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

Victor Hanson, “Natural Links in a Long Chain of Being”

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I heard this yesterday while at an event.  Someone read it aloud, and it resonated for me.  It’s from Victor Hanson’s essay, “Natural Links in a Long Chain of Being.”  You can find the full work at the following link:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5048763

Here are some of the lines that stood out for me.  I think you will see why when you read them.

“[W]e need some daily signposts that we are not novel, not better, not worse from those who came before us….Although I came into this world alone and will leave alone, I am not alone.…I believe all of us are natural links in a long chain of being, and that I need to know what time of day it is, what season is coming, whether the wind is blowing north or from the east, and if the moon is still full tomorrow night, just as the farmers who came before me did.

The physical world around us constantly changes, but human nature does not. We must struggle in our brief existence to find some transcendent meaning during reoccurring heartbreak and disappointment and so find solace in the knowledge that our ancestors have all gone through this before.

You may find all that all too intrusive, living with the past as present. I find it exhilarating. I believe there is an old answer for every new problem, that wise whispers of the past are with us to assure us that if we just listen and remember, we are not alone; we have been here before.”

 

 

Another mystery! Looking for theories from the rest of you

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After learning the name of Frieda Brotman’s husband, I was curious as to what happened to Harry Coopersmith after losing his young wife and infant son. Also, I wondered how long they had been married and whether or not Max had been born prematurely. I looked up Harry Coopersmith in the index of NYC marriages and found two for whom no bride was listed. I ordered both certificates, hoping one would be for the marriage of Harry Coopersmith and Frieda Brotman. They arrived yesterday, and imagine my confusion when BOTH certificates were for Harry and Frieda.

The first one is dated May 28, 1923. The marriage ceremony took place at City Hall in NYC, and the officiant was the Assistant City Clerk. It has Frieda’s home address wrong—it was 646 E. 6th Street, not 446 E. 6th Street. It was witnessed by L.B. Waterman and Nathan Stern and signed by Nathan Stern. The front of the form seems to have been filled out by someone in the clerk’s office, not Frieda, Harry or Mr. Stern, since their signatures all are in very different handwriting than that on the front. Also, Frieda would have known her own address. But this is certainly our Frieda—parents’ names are Joseph and Bessie Brotman. [Notice also that her age is wrong; in 1923 she was 26, not 20. Perhaps she lied about her age because Harry was younger than she was?]

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The second one is dated September 2, 1923, a little over three months later. This one appears to have been filled out by someone else, not the clerk. It now has Frieda’s correct address (but not her correct age), but Bessie is spelled incorrectly. I can’t tell whether the handwriting matches any of the signatures on the back (I guess I need the FBI, Bruce!), but what’s odd is that all those signatures seem to match, as if one person signed for Harry, Frieda and the witnesses Max Sambel and Juda Kramer (?). This time the ceremony took place at Bessie and Philip’s apartment at 646 E. 6th Street, and the officiant was Selig Vogel. There is only one Selig Vogel in the 1930 US Census, and he was a rabbi. So obviously this was a religious ceremony, presumably meant to “validate” the earlier civil ceremony.

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So…why did they get married twice? Was the first one a secret marriage? Why did they decide to have a religious ceremony the second time, and why did they wait three months? If Max was a full term baby, Frieda would have been about a month pregnant by September 2, 1923 —would she have even known she was pregnant that early back then before EPT? If so, were they then ready to “go public” and have a public ceremony? If Max was born prematurely, which was one possible cause of his death, then maybe Frieda wasn’t even pregnant yet. And who filled out and signed the forms? And who are Max Sambel and Juda Kramer (if that’s what it says)?

I would love to hear the speculations of the rest of you. Leave your thoughts in the comments space below. Meanwhile, I will go see what else I can learn about what happened to Harry and who those other witnesses might have been.

While we are waiting….

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I am in a holding pattern right now, waiting for some more documents and also waiting to talk with Elaine Ashin, who is Moses Brotman’s granddaughter (of the Brotmanville clan). I am also still working to find some way to determine our ancestral home town in Galicia. It’s frustrating sometimes, waiting to find more information, but it has always been worth it once it arrives.

So while we’re waiting, please consider sending in some pictures, old or new, of your family members. We created a new page for the “Newer Generations” that would include both current and older pictures of any of us—including our children, grandchildren, parents, etc.

It would also be nice to add some pictures to the pages set aside for the first, second and third generations. If you have lots of pictures to add, that’s great and easily done; Judy and I each compiled a Picasa online album of older pictures of our families and created links to those albums on the Max page and the Gussie page (see the bottom of each page); it would be nice to do that for Abraham, Hyman and Tilly also. If you want me to scan pictures for you, I’d be happy to do that also.

Also, I think it would be nice to add some personal recollections to the blog—your memories or feelings about your grandparents. I’ve done some of that on Gussie’s page, and some of her other grandchildren have added comments with their stories. It would be great to do that for Abraham, Max, Hyman, and Tilly also. Since I didn’t know any of them, I can’t do it without your help. So feel free to add comments on the blog, and then I can incorporate some of that to the pages themselves.

Meanwhile, I will keep you all updated about any new things I learn.

Oh, and GO SOX!

Another mystery solved

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One of the remaining mysteries in our family story was the story of Frieda Brotman, Joseph and Bessie’s third daughter who was born in 1897 in New York, their second child born in the US. Family lore had it that Frieda died in childbirth as a result of a botched delivery by a doctor who was described by Tilly and Gussie as a butcher. That was all I knew about her—not her married name, not her husband’s name, and not her child’s name. In fact, no one knew when she died or whether the baby survived, though we assumed that he or she had not survived. Without the husband’s name, I was sure I’d never be able to find out the answers to those questions.

Then I decided that if I searched for all Friedas who were buried at Mt Sinai and Mt Hebron cemeteries between 1920 and 1930, I might find some answers. I picked those dates because Frieda was listed on the 1920 census as living with Bessie and Philip and because I knew she had died by 1930 because my mother Florence was named for her. I focused on Mt Sinai and Mt Hebron because I assumed she would have been buried either where her father was buried or where other family members were later buried. I found two possible Friedas that fit those dates. One did not pan out, but the other was buried in the same section as Bessie. Her name was Coopersmith, and when I searched for other Coopersmiths buried there, I found that there was a one day old baby named Max Coopersmith buried there also in that same section. I ordered the death certificates for both Frieda and Max Coopersmith and then waited and waited for the documents to arrive.

Well, they arrived the other day, and sure enough, it was our Frieda, as you can see from the death certificate below.

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The father’s name was Joseph Brotman, mother Pessel Broat. (You should also notice that Frieda’s age is wrong; it says she was born in 1903, which was two years after Joseph died.)

The baby Max was her son: parents’ names were Frieda Brotman and Harry Coopersmith.

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The baby died a day after birth; she died the following day. My heart broke for Harry and for all of her family. My mother said that my grandmother never spoke about Frieda, that it must have been too painful. After all, Gussie and Frieda were only two years apart, much younger than their older siblings, and must have been very close. They were the two girls born in America and must have had different outlooks and experiences than Tilly and their older brothers.

I sent the death certificates to my brother Ira, who is a doctor, to get his insights on the causes of death. Frieda’s death certificate says that she died of “broncho pneumonia and influenza” with “pulmonary edema and acute dilation of the stomach” as contributing causes. Ira thought that this could mean either that she died of peripartum sepsis or pre-eclampsia based on this combination of symptoms and causes. As for Max, his certificate says that he died of congenital atelectasis, which means his lungs had not expanded sufficiently. Ira thought that might have been caused either by sepsis or by prematurity. In any event Ira concluded that it did not appear that the deaths were caused by malpractice by the doctor.

I am now trying to find out more about Harry and his marriage to Frieda, though I am not sure what I will be able to find. But as I’ve learned by doing all this, you just never know what you can find. I never thought I would find Frieda. Now that I have, she is not just a name, but a real person who died far too young with her whole life in front of her. And imagine if Max had lived? How many more Brotman cousins we might have had.

Mt Zion and Mt Hebron

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[This is the second part of my post about the weekend in New York. If you haven’t read the post about the Lower East Side, that is Part One. This is Part Two.]

Before I write about my trip to Mt Zion and Mt Hebron cemeteries, let me tell you that I have never been someone who understood why people go to cemeteries, and it always seemed a little creepy to me. I don’t believe in an afterlife, and it seemed to me that you could remember those who had died without standing over the place where their bodies were buried.

I initially saw a cemetery trip this time as a way of doing more research. Then when I realized that Joseph was not buried near any of his children or his wife, I felt badly. It was likely no one had been there for a hundred years. Did that matter? Joseph didn’t know, so why did I care? I am not sure, but somehow I felt compelled to pay him honor. In fact, once I received the photos of the headstone and footstone from Charlie Katz, I no longer needed to go for research. I was going for some emotional reason that was mysterious even to me. The trip to Mt Hebron, which is only ten minutes away from Mt Zion, then seemed like an obvious addition to the trip to Mt Zion.

So off we went on Sunday morning, first to Mt Zion. It is one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in New York City, and the graves are very close together with almost no open land left. I knew from Charlie Katz that it would be hard to find Joseph’s gravesite. The stones are so close together that it is very difficult to walk between and around them, and without Charlie’s directions, we might never have found it. But then suddenly we spotted it.

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I stood there, not really knowing what to do or to think. I thought of his life, thanked him silently for bringing his family here, tried to imagine what he looked like. Did he have red hair? No idea. Then I left on the headstone one of the beach rocks I had collected the prior weekend. I had decided to bring a piece of something I loved to leave at the graves, and the beach is the place that always makes me the happiest. I left feeling that I had at least done something to honor his memory.

Then we went on to Mt Hebron, a much larger and much less crowded cemetery. The section where Bessie is buried is across the road from the section where my grandparents and Sam are buried. [What I didn’t know then is that Frieda is also buried there, but that’s a story for another post.] I saw Philip’s headstone right away, but did not realize that Bessie’s was right behind it, as you can see in the photo below.

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It took some counting and looking, but finally Harvey spotted it. I felt the same way standing at Bessie’s grave—grateful and wistful. I found myself drawn to her name—both in Hebrew and in English—and rubbed my hand over the name Bessie, saying, “That’s my name.” I also was very touched to see that the Brotman name was included on her headstone, not just Moskowitz.

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I left one of my beach rocks there as well and then walked across the street to the other section.

In that section I first saw Sam Brotman’s headstone. I never met Sam, and I really felt badly about that, given that he lived until I was 22 years old. I left a beach rock on his stone, saying, “I am sorry I never met you.”

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In the row behind Sam’s grave I found my grandparents’ grave. The headstone was covered with ivy, which looked pretty but made reading the inscriptions impossible. I gently tore away the ivy so I could see the stones.

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My grandfather died when I was almost five, so I have only the vaguest memories of him, but have heard lots of stories about him—how funny he was, how smart he was (he knew several languages), and how opinionated. He walked across Romania to escape oppression and poverty. I wish I had had a chance to know him better. There was a rock left on his headstone when we arrived. Who could have been there? I don’t think it could have been anyone recently, but perhaps it had been there for many years. I placed mine next to it and rubbed his name.

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Seeing my grandmother’s headstone was the most difficult for me. She lived until I was 23, and when I was a little girl I loved her very much. She was fun and loving with her grandchildren, despite having had a difficult and often sad life. I have thought of her so many times while doing this research and learning what her life was like, but standing there, thinking of her, I suddenly was overcome with emotion and found myself sobbing, thinking of her and her life and the memories I have of her. As I did with Bessie and Isadore, I found myself rubbing my hand over her name, Gussie, feeling some unexpected emotion in doing so. I left my beach rock, specially selected for her, and wished I had asked her more questions while I could have.

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Apparently, I was wrong. Going to the cemetery can bring you closer to those who are gone.