. (That is particularly frustrating and sad for people researching ancestors who arrived in the 1880s.  We will likely never know where Joseph, Abraham and Max first settled, although it appears that all three arrived sometime between 1888 and 1890. )

Ancestry also has many other records available in digital form: some naturalization papers, some draft registration forms, some yearbooks, phone books, directories, and ship manifests.  Many records, however, are not directly accessible through ancestry.  For example, NYC birth, death and marriage certificates are not viewable through ancestry; you may find a record that indicates some of the information found on such certificates, but not the entire certificate.  For that, you have to order a digital copy or a photocopy elsewhere.

I have found the Family History Library to be a great resource for this.  The FHL is run by the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City; apparently the Mormons are trying to collect the names of anyone who ever lived as part of a religious mission to save everyone’s souls.  Fortunately, you don’t have to be a Mormon or support their mission in order to be able to use their services.  I guess the Church sees helping others find their relatives to be part of that overall mission.

At any rate, to request documents from the FHL, you need to find the NYC certificate number[1] and then the FHL film number.  Sometimes ancestry.com will have the certificate numbers, but usually I go to another website, http://www.germangenealogygroup.com/records-search/, to locate the certificate number.  It provides an index of NYC birth, death, and marriage certificates, but only for those years for which NYC has made them accessible to the general public.  For example, death certificates only run up to 1948; birth certificates are even more limited in terms of availability.  (I assume this is for privacy reasons, just as with the census reports.)  If, however, the certificate you are seeking falls within the date range, you can find the certificate number and dates through the germangenealogy website.

Once I have that information, I then go to another website, http://stevemorse.org/vital/filmnotes.html, where I can enter the information into the appropriate boxes, and then obtain FHL film number.  That website also includes a link to the FHL Photoduplication Request form.  By filling out that form with the numbers I now have, I can make a request to FHL for the certificates I am seeking.  There is a limit of five per month, and it can take several weeks to receive them, but it is free.  Amazing, it is free!

For other documents, for example, more recent death certificates and other documents like Social Security applications or immigration papers, the process can be more complicated, involving notarized documents, some fees, and much longer waits.  But starting with ancestry.com and using the FHL process can give you a good start on finding out more about your ancestors.  I found most of the documents that I have used in my research and reported here through those two sources and have only turned to the less efficient means of obtaining information more recently.

Of course, there have been lots of other sources of information: all of you who gave me clues and information, my mentor Renee and other experienced genealogists who helped me dig up clues, and many other websites like http://www.jewishgen.org/ and Findagrave.com.  There are still lots of other sources I have yet to explore, but those will require more time and more training before I can use them very effectively.

[1] This website only indexes NYC documents and some Nassau/Suffolk County documents.  For other locations in New York State and other states, you need to check the appropriate website for vital records for that county or state.

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Jewish Naming Patterns

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Most people know that in Jewish tradition, a child is often named after a relative who is no longer alive.[1]  It is also Jewish practice to identify a person in Hebrew with his or her father’s first name added to that person’s own first name.  For example, on his headstone Joseph’s name appears in Hebrew as Yosef Yakov ben Avraham, meaning that his father’s name was Abraham.  These naming patterns are a great help to genealogical research since often you can find names recurring through several generations, providing a means of establishing family relationships.

For example, we know that Bessie’s Hebrew name was Pessel and that her mother was named Gittel.  Bessie named her daughter Gussie for her own mother—in Hebrew, Gussie’s name was Hannah Gittel.  Then, in turn, I was named for Gussie’s mother, Bessie—in Hebrew, Pessel.  I then named my older daughter Rebecca Grace for my grandmother; her Hebrew name is Rivka Gittel.  So both Gittel and Pessel are names that recur through the generations and perhaps go back even further and perhaps will stretch further into the future.

Similarly, my brother Ira was named for our grandfather Isadore, whose Hebrew name was Ira.  Isadore’s father was Moritz/Moshe, and Isadore was named for Moshe’s father Ira.  Isadore in turn named his son Maurice for his father, and Maurice named his son James Ian and one of his daughters Robin Inez, the I being for Maurice’s father Isadore.  So the M’s and the I’s keep recurring in our family.  My younger daughter Madeline (Mazal Ahava) was named in part for my uncle Maurice (as well as for my husband’s uncle Murray), and there are several other M’s in the family among the fifth generation.

I am sure each of you can find similar recurring patterns in your own branches of the family.  There certainly are many B/P names and J names that run throughout our family tree.   Some of them undoubtedly are for Bessie/Pessel and Joseph or one of their descendants.

Why do I bring this up now? Well, after receiving Abraham’s death certificate and being bewildered by the fact that it records his parents’ names as Harry and Anna, I consulted with my mentor Renee.  She asked me several questions that reassured me that the death certificate is most likely incorrect.  First, she said look for naming patterns.  That reminded me that Abraham’s oldest son was named Joseph Jacob—Yosef Yakov on his headstone.Image  If Abraham’s father was named Harry, then why would he have named his son Joseph and not Harry? In fact, there are no Harrys or H names among Abraham’s children or grandchildren.

In addition, Renee pointed out that Abraham’s full name on his headstone is Avraham Zvi ben Yosef Yakov.  Zvi is a Hebrew name that means “deer” and in Yiddish was usually translated into Hersh or some Americanized version: Harry, Herbert, or (as in the case of my husband) Harvey.  Renee also pointed out that Abraham’s American name was Abraham H. Brotman.  She said it was extremely unlikely that his father’s name would have been Harry or Hersh/Zvi also (unless, of course, his father had died before Abraham was born, which does not seem likely).  By looking at the naming patterns, I am now convinced that it is unlikely that Abraham’s father’s name was Harry and that the death certificate is not correct and the headstone is.  Perhaps the Zvi/H in his name was for his maternal grandfather. Maybe that’s how it ended up on his death certificate.

So, cousins, do you know who you were named for? Do you know what your Hebrew name is? What your parents’ Hebrew names are? It would be really helpful and interesting to me and perhaps to others to know this information as it may open other doors for more research.  If you are willing to share that information, please let me know by using the comment box below so that we can all share this information.  Thank you!

[1][1] At least that has been the tradition among Ashkenazi East European Jews.  German Jews apparently did not always adhere to this tradition.  For example, my father’s name is the same as his father, John Nusbaum Cohen, and until he was an adult, he used “junior” after his name.  Moreoever, his sister’s name was the same as their mother—Eva.

Max Brotman: Who was his mother?

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Yesterday I received Max Brotman’s death certificate from the City of Mount Vernon.  It has been quite a task tracking down this document.  Although I knew from Judy and the picture of his headstone that he had died in 1946, I could not find any record of his death certificate.  There is a public index of NYC death certificates that runs through 1948, so if he had died in 1946, it should have been there.  But it wasn’t.  Death certificates dated after 1948 from NYC are much harder to obtain; to get Abraham’s I had to use snail mail (!) and a notarized form and fee and self-addressed envelope sent to the NYC Department of Vital Records.  I was hoping that I could just obtain Max’s electronically through the Family History Library, which is faster, easier and free.  Unfortunately, the FHL does not have non-NYC certificates, and I could not find Max in the NYC register.

I was fortunate to find a volunteer in NYC who checked the paper records and found a reference indicating that Max, a NYC resident, had died “upstate.”   But where upstate?  It’s a big state! I recalled that Max had had a summer home in Congers, NY, and since he died in late May, I thought that perhaps he had died while up there. Image I contacted the town registrar in Congers, sent them a written request, check, and envelope, but they sent it back, saying that they had no record for Max Brotman.

So I was stumped.  I asked Renee, my mentor, for advice, and she suggested calling the cemetery where he was buried to see if they had a record for where he had died.  I called Beth David Cemetery on Long Island, and sure enough, they did have such a record and were willing to divulge where he died without a written letter, check and envelope.  They said he had died in Mount Vernon, New York, not far from where I grew up.

I asked Judy if she had any idea what he might have been doing in Mount Vernon at the time of his death.  She didn’t know.  I wrote to Mount Vernon (yes, a notarized letter, check and envelope), and finally received the long-sought-after document yesterday.Image

So what does it say? Well, it explains what he was doing in Mount Vernon.  He was a patient at the Mount Vernon Convalescent Home, where he was suffering from liver cancer.  It looks like he was there for three weeks, as the doctor who signed the certificate had cared for him from May 6 through May 27 when he died.

What else does it report? It lists Joseph Brotman as his father (phew!), but Adda Browman as his mother.  That conflicted with his marriage certificate which said his mother’s name was Chaye. Image And Browman? Is that just a misspelling of Brotman? Or was her maiden name really Browman? I consulted with Renee, and she said that Chaye was often Americanized to Ida, which is close to Adda.  (She said immigrants tended to Americanize even the names of ancestors who never left Europe.)  So maybe Adda is Chaye? Or maybe Richard Jones, who was Max’s son-in-law and the informant on the certificate, misunderstood or was misunderstood.  I don’t know and probably won’t know until I can learn how to research records from Europe.

The good news is that it’s just one more bit of evidence confirming that Max was Joseph’s son.  The bad news is that the document brings us no closer to knowing the town in Galicia from which they all came.

Max Brotman: When was he born?

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Here’s another example of the inconsistency of records when it comes to birthdays.  On the 1900 US Census, Max gave his birthday as April, 1878.[1]  [Edited: On his naturalization application in 1900, he listed his birthdate as April 1877.] On the 1910 Census, he reported being thirty years old, meaning he was born around 1880.  On his draft registration in 1918, he gave his birthday as July 7, 1878.  On the 1920 Census, he said he was 45, making his birth year 1875.  In 1930, he said he was 50, meaning he was born in 1880.  In 1940, he claimed to be 60, again meaning he was born in 1880.  On his draft registration in 1942, he put his birthday as March 26, 1880. [2]

Today I received his death certificate.[3]  It has his birthdate as July 27, 1882!  He just kept getting younger (like we all wish we could, I suppose).  Since Hyman was born in either 1882 or 1883 and had a different mother than Max, it seems unlikely that Max was born in 1882.  I am going to assume that the earliest documents are more reliable (when he had less incentive to make himself younger) so that 1878 is the mostly likely year of birth.  As to the month? Who knows? Could be March, April, or July.  As I said in an earlier post, birthdays were not a big deal to Jews in Europe, so maybe he never knew the month, but wouldn’t people know what year they were born? We know Joseph’s age is equally mysterious—he could have been born any time between 1825 and 1855, depending on which document you read.  And Hyman also had two different birth years on his records.

The other inconsistency in these records is the year of immigration for Max.  The 1900 Census says he came in 1888; the 1910 and 1920 say it was 1890.  Finally, the 1930 Census says it was 1893.  I have applied for a copy of his naturalization records (which take 90 days to process, so it will be at least another two months before I get it), so perhaps those will be more accurate. [Edited: The naturalization application said 1882, when Max was at most five years old.]

Sometimes I wonder whether there was a certain level of paranoia among immigrants—people who had faced such hostility and oppression at the hand of the governments of the countries where they were born.  Maybe they just didn’t want to give the US government too much personal information.   Or maybe census takers just weren’t very careful note takers or very good listeners. Or maybe our relatives just liked to lie about their ages.

[1] All the documents are consistent with respect to his place of birth being Austria, though none specifies the town or city. [Edited: The naturalization application said Germany.]

[2] These documents are available on ancestry.com.  If anyone is interested, I can download them and post them on the blog.

[3] More on his death certificate tomorrow.  I want to scan it and won’t get a chance tonight.

Another day, another death certificate, and more confusion

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Sometimes I wonder why we have death certificates.  Just about every single one I have seen has raised more questions than it has provided answers.  I’ve been told by an expert genealogist that death certificates are notoriously unreliable because usually the person providing the information is a close relative still in shock and mourning the death of a loved one.  No wonder Hyman’s said he was born in Philadelphia and Bessie’s said her mother’s name was Bessie.  And so on.

All that leads me to today’s mysterious death certificate, that of Abraham Brotman of Brooklyn.  You may recall that Abraham’s headstone revealed that his Hebrew name was Abraham ben Yosef Yaakov, just as Joseph’s revealed that his was Yosef Yaakov ben Abraham, providing me with the additional clues that helped me conclude that Abraham was Joseph’s son and Max’s brother.Image

(You may also recall that Max was the witness on Abraham’s naturalization application.)

Naturalization of Abraham Brotman Max as Witness

Naturalization of Abraham Brotman
Max as Witness

I had ordered Abraham’s death certificate in order to obtain more confirmation of those relationships as well as to get some information about the place where they were all from in Galicia.

Unfortunately, Abraham’s death certificate confirmed nothing and just added to the confusion.  His birth place is listed as Russia, despite the fact that every census report and his naturalization papers list his birth place as Austria.  His parents’ names are listed as Harry and Anna.

Image

I emailed Abraham’s grandchildren, Paula Newman and Morty Grossman (whose mother Ethel provided the information on the certificate), but neither of them knows anything about Abraham’s parents.  So now what? Do I assume that it’s just another mistake on the death certificate? Is it more likely that the headstone is right than the death certificate? Since the place of birth is wrong, why should I trust any of the information on the death certificate? Perhaps Ethel Grossman was thinking of her mother’s parents, not her father’s parents?   Abraham’s wife Bessie Brotman was born in Russia, so maybe her parents were Harry and Anna? Grrrr…now I am ordering another death certificate to see who HER parents were.  But why would I trust that one either?

Very frustrating! So no new information and just more confusion.

I can’t wait to see what misinformation Max’s death certificate provides.  That should be arriving in a day or so.

Link

A great story by Calvin Trillin about name confusion in his own family.

I guess I am not the only one visiting cemeteries, translating headstones, and enjoying the search for answers to family questions.