Did They Really Meet on the Boat?

We all know about urban myths, legends, and fairy tales, et cetera. A story gets told, and retold, from person to person, until there’s no longer an original source, no factual back-up, and no way to know if the tale is true. Some stories, though, really are true. Over the years, I have heard that my maternal grandparents had met on “the boat” coming to America from “the Old Country.” They fell in love, and that was that. It’s a nice story, very romantic. Some people have their “come to America and strike it rich” stories. We had the “fell in love on the boat to America” story.

Unfortunately, my grandmother died long ago, in 1973. My grandfather died even earlier, in 1967. My mother was an only child. She never seemed to remember much about the old stories. As far as I know, we have no living relatives (at least none I know by name) from my grandmother’s side of the family.

Our known relatives all descend from my grandfather. His name in America was Harry, although he was apparently called “Hiller” in Yiddish. His name in the “Old Country” would have been Hillel. To me, of course, he was just Grandpa. Grandpa had a brother and a sister. His sister had three children, Benny, Sylvia and Annie, my mother’s first cousins. It is from these cousins and Sylvia’s daughter, Phyllis, in particular, that I learned most of our family stories.

Phyllis is the de facto family historian. She’s heard all the stories, kept them in her head and in her heart, and passed them along to the rest of us. From Phyllis I have heard that my grandfather was “quite the player” in the old country—until he met my grandmother on the boat, that is. They fell in love. It was a love story for their generation and generations to come.

A number of years ago, I came across the website www.EllisIsland.org. From this site, one can research family histories, tracing relatives’ arrival at Ellis Island. Ship manifests are scanned online. Actual copies of handwritten/typed information are available for viewing, as are computer-generated (and easier to read) translations. As I explored this website, I thought to myself: What a wonderful gift finding my grandparents’ passenger information would be for my mother, indeed for all of us. I began my search.

I started with my grandfather’s last name: Grebetz. No luck. I took a break from Grebetz and started looking for my grandmother’s name. In America she was known as Fannie, and her maiden name was Augenlicht. With Grandma, I got lucky. Very quickly I found Feiga Augenlicht on the S.S. Susquehanna, arriving in America in September 1920. The timing was right. The information contained in the manifest about her fit. She was traveling to America with her mother and a sister, Chana. This made sense, because I knew she’d had a sister in America known as Anna.

Now, this is all good news, right? Well, yes and no. You see, as happy as I was to find her—and I had no doubt this was truly my grandmother—I was saddened not to be able to find my grandfather on that same boat. I had so wanted to confirm the love story. So I scoured the manifest, line by line, name by name (the computer-generated version, obviously, so much easier to read!).

I thought I had him once, when I found the name Grybetz listed on a page. But no, this family consisted of two females, ages 26 and 30, traveling with their parents. Grebetz is not a common name, even by Eastern European standards. I kept looking. I eventually read every passenger’s name on that ship, over hundreds of pages of data. He just wasn’t there.

I was forced to the conclusion that the greatest love story of our family was really just that, a story. Perhaps my grandparents met in the U.S., shortly after arrival. Perhaps they even met at Ellis Island. A nice story, yes, but not the one I’d grown up with, had believed in, had in fact repeated.

Fast forward a few years. My mother and her cousins are getting older, and I have been feeling the need to learn as much as I can—while I still can—about our family’s history. Fortunately, my cousin Sharon feels the same way. One day at a family party, Sharon broke out the video camera, pointed it at the older generation and asked them to speak.

The video of Benny and Sylvia, with a smattering of Roshy, Annie and Phyllis, is only thirty minutes long, but what I learned from that short tape was priceless. The Grebetz family was from a small town called Telechan, located then in Lithuania, but now in Belarus. One brother, Tedder, came to America earlier and changed his last name to Wilson. My grandfather came with his parents, his sister, and a young boy, Danny, who was being raised by Grandpa’s sister, Fejga. Once again, the love story was repeated.

Armed with this additional knowledge, I went back to <ellisisland.org>, reopened my files on my grandmother, and searched the S.S. Susquehanna yet another time. Once again, I found the Grybetz family; but this time it fit. Well, for the most part, it fit. There I found records for Fejga and the little boy, Danny. And there were their parents and another sister, Gitel. The place of birth was even listed as Telechan! Much to my dismay, however, my grandfather still was nowhere to be found.

Yet there was much to celebrate. I had found my grandfather’s family on the same boat as my grandmother and her family! Surely Grandpa must have been on that ship, somewhere, somehow. Perhaps he had illegal papers. Perhaps he had snuck on the boat with no papers at all. Perhaps the story was not quite accurate, and he came over on a different boat. Maybe my grandmother befriended my grandfather’s sisters, and then met my grandfather afterwards in America.

A voice in my head told me to keep looking. And so I did, again, line by line, page after page, looking for…I did not know what. I looked for names that sounded like his. I looked for “Hiller” and “Hillel” as a last name instead of a first. Nothing I tried worked, and I really felt I had reached a dead end.

Before “closing” this chapter of my family history, I watched the thirty-minute video of my cousins one last time. Yes, here was the name of their village, Telechan. There was the name of my grandfather, Hiller, and his sister, Fejga. That was really it, as far as anything that could have helped me.

And yet…Wait! There was only one sister, not two! The only other sister had died back in the old country. I went back to the ship’s manifest for the S.S. Susquehanna, but this time when I looked up the “Grybetz” family. I checked the original manifest, not the computer-generated version.

Here is what I found: On the original manifest, next to the names of the passengers, was an assortment of personal information, including: age, sex, married or single, race, nationality, occupation, even physical descriptions. The occupation listing next to Gitel’s name was “farmer,” the same as the father, not “housewife” or “house-daughter,” as the other females had been listed. Next to the name of “Grybetz, Gitel,” where the sex was marked with an “F,” the “F” was written over by hand with an “M.” Gitel Grybetz was in fact Hillel Grebetz!

When giving his name, “Hillel,” it must have come out sounding like “Gitel.” (Go ahead. Try it. Say each name aloud, using a thick Yiddish accent. You will see that I am right.) When filling out forms, some employee must have seen the name “Gitel” and assumed “female.” But then someone must have seen him, my grandfather, a thirty-year-old man, and corrected the gender. It is right there, corrected on the handwritten manifest, just not on the computer-generated version.

What did I do next? Why, I told my daughters about my grandparents, their great-grandparents, who actually met and fell in love on the boat to America, the S.S. Susquehanna, in September 1920. You see, some family legends really are true.

Kathy Sefton notes that she wished she had become interested in genealogy at an earlier age, because her father and grandmother would have loved to see what she found.

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