The topic for Week 34 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge is “Newest Discovery.” My newest discovery was made two weeks ago, when I had a breakthrough on one of my husband’s family lines. Tracing his family is hard because he’s an Ashkenazi Jewish immigrant. Most records from Eastern Europe were either destroyed or are nearly impossible to find. There’s a language barrier too. I’ve found records for his family in Russian, Polish, Ukrainian, and Yiddish – different languages, different alphabets. To add to the confusion, Ashkenazi Jews had several names, which could be changed and Russified when they applied for documents or were conscripted into military service. Because it’s far more challenging than my own genealogy, it’s also more rewarding and exciting on the rare occasion I do make a discovery.
I think about a year or two ago I found the 1886 Warsaw birth record for Alex’s great grandmother, Sura Jedynak, on the JRI Poland website. Her parents were Efraim Fiszel Jedynak, and Mirla Bergarten, aged 22 (born about 1864). JRI Poland also had a record for Fiszel Jedynak’s 2nd marriage in 1890 to Chana Dabek, and his death record and gravestone from 1901. The only record that mentioned Mirla, besides Sura’s birth record, was her gravestone. Her 1890 gravestone lists her husband as Efraim Fiszel and her father as Yitzhak. Unable to make an immediate connection, I set the information aside, and periodically revisited it.
A couple of weeks ago, I took a deep dive into the Bergartens/Berengartens listed in Warsaw on JRI Poland. My goal was to see how Mirla fit with the other Berengartens in Warsaw. In order to see the big picture, I took the information on JRI Poland and sorted it into family groups. JRI Poland had 69 record listings for Berengarten in Warsaw and 3 for Bergarten (two of which pertained to Mirla). This is how the information is presented on JRI Poland:
I entered the information into an outline, starting with the oldest entries. Compiling and sorting the information in such a way makes it easier to understand. You can immediately see proven family groups, and also spot people who might be either related or potential duplicates. Dates can make it easy to rule people in or out of families. There are some men named Yitzhak (also spelled Icek) that can’t be Mirla’s father because the dates don’t fit.
This outline also makes spotting patterns easier. Ashkenazi Jews have naming traditions, and while they’re not set in stone rules, they often follow a pattern. Names tend to repeat about every other generation. Children are usually named for ancestors, but never for living relatives, so unless a father dies before a child is born or a mother dies in childbirth, children are not named for their parents. They are often named for deceased grandparents, deceased great-grandparents, or deceased aunts and uncles. Because cousins share common ancestors, it’s not unusual to see several cousins named something like “Abram” after a deceased grandfather or “Faiga” after a deceased grandmother. A sudden onset of little “Abrams” in one family over a span of a few years can give us a clue that Grandpa Abram probably died shortly before his first namesake was born.
I examined my outline for dates and naming patterns, and spotted a couple of interesting things right away. Mirla couldn’t be the daughter of the first Yitzhak/Icek on the list, so he was ruled out. He could possibly be her grandfather though. Her father, Yitzhak/Icek (#5 on my list) could be the same Yitzhak/Icek as #3 on the list, married to Rywka-Maryam, daughter of Fiszel. It was my working theory that Mirla was their child. I also noticed a man named Fiszel Bergarten (#6) and suspected he was Mirla’s brother. A few months after our Mirla’s death, he had a daughter and named her Mirla. This fit within Ashkenazi naming customs. Fiszel’s estimated birth year (based off his age in his children’s birth records) fits into the family of Icek and Rywka-Maryam. Rywka-Maryem’s father was named Fiszel, so if he was named after his deceased grandfather, Fiszel, that also fits within naming patterns. Of course, without further documentation, I couldn’t prove anything.
I decided to revisit the family pictures my father-in-law scanned. Many are unidentified because they are either unlabeled or we can’t figure out how they fit into the family tree. I recalled that a couple said Berengarten on the back. All of the Berengarten pictures were dated 1925-1934, and several were addressed to “Reifish cousins.” Alex’s great-grandmother, Sura (Mirla’s daughter) married a Rajfish/Reifish, so Sura, her husband, and children were the Reifish cousins. There were four Berengartens in the family photos: Icek who was the father and presumably Sura’s first cousin, his unnamed wife, an older son named Natan, and a baby girl named Halina. Again – the naming patterns were promising. Icek was likely named after his and Sura’s shared grandfather, Mirla’s father. Cousin Icek wasn’t on my Warsaw outline, but if I could identify his father, maybe he’d be on the list and point me to the correct father for Mirla.
I decided to search MyHeritage for record or tree matches. Maybe I’d find Icek, Natan, and Halina together. I searched for Natan Berengarten first, as it seemed to be a less common Berengarten name than Icek, plus if he survived the Holocaust, maybe he had a family. The very first hit was a family tree for Natan born in Warsaw with a sister named Halina and a father named Icek, also born in Warsaw. Even better? There were two pictures of Natan. I ran them through the photo tagger tool and they matched my three pictures of Natan. It was the same person!
I took a closer look at the tree. I was particularly interested in the identity of Icek’s father, and hoped the name would match one of the Berengartens on my Warsaw outline. Icek’s father was listed on the tree -- Calel Berengarten. He was the son of Icek and Rywka-Maryam Berengarten, the people I theorized were Mirla’s parents! So Sura (Jedynak) Reifish and Icek Berengarten were cousins. Mirla (Bergarten) Jedynak (Sura’s mother) and Calel Berengarten (Icek’s father) were siblings. Yitzhak/Icek and Rywka-Maryam Berengarten were Mirla and Calel’s parents, and my husband’s 3rd great-grandparents. Although I already had Yitzhak on our tree as Alex’s 3rd great-grandfather, I didn’t have any dates for him, nor did I have his wife’s name. Now I had his approximate birth year, the first name of his wife and her approximate birth and death dates, and a list of their children and grandchildren to add to the tree.
Although the inscriptions written on the back of these pictures don’t meet pure “genealogical standards” for proving familial relationship, I’m okay with that. I will probably never find Mirla’s birth record if it even exists. The circumstantial evidence is strong enough for me to feel comfortable adding these family members to the tree. I was unable to connect Fiszel with the daughter named Mirla to this family, but I still think he’s our Mirla’s brother.
Genealogy isn’t done in a vacuum. Collaboration is key. That’s my biggest takeaway from this experience. My father-in-law kept these pictures, even though he didn’t know who the Berengartens were. If he hadn’t, I wouldn’t have made the connection. If the tree owner hadn’t shared his tree and pictures of Natan, I also never would have made the connection. So many genealogists choose to hoard their information like miserly, treasure-guarding dragons out of some weird Tolkien novel. Your tree belongs to everyone related to you because it’s their family history too. If we all share the resources we have and the research we’ve done, imagine the brick walls we could smash down! This guy shared, allowing me to make a connection. In turn he’s benefiting because I’ve reached out to share our pictures with him. He has later pictures of Icek and his wife, pictures of Natan (who died in the Holocaust) as a young man, but not as a boy, and many pictures of his direct ancestor, Halina, but no pictures of her as a baby. He doesn’t have a picture of the four of them together, but I can give that to him. How amazing is that? For decades these family pictures sat in a box –first in Poland, then moved to several locations in Russia, and finally made their way to America. They were names and faces that didn’t fit anywhere, but now they do. Maybe this man or one of his family members has a similar box of photos of unknown people from Warsaw with names like “Jedynak” and “Reifish” written on the back that are waiting to find their home on our family tree.
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