Ancestry Magazine

Are there, in the purest sense, "linear," or directly applicable, genealogical benefits from being a reader of history?

Editor’s Note: This article is the first in a three-part series. Read Part 2 and Part 3.

Recently, much has been said about seeing our ancestors as more than individual piles of documents or groupings of bytes on our hard disks. The notion of “family historian,” as opposed to genealogist, has taken hold, and the market now dictates-appropriately-that professionals speak of context as well as content. The real question remains: are there, in the purest sense, “linear,” or directly applicable, genealogical benefits from being a reader of history? Does general and contextual knowledge of history lead to important genealogical discoveries which would otherwise remain secrets?

This is not the same as “fleshing out” the lives of those we re-introduce to the living by combining genealogy with social history, which is also a laudable endeavor. Biographic, cultural, and religious background information is a given for those who wish to do more than create what I call “phone books full of dead people.” After all, you can’t call any of them, so why bother!

Here we attempt to take the premise one step further. Can a genealogical reading of history yield an index of enormous genealogical significance which would otherwise remain unknown? Can knowledge of the process of arranged marriages in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century eastern Europe lead to the discovery of even more ancient ancestral towns? What if the facts have been out there for decades, but only historians have bothered to read them?

My premise here is not necessarily to provide answers to all these questions, but to focus on the reasoning process which uses the knowledge of history to expand the breadth and depth of potential genealogical resources. The questions expand the genealogical repertoire and get us out of a rut or over the stone wall.

Consider the following examples:

The Saga of “Form 51″
Recently, while doing some research on Ellis Island, I chanced upon a photograph of an old document known as Form 51. Actually, it was a postcard used during the years that William Williams was Commissioner of Immigration. Those thought to be related to detainees being held on Ellis Island received the message printed on the card below.

Permit me a brief aside here for the musings of social history: imagine the numbers of times this postcard was crumpled up and tossed away by husbands who thought they had successfully abandoned their families in Europe, only to be surprised by the sudden arrival of wife and children. Consider the number of detainees who lacked the presence of mind or the will to fight the deportation process and were deported because postcards were lost in the mail. (Telephones were not always available and telegrams were used inconsistently.)

Certainly one sees the drama and biographic significance? We know that approximately 10% of Ellis Island arrivals were detained for some period, and ultimately between 1 and 2% of arriving passengers were depo rted. Using the most conservative figures, somewhere between 120,000 and 240,000 individuals were sent back to their ports of embarkation between 1892 and 1924.

It is reasonable to assume that a significant number of immigrants requested that the Bureau of Commerce and Labor Immigration Services attempt to contact their relatives using Form 51. If we consider the combination of both successful and unsuccessful cases of connecting detainees with relatives, we can assume that tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of these cards may have been generated.

Here they mystery deepens and the knowledge of immigration history becomes more important. If these postcards were sent out, then surely evidence of this attempt to reunite relatives must be recorded, but where? I have never seen references to these cards on “Records of Detained Aliens Held for Special Inquiry” (U.S. Department of Labor and Immigration Services, Form 215, or one of its variants), or the type of passenger lists associated with steerage travel during that period (U.S. Department of Labor and Commerce Form 500B). The reference codes on detention documents are well known, thanks to the work of experts such as Marian Smith at the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). But the question remains: what other evidence-besides the form itself-records the use of these postcards?

Surely the need for due diligence (and frankly, the protection of careers) would require that independent records of attempts to reach the relatives of detainees were scrupulously maintained. The official from the Bureau of Immigration would have wanted to prove that his office attempted to reach the suspected relative before deporting the detainee. The only answer can be that, at the very least, a comprehensive index existed showing not only the names of the detainees and the ships which brought them to America, but the name and address of the relative contacted to attempt to free the detainee from Ellis Island.

Th ere are profound implications to such an index. Not only could it have the names of tens of thousands of detainees, but it could have the subpopulation of deportees as well. These would have enormous implications for both genealogists and demographers.

So, where is this list? The answer is, I don’t know. I don’t even know if it still exists. The point is that a focused examination of the history of the immigration process leads us to conclude that the list must have existed at one time, may well still exist, and is something we could be looking for. The rewards of locating such an index would be astounding, and I hope we can all work together to see if it can be found.

The Brothers Twersky
My real family name is Gubernick, shortened by my father to Guber in the 1930s. It is a Yiddish (Judeo-German) word meaning “oat seller.” The name is not all that common, and when I first began my personal genealogical quest many years ago, I kept running into the same brick wall.

My father was born in Talner or Tolnoye in the Oblast province of Kiev in 1912. Of those I met who were able to identify their ancestral towns and who were not among my first and second cousins, I could find no one else who mentioned Talner among the places of family origin in the Ukraine. I heard towns like Trisk, Chernobyl, and Romistrovka in these conversations. Once, I heard a “Gubernick” mention a town named Skvir, which was known to me and was geographically close to Talner, but many of the other places were as far as a hundred kilometers away from my father’s birthplace. I was trying to be the Einstein of my family’s history and create a “unified field theory.” As many of you know, putting together all the pieces of the puzzle in a neat package is often the dream of the novice genealogist. While many of the places I heard mentioned are still mysteries to me, a careful reading of history has shown me what could be an important pattern.

The overwhelming majority of the Jews of the Russian Empire were confined by Czarist decree to an area made up of the Ukraine, parts of what was known as White Russia (now Belarus), as well as Lithuania, Russian Poland, Russian Galicia, and parts of Latvia, Estonia, and Bessarabia. Known as the Pale of Settlement, approximately 95% of the Czar’s Jewish subjects lived within these borders.

The Jews of the central and southern Ukraine, and for that matter most of the Pale, were Chassidim. The Chassidic (roughly translated as “righteous followers”) Jews were the disciples of the Baal Shem Tov (”Master of the Good Name,” and circa 1700-1760), a mystic from Mezheboz, near Talner, who started an anti-elitist rebellion among the poor Jewish masses, and focused on spiritual devotion through joy, piety, and good works. His disciples, known as “rebbes” (teachers), became the nineteenth-century leaders of Ukrainian and Polish Jewry. The overwhelming majority of American Jews are descendants of these Chassidim.

Chassidic houses of worship were called shtiblach (”little rooms”), and the rebbes of these communities essentially owned these synagogues were followers gathered for prayer and study. This is in contrast to the standard practice of rabbis being hired by congregations, as was done in most of western Europe.

What does this have to do with genealogy? Consider the following: among the first generation of disciples of the Baal Shem Tov was Menechem Nachum Twersky (d. 1798) of Chernobyl, the city known in more recent history for its failed nuclear reactor. He had a son named Mordechai (d. 1837) who had eight sons of his own.

By the mid-nineteenth century, important Chassidic families became dynasties, with the sons of great rebbes becoming the next rebbes upon the death of their fathers. When there was more than one son in a family, the younger brothers were given franchises, in effect, and sent to other towns and villages to establish satellite communities with connections to the father’s dy nasty. Sometimes the young leader sent to establish a shtibel in a new town would bring his contemporaries with him, along with their families, as “spiritual colonists.”

Through a vast body of correspondence known as responsa literature, questions of religious law and personal advice were referred to elder rabbis, rebbes, and other scholars. Tens of thousands of these questions and answers have been compiled in book form in hundreds of volumes predating the Moorish period in Spain. The questions were often religious in nature, but sometimes they were about family matters such as who a daughter should marry. Often the question actually included the name of the person seeking advice, unless their name was omitted for reasons of modesty or privacy.

Marriages were often arranged between the family of the follower of one Chassidic rebbe and the family of the follower of that rebbe’s brother or father, with the wives of both rebbes typically brokering the relationship. In the Chassidic world, this is a practice which remains to this day.

Should I be surprised then to learn that: Rabbi David Twersky, the rebbe of Talner (d. 1882), had both a father, Mordechai Twersky, and a brother Aron Twersky (d. 1872), who were rebbes of Chernobyl, and that David’s brother, Isaac Twersky (d. 1885), was the rebbe of Skvir; another brother, Jonathan Twersky (d. 1895), was the rebbe of Rotmistrovka, and yet another brother, Abraham Twersky (d. 1889), was the rebbe of Trisk?

As I mentioned previously, I have met “Gubernicks” who claim to have ancestral lines going back to all these places. I have also met other Gubernicks who do not fit the pattern. I also know that, by 1900, the Twersky line could be found in over 60 towns in eastern Europe.

The awareness of relationships in the Chassidic world could help me decide where to look for names and relationships which may expand “linear” knowledge of my family. This has more in it than the anecdotal benefits of social history. M y next step is to check out the towns of Marakov, Cherkassy, and Korostysev, where Rabbi David Twersky also had brothers who were rebbes.

I have not as yet firmly established my relationships to those other Gubernicks, although their naming patterns in given names are very similar. I am aware that the knowledge of these similarities cannot be defined as conclusive evidence. This knowledge does, however, point me in a pretty focused direction. I hope to let you know in the future what I am able to uncover.

By way of example, I can point out that this same responsa literature which details over 1,000 years of Jewish life in Europe is a link in the linear chain responsible for the existence of my wife and children. Rabbi David Deutsch (1756-1831), known by the name of his most famous book, Ohel Dovid (”Tent of David”) posed a difficult rabbinic problem in a correspondence with the unquestioned rabbinic leader of the Austro-Hungarian Empire during that period, Rabbi Moses Sofer (1762-1839). Rabbi Sofer was head of the rabbinical seminary in Pressburg/Bratislava, and had taken ill when the letter arrived sometime around 1805.

He asked his prize student, Rabbi Meir Eisenstadt (d. 1852), to attempt to find a solution to the problem posed in Rabbi Deutsch’s letter. Rabbi Deutsch was so impressed with the answer that he immediately wrote Rabbi Sofer and asked if he could arrange the marriage of young Rabbi Eisenstadt to Rabbi Deutsch’s own daughter. A daughter of that union is the great-great-grandmother of my wife Rosalyn.

You don’t have to be Jewish, or descended from Chassidic Jews, or Ellis Island detainees to benefit from the vignettes I have just described. You can apply creative thinking to your own research to go beyond the “ten steps” you know so well.

I can give you many other examples of how understanding the events and processes of history make us better genealogists, but I hope I have made my point. For genealogists who complain that his torians do not take them seriously, there can be no greater respect than the kind that comes from serious scholarly achievement. Historians will learn, as well, that genealogists have significant contributions to make to their understanding of history. I wish to stress that everything I have said applies equally to the unpaid genealogist as to those earning a living in the field. I am pleased to say that the path between genealogy and history is more easily traveled than I ever remember it being, and I look forward to the developments of the next few years.

Rafael Guber is the founder, president, and art director of the Sepia Guild. He is a member of both the Jewish and Italian Genealogical Societies of New York.