Sunday, October 23, 2022

Westernized Ancestral Names

My great-great grandfather was Yechiel Suttleman.  He did come to the United States, although his first two wives did not (as they had died in Europe).  On official papers in America, he used the name Charles or Charlie.  His first wife, Kreina, never left Europe or used any westernized name, same as wife #2, Chana.  But how do these three people appear on their children's records?

Death Record of Roza Zutelman Paciornik; Curitiba, Brazil; 1945

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

80th Yahrtzeit of Senkevichivka Ghetto's Destruction--Details per my grandmother

Tonight into tomorrow (18th of Tishrei) marks the 80th anniversary of the destruction of the Senkevychivka Ghetto.  On that day, thousands of my paternal grandparents' relatives, friends and neighbors were murdered.  Among those were three of my great grandparents, a great-great grandfather, great aunts and uncles, and many other relatives.  My teenaged grandfather was out of the ghetto on that day on a work detail, but my grandmother was there.  I've transcribed her life story before (you can read her nine-part story here covering her life before and during the Holocaust).  But today I'm going to repeat the chapter about the ghetto's destruction, from her perspective. 

My grandmother is on the right, with her arm on her grandmother's shoulder.  Her younger sister Malia is to the right.  And her parents are in the center.  Her grandmother had died before the war.

Sunday, October 2, 2022

Check and Check Again / Town Searches

It's important to keep up-to-date on record sets that are newly digitized &/or newly indexed that might give clues about your family.  It's why I consistently re-do searches on JewishGen, Ancestry, FamilySearch, and more.  Just recently, a new batch of records was added to JewishGen which helped me to find out more about some branches of my family, and I found it re-doing a search I'd done many times before.  And while I did then search in that record set for some of my family surnames, searching for ancestral towns found even more branches than I would have discovered otherwise.

1930 Czechoslovakian Census; Fried Family; Kosice, Slovakia