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.

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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.

Rosalind Haber and Dan Dombey’s wedding photos

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Thanks to Naomi, we have some new pictures to add to the blog.  I will also post these to Max’s page, but thought I’d also post them this way so that everyone sees them.  I already posted about the photo of the groomsmen including Sam Brotman, but here are several more.

First, the bride and groom, Rosalind and Dan. Notice the two young people in the background to the left—that’s cousins Tom Jones, son of Rosalie and Dick Jones, and Judy Haber Ruzicka, daughter of Renee and Charles and the bride’s sister.

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Here are the bride’s parents, Renee Brotman Haber and Charles Haber.

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And here are the bride’s aunt and uncle, Rosalie Brotman Jones and Dick Jones.Image

Finally, here’s one of the Haber family, including Renee, Charles, Susan and Judy, and the Dombey family.

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I tried to look at the faces in the background of these pictures to see if any other Brotman family members are shown, but no one besides those mentioned looked familiar to me.  Do any of you recognize any of those faces?

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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.

One Uncle Sam mystery solved

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It seemed that there were multiple Uncle Sams remembered by different cousins.  Judy remembers one who was the life of the party at family gatherings and known for eating flowers.  Bonnie C. remembers one who drove her to the airport in Florida when she visited her father there.  Denny remembers one who lived in Arizona and wore a white cowboy hat.  And then there was the Uncle Sam who visited my grandparents every Friday night and never left New York City, lived alone, and was a cab driver.  I’ve often wondered whether Uncle Sam had multiple lives and personalities or whether there were just a number of a different people named Sam Brotman.

Well, we have now resolved at least one of those mysteries.  Below is a photo from Rosalind Haber’s wedding in 1956 (with more to follow in a subsequent post[1]) showing some of the groomsmen from the wedding.  I asked Judy who these men were, and she identified them as her father Charles Haber’s brothers Jack, Sol, and Abe, another Haber, and Charles’ nephew Jack Simon. Mixed in with all those Habers standing to the right in the middle row with the silver hair and those distinctive Brotman cheeks is none other than the Sam Brotman who Judy remembers from family events!

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I showed the photo to my parents, and they confirmed that that is the same Sam Brotman who lived in the Bronx and visited my grandparents every Friday night, bringing a strawberry shortcake every single time.

Here’s a photo of Sam with my grandmother and my aunt Elaine; you can see that it is the same face.

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So how could the same person be perceived so differently? My parents remember Sam as a quiet, shy loner who rarely spoke at family dinners.  Judy remembers him as funny and outgoing.  Could he have just been quiet in the context of my grandparents’ home and himself when he was with the Habers? He must have been quite close to Renee and Charles to have been made a groomsman at their daughter’s wedding.  Perhaps they brought out the best in him.

Now if we could only figure out who those OTHER two Sams were….

[1] Thanks to Naomi Ratner and Ron White for sending me these photos!

Research update

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I am once again in a holding pattern, waiting for a few more documents to arrive: Max’s naturalization papers (which take 90 days for USCIS to process, so another 75 days to wait for those), Max’s death certificate, Abraham’s death certificate, and a few others from the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. My principal research goal right now is to find out where our family came from in Galicia.

I’ve been trying to search for European records, but that is much more complicated than searching for US documents. JewishGen.com offers a course online that provides instruction on how to do that, and I plan to take that course when it is next offered in May, 2014. That’s a long way off for someone who is as impatient a researcher as I am. I am meanwhile making inquiries of other researchers who are researching Galicia and searching several genealogy websites, but so far, I’ve still come up empty.
So I figured that while I was waiting, I would learn what I can about life in Galicia in the 19th century and life on the Lower East Side in the late 19th, early 20th centuries. I’ve ordered some books and will provide whatever information or reviews I find interesting and helpful once I have read them. If anyone has any recommendations on books on either of those topics, please provide them in the comment box below.

Meanwhile, I would still love some pictures (hint, hint!) from other members of the family.

Hope you all are well, and I will report back when I get some new documents or have anything else to report.

The Illusion of Accuracy: Hyman Brotman’s Story

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One of the many things I have learned over the past several months is just how unreliable so-called “vital records” can be.  Again and again, there are errors and inconsistencies in the documents and records of our ancestors.  Names are spelled wrong, birth dates change from document to document, places of birth are inconsistent from one document to another, as are the names of parents listed on those documents.

Herman Brotman is a good example.  First of all, his name kept changing.  He was Chaim Brodmann on the ship manifest when he emigrated, Hyman Brotman on the 1900 census while living with his parents at home, and then at some point he became Herman Brotman, though his family always called him Hymie or Hyman.  These were, however, not mistakes, but actual changes he made to his name.

On his naturalization papers, he listed his place of birth as Jeekief.  On his death certificate, his place of birth is Philadelphia.  His mother’s name on the death certificate was “unobtainable.”  Now I have received his social security application, which he filed in 1952.  It lists his birth date as July 18, 1883, whereas his death certificate lists it as July 18, 1882.  On his naturalization papers he wrote his birth date as January 10, 1883.  The social security application lists his mother’s name as Fanny Brotman, not Bessie.  And it identifies his place of birth as Giga, Austria.  It’s enough to make a researcher crazy!

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Herman Brotman's death certificate

Herman Brotman’s death certificate

Now the birth date I am willing to chalk up to absence of records; I’ve read that in the Old Country no one celebrated birthdays so it just didn’t matter.  The place of birth? Well, obviously Philadelphia is just wrong.  And I imagine that little Chaim, who was about eight years old when they left Galicia, probably never learned how to spell the name of the town, so both times he was trying to do it phonetically—Dzikow, which may be the town where they were from, is pronounced  Gee-kuff, so Giga, Jeekief? Close enough.

But I was really thrown by his use of Fanny.  Could he have forgotten his mother’s name in 1952 and written Fanny by mistake? That just seems so unlikely.  He knew enough to note that she was related to her husband in order to explain why her maiden name was also Brotman.  He had grandchildren who were named for her, using the B in Bessie.   He must have known his mother’s name.

I consulted with my mentor, Renee Steinig, who suggested that perhaps Bessie had a double name, which was not uncommon even then—a first and middle name.  I then recalled that Bessie DID have two names on her headstone—Pessl Feiga!

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I looked up Feiga on the web and learned that it was often Americanized to Fanny.  I have never, ever heard of Bessie referred to as Fanny, but perhaps she was.  And maybe 68 year old Herman who was also Hyman and Chaim decided to use one of his mother’s alternative names on that government form.   I don’t know, but it seems like the only logical explanation.  I guess I will now order Hyman and Sophie’s marriage certificate and see what he listed there for his mother’s name.

Have any of you ever heard of her referred to as Fanny?

The Brotmanville Brotmans

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One of the questions raised early on by several of the Brotman cousins was whether and how we were related to the Brotmans of Brotmanville, NJ.  The history of Brotmanville is quite interesting and something I knew nothing about until I started this project; in fact, I’d never heard of Brotmanville at all.

Brotmanville was established by Abraham Brotman to provide jobs to the Jewish community that had settled in nearby Alliance, New Jersey.  Alliance was founded to be an agricultural community for Jewish immigrants and funded by the Baron de Rothschild.  As The New York Times reported:

In the 1880’s, pogroms and anti-Semitic laws in Russia caused a historic exodus of Jews. Most ended up crowded into tenements in American cities. But some Jewish thinkers urged their brethren, as one of them wrote, “to become tillers of the soil and thus shake off the accusation that we were petty mercenaries living upon the toil of others.” And so hundreds of Jews established agricultural colonies on land bought for them by charities and philanthropists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/22/nyregion/22colony.html

As Richard Brotman, Abraham Brotman’s great-grandson, reports in a film he made in the 1980s about Brotmanville, the land was difficult to farm, and many people needed an alternative way to earn a living.

Abraham Brotman, himself a recent immigrant from Galicia, had established a successful coat factory in Brooklyn, NY, and decided to relocate it near Alliance to provide jobs for the people who lived there.  Abraham moved with his wife Minnie and their children and his father Moses and his wife and children to southern New Jersey, where eventually a portion of the community was named in his honor.

Many of the Brotmans descended from Moses and/or Abraham Brotman stayed in the southern New Jersey/Philadelphia area, including Judge Stanley Brotman, Rich Brotman’s father, who recently retired from the federal bench at age 89.  In addition, Moses’ granddaughter (through a child of Moses’ second wife), Elaine Ashin, still lives in nearby Vineland.  I spoke with Elaine last week to try and find out more about her grandfather, but unfortunately he died when she was just a few months old so she knew very little about him or his background.

Moses Brotman (photo courtesy of Elaine Ashin)

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Bruce and Dennis Brotman remembered meeting with Judge Brotman many years ago and attempting to trace some family connection.  Although they cannot recall finding anything specific, they all left believing that there was some family tie.

Unfortunately, I have yet to find anything that reliably demonstrates that tie.  Moses Brotman was born in Austria in 1847, making him a contemporary of our Joseph Brotman.  Elaine Ashin sent me this photo of Moses’ headstone last week, and I was very excited when I saw it because Moses’ father’s name was Abraham.  I thought perhaps Moses and Joseph were brothers, making us all closely related to the Brotmanville Brotmans.

Photo courtesy of Elaine Ashin

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I ordered a copy of Moses’ death certificate from Trenton, NJ, and it arrived the other day.  It confirmed that Moses’ father’s name was Abraham.  However, it listed Moses’ mother’s name as Sadie Bernstein, not Yetta as listed on Joseph’s death certificate.

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So I see four possibilities: one, Moses and Joseph are not related at all, but it’s just coincidence that they both had fathers named Abraham Brotman.  Two, either Joseph’s death certificate is wrong as to his mother’s name or Moses’ death certificate is wrong as to his mother’s name, and they are brothers.  Given that we have seen that so many records, even death certificates, have errors (Frieda’s birth year,Hyman’s place of birth, etc.), it certainly is possible that one is wrong, that both are wrong or that both are right.  Three, it could be that Moses and Joseph are half-brothers and that Abraham had two wives and children with both, just as Moses and Joseph both did.  Four, perhaps they are distant cousins sharing a common ancestor named Abraham for whom both their fathers were named.

Unfortunately, we may never know.  In order to learn more, I would need to find documents from Galicia that would trace the history back further.  So far I am still not even sure what town our family came from nor where Moses’ family came from, so that is a difficult task.

So at the moment, the lawyer in me says there is just not enough evidence to conclude with any degree of certainty that we are related in any direct way to the Brotmans of Brotmanville.  But I have not given up, and I will keep looking or find someone in Poland who perhaps can search for me.

Whatever happened to Harry Coopersmith??

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Remember the story of Harry Coopersmith, who married Frieda Brotman and then lost both her and his infant son Max when they both died shortly after Max was born?  I felt I needed to find out what had happened to Harry.  Did he ever remarry?  Did he have children? Well, now I know the answers.

To make a very long story short, I was able to find a genealogist whose great-grandmother was the sister of Harry’s father Nathan.  And she sent me the following document:

NathanKupersmith family by Sharlene Kranz

For those who may be less interested in the story of the Coopersmith family, I will summarize the parts that are most relevant to us.  First, Harry’s mother Lena died in June, 1923.  Remember that Frieda and Harry first had a civil ceremony at City Hall in May, 1923, and then a later religious ceremony in September, 1923.  Perhaps Harry wanted to make his ailing mother happy in her last days by getting married, but then they—or the remaining parents—wanted them to have a religious ceremony afterwards.

And as for what happened to Harry? Well, Frieda and Max died in May, 1924, and on July 22, 1924, two months later, Harry married Nettie Lichtenstein, and had three sons with her.  Sadly, Nettie ended up institutionalized by 1940, and according to the 1940 census, the three sons were then living with another family on Long Island.  Neither the genealogist nor Harry’s grandson Stanley[1] knows where Harry was at that time.  Harry died in 1956 and was buried in a veterans’ cemetery on Long Island.

So ends the mystery of Harry Coopersmith and Frieda Brotman.

[1] I was able to find Stanley through ancestry.com.  He had an error on his family tree that had me thrown for a few days, but once I was able to communicate with him, he said that he had been mistaken about the names of his great-grandparents and thus I knew I had found the right family.

New photo of Max, Sophie, Rosalie and Renee

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I thought you’d all like to see this picture Naomi sent me of Max, Sophie, Rosalie and Renee.  From the ages of the girls, I am guessing that this was taken sometime between 1913-1915?

Wonderful photo!  I am going to add it to the Max page as well.Image

Blog Updates

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I’ve made some changes to the blog that will hopefully make it easier to find subjects discussed here.  For example, I’ve added a Search Box on the sidebar at the bottom.  Now if you want to search for specific people, for example, put their name in and all the pages or posts where their name is mentioned will pop up.

Also, I’ve arranged the posts into categories and added a menu for those categories.  So, for example, if you want to see all posts in the category of Family Information and Updates, just click on that category in the menu, and all posts in that category will be listed on the page.

I am still learning how to do this (thank you again, Judy, for getting me started!), so I will continue to fiddle with this.  I am open to suggestions—just add your thoughts in the comments.  I’d prefer receiving comments about the blog on the blog rather than in my email because my email box gets so overloaded with all the research I am doing that sometimes I lose track of what’s where!

Thanks!

Amy