In January, I wrote about my 5th great grandmother, Chava Lefand, and the lengths to which she tried to keep her sons from being conscripted into the Russian Empire's military. (You can see that here.) Well, this past week I got another file related to Chava, and it shows once again that she was a very persistent woman, bringing her concerns to the highest levels of government.
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| Chava Lefand generated lots of paperwork! |
Sometimes you just can't find someone in the US census, even if you're sure they're there. Sometimes they were just missed (I believe this to be the case for my 1-year-old grandfather and his parents in 1920). But sometimes there's a transcription or other issue, and they're there. Here's how I was able to locate a relative who I knew HAD to have been recorded in the 1940 census, but whom I just couldn't find.
Samuel Isadore LaFond (yes, they used that spelling) was my third cousin three times removed. He was born in Detroit to Louis and Bessie LaFond and was their only child for whom I have found a record. Bessie died when Sam was very young.
I have Louis and Sam living in Detroit in the 1930 census. I have Sam registering for the draft in 1942, also in Detroit. But I simply could not find the two of them in the 1940 census, even using all sorts of wildcards to try to find LaFonds.
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| Samuel Isadore LaFond WWII Draft Registration, 1942; Ancestry.com |
My third great grandfather had a brother named Meir Leib Lefand. I have Meir Leib's 1862 birth record and his 1883 marriage record. But then he disappeared from records. I couldn't find birth records for any children, I didn't see any death records for Meir Leib or his wife, and they didn't seem to have emigrated. So what happened to them?
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| Marriage of Meir Leib & Sheina Freida Lefand; Nezhin, Russian Empire; July 5, 1883 |
I've mentioned how I got various cases relating to my family from the Chernigov Archives, thanks to J-Roots tipping me off to their existence. I just finished getting the largest case (nearly 100 pages) translated, and it reveals a tale of betrayal, ancestors being arrested, relatives illegally traveling to far-away districts to hide from the draft, and an ancestor of mine who was set on protecting her remaining children, whatever it took.
Life for Jews in the Russian Empire under Czar Nicholas I was very difficult. There were many difficult edicts that impacted where they could live, what professions they could enter, and how much they were taxed. One of the most hated edicts was the mandatory military service that took Jewish boys from their families, with the ultimate intent of converting them to Christianity. Jewish boys were taken as young as aged 12 (and sometimes younger, illegally) and conscripted to military institutions until the age of 18, at which they were mandated to enter the regular army for a 25-year term--which started at that point, meaning that if they survived, they were serving until the age of 43. These boys were called Cantonists, after those military institutions. Each Jewish community had a quota to meet, and everyone knew that once a boy was taken, he'd likely never be seen by his family again. There are lots of stories of what families would do to try to protect their sons. (You can read more about this era here.) In a document I've recently had translated, I've learned part of my own family's story.
And I've learned that you should not mess with my 5th great grandmother.
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| One page of correspondence |
Finding names and dates are great and are the foundation of genealogical research. But I love finding documents that tell the stories and show that my family actually interacted with those documents. So how excited do you think I was to find my 5th great grandfather's signature?
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| Meir Lefand's Signature |
I started writing this just this past Thursday, based on a trail I latched onto the previous day. When I started, I expected to write about a huge mystery behind how a branch of my solidly Russian Empire family ended up in Hungary. Just a few days later, I've likely figured out why they emigrated to Budapest--and I've discovered that I'm distant cousins with a Grammy Award-winning cellist and a performer who was on New Year's Rocking Eve (but of course I only found that connection the next morning when it was too late to watch it, but I did watch on YouTube). I have not discovered why that musical talent did not make it into my DNA.
This is another tale of why you need to use multiple sources to fully flesh out a family. Keep track of how many different resources I use in figuring out these connections.
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| A Marriage Record With A Mistake - Keep Reading to Find Out More! |
People often want to know which genealogy company's database they should subscribe to in order to best research their family. There's no one right answer; while some records are common across multiple platforms, some are only on one. And sometimes the answers can be scattered across different platforms. Here's a puzzle I solved this long weekend, and the resources used.
Women often disappear into the genealogical ether upon their marriage. Name changes wreak havoc on building back families. But sometimes records can help reconnect them and their descendants to their families. And there are some great online resources that might be able to help with that. No one resource is necessarily the best--sometimes you get a tip-off from one but need to use lots of different sites to find all of the pieces.
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| Chana Lefand, 1850 Revision List, Nezhin |
