How do I find my great-grandfather’s ancestral town?

Part 9 – Putting it all together

By RONALD D DOCTOR

article created on: 2010-02-17T00:00:00

The Americanized names of my paternal grandparents were Abram and Rose Doctor. They immigrated to New York from “Russia” sometime before my father was born in 1907.

That is all I knew about my grandmother and her family when I first began putting my family history together. Today, I can trace my grandmother’s line to the 1730s. How was I able to do this? This month, I will show you how I put together my information, piece by piece. I’ll also point out some hard-learned lessons and some pitfalls to avoid as you trace your own family.

Interviews with my family revealed that Rose died young, when my father was only 5 or 6. My grandfather was unable to deal with his large family and placed the older children in a Jewish orphanage, where they remained until their early teens. The youngest children were raised by one of Rose’s sisters.

I learned that Rose had two sisters, Mime Velia Gittelman and Dora Mandel. Dora and her husband Abe raised Bea (Beckie), my father’s youngest sister. Contact with my father’s side of the family was sparse, but I learned that he had two brothers, two sisters, two half-brothers and a half-sister.

Aunt Bea lived in New Orleans with her daughter. I contacted her and subsequent interviews provided more information. Putting these bits of information together, I figured that my grandmother, Rose Doctor, immigrated to New York before 1907; her children were born there and she died sometime before 1913. She was buried in New York at Mt. Zion Cemetery.

I wrote to New York City’s Municipal Archives seeking a death certificate for Rose and birth certificates for her children. I gave them the names of Rose, Abram and their children and approximate birth years.

Table 1 shows the wealth of information I received from this query.

 

My grandmother was known as Rose in America. All but two records were consistent with this. The marriage record for her son Charles gave her Americanized name as Rebecca, which actually was the name of Charles’ stepmother. Rose’s death record provided her Hebrew name, Reisel. This made sense since Reisel translated to Rose. Having her “old-country” name became important in later years to confirm that I had the correct old-country birth record for her.

Every record I received spelled Rose’s birth surname differently…Durer, Vora, Werer, Wahrar, Wuer and Wurer, all phonetically similar. However, since there is no “W” in either Russian or Hebrew, I figured her name probably started with V, as in one of the entries. Several years later, when I found her old-country birth record, I was able to confirm that in Hebrew the name was Vorir or Vorer, and in Russian it was Vurer. Notice that 16 years after her death, the marriage record for her son Charles gave her name as Rebecca Kornfeld, totally different from all the other records. Later, I learned that Kornfeld actually was the maiden name of Rose’s mother.

Birth records for her children give Rose’s age, which she consistently misrepresented. Her implied birth years were from 1873-1877. When I found her old-country birth record several years later, I learned she was born in 1872.

Rose’s death record was one of the most important I received. Not only did it give me her old-country given name and birth surname, it provided the name of her father, Duvid Wuer. It also said she had been in America for 11 years, meaning that she immigrated in 1900-1901. This was confirmed by the 1910 U.S. Census for New York which gave 1900 as the year Rose immigrated. The death record and census information helped me find her passenger ship manifest in a later search. The death record gave a name for Rose’s mother, Perel Shecter, which turned out to be wrong. As a result I spent a lot of time researching a name that had nothing to do with my family. I didn’t learn this, however, until several years later when old-country vital records showed that her mother was Sore Ester Korenfeld.

Remember, I began with very little information about my maternal grandmother and her family. Using fairly accessible U.S. birth, marriage and death records along with U.S. Census records, I was able to learn my grandmother’s oldcountry given name and birth surname, approximately when she was born, the year she died, the year she immigrated and her father’s name. We can learn several lessons from this part of my search.

When you begin your research, get as much information as you can from your older living relatives. Even if you have already begun, be sure to interview them…several times. What they tell you will provide valuable clues that enable you to evaluate documentary evidence you receive later. Don’t accept what you are told as truth until you find confirming documentary evidence.

Be flexible in the way you spell names. Don’t reject data just because a name is spelled “wrong.” Note how names you find on various records sound. Phonetics will help you make sense of misspelled names.

Use the “age” of a person in vital records as an indicator of the person’s age, not as truth. Our ancestors often misrepresented their age.

When you order records, go for the easy ones first. Vital records contain an enormous amount of information and are easy to obtain.

Death records, especially from the early part of the 20th century, may tell you when the immigrant came to America. These records, obituaries and burial records may give you other useful information. Rose’s death record gave the name of the cemetery where she is buried. When I called the cemetery, a very kind receptionist sent me Rose’s burial record, a photo of her gravestone and a map of the cemetery showing where she is buried. (She has a simple stone with no Hebrew on it. Her burial site is in the Workmen’s Circle plot where victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire are buried.) All of this proved very useful.

Nevertheless, death records are notoriously inaccurate. The more distant in time a record is from the actual event, the more likely it is to be wrong. Information in death records is recorded at an emotional time and the survivors are not always knowledgeable of past events and timing. So use the information from them cautiously and always look for verification in another document.

Next month we’ll conclude this wrap-up. I’ll focus on passenger ship manifests as well as old-country vital records and censuses. I’ll show you how I continued to build my grandmother’s ancestral line bit-by-bit.

The Jewish Genealogical Society of Oregon meets this month at 1:30 pm, Sunday, Feb. 21st at Congregation Ahavath Achim. PSU Professor Natan Meir’s presentation is titled “Reading in another hand: Deciphering cyrillic and Hebrew archival documents from Eastern Europe.” This will be a useful follow-on to my January column and will be a good lead-in to my next column. If you’ve been reading these columns over the past year, stop by and say hello.