Jews of Lviv in the 16th or 17th century (credit: Majer Bałaban via Wikimedia Commons, full attribution via link)
(As a bit of a spur for myself, I’m trying a less structured post, instead of waiting for all eternity to produce one perfect monograph.)
If you follow me… anywhere, you have probably realized that I’m looking at a lot of 18th-century archival material of my ancestral Lviv, then Lwów in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth or Lemberg in Habsburg Galicia, before or after the Austrian conquest of 1772 respectively.
In these documents, legal surnames are largely non-existent (except after 1787, a neglible fraction of what I’ve been looking at), pre-legal surnames are used minimally, and patronyms and the like (epithets referring to one’s father, et cetera) are hardly enough to identify people. Hence, Jews are largely referred to by their professions. Some are easily identifiable by anyone with a smattering of genealogical Polish: many a złotnik (‘goldsmith’ – no lack of those in Jewish Lviv!), krawiec (tailor), or szewc (cobbler) can be found. Others, however, led me down the rabbit holes of historical Polish dictionaries or ethnological monographs – and even then, some I’m just unsure of.
Selecting my favourites with no scientific method whatsoever, except that they’re all from the same set of 1765 documents:
barysnik (modern spelling barysznik):
The word still exists, to a limited extent, but has gone through a change in connotation. Now quite negative (ranging from ‘camp follower’ to ‘swindler’), in the 17th and 18th centuries it seems to have been the neutral term for a door-to-door peddler, and appears often in legislation relating to Jews (which might explain the evolution of the negative connotation).
celnik:
Historians of Jewish Lviv say that celnik and torbiarz are synonymous, and the documents support this contention (for example, the Jewish guild of torbiarze refer to themselves as tselniker in Yiddish) – but the former means ‘customs offical’ and the latter means ‘bag-maker’!
czachczader:
Haven’t a clue. And yes, it must be an occupation – location- and appearance-based names are always in Polish, only occupations occasionally have a German form (e.g. Farber)
czopownik:
This one will vex the user of a modern dictionary, as the stem, czopow(e)-, means ‘pin’ or ‘peg’, an oddly specific occupational term! Consulting older books, however, one finds that czopowe, in the sense of a peg as the stopper of a cask, was the name of the Polish Crown’s tax on alcoholic beverages, often collected by Jews – thus, the collector was a czopownik.
malowany:
Not strictly an occupational epithet, but I included it because it intrigues me. If my dictionary-informed Polish grammar is correct, this is the verb malować ‘to paint’ in the adjectival form of the past participle – so, ‘painted’. This epithet follows the rabbinical family otherwise called – even in Polish sources – by the matronymic surname Mizys (later spelled Mieses under the Austrians). The Malowany–Mizys connection has been noted before by several historians, but I have never seen an attempt to explain the pairing. (Mizys is simply Mizhes in Yiddish – the husband/sons/grandsons of Mizhe, wife of Rabbi Tzvi Hirsh Koziner/Kozinski of Lviv.)
muncyrz or moncyrz:
Still stuck on this one! Several people with this occupation all lived in the same neighbourhood of outer Lviv. No idea what it means; I can’t find it in any dictionary.
namiotnik:
namiot is a tent, so a namiotnik ought to be a tent-maker – but why did they need even one tent-maker in 1760s’ Lviv? (I don’t think outdoor minyanim were in vogue then.) The corresponding term in German (Zeltschneider) also had currency, so I must be missing something.
preffekt (in modern spelling, prefekt):
Non-intuitive meaning of a Polish word with an obvious English cognate – ‘prefect’ here means a religious teacher, specifically a rosh yeshiva, the head of a rabbinic school. In Lviv, as in several other larger Jewish communities, the head of the yeshiva (locally styled ריש מתיבתא resh metivta or ר”מ for short) functioned as an assistant rabbi and deputy head of the rabbinic court.
szafarz:
While this word lives on in modern Polish, even in the sense it appears in the 1760s (a collector of a given fee), the terms that follow are often head-scratchers; for example, Moshe b. Yair, Moszko Jurowicz in Polish-language sources, otherwise known as a dayan (rabbinic judge) of Lviv, was the szafarz berdonie – which I leave as an exercise for the curious.
szaydarz (modernized spelling: szajdarz):
With my knowledge of Yiddish and this word’s telltale -arz, indicating a loan from German, I suspected the meaning long before I found confirmation: ‘refiner’ (as of precious metals), from German scheiden, to separate. (In German, found historically as a compound: Goldscheider.)
wiernik:
As a description, this one is straightforward in modern Polish ‘faithful one’ (contrast with the common epithet for Jews in documents of the time: niewiernik, lit. ‘unfaithful one’ = ‘the infidel X‘). As an occupational description, however, this is the Polish translation of the Hebrew נאמן ne’eman (lit. ‘trusted one’) – a representative of the Jewish community.
woskoboynik (modernized: woskobojnik):
This breaks down into its parts to mean ‘wax-beater’. Sure enough, German industrial dictionaries of the time translate woskobojnik as Wachsschlager, of the exact same meaning. The trouble is, I have no idea why one would beat wax, and my searches so far have failed me.
żyłownik:
This one stumped me at first. A Google search only brings up references to the capabilities of a medical device. A bit of dictionary legwork shows that the first element, żył-is from żyła ‘vein’. The verb żyłować, then, means ‘veining’. Aha! With our trusty -nik suffix for nouns, this must be a ‘veiner’, or in other words, a מנקר, menaker, one whose occupation is to perform nikkur, the removal of unkosher fats and veins from otherwise kosher meat to prepare it for sale (also known in English by the somewhat obsolete term porging). This would explain its absence from Polish dictionaries! And sure enough, the term does appear in Polish-language discussions of Jewish history alongside ritual slaughterers, their natural partners.
(My thanks to Dr. Sophie Kay of The Parchment Rustler, @ScientistSoph of the former Twitter and several other platforms, for inspiring me to pay attention to historical occupations with her long-running project of educating on this very subject.)
Google map of Lviv and the surrounding areas, marked with many-coloured pins… as will be explained. Interactive version follows below.
Perhaps not the most descriptive of titles.
Just a brief post follows, mostly to explain in full sentences what the map legend can’t.
As I’ve mentioned in all my most recent blog posts,* I’m working on my ‘Lviv Family Evidence file’ project, which examines a unique record set documenting all manner of events in the lives of Jews of Lviv – mostly covering 1795 through 1850, though with occasional updates (especially for emigrants and immigrants) as late as the 1880s.
*… and inumerable times on Twitter, Facebook, Mastodon, Reddit, and whatever other blessed social media platform (see my contact page) I shall be compelled to join as Twitter flounders….
Applying my newly-acquired Python coding skills, I decided to extract all references to places outside of Lviv from my notes on the Evidence files and see what I could learn. These include references to immigration, emigration, and births, marriages, and deaths of Lviv residents that took place elsewhere.
The data used here is crude and has gaps (from, say, difficult to read entries) and duplicates (my spelling corrections, which I recorded separately from the original spelling, are counted as well) but give you a rough measure of how often Lviv residents associated – in whichever of the above ways – with other towns. The interactions number from over 200, for Lviv’s sister city Brody, to single mentions of places as far apart as London, St. Petersburg, and Jerusalem.
Without further ado, here’s the map in all its glory, hosted by the good grace of Google Maps (follow the link for its full capabilities):
The colour scheme is simple: it reflects the different numbers of connections between Lviv and the marked cities, in a logarithmic scale, with a factor of two. That is to say (if your math is rusty): every colour in the series represents a threshold of half the amount of connections as the one before it.
Brody, with just over 200 connections, gets its own colour (maroon)
Żółkiew, modern Zhovkva, with just over 100, gets the next (red)
Janów (modern Ivano-Frankove) and its three fellow Lviv-area exurbs have between 50 and a hundred each; they get dark orange
(And so on, and so on, down to…)
Teal for towns mentioned two or three times and…
Purple for the towns mentioned only once.
You can view the different colour-levels as layers on the map, which can be selected or unselected. By default, the lowest two levels are not selected.
The data has its problems – I didn’t call the map ‘raw’ for nothing! – but the following points are adequate as caveats (and explain my methodology, indirectly):
There are duplicates, I’m sure of it. But I can’t account for them numerically (yet) without reviewing all the data; I assume the figures are close enough.
The four exurbs of Lviv, Janów and its fellows, of colour-code dark orange/layer ’50+’ on the map, include data from many ’emigration’ entries I suspect are fake. This is a discussion for another time; just assume that they’re overcounted by 30%+.
I’ve skipped ambiguous abbreviations from my count. ‘Przem-‘ can stand for both Przemyśl in Poland and Przemyślany, now Peremyshliany in modern Ukraine, both of which had significant interaction with Lviv. If I couldn’t assign an entry to one or the other, I omitted it from the count.
I’ve skipped ambiguous location names, like ‘Kusemir‘, which is the German spelling of the Yiddish name of both Kazimierz, the Jewish district of Kraków, and Kazimierz Dolny, a town near Lublin with a historic Jewish population as well. In almost all cases the source entry has enough information to specify which town was intended, but if it’s not in my notes that were trawled by my Python script, it didn’t make it into the map.
There are some locations (mostly with only single references) I couldn’t identify, so obviously I omitted them.
District names appear in my data; where these are narrow enough (as decided by me, on the fly) I used them on the map, otherwise no. (So no ‘Bavaria’, ‘Prussia’, ‘Russia’…)
Occasionally, I may have misinterpreted district names as the cities for which they are named. I suspect this particularly for Minsk.
What follows is a statistical analysis of the sex ratio of 1806 births inblah blah [if your eyes are glazing over, let’s rephrase this:]
What’s going on? Are there no baby girls in Lemberg?!
Reading between the lines
One of the earlier steps the typical family historian takes on the path from novice to genealogist is learning not to take records at face value. It’s tempting to see the text – be it in an online database, or even more so, as a scan of an original document – and assume that, if someone bothered to write it down, it must be so.
But it isn’t.
In all branches of genealogy, but especially Eastern European Jewish genealogy, the farther back in time you go, the less quality control was possible in the record-keeping, and the easier it was to fudge the facts, if so motivated. And Jews often had such motivations, considering that many species of paperwork were implemented as tools of oppression (censuses, to limit the population; birth records, for conscription; marriage records, to set all manner of demands on newly married couples; and so on).
Another aspect of ‘face value’ takes a bit longer to unlearn, though: the presence versus the absence of information. How comprehensive are the records? Who was included, and who was missed? I think most amateur genealogists pick up on the general imperfection of older record sources, but even professionals would do well to get a quantitative grasp on the invisible gaps in early vital records.
Case in point: where are all the Jewish baby girls in early 19th-century Lviv?
Interlude: my Lviv projects
(Feel free to skip ahead to the next section where I get to the point; here I explain the broader context for the observations that led to me investigating this mystery.)
My genealogical home base is Lviv (Yiddish/German ‘Lemberg’, Polish ‘Lwów’) in modern Ukraine, once the largest and second-largest city in the Austrian province of Galicia alternatively (depending on whether or not Kraków was part of Galicia at the time). My Mund line originates there and Mund relatives continued to reside there until the Holocaust.
I spent the teenage launch of my genealogical trajectory poring over microfilmed vital records of Lviv at the LaSalle LDS Family History Centre in West Montreal – records not indexed by JRI-Poland, and then not yet indexed by Gesher Galicia (the All Galicia Database first launched around early August 2011). In this early research, I, like many other genealogists with Lviv connections, noticed a quirk I did not understand at the time: ‘family numbers’ noted for many births, marriages, and deaths. Little did I know that my curiosity about these would eventually become an intense obsession.
When I became aware of Gesher Galicia’s All Galicia Database, many years later, with its extensive collection of vital records from the Lviv archives (identical with those microfilmed by the LDS, now digitized on FamilySearch), I was reminded of these mysterious ‘congregational family numbers’, as Gesher Galicia calls them, and the flame was reignited. After many false leads, I learned what more experienced genealogists already knew: these numbers are file/page references to an extensive set of census-like records called (Familien-) Evidenz-Bücher (‘family evidence books’).
In short, I have accidentally become (and forgive me as I ignore false humility for a moment) the leading authority on this obscure record set. I have read and re-read the pages of the Evidence Books over three and a half years, and I am more familiar with their uses and pitfalls than any genealogist I know.
I have several long-term projects related to the Lviv Family Evidence files (as has become my preferred terminology) which I do not wish to divulge in detail before they are ready; two of my favourite projects have completed their respective first phases, as alluded to in this Twitter thread.
For some of the fruits of my labours, take this graph, compiled from the data I’ve collected from the Evidence files, showing how often entries were reassigned to new households:
Graph of reuse rate (y-axis: number of entries per batch of 10 files) by location in Evidence Book set (x-axis: numbers 1–3764) showing a steady decline from about 2.5 uses/file to 1.5/per file, with an average of approximately 2.
My first project thus concerns the Family Evidence files as a whole; I’ll be tighter-lipped about the second project (which I do touch on, barely, in the Schmelkes post), but finishing the latter’s first phase (on the evening of 25 October 2022) gave me much food for thought about the demographics of Jewish Lviv after the Austrian conquest of 1772. What was the birth rate? The death rate? The rate of natural growth? These all concerned the antisemitic Austrian authorities greatly (indeed, the evidence books exist in part due to laws intended to curb the growth of the Jewish population within the cities of Galicia), and ought to be recorded in contemporary documents.
(They are! See the figures cited by Lviv historian N. M. Gelber in Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Lwów (Tel Aviv, 1956, p. 181, in Hebrew; via Yiddish Book Center reprint on Archive.org) and in English translation by Myra Yael Ecker on JewishGen – but these figures are problematic in ways that motivated my questions of the coming paragraph.)
Above all, I wanted to know how closely the official records matched reality, which would give me a measure of how comprehensive they were. The basic mathematics of natural population growth* matched against the reported numbers of registered births and deaths should give us a measure.
*(defined as the rate of birth minus the rate of death for a defined population size)
So, after pondering the above all night (quite literally), I decided to calculate the vital statistics for the Jews of Lviv for 1806,* the first year for which proper vital records survive, and so the closest available to 1803, which I believe to be the highest, most stable point for the legal residency rate (and hence eligibility for coverage by the record-keepers).
*(Marriage records begin earlier, but are irrelevant to the subject of natural growth; birth and death records begin in middle of February of 1805, but records from 1806 have sums of events by type: male/female, birth/death, and having a well-defined full year of data makes the math easier too.)
(Bear with me… one short introduction is still necessary, even for those who skipped the previous section. If you really are impatient, skip ahead to the point.)
Now, how did I check how many births and deaths were registered in the Jewish community of Lviv for 1806?
In retrospect, I could have done it with Gesher Galicia’s database (search ‘1806’ as a keyword, select the Lwów births/deaths as needed, use sorting by date to manually exclude mismatches – and I’d get 530 births, 611 deaths, and this post would never have been written) but, perfectionist as I am, this didn’t occur to me.
So, of course, I went back to the original: Lviv Archives (TsDIAL) volume 701/1/100, scanned and later digitized by FamilySearch, available online (with a free account) as part of their Lemberg Jewish Congregation Metrical Books, 1801–1906 collection (film no. 2405319/DGS 7761770, item 22).
On good ol’ Microsoft Excel, I started tabulating the official count of births and deaths of 1806 by month.
Vital records by sex and type (columns represent male births, female births, male deaths, female deaths, respectively) for June 1806 with sums (death sums left blank). (Credit: TsDIAL via FamilySearch)
Of course, I followed the format of the original, as the registrar summed them (occasionally forgetting to count the deaths, so my manual count had to do), sorted by sex as well as birth/death. Even before doing the math, it was obvious that something was seriously wrong. (See if the sample image above doesn’t make it clear enough!)
The point
There are far too few girls. By my first, frustrated count, on the morning after that sleepless night, I had the ratio of male births to female as about 2.5:1; on closer review, the figure for 1806 as a whole turned out to be a whopping 2.77:1. (The natural human sex ratio, by contrast, is around 1.05:1 ± .02.)
By 1807, the skew in the sex ratio approaches 2:1 – still much too high. But you really don’t need math to tell you that something is off; just look at the total in the image above: 18 girls born in a span of time that saw the birth of 30 boys?!
For a while, I was still focused on the growth-rate problem, but the sex ratio problem ate at me, until I had an absurd idea, or in my own words…
OMG
I have a solution for the sex ratio problem (not the others, alas) and it's so stupid, simple, and relatable.
Standardized form for Jewish birth registrations in Galicia, from the official Austrian Imperial regulation (via Google Books)
Two dates are given explicitly: the date of birth (column 2 above) and the date of naming (column 3 above), the latter of which is synonymous with the circumcision date in boys. A third date is implied: the date of registration, which can be inferred from the order of the dates in the naming column, roughly equal to the naming date most of the time, except in cases of delayed registration.
This raises a question: in older records, especially approaching (or passing) 1800 in reverse, only a single date is given per event (say, birth, in this case); what does this date represent?
Towns with decent record keeping tended to cross-reference their records when possible; Lviv’s Jewish records are exemplary of this. It is tempting to take such cross-references with declarations of the type “born on [day] [month] [year]” at face value, taking precision for accuracy, and resolving the above question.
This is misleading, however. Firstly, even when citing records with distinct event and naming-qua-registration dates, the cross-referencers occasionally get it wrong; more importantly, I have found, time and again, that even the relatively meticulous registrars of Lviv took such dates at face value even when the context makes this interpretation impossible. (More on this in the final section of the post.)
As the point below (0.2) will explain, we do have a hint of the timing of older records: the inclusion of children’s names at the time of registration (i.e., in one go instead of two; a distinction not always possible to make, depending on the hand and pen of the Matrikel-writer) suggests that the children were entered after being named.
Thus: dates in old records likely reflect the time of registration, not birth (or death, as the case may be).
0.2: Ashkenazi Jewish naming customs
The traditional Jewish custom across (almost) all rites is to name boys at their brit (bris, in Ashkenazi transliteration), their circumcision. For girls, however, the custom is much more variable; the Eastern European custom is to name girls at the reading of the Torah (which takes place every Monday, Thursday, and Shabbat, as well as on all major and some minor holidays), with a strong preference for Shabbat, varying on one’s exact community affiliation.
A brief examination of post-1877 records for towns near Lviv fits the preference-for-Shabbat model. (Take, for instance, the birth records of Zhydachiv, beginning in 1877, AGAD/300/1590 – an exercise for the skeptical reader.)
(Researching the full intra-Ashkenazi diversity of practice in this respect is beyond my ken; let this reference from a rabbinic source reflective of normative Hasidic practice suffice: נטעי גבריאל הלכות נדה ח״ג, פרק ע׳ סי׳ ט׳, עמ׳ תקצ״ב; his sources also reflect the preference for Shabbat in and around Galicia in the 19th century.)
Also, there is a tradition to avoid using the intended names of children before their respective naming ceremonies, with some ambivalence towards making exceptions for legal registration (ibid. פרק ע״א סי׳ א׳, עמ׳ תר״א ובהערות).
Thus: boys are named at their brit, usually seven days after birth, while girls in Galicia would usually be named on the Shabbat following their birth, and registering their names in advance would be avoided.
0.3: Procrastination
Need I say more?
This premise has two parts:
Procrastination is an eternal element of human nature.1
That which is delayed briefly tends to be delayed indefinitely, or to borrow a phrase from the Talmud, “since it has already been deferred, let it be altogether deferred” (הואיל ונדחה ידחה).
Thus: in a lax registration framework, delays will lead to total omission from the register.
1: Hypothesis: girls are forgotten
I propose that, since (a) girls are usually named on Shabbat, and (b) the Shabbat-observant community Matrikel-writers could not record them contemporaneously, and (c) registration necessarily took place after naming, girls’ births were disproportionately forgotten.
Not completely forgotten, because some parents were more organized than others and remembered to register them in the coming days or months (and late registrations marked as such – usually when more than a year late – do occur in 1806), and some girls were no doubt named mid-week (say, on a Monday or Thursday), but the majority of them never made it into the birth register.
Boys, on the other hand, are likely to be named on any day of the week, so this proposed Shabbat-delay forgetfulness effect would not affect them greatly.
2: Predictions
This hypothesis is testable; I could make predictions about the fine structure of the data that I hadn’t measured yet.
If the dates correspond to instances of registration, there should be gaps in the combined birth and death register for every Shabbat and major holiday on which writing is forbidden.
2.2: Distribution of boys’ births
Boys’ births, reflecting a natural distribution, should occur with equal frequency on the six weekdays available for registration, with a slight peak on Sunday to account for delayed registrations of Shabbat circumcisions.
2.3: Distribution of girls’ births
Girls’ births, however, might peak on days corresponding to weekday Torah readings (Monday, Thursday, minor holidays which include Torah reading), and have a small peak on Sunday, as with the boys, to account for late registrations of Shabbat namings by that minority of fastidious parents.
3: Method
The key idea was to collect the male vs. female birth and death information, in an Excel spreadsheet, by day instead of by month as before. (The register is usually legible enough to distinguish between days.)
So, I hand-counted events by day, sorting them into male and female births, as marked by checkmarks (a painful word now, I know) in the first two of the original four columns in the register. I collected four months’ worth of daily data: January through April, 1806, chosen because the sex ratio skew seemed higher the older the birth record, and any factor associated with it should also be more prominent then.
I recorded the information in three columns: one for daily male and female births each, with a third noting the presence or absence of records (i.e., including death records) for each date.
For a flavour of it, here’s the first week of data:
Gregorian Date
Hebrew Date
Day of Week
m. b.
f. b.
gap
1806-01-01
5566-04-Tevet-12
Wed
3
1
N
1806-01-02
5566-04-Tevet-13
Thu
0
0
Y
1806-01-03
5566-04-Tevet-14
Fri
0
1
N
1806-01-04
5566-04-Tevet-15
Sat
0
0
Y
1806-01-05
5566-04-Tevet-16
Sun
0
0
N
1806-01-06
5566-04-Tevet-17
Mon
0
0
N
1806-01-07
5566-04-Tevet-18
Tue
1
0
N
An illustrative 7-day excerpt from the data collected as described above. (January 5 and 6 are not ‘gaps’ because deaths are recorded for those dates.)
The Gregorian dates (copied from the register – Austria had already adopted the Gregorian calendar) were noted in the key column, followed by Hebrew date and the day of week, calculated with Hebcal.com’s Hebrew Date Converter.
Then, using Excel’s sort function, I could easily sort the results by day of week. I then summed male births, female births, and record absences by day of week.
4: Results
First, let me represent my results graphically. (The image in the Twitter version has a typo, corrected here.)
Male births
Female births
Record gaps
Sun
21
3
3
Mon
22
3
3
Tue
20
2
5
Wed
19
4
3
Thu
12
6
6
Fri
36
26
1
Sat
1
0
14
Male and female Jewish births in Lviv for January–April 1806, summed by day of week
So, what does this tell us, and how does it measure up with my predictions?
Firstly, one part of my hypothesis is well-nigh confirmed: the dates (a) reflect registration and (b) respect Jewish law in this, as evidenced by the distribution of record gaps. These occur with roughly equal frequency (about 20% of instances) for Sunday through Thursday, while Saturday has no records about 80% of the time, and only a single instance of a birth record. (The existence of some Saturday records does not disprove the Shabbat-observance theory, as Shabbat ends at sundown. One supposes evening hours on a weekend were a rarity, but not impossible. Only a single event is recorded for a date for which writing is forbidden throughout – the first day of a two-day holiday, hence no writing-permissible evening hours – which can comfortably be attributed to scribal error.)
Furthermore, the small deviations in gap frequency in the first five days of the week are mostly accounted for by Jewish holidays when writing is forbidden (the initial and final days of Passover) or impractical (Purim).
So far, so good; virtually no records correspond to dates which preclude registration, an utterly unnatural pattern for births proper.
What about the proposed ‘peak’ pattern? Well, here I was in for a surprise.
Returning to the table above, we find that I ignored Friday and hoped you would roll with it. Friday is anomalous. Sunday, not so much.
For male births, we have a smooth distribution on Sunday through Wednesday, with a slight dip on Thursday, followed by a near doubling on Friday. Meanwhile, for female births, we have a fairly smooth distribution (to the degree one can judge smoothness around an average of 3.6 with 5 data points) for Sunday through Thursday (though ‘smooth until Wednesday, rising slightly on Thursday’ is also a reasonable interpretation), followed by an abnormal peak on Friday. Indeed, more than half of all female births are registered on Friday – but no Monday peaks (Thursday being debatable).
I clearly missed another factor at play – one that seems to account for most of the minority of girls’ birth registrations that made it.
4.1: Modified hypothesis: the early bird gets the registration
The Friday skew effect had me thinking that some form of pre-registration did take place on occasion. The near doubling of boys’ birth registrations on Friday in anticipation of the Sabbath, with its Biblical echoes, suggested this in particular.
Alternatively, a more prosaic (but almost equivalent for purposes of the girl-absence problem) interpretation of the Friday bump is that Shabbat events were registered on Saturday night or Sunday, but without noting the passage to the next date in the margins (as it is done in this record set), because the appearance of a Shabbat registration was unseemly, say.
4.2: Another test: death comes unplanned
To differentiate between the last two interpretations, I proposed tabulating the death registration data – you can’t record those in advance, usually – which I’d omitted (beyond presence/absence) so far.
Using the same methods outlined above (in the section called ‘Method’, conveniently enough, in case you missed it), I compiled the data from the male and female death columns as well and threw in three more months of data for good measure, to better assess the trends.
The results are in this humble Excel-wrought table, with anomalous high points highlighted:
Lviv Jewish births and deaths for December 1805 through June 1806, divided by sex and summed by day of week
The bizarre Friday birth bump is reinforced, but for deaths (which, incidentally, have a natural-looking male/female ratio), we have a Sunday bump instead – again, almost double the average!
This leans toward my preferred modified hypothesis: advance registration of boys and girls to be named on Shabbat was an option used by some. For Shabbat deaths, they were mostly recorded on Sunday.
5: Further avenues of research
The questions above, my attempts to answer them, and the data I collected along the way prompt several further questions…
The impossible male:female birth ratio vanishes eventually (one assumes). When, and how?
Do the ritually-correlated record gaps disappear in a corresponding fashion?
When do purported event dates start correlating with the actual events, as opposed to registration? (For problems with one aspect of this in Lviv specifically, see below.)
Female births are plainly undercounted, at the very least by the number needed to reach a plausible sex ratio – but how many male births are missed? Can they be estimated?
Does the post-Shabbat negligence mechanism (still my primary explanation for the oddities in the registration of female births) affect boys? In other words, was pre-Shabbat registration comprehensive? If yes, why are girls different?
… some inadequately explained observations…
One finds, rarely, births of male children (and only male children) with names left blank. Are these pre-naming registrations? If yes, did the child necessarily die before naming, or is neglect at play?
In one instance, I found a male birth, first recorded with no name and a note ‘born’, with the name filled in later. What does this mean, and what does it imply about the other records?
With several years of data available, one finds that the skewed ratio varies greatly between the earliest years of birth registration: from 1.7:1 for (the surviving part of) 1805, to 2.8:1 for 1806, to 2.1:1 for 1807, to lower than 1.7:1 (pending data collection) for 1808. All unnatural ratios, yet very different.
The male:female death ratio is much closer to what seems reasonable – ranging between 1.09:1 to 1.03:1 for most years – but peaks at 1.22:1 for 1806.
… and angles for further research:
Lviv is not the only Galician town with records of such antiquity. Among others, Klasno, Kraków (though not part of Galicia then), Przemyśl, and Wielkie Oczy have birth records dating before 1800 (which Lviv, to be clear, does not). A brief check (thanks for the idea!) seems to show that Kraków and Wielkie Oczy have realistic-looking sex distributions for births, while Klasno shows a strong male skew. (And I haven’t checked Przemyśl yet.)
Ersatz vital records exist for Lviv, older than the oldest birth and death records (more on this in the final section below). Effects of the Hebrew calendar on the dates of registration are apparent. Is there a corresponding sex skew?
Most of all, when the various gaps in the record are numerically accounted for, do the natural growth figures for early Austrian Lemberg finally make sense?
Conclusion: Precision vs. accuracy
From all this, we can conclude that birth dates and death dates for Lviv, at least in the 1805–1808 range, are not to be taken as literal, despite the precision with which these are cited and cross-referenced in later Lviv vital records.
The problem does not end there, though. Precision does not guarantee accuracy.
There’s always an xkcd, and it’s always obligatory.
Two cases I’ve discovered in Lviv vital records make this clear.
The case of the alphabetical birth dates. See the Twitter thread, for now, for a fuller description, but for some of 1818 through 1822 (and perhaps more), the dates of birth (and for some years, death) recorded in the metrical books are fictitious, as they are assigned to the subjects in alphabetical order by month. Yet later records reference these as real birth dates.
Dates for births, marriages, and deaths appear frequently in the Family Evidence files, covering years not covered – never covered – by the relevant record sets (i.e., marriages before 1801, births and deaths before 1805). Some digging into these dates shows that they cannot be taken as even dates – births and deaths only occur in batches once every few weeks – yet the scribe of the evidence books cites them as ‘born on …’, ‘died on…’. (These deserve deeper study, and hopefully will get it as part of my broader Evidence File project.)
And finally, this point bears reiterating: the early birth/death registers of Lviv give the seemingly valid impression that, finally, all Jewish families in Lviv were legally recognized, insofar as births and deaths are concerned – but this doesn’t carry over to the comprehensiveness of the coverage.
Acknowledgments
This was my attempt at gathering my thoughts from a Twitter thread into a cohesive narrative, possibly in preparation for a more formal and thorough treatment of the subject.
As you may have noticed, there isn’t much to notice here lately. I’ve been busy and haven’t had much time for long-form writing. That might change soon, but I’m not making any promises.
Hopefully, you’ve discovered that I’m much better at finding time for short-form writing, i.e. Twitter.
Now, a brief notice. As Twitter appears to be, ah, floundering a bit now, I thought it would be advisable to have a contingency plan for my short posts.
As such, I’ve expanded my network in two (metaphysically opposite) directions:
Towards Facebook
Towards Mastodon (instance c.im, specifically, for now)
A one-sided conversation by yours truly, trying to figure out a genetic match on my Thumim side (see below)
The blog has been asleep for a while. I’ve been overwhelmed both by so-called ‘real life’ and by an abundance of genealogical success (and, of course, the business side of genealogy – though I still have openings for new clients, if interested…).
In fact, I haven’t been keeping up my significant recent discoveries. Perhaps by giving a brief status update, I’ll spur myself into writing about them…
First come the long-term works-in-progress, then, the bits where I’ve reached some point of accomplishment.
Ongoing projects
Twitter. Really. I spend most of my genealogy-devoted time (and then some…) there.
I continue to get a grasp on the Lviv Family Evidence files; see my most recent post, on the Schmelka–Schmelkes family, for a sample of their potential, or my (graciously credited) contributions to the genealogy of the Fingerhut family at genealogist Edward A. Rueda’s “Rueda y Fingerhut” genealogy blog.
I’m working through the notarial records of Rozwadów (now part of Stalowa Wola, Poland), where much of my Wachs (and hypothetical Wang) family lived, but no vital records survive. (See the relevant thread on the underused forum portion Logan Kleinwaks’s GenealogyIndexer.org.)
An early, minor success on this front:
My first success in the notary files! The signature of one of my least-documented Wachs ancestors, Aharon (Ur'tsche) on a contract of some sort!
Could someone with basic Polish skills (I'm limited to 'genealogical Polish') tell me what it says about where he lived? pic.twitter.com/ujQ8iJWKnA
The discovery of a reference to my third great-grandfather Aharon “Ur’tshe” Wachs in Turbia, a village near Rozwadów.
I’m studying excerpts of my great-grandmother Reizel Mund’s address book, which mostly lists her and her husband’s cousins – many of whom we’ve forgotten how we’re related to.
A sample from Babbe (‘Grandma’) Reizel’s address book, courtesy of my grandfather, discussed on Twitter here.
Finally, the ongoing project of the season: processing the many, many genetic matches I have for myself and several other family members on five genetic genealogy websites.
Major breakthroughs
I’ve unlocked the basic structure of the Haar family (my Mund grandfather’s maternal great-grandparents) of Żupawa, a village near Tarnobrzeg, Poland, showing that my third great-grandmother, Mesha Gross née Haar, had one brother (probably Joseph Haar of New York City) and certainly had one sister, Sima Goldmann née Haar. (I hope this will be the subject of my next post). I also have clues at the greater structure of the Haar family of the Tarnobrzeg area, thanks to genetics and naming patterns.
A hint of what is to come:
Joseph (Yosef Elimelech) Haar (center) of Żupawa in 1911, after emigration to New York City, surrounded by his children, children-in-law, and grandchildren. (Credit to the anonymous descendant who shared it with me, and to the late Frances Haar Yeston who identified the subjects.)
Sima Goldmann née Haar (left) and her husband Ovadiah (right) (Credit to the many Goldmann relatives who have used the image on their online trees, the anonymous descendant who share the uncropped version of the photograph with me, and to the late Clara Esther Jawetz, who provided at least one copy of the original photograph.)
The near-simultaneous discovery of surviving branches of several paternal great-uncles and -aunts of my grandfather Thumim – that is, the other children of Rabbi Yitzchak Thumim, the rabbi of Krystynopol, modern Chervonohrad, Ukraine. Here genetics and a surprise picture match each play a role.
Identical pictures of R. Yaakov Unger, the last rabbi of Radziechów (modern Radekhiv, Ukraine) in very different sources. (If you have any idea where Meir Wunder got the photos for the Radekhov yizkor book, please let me know!)
Most tantalizingly, I have, at last, a crack in my closest “brick wall” – a potential connection on the side of my second great-grandmother, Ita Sheva Thumim née Klugman.
The German (left) and Hebrew (right) signatures of Sender Schmelka, signed under the date 26 September 1799, at the end of Evidenz Ausweis, a companion volume to the Evidence files, for 1798–9, among the signatures of other Jewish community leaders. (TsDIAL/701/1/42, via FamilySearch)
Another timely post!
In honour of the upcoming yahrtzeit of one of the greatest rabbis in the latter years of Jewish Galicia’s glory, Rabbi Yitzchak Yehudah “Itzikl” Schmelkes, who died on 8 October 1905, the Eve of Yom Kippur of 5666, I’ll write up one or two of my findings in his family history.
Postcard portrait of R. Yitzchak Schmelkes, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
I’ve long been fascinated with the Schmelkes family, probably since I realized that the Galician family of rabbis – yes, R. Yitzchak is only the most famous of them – is but a branch of the Rokach rabbinic family. Later, when I became aware of what is now an obsession of mine – the Lviv Family Evidence files (see a brief overview in my discussion of Benjamin Epstein) – the Schmelkes family was the first that I researched, other than my own direct ancestors. Then I found my first significant rabbinic genealogy discovery in the Evidence Books, which I posted pseudonymously on my favourite online forum, and from then on, I just cannot ignore the Schmelkes clan. (I have a long-running interest in Rabbi Schmelkes’ mother’s side, the Wohls of Lviv, but that’s for another time).
I’m not going to burden you with all I have to say about the Schmelkes family – or as I should call them, the Schmelka family, for reasons that will soon become clear – just now. Let an introduction into what the traditional sources say suffice, and then I will lead you to my oldest and most recent discoveries, respectively.
The Schmelka family
We begin with R. Yitzchak Schmelkes’s own words, as they appear on the title page of his halachic classic, בית יצחק Bet Yitshak (Przemysl, 1875):
אני … יצחק יהודה שמעלקיש בהרב … חוטר מגזע היחש … מוה׳ חיים שמואל יכונה שמעלקא זצ״ל מלבוב
I, Yitzchak Yehuda Schmelkes, son of the rabbi, of illustrious ancestry … Chaim Shmuel, called Shmelka, of blessed memory, of Lvov [Lviv].
Note that ‘called Shmelka’ here refers to his father’s given name – Chaim Shmuel being the formal, Hebrew part of the name, Shmelka being the informal, Yiddish portion (or, strictly speaking, his kinuy).
We proceed to the end of his introduction, where he has more to say about his parents [my translation simplifies the flowery language a bit]:
מ׳ שמעלקא זצ״ל (בהרב מ׳ סענדר בהרב מ׳ שמעלקא זצ״ל רב דחייטים בק׳ בראד חתנו של הגאון בעל תבואות שור זצ״ל בהרב הגאון מו״ה משה זצ״ל האבד״ק זלאטשוב בן לאותו גאון עיר וקדיש מ׳ אלעזר רוקח זצ״ל אבד״ק בראד ואמשטרדאם ומנוחתו כבוד בארץ הקדושה) תהי מנוחתו כבוד
[My father] R. Shmelka of blessed memory (son of R. Sender, son of R. Shmelka, rabbi of the tailors [i.e., rabbi of the Tailors’ Synagogue] in Brody [and] the son-in-law of the author of Tevu’ot Shor, son of R. Moshe, the rabbi of Zlotshov [Zolochiv], son of R. Elazar Rokach, rabbi of Brody and Amsterdam, who is buried in the Holy Land), may he rest in peace.
Note that the punctuation, and hence the parsing, is my own, but this is in keeping with what is known about the Rokach (also Rokeach) family from other sources: The founder, R. Elazar Rokach (previously Margulies, he adopted part of the name of his work, מעשה רוקח Ma’ase Rokah or Roke’ah, as his surname) was the rabbi of Brody, later of Amsterdam, and then lived his last years in Safed. His son, R. Moshe, was the rabbi of Zlotshov, whose son, R. Shmuel Shmelka Rokach, was the rabbi of the Tailors’ Synagogue of Brody. (The bit about the author of Tevu’ot Shor skips a generation, but no matter.) The latter’s better-known son is R. Elazar, father of R. Shalom Rokach, the rabbi of Belz, a prominent Hasidic leader, and the founder of the Belz Hasidic group and rabbinic dynasty, which I’ve written about several times before. (Check out the Rokach tag.)
The medallion issued in Rabbi Elazar Rokach’s honour in Amsterdam (as reproduced in the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 5, p. 104)
R. Yitzchak Shmelkes proceeds to write of his then-living mother, Miriam Mirl née Wohl, and her ancestry, but that does not concern us here.
Returning to the paternal line, R. Yitzchak Schmelkes of Lviv was thus the grandson of R. Sender (a nickname for Alexander), a son of the Rabbi of Tailors and an uncle of the first Hasidic Rebbe of Belz.
The only other long-published source to speak of Sender, as far as I know, is his descendant Sender Chaim Amkraut, publisher of נפש דוד–מכתב לדוד Nefesh David–Mikhtav leDavid (Przemysl, 1878), who, in the genealogical outline on the back of the title page, writes of his mother “Sarah Reizel, daughter of Rivkah Rachel, daughter of the wealthy (“הגביר”) R. Sender, Parnas (lay community leader) of Lvov, son of R. Shmelka son of R. Moshe son of R. Elazar Rokach the rabbi of Amsterdam…. And my ancestor R. Sender the Parnas was the brother of R. Elazar, father of R. Shalom of Belz.”
Hence, it is unsurprising that genealogical reference works are uncertain where the ‘Rokach’ name ends and the ‘Schmelkes’ name begins, and Sender is almost always called ‘Sender Rokach’ in modern sources.
Enter, of course, the vital records and evidence books.
It is trivially easy to find records of R. Yitzchak Yehudah’s immediate family on Gesher Galicia’s All Galicia Database: his own marriage, for instance (citing TsDIAL/701/1/134, p. 24, no. 62/73) as Isaac Leib Schmelkes, son of Chaim and Mirl, to Sara Allerhand of Żurawno; or the births and marriages of his siblings; or even the death of his father in 1839.
It is immediately apparent that the spelling Schmelkes only crystallized in the late 1840s. While it appears as early as the 1820s, the older spelling definitely was Schmelka, which fell out of use very slowly. Certainly, R. Yitzchak Schmelkes’ parents married as Schmelka (though no marriage record is found for them).
Older records of Lviv, however, do not provide adequate information to join them into one family tree. For this, we need the Evidence files.
Chaim Schmelkes’ death record has his file number as 3264. There, in the second entry on that page, we have a record of the marriage of Chaim Schmelke (later amended to Schmelkes) of family no. 18 to Mirel née Wohl of family no. 1. The marriage was recorded in September of 1810 (when Chaim was about 15, typical for a child of a wealthy family). Ten of their eleven children to survive to adulthood (known from other sources) are listed below them, from Hinda in 1823 – later her brother R. Yitzchak’s sponsor – to Israel Feibusch in 1833. (The 1830s were years of decline in thoroughness for the Evidence Books; the absence of the children who died in childhood, as well as Mordechai, the youngest to survive, is not surprising.)
(The latter, his illustrious brother’s disciple in his teens, would later leave Orthodoxy and settle in Vienna. In his final years, he wrote a short but informative memoir, “The Story of my Life’s Joys and Sorrows” – strictly, an English translation by a granddaughter – available online courtesy of the Leo Baeck Research Institute. It has been published in translation back to German in Als hätten wir dazugehört: Österreichisch-jüdische Lebensgeschichten aus der Habsburgermonarchie (by Albert Lichtblau, 1997), pp. 157–168. The identification of Phoebus as R. Yitzchak’s brother (whom he refers to as the rabbi of Żurawno and Lvov only, not by his given name) was heretofore hindered by his descendants’ impression that his father’s name was Markus, as seen on Geni.)
Leaving the Wohls aside again, we proceed to family no. 18. There we have Chaim’s father at last, by his legal name: Sender Schmelke, Tuchhändler (‘draper, cloth seller’), followed by his wife Dwora (Devorah) née Margulis, and a series of children and servants, with their movements out of the entry – into marriage, independence, or death – noted, though Sender’s own death is omitted. Also worthy of note: the address. As with a significant minority of the first round of Evidence files, the Schmelka family’s residence is specified: house no. 192 (but no mention of which of the five quarters of Lemberg – St. (the inner city), or the outer suburbs 1/4, 2/4, 3/4, 4/4 – this number belongs to).
Another unique feature of the first round of Evidence files is that related households are often listed consecutively – father and son, father and daughter, brothers, and so on. As such, note that family no. 17, immediately prior, is that of Moses Margulis, homeowner, residing at house no. 205 St. (i.e., in the inner city) – perhaps a relative of Devorah’s.
Sender Schmelka’s death is recorded in 1820, 66 years of age, at house 204 St., where many of Chaim Schmelkes’s children were born and which Chaim owned by 1831 (Gesher Galicia, citing the Lwów City Franciscan Survey, TsDIAL 20/12/75). Property records (e.g. the 1871 directory for converting old to new home numbers, i.e. modern street addresses) also confirm that 204 St. was adjacent to no. 205 St. (this isn’t necessarily the case for consecutively numbered houses).
Once we are sure that R. Yitzchak Schmelkes’ grandfather, the community leader R. Sender, was surnamed Schmelka, we can find other references to him as such: among the subscribers (prenumerantn) of מנחת יצחק Minhat Yitshak (Zhovkva, 1805), or as a donor to the Austrian Imperial army (?), among other Lemberg Jewish community leaders, in the 9 March 1814 edition of Lemberger Zeitung.
(I later found that some of my points on R. Sender also appear in genealogist Dov Berish Weber’s comments on תולדות מעשה רוקח by Aharon Chaim Hoizman (2001), in the periodical קובץ בית אהרן וישראל Kovets Bet Aharon veYisra’el, iss. 125 pp. 151–2. Some further details on the Schmelkes family, unsourced, possibly from family tradition, appear in an introduction by Shmuel David Levin, R. Yitzchak’s great-grandson, to בית יצחק על התורה Bet Yitshak Al haTorah (Jerusalem, 1986).)
The first discovery: Ela Halberthal
I’m not sure whether Halberthals led me to Schmelkes or vice versa, but for simplicity’s sake, I will pretend that the latter happened.
When I examined Sender’s Family Evidence entry, I noticed, among other things, his daughter Elle, her entry cramped as an afterthought between two other lines. She departs the entry on 27 August 1799, being transferred to no. 1710.
At no. 1710, in turn, we find Elle again: the second entry in that number records (on the above date) the marriage of Beer Halberthal, of Brody, age 14, to Elle Schmelke, of Lemberg, family no. 18. The rest of the entry is clearly incomplete; we can find several children of Berl and Ella (to use another few spellings) Halberthal whose births or deaths are registered with a cross-reference to no. 1710, but do not appear in the entry.
Halberthal seized my attention, as it is one of my ancestral names on my maternal Thumim side. My fourth-great-grandmother, Esther Thumim, was the daughter of R. Yehoshua Yehudah Halberthal, the rabbi of Berestechko (historic Volyn, now Ukraine), who spent much of his time in nearby Brody, within the borders of historic Galicia.
Background on the Halberthals
The Halberthals, like the Halberstams, are but a branch of the older Halberstadt rabbinic family, named for R. Tzvi Hirsh, the Rabbi of Halberstadt, whose descendants used the name of the town as a sort of surname. Descendants of R. Tzvi Hirsh living in Galicia adopted (somewhat inconsistently) the modified forms Halberthal and Halberstam. (See Yosef Kwadrat (@kankanjournal)’s 2014 article, בני האלברשטאם למשפחותם א׳, in Kovets Sha’are Tsiyon, vol. 42, pp. 75–92. The fact that this paragraph resembles the brief Wikipedia article is not an accident, by the way.)
R. Yehoshua Yehudah, R. Tzvi Hirsh’s great-grandson, appears to be the ancestor of all that took the Halberthal form. So who is Ber?
First, let us return to the original sources. The first to describe the Halberthal branch at all that I am aware of is my fourth-great-uncle R. Moshe Thumim (son of Esther), rabbi of Horodenka, in the genealogical introduction to his דבר משה Devar Moshe (Lviv, 1864). He says – and I paraphrase – that his maternal grandfather, R. Yehoshua Yehudah, the rabbi of Berestechko, had four sons: R. Berish, the rabbi of Łańcut, R. Moshe Chaim, the rabbi of Khorostkiv, R. Zev Volf Halberthal of Rzeszów, and R. Yosef Halberthal of Tysmenytsia. There were also two daughters: the [second, see my previous discussion] wife of R. Enzel Zausmer, the rabbi of Stryy, and the wife of R. Mordechai Tzvi Horowitz, the rabbi of Horokhiv. (The lack of female detail is in the original.)
He later returns to R. Yehoshua Yehudah’s wife’s line, saying that her father was R. Chaim Margulies of Lvov (whom he refers to as הרב הג׳, which in this context seems to stand for הרב הגביר, ‘the wealthy rabbi’, with ‘rabbi’ being more of an honorific here), son of R. Elyakim Getzel, the rabbi of Raków (ראקווע Rakve in the original; I presume this is the best-known of the towns by that name, that near Apta – Opatów, Poland).
The second early source on the Halberthal family is a publisher’s genealogical introduction to R. David Twerski, the Rebbe of Tolne’s מגן דוד Magen David (Lviv, 1880). The publisher, Yosef Halberthal, son of the above-mentioned Zev Volf Halberthal of Rzeszów, adds little to the older family tree – other than giving us the names of the women in the family: Rivka, R. Yehoshua Yehudah’s wife; Esther Thumim, Chaya Sarah Zausmer, and so on. (He is also the first to record the dubious fact that R. Elyakim Getzel of Raków was the son of R. Tzvi Hirsh Ashkenazi, author of חכם צבי Hakham Tsvi.)
He also tells us more about the families of his mother, Zev Volf’s wife, as well as that of Yosef Halberthal of Tysmenytsia’s wife. That leaves two of our mutual (great-…-)uncles, Berish of Łańcut and Moshe Chaim of Khorostkiv, whose wives’ families we know nothing about.
Berish Halberthal – of Lviv and Łańcut
By now, you see where I’ve been going with this. I propose (well, proposed – I thought of this 10 years ago) that R. Berish Halberthal of Łańcut – who is known to have lived in Lviv for some time, as shown by Kwadrat, cited above – is the same who married Ela, Sender Schmelka’s daughter.
As it happens (and I missed this at first; I don’t remember who pointed this out to me), one of the sources Kwadrat cites is the 1814 חידושי ש״ס Hidushe Shas, whose Lviv and Brody subscribers identify themselves in detail, among them: Dov Ber/Berish Halberthal in Lviv, son of the rabbi of Berestechko in Brody, and son-in-law of Sender Margulies. (‘Sender Margulies’ himself signs by proxy, on the same page, for the reason of having lost his sight.)
So Sender Schmelka, married to a Margulies according to the Evidence files, seems to have gone by “Sender Margulies” as well. The latter name appears in several Lviv subscription lists of the era, indeed once more, in 1809, as “Berish – son-in-law of R. Sender Margulies – son of the rabbi of Berestechko” (punctuation mine).
Better yet, in יראים Yere’im (Zhovkva, 1804), we have “Sender Shmelka Margulies” (‘ר׳ סענדר שמעלקא מרגליות’) – or as we would render it, Sender Schmelka-Margulies. (This latter point has been noticed by Weber, cited above, but he does not make the connection to R. Berish Halberthal.)
So there we have it. A rehashing of my old discovery, that (my maternal fifth-great-uncle) R. Berish Halberthal was married to Ella née Schmelka, daughter of (my paternal seventh-great-uncle) R. Sender Schmelka(-Margulies), a leader of the Jewish community in Lviv.
(As ever, my thanks to my friends at Ivelt for their magnificent prenumerantn thread, and in particular to the arch-curator, טייבעלע Taybele.)
And old hunch
Now to my more recent discoveries.
I’ve been curious about Sender’s wife, Devorah née Margulis, ever since I saw her name. (Incidentally, she died 28 August 1826, age 62, per vital records of Lviv on Gesher Galicia, citing TsDIAL/701/1/109, p. 47, no. 79. The full date is from the Evidence file; I haven’t checked the death record proper.)
Margulies, Margolis, Margulis, however you spell it, is a classic rabbinic name – though it hasn’t been shown conclusively that all Margulieses are related. Sender himself is tied to two Margulies families: the Rokachs were previously called Margulies, and as I’ve demonstrated, his son-in-law Berish Halberthal’s mother was a Margulies as well – from Lviv, no less. Rabbinic (and associated) families tending to intermarry, it would not be surprising if Devorah was related to either her husband or to her son-in-law’s mother.
Furthermore, one of Sender’s sons (who is not attested elsewhere, so I assume he died young) was Getzel, who in 1804 left Lviv for Kolomea, presumably to marry. The name Getzel, plus Margulies… was Devorah related to Chaim Margulies, son of Getzel of Raków? If yes, she ought to have been his daughter, as Chaim appears to have been the only member of that Margulis family in Lviv, and she belongs, roughly, to his daughter Rivkah Halberthal’s generation.
Also, note Sender’s son’s name: Chaim Shmuel Shmelka. Shmuel Shmelka is Sender’s father’s name – R. Shmuel Shmelka Rokach, the Tailors’ Rabbi of Brody. In Lviv especially, a child named after one parent’s parent (say, his paternal grandfather) in combination with another name is almost certainly named after the other parent’s parent (the maternal grandfather, in this case). Another naming practice, this one more specific to Lviv: the maternal name precedes the paternal one. This suggests that “Chaim Shmuel Shmelka” be analyzed as Chaim (maternal) + Shmuel Shmelka (paternal), again suggesting that Chaim + Margulis (from Devorah’s maiden name) is Devorah’s father’s name.
But that was it. Just a hunch, nothing more – and so it would remain forever because the pre-vital-record barrier is insurmountable, is it not? Even the oldest stand-ins, the Evidence files, date only to 1795; I cannot pass.
Or so I thought for about ten years, at any rate.
Luck of the rich
In recent years, Gesher Galicia began to upload to their database the Josephine and Franciscan surveys of Galicia, property surveys ordered by Emperors Joseph II (in 1785) and Francis I (in 1817), respectively. These list property owners of each land parcel, with house numbers where they applied. In many towns, the surviving property records are far older than the oldest Jewish vital records – though they only cover property owners, the relatively wealthy.
Even more fortunately, for some towns, the surveys predate the Jewish surname law of 1787, or at the very least its full implementation, which could lag for a while. Thus, if you compare the owners of the same parcel of land before and after surnames were imposed, you can match a surname to a pre-surname epithet – often a patronymic, giving the father’s name, or sometimes hinting at a place of origin (e.g. ‘Samborski’ “from Sambir”).
So, I revisited the Schmelka and Margulies families of Lviv and searched for them in the Josephine Survey (which, due to its date, is the one that interests me). For the Schmelka family, I have nothing; the only Schmelkes (spelled in the Polish style, Szmelkies) in the Lviv Josephine survey is a Leyzer, in the 1787 survey of the Krakow (2/4) suburb/quarter, who probably belongs to the other unrelated Schmelka/Schmelkes family of Lviv (more on them another time, perhaps). Sender would have been in his twenties then; maybe he didn’t own property yet.
We should expect the wealthy Sender to have inherited property in Lviv from his similarly wealthy father-in-law who resided there. As all the addresses associated with Sender’s family are in the inner city of Lviv, we should focus there. House no. 204 is a particularly fine candidate, as Chaim Shmuel Shmelka Schmelkes owned it eventually.
Alas, no promising results turn up.
How about searching by house number and tracing the owners backwards? The match-the-owner trick clearly does not work in Lviv at all. By checking several names I can recognize in the pre-surname era, it is clear that house numbers must have been changed sometime between the 1787–8 Josephine surveys Lviv’s five quarters and the implementation of the new system of numbers. The newer system is that familiar to genealogists, especially Gesher Galicia users; it was in use already by the time the Evidence books were compiled (1795) and remained in use until modern street addresses were introduced in 1871. (These, at least, are stable.)
There is no conversion formula between the two. (There is, I know now, a laborious way to work out the correspondence between them: the full surveys (available to Gesher Galicia members) describe the layout of the houses street-by-street, and these can be matched with later address books.)
A key in two parts
Here came the help of a genealogical collaborator (who I believe wishes to remain anonymous) who shares with me an interest in early Lviv. They gave me access to their images of various property records at the Lviv archives.
A few of these are a series of property lists, or to be more specific, a series of homeowners’ lists, arranged by house number (whose actual function is as an index to property records of the Tabula Registers, but that is irrelevant). These turn out to be a goldmine of information – if you are lucky enough to have property-owning ancestors, of course – but the realization only came in two phases.
Firstly, their age needs to be established. Without getting into too much detail, by comparison with other documents written in the same hand by (presumably) the same official and the transitional Polish-German spelling, as well as from the dates that appear in marginal comments, I think they date to roughly 1790 – after surname laws, but before the Evidence Books.
In my initial joy of finding another set of property records, I ascertained that these do correspond exactly to the later system of house numbers (along with several other columns of numbers I ignored). All that remained was to look up the numbers!
And it really was that simple. While many houses in the Jewish neighbourhood (once the ghetto) of the inner city of Lviv had complex shared ownership arrangements, number 204 has a sole owner: Chaim Margules, exactly has hypothesized.
This, of course, is not enough to prove that this is our Chaim Margulies, son of R. Getzel of Raków, but bear with me.
A little later, as part of another project, I began to match up 19th-century house numbers of Lviv with those of the Josephine surveys, and it dawned on me – the numbers, where I could match them, correspond to those in one of the other columns in the same 1790ish homeowner list. In hindsight, this was obvious: the columns bear the Latin legend numerus domus antiquus and numerus domus novus (‘old house number’ and ‘new house number’ respectively) – but in fairness to myself, the column labels are missing from most pages.
Thus we have a key between the new house numbers and the old (for some quarters of the city, at least – I’ve seen for three of the five), which makes identifying houses in the 1787–8 surveys possible.
So, who owned house no. 204 St. when it was still no. 192?
(No. 192? Where have I seen that before? Wouldn’t you know it, that’s Sender’s address in the Evidence Books – it looks like not everyone was using the new numbers consistently by 1795!)
For this, we have to consult the originals available via Gesher Galicia’s Member Portal (sorry, I can’t show these either, due to the terms and conditions of use). There, on scan pb170116, lot no. 96, house no. 192, we read Haym Geclowicz – Chaim, son of Getzel.
(The searchable index on Gesher Galicia’s publicly accessible database has Gulowicz “son of *Gul” due to a transcription error.)
So… the house of Sender Schmelke and Devorah Schmelka née Margulis had belonged to Chaim Margules, who was called “Chaim son of Getzel” before surnames. Without much doubt, this is the same Chaim son of Getzel Margules of Lviv whose daughter Rivkah married R. Yehoshua Yehudah Halberthal, and thus Ela, Sender and Devorah’s daughter, married Berish Halberthal, Rivkah’s son, and thus her first cousin, on both their mothers’ sides.
Q.E.D.
(I can also show that Sender acquired the house at the same time as Yitzchak, Yehoshua, and Moshe Margules, suggesting acquisition by inheritance, but that’s for another time. Another unresolved issue: Weber, cited above, argues that Chaim Shmuel Shmelka Schmelkes must have been a descendant of R. David haLevi (author of Ture Zahav or simply Taz) on his mother’s side – but we know little about Chaim Margulis and nothing about his wife, so the path of descent remains an open question.)
P.S. I made sure to mark the day of my ultimate realization with a Twitter thread, q.v.:
I'm not sure who cares, but today is the day I'm finally confident of my long-held suspicion that Devorah Schmelka of Lviv, wife of Sender Schmelka and ancestor of the Schmelkes rabbinic family (best known is her grandson R. Yitzchak of Lviv)… …
Birth record of Rachel Dinah Jeruchem née Goldberg (citation in text below)
A short post for a recent discovery – and a very timely discovery too!
Yesterday, the second day of Rosh Hashanah, was the yahrtzeit of my great-great-grandmother (on my maternal grandfather’s side) Rachel Dinah Jeruchem, marking 84 years since her passing. Her life and death are described in loving detail by her son Aharon (‘Ahr’tshe’), in his lengthy introduction to his edition (entitled ברכת חיים Birkat Hayim, New York, 1956) of the remnants of the rabbinic writings of her husband, his father, Rabbi Chaim Yitzchak Jeruchem, known as the “Altshteter Rov”, the rabbi of Staryi Sambir (now Ukraine).
I am neither capable nor willing to write a full biography; suffice it to say that R. Chaim Yitzchak and Rachel Dinah settled in Vienna during the evacuation of Galician Jews from near the front of battle in World War One. There they remained until Rachel Dinah’s death, on Monday night, the second night of Rosh Hashanah as mentioned, Hebrew year 5698 (i.e. 6 September 1937). Tuesday night, at the close of Rosh Hashanah (if I understand Uncle Ahr’tshe correctly), her body was transported from Vienna to Limanowa, her hometown, to be buried near her father, Rabbi Nathan Goldberg, who had been the rabbi of the town. R. Chaim Yitzchak remained in Vienna until he was deported to Poland, and he would eventually die in the Sambor Ghetto in 1942. (See עלים בוכים Alim Bokhim in Birkat Hayim above, pp. 16–18.)
I believe a picture of Rachel Dinah exists and was published in the booklet Ahr’tshe Jeruchem published in her memory, Die Mutter in Israel (Zurich, 1938; Hebrew title האם בישראל), which I do not have access to now.
The records of Limanowa
Now, as a genealogist with a preference for facts documented in records, family in Limanowa is frustrating. Little remains of Limanowa records. By 1877, per Gesher Galicia’s Galician Town Locator (which does more than the name suggests), Limanowa was the place of registration of its own records and those of the entire district, and yet Miriam Weiner’s Routes to Roots Foundation database has no vital records for Limanowa at all.
The (lucky) catch here is that, until 1877 (when the administrative map of Galicia was redrawn), Limanowa Jewish records seem to have been registered in Nowy Sącz, known in Yiddish as סאנז Sanz or צאנז Tsanz. Birth records for Nowy Sącz survive from 1854, and the description of the volume of birth records for 1854 through 1877 (as it appears on the Szukaj w Archiwach site of the Polish National Archives, signature 31/494/0/2/135, where scans of it are available) claims that it contains the birth records of “Nowy Sącz, Grybów, Ciężkowice, Bobowa, Czarny Dunajec, Krościenko, Limanowa, Krynica, Skrzydlna”.
Yet despite being aware of this for a while, I never found records of the Goldberg family in the volume of Nowy Sącz births. Scanning the left column for the towns of birth – mostly Nowy Sącz, with names of nearby villages scattered throughout – no Limanowa births are listed that I could see.
A helpful friend
This brings us to the present. Just last week, a friend who goes by the screen name הרב מגאליציען HaRav miGalitzien on Ivelt forums pointed out to me that the Nowy Sącz birth metrical book does, in fact, contain Limanowa births. These include my ancestral Goldbergs (and even my great-great-grandmother Rachel Dinah) – only not among the Nowy Sącz registrations! The towns listed above each have their own sections in the book: Limanowa births (only 1860–1871) are in their own section, pp. 801–806 in the original (scans 141–144).
The Goldbergs et al. born in Limanowa
Without further ado, here is my report on the children and grandchildren of R. Nathan Goldberg and his wife Riva Malka née Perlman who appear in the birth records of Limanowa, 1860 through 1871.
For R. Nathan and Riva Malka, we have as follows. (Her name is variously rendered as Riwe, Rifke[!], or Malke, his, as Natan or Nathan)
Simche, born 1 May 1859, registered sometime in 1863 (no. 42) – has known issue, including the Levite Teitelbaum family (who took the name of a maternal ancestor of theirs at some point).
Schulim, born 12 June 1862 (no. 22), otherwise unknown, presumably died in childhood.
Zipora, born 19 July 1863 (no. 44), otherwise unknown, presumably died in childhood.
Ruchel Diene, born 9 December 1864 (no. 16) – the subject of this post. Oddly, her son Aharon (Alim Bokhim, ibid., p. 13) records her date of birth as 3 Kislev 5625, which works out to the Gregorian date 2 December 1865, a week earlier than the metrical book would have it. I am not sure what to make of the discrepancy. [Updated the same day to add: It appears that 2 December 1865 can be found as her legal date of birth as well – in the Vienna Population Card database on FamilySearch, that is. On the other hand, the same collection gives multiple differing dates for her husband’s birth, so its utility is limited; even Rachel’s date of birth is given, in once instance, as August 1864!]
For R. Nathan’s daughter Leah and her husband Avraham Margiel (or Margel), we have:
Lasar, born 30 January 1868, not attested elsewhere to my limited knowledge
Jachet, born 3 June 1869, likewise
For R. Nathan’s mostly forgotten son Yitzchak (Isaac) and his wife Yocheved (Jachwet), we have the birth of their only known son, orphaned at a young age and raised by his grandparents (according to family tradition as per my maternal grandfather):
Chananje (Chanaya), born 26 June 1865 (no. 5). He married Dinah Rubin, daughter of Rabbi Alter Elimelech Rubin of Sokołów Małopolski (of the Ropshitz dynasty) – my fifth-great-uncle on my father’s side, coincidentally. My research into Chananya’s (surprising) surviving family needs to be written up properly, but for now, see my Twitter thread on the subject – with discoveries occurring in the thread!
Anyway, if you recognize this man (d. 2012) or his wife (possibly alive?) please let me know; I am a grandson of their second cousin, who somehow never knew that he survived the Holocaust. pic.twitter.com/Gq9cQW499J
The signatures of Rosa Epstein over the years. See below for context (Left: cited in text; Right: cited in Part 1, marriage of Bernard, via metryki.genealodzy.pl)
Time to reawaken the blog, if only briefly for now!
I’ve been busy with clients* and with longer-term personal genealogical projects (some of which integrated neatly with research for clients), most involving my favourite set of records – the Family Evidence Books of my ancestral Lviv (Lwów, Lemberg), so I’ve put my macro-blogging on unofficial hiatus. The micro-blogging continues apace.
* I ought to have made it clearer on the blog or my contact page that I take clients, yes?
This is not to say that I haven’t been working on my personal genealogy, much of it blog-worthy material (a new Horowitz third-great-uncle! I hope to get to him soon); I haven’t even abandoned my research of the Rubin family, the external frame of the Epstein series and the immediate cause of my starting this blog.
What calls for an immediate update, however, is a crossover between the Lviv Family Evidence filesand the Epstein family andTomaszów Lubelski records (another ingredient in starting the blog) that led me to two new children of Zimel, the Epstein family patriarch. Both children have traceable families on online trees, only without knowing their connection to the famed Epstein family of Babruysk and Warsaw.
Genealogy is searching the same thing over and over and hoping for different results
— P.Y. Mund's Genealogy (@PYMundGenealogy) March 16, 2021
Insanity is The Way
Furthermore, in honour of these discoveries, I retraced my older Epstein research and found on JewishGen a newly uploaded 1834 revision list (Russian Empire census-ish thing, to the uninitiated) for Babruysk, including Zimel, his family, and the families of two of his sons. The new information – much of which confirms my own previous theories – is worthy of a post in its own right. It also confirms much of what I speculated in Part A of my piece on R. Yudel Epstein’s children and provides new material for the as-yet-unpublished Part (3)B.
The Lviv Family Evidence Files – a very brief introduction
The Family Evidence Files – Evidenz-Bücher (‘evidence books) in the original German, written when Lviv was Austrian Lemberg – are an underutilized record set for the metropolis of Eastern Galicia. Set down as a series of three-thousand-odd files in 1795, listing every member of every Jewish household with legal residency in the newly Austrian-ruled city, it was expanded to a set of 3,764 files by 1805, old files being recycled as they became available all the while. A perpetual census, if you will (and like many census-like documents, originally an instrument of taxation and oppression, though it long outlived its intended purposes).
Births, marriages, divorces, deaths (at home or abroad), immigrations, emigrations, employment, and conversion – among other things – are recorded with varying degrees of consistency. Though possibly never a completely comprehensive enumeration of Lviv families (but I suspect it came close to it in the 1810s), it complements the vital records of early Lviv available at Gesher Galicia in ways I will tire from (but not of) enumerating. Past around 1840, their use waned, but they remain useful (through the early 1870s) in tracking the comings and goings of foreign-born Lviv residents, who sometimes slip through the cracks of the vital records.
These records have survived almost in their entirety – only two books of 200-entries each (as they were rebound in the 1830s) are apparently missing, comprising entries no. 400–800 – but all the rest are in the Lviv Central State Historical Archives and have been microfilmed by FamilySearch and are available online (though catalogued poorly; I would not have found them without Gesher Galicia’s archive inventory feature). Sadly, the especially information-rich entries 1–366 are on a microfilm roll that some authority at the archives has deemed unworthy of public perusal, and FamilySearch was obligated to withdraw them from remote access. (Edited to add: access to this volume has since been restored, thankfully.)
An Epstein of Warschau in Lemberg
In the later recyclings of the evidence file numbers (written under the old listings on the same pages, or on insert pages when space ran out), one often finds immigrants from outside the Austrian Empire: Lublin, Zamość, or even Warsaw and Minsk.
One such entry jumped out at me a few days ago: the third household registered to file no. 1180. It reads as follows:
Benjamin Epstein of Warschau (Warsaw), registered in Lemberg in 1857; a marginal note adds: died 1862 in Vienna.
According to a note dated 1858, he married Ester/Ernestine Reele (one spelling of the Yiddish name רעלא Rela) née Klärman, age 22, from family no. 1412, with whom he had:
Sara, born 1854
Pauline, born 1856
Anna, born 1858
Ester’s family having its own Lviv evidence file number indicates that she, at least, was a Lviv resident.
Following the cross-references (which I won’t work out in full, for space), one finds that Ester’s parents were Elias Salomon (or as the Hebrew sources have,* אליהו שלמה זלמן Eliyahu Shlomo Zalman) Klärman and his wife, Breindel née Rapoport. The latter was the daughter of Yosef Tzvi Hirsh Rapoport, of a prominent Lviv family, related and intermarried with the famed Mieses family, among others. (One can also find Ester’s own Lviv birth record from 1835.)
* e.g. המבשר Hamwasser, a periodical of Lemberg issued by Joseph Kohn/Kohen-Tzedek, vol. 6, iss. 7 (of 16 February 1866), p. 53.
An Epstein from Warsaw who married into the Lviv elite… that yells ‘Zimel Epstein’ to me. (The other wealthy Epstein family of Warsaw was rather more assimilated at this point and were unlikely to be using ‘Benjamin’ as a name or to marry a Lviv Rapoport, for that matter.) Yet, so far, there is nothing to go on. We only have his date of registry and death. Even his age, usually listed for a new head of household, is omitted.
The births of their children can be matched to the birth records indexed by Gesher Galicia,* but these have nothing to say about the father.
* With the addition of Chana, a twin of Sara’s, who had presumably died by 1858.
On a whim, I searched JRI-Poland’s database broadly, for Epstein + Klarman, with phonetic matches. Behold, a match in Tomaszów Lubelski, of all places: Beniamin Epsztain to Estera Rela Klerman in 1853, marriage akt no. 9 – a name match for a rare name combination!
Checking the original via the Polish Archives’ Szukaj w Archiwach site,* we find it far more informative.
Dated 25 February 1853, it has the following information:
The groom: Beniamin Epsztajn, age 19, born and living in Warsaw, son of Symche and Rajzla
A note corrects the birthplace to Bobrojsk in Minsk Province.
The bride: Estera Rella Klerman, age 17, born and living in Lwów (Lviv) in Galicia in the Austrian Empire, daughter of Zelman and Brandel.
Clearly, the names mostly match, and the groom has Warsaw and Babruysk connections. But what of the name mismatch on the groom’s side? Rajzla matches the name of Zimel Epstein’s second wife, Reizel née Bernstein, who also went by the Polish name Rosalia – and in fact, her signature here has Rosa. But Zimel’s full name was Shimon Zimel, and Simcha is neither.
I suspect that the answer is a simple error: the Yiddish name זימל Zimel traditionally corresponds to either Shimon or Simcha, and the registrar guessed wrongly. In any case, we have a hint at the correct name in the shaky signature of the groom’s father (who, as you may recall, was in the second last year of his life): Z. Epstein. Of course, above all we have evidence in the form of Reizel’s identical signature across marriage records, as highlighted above.
Signature of Zimel Epstein of Warsaw (attribution in text above)
Having seen the marriage record, I can now discern that the evidence book refers to his 25 February 1853 marriage in Tomaszów, but in a note in cramped handwriting that I had not bothered to read.
What of Benjamin’s 1862 death in Vienna? Here JewishGen is useful again: their index of Jewish records of Vienna brings up a potential match, which can be seen in full at FamilySearch:*
*From the records of the Vienna IKG (Jewish community), deaths vol. C., 1862, no. 1738.
Benjamin Epstein, merchant of Warsaw, married, age 27, died 1 June 1862. His cause of death is Gehirn- und Rückenmarks- Erschütterung* (‘brain and spine concussion’ in modern German) and is being investigated by the Sanitätspolizei – sanitation police? – which is also what appears in his death notice in Die Neuzeit of 13 June of that year, p. 287.
Benjamin’s presence in Vienna is easily explained by his business affairs: he was a business partner of his brother-in-law Samuel Klärmann, whose business dealings in Vienna are regularly mentioned in the newspapers of the time.*
* Sorry, too exhausted to cite the various Viennese newspapers in full. Consider it an exercise for the reader.
I could trace the further progeny of Benjamin’s orphaned daughters in the Lviv records… but I need not bother, as a team of contributors on Geni, devoted to Jewish families of Vienna, has already done all the work. They’ve even found Ernestine’s second marriage and her death in Vienna – all done except for identifying Benjamin’s parentage. (I will eventually fix the omission there.)
Tomaszów again
Inspired by my success at expanding Zimel’s family, I decided to try my luck. You see, marriages between Galician and Russian-Polish Jewish families taking place in Tomaszów Lubelski is a thing I’ve seen before. I’m still not sure why it happened, but many of the wealthiest families of Galicia and Congress Poland – those most likely to seek a spouse for their son or daughter at a distance – make an appearance in Tomaszów.
There is, indeed, another Epstein marriage there. The index at JRI-Poland has an 1858 marriage (akt no. 7) between Masza Epsztejn and Joel Halpern. Halpern – there’s a lightbulb moment for me. Halpern, usually a rabbinic surname; the combination Joel Halpern is associated with a large branch in Galicia; Epstein + Halpern = a marriage between elite families for sure.
The groom: Joel Halpern, age 20, born and living in Stanisławów, Galicia, in the Austrian Empire, son of Abraham and Nechama (daughter of Enzel)
The bride: Mina Epsztejn, age 21, living in Warsaw, daughter of Zynel [sic], deceased, and Rojzja née Bernsztejn.
The bride is clearly ‘our’ Zimel’s daughter, also from his second wife. (Note the indexing error in the bride’s name; the original has Mina throughout.)
But who is the groom?
As a rabbinic genealogist, my first step this time isn’t JRI-Poland; instead, some memory-jogging is in order, as these names sound familiar. Enzel is quite a rare name, a kinuy (Yiddish counterpart, roughly) to Asher. There is a famous individual named Asher Enzel associated with Stanisławów: the rabbi of Stryj (d. 1858), in full Rabbi Yekusiel Asher Zalman Enzel (ben Menachem Nachum) Zausmer, often known by his abridged name as used on his work, מהריא״ז ענזיל Mahariaz Enzel. (He was, incidentally, my fifth-great-uncle in his second marriage, but that’s for another time.) In his later years, R. Enzel of Stryj lived in Stanisławów, near his daughter and son-in-law (who published his work): Nechama and Avraham Heilprin, a name often pronounced and spelled Halpern. Avraham and Nechama’s children are discussed in several genealogical works,* and in our times, an impressive tree has been assembled on Geni, from the classic reference works augmented with data from JRI-Poland and other genealogy databases. I will not endeavour to fact-check every detail; suffice it to say that the broad strokes are clearly correct. (There are some dreadful errors in other branches of R. Enzel’s tree, some of which I’ve attempted to fix as of the time of writing, due to a merge between his father and a grandson of the same name, but these do not affect the Halpern branch.)
* See “ימי כהונתי בסטניסלאב” (‘My tenure in Stanisławów’) by Mordechai Zev (Markus) Braude in ערים ואמהות בישראל Arim veImahot beYisrael vol. 5: Stanisławów (Jerusalem, 1952, ed. Dov Sadan and Menahem Gelehrter), p. 98; Shmuel Zanvil Kahane in ענף עץ עבות Anaf Ets Avotp. II §18; cf. JRI-Poland records for Abraham and Nechama Halpern in Stanisławów.
We do find Joel Halpern married to Mina née Epstein in Stanisławów, where they had several children and appear to have lived until his death in 1889. The contributors at Geni have found documentation of Mina’s death in Vienna, where the family seems to have resettled. Her parentage given there is that which the birth record of her son Benzin Beno in Stanisławów* has, “Simon and Reisel Epstein from Russia”, but no indication which Simon Epstein. But now, thanks to the marriage record, we know.
* AGAD signature 300/1221 p. 43 akt no. 407, found via JRI-Poland
Mina’s age is problematic, as the marriage record, if taken at its word, places her birth sometime between June 1836 and June 1837, which is impossible: her brother Mordechai Tzvi, who died in infancy, was born in December of 1836. The Vienna death index on JewishGen (24 September 1913) omits her age; the burial index, also there, has 70, no doubt rounded down.
As an aside, it is unsurprising to find that both of Zimel Epstein’s ‘new’ in-laws are connected to each other by ties of marriage. By the Lviv Family Evidence files (nos. 194 & 990, compare marriage records at Gesher Galicia) it can be shown that Ernestine Epstein-Nirenstein née Klärman’s maternal uncle, Abraham Rapoport, married Tauba Halpern, Joel Halpern’s paternal aunt.
A new revision list
Followers of the series are already familiar with revision lists: census-like documents drawn up every few years by the Russian Empire for purposes of taxation and the military draft. For my Epstein family research, the earliest revision list I had for Yudel Epstein himself was the 1850 revision list for Babruysk. His father does not appear there; he had apparently already established his legal residency in Warsaw, or perhaps his status as a Hereditary Honoured Citizen (a rank which exempted oneself and one’s children from the revision lists) had already been recognized. (Yudel is entered, with a note acknowledging his exemption due to Hereditary Honoured Citizen status added.)
The revision list immediately prior, from 1834, ought to have had the Epstein family and ought to have survived for Babruysk, but as it hadn’t been transcribed yet, I could do nothing but wait.
The wait is over now. At some time in the intervening months, JewishGen uploaded the 1834 revision list for Babruysk, including Zimel Epstein, his own unmarried children as of then, and his eldest sons Yudel and David and their families.*
* Bobruysk revision list of merchants, dated 12 June 1834, signature NHABMinsk/333/9/1070, p. 48, no. 1, as reproduced at JewishGen’s Belarus Revision List database.
There is much to say about the interpretation of this document, but little of it is for now; I present it below, reorganized in logical order and lightly paraphrased, with only brief comments. (The age at the previous revision is not recorded for any of them, only the occasional comment ‘newborn’, i.e. born since the previous revision list, is written for some, which I omit here.)
Zimel Epshteyn, son of Mikhel, aged 53 [registration transferred from Glusk in 1823]
Yudel, son of Zimel from his first marriage, aged 36 [from Glusk]
= Zelda, Yudel’s wife, aged 36
Khayka, daughter of Yudel, aged 17
Mirim, daughter of Yudel, aged 12
Khasya, daughter of Yudel, aged 9
Afroim, son of Yudel, aged 7
Khovva [Chava], daughter of Yudel, aged 5
Pesya, daughter of Yudel, aged 2
David, son of Zimel [marriage not specified, from first by age order], aged 32 [from Glusk]
Shlioma, son of David from [David’s] first marriage, aged 12
Yankel, son of David from [David’s] first marriage, aged 10
Aoin (?), son of David from [David’s] first marriage, aged 7
= Malka, David’s [second – but see below] wife, aged 23
Movsha [Moshe], son of David from [David’s] second marriage, aged 4
Itka, daughter of Zimel [marriage not specified], aged 22
= Reyza, Zimel’s [second] wife, aged 34
Bentsiyan [Bentzion], son of Zimel from his second marriage, aged 8
Pinkhus, son of Zimel from his second marriage, aged 6
Merka, daughter of Zimel [marriage not specified, from second by age order], aged 4
Beniamin, son of Zimel from his second marriage, aged 1
I will make use of this to update my table of Zimel’s descendants in Part 1 and my chart of Yudel’s children in Part 3A, as well as to expand on the still unfinished Part 3B, but for now, here are my disconnected thoughts:
Zimel’s age works out to a date of birth around 1781, about halfway between my two prior estimates (1783, 1778)
Reizel/Rozalia’s age (= b. ca. 1800) is reasonably consistent with my previous estimate (ca. 1801)
His children from his first marriage’s ages and age order are mostly in keeping with my previous estimates. The exception is Itka/Itta, whose date of birth I estimated at 1819, but this revision list would have it at ca. 1812 (though this is closer to the youngest age reported for her – 30 in 1847, i.e. born ca. 1817). As Itta Ettinger could not have married before 1836 – when her husband’s first wife died – I am confident that she and Itka are identical, despite the discrepancy.
The children from Zimel’s second marriage are in their correct age order – Bentzion, Pinchas, and Benjamin whom we’ve just discovered – and their ages correspond roughly. Oddly absent is Basha/Barabara, subject of Appendix A, whose date of birth I estimated at 1824 – though in truth, the estimate was a wide range: 1824–1831. Perhaps Merka – who is new to me – is an error for Basha? Mina, covered above, would have been too young to make it into this revision list.
The list of Yudel’s children is deeply satisfying to me, as it matches the age order and names I predicted. For now, note that Yudel’s children’s ages appear to be overestimated by 1–2 years consistently. The youngest daughter as of 1834, Pesya, is, of course, the memoirist Pauline Wengeroff.
David’s children of his ‘first’ and ‘second’ wives are, as discussed in Part 1, the children of his second and third wives respectively; his only known son from his first wife is not present in this revision list, so there would have been no need to mention her. Two of three children from his second (‘first’) wife (Bassheva née Mintz, not named in the revision list) are known to us from the previous post: Shlomo and Yaakov [Michel], and a third whose name (‘Aoin’) must be a transcription error. The age given for Shlomo especially makes the received date for David’s first wife’s death – 1829 – even more problematic (see the problems raised in Part 1). Perhaps I should already have noticed that his age at marriage, which places his birth in 1824 (per a Geni contributor’s research), presents the same problem. Moshe, David’s son by his third (‘second’) wife, is the same whose death we find in Warsaw, as described in Part 1.
Excuse me for a while, as I pause to catch up with the other side of genealogy – that which is, shall we say, not as purely motivated by sheer curiosity.
(Jokes aside, I greatly appreciate my clientele!)
Who knows? Maybe something I find along the way will make it here some day.
Meanwhile, I bless my fortune that few of my ancestors lived in small-town Eastern Galicia, as I learn just how poorly the state of surviving records there is – for two consecutive clients!
As I see there is much interest about my findings in the broader Lehman family, I’ve gone ahead and assembled a rudimentary unified tree of the Levi/Lehman/Silberman family on Geni.com, without getting into proofs and details, just to give you a feel for it. I hope to eventually write an article explaining it, but now is not the time. It is based on the Lehman family traditions as given to me in a file compiled by Shoshana Weinberg, as integrated with my research into the family.
My thanks again to the Weinberg family for giving me a picture of R. Dov Aryeh, and allowing me to publicize it (see his Geni profile).
A Brandwein relative tells me that a picture of my/your uncle R. (Yitzchak) Asher Lehman of Kolomea and his children may survive in one branch of our family; I await eagerly the results of his attempts to track it down.
P. Y. Mund's Genealogy Blog 
