My maternal grandparents, Isaac Kolnik and Sarah Karp, emigrated to New York City around the beginning of the 20th century. They do not appear in the U.S. census for 1900, and I have not been able to locate their arrival manifests. My grandfather was naturalized in 1906 in the District Court for the Eastern District of New York and lived in Brooklyn at the time. However, they moved to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, sometime before 1910 because they appear as residents of Wilkes-Barre on the 1910 census. They lived in Wilkes-Barre the remainder of their lives. My grandfather opened a dry goods store and apparently prospered. As far as I know, they initially had no relatives there, although in later years they brought my grandmother’s brother and other relatives to Wilkes Barre. Some of my grandmother’s relatives in Wilkes-Barre had the surname “Katcher.”

At my grandparents’ grave site, the headstones read: “Yitzchak ben Moshe” and “Sarah ben Mordechai Yehoshua.”

I would like to know:

• How to locate my grandparents’ arrival manifests.
  • How the Katchers are related to the Karps.
• When, and why, the family moved to Wilkes-Barre.

Irwin Pikus

Bethesda, Maryland

1. The arrival manifests for your grandparents were difficult to find, because of ambiguities in the handwriting that resulted in their being indexed incorrectly.

The 1910 U.S. census for Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, shows Isaac Kolnik immigrating in 1900, and his wife, Sarah (Karp), arriving in 1903. Using Steve Morse’s “One Step” search for the Ellis Island Records at and limiting my search to everyone named “Kolnik” who immigrated to New York between 1899 and 1901, I got three hits. One of them, “Hzik Kolnik.” turned out to be your grandfather, Itzik (Isaac), who resided in the village of Uscieczko, near the town of Horodenka, in Austrian Galicia.

I tried the same approach to find your grandmother, Sarah Karp. For the years 1902–04, I queried various spellings of her name and came up empty. So I went to Ancestry.com’s version of the Ellis Island Records <http://content.ancestry.com/iexec/?htx=List&dbid=7488> and made a wild card query for the years 1902–04, for all given names beginning with Sar* followed by the surname “Karp.” I got a hit for a “Sara Karp” who arrived in 1902, but instead of getting the main manifest page, what appeared was a page titled, “Record for Detained Alien Passengers,” which stated that Sara was going to join her uncle “Mendel Carp,” in New York City. To locate the main manifest, I had to return to Ancestry’s search engine and find everybody named “Sara,” who came on the vessel “Rotterdam,” in the year 1902. This time, I found her, indexed as an unmarried 19-year-old, “Sara Kaep,” formerly from Horodenka, joining her uncle “M. Karp.”

2. A search of the Ancestry database reveals that a couple named Moses-Lejb and Jutte Kaczer (pronounced “Moses-Laib and Yitta Katcher”) arrived in New York on November 13, 1925, joining eight children, two of whom were named Max and Philip. Moses-Lejb was born in Berbesti, Romania, (mistakenly listed as “Berbesti, Poland”), and Jutte was from Horodenka, Poland, which belonged to the Austro-Hungarian province of Galicia before World War I. Jutta Kaczer’s closest relative in Horodenka was a sister, listed on the manifest as “Kap Etel.” This is probably a reference to a woman from Horodenka named “Ettel Karp,” listed in JewishGen’s All Poland Database as the wife of Rubin Karp.

In a 1912 New York ship manifest, Rubin Karp is listed as the father of Simon Karp, who was headed to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, to join his uncle Max Karp (a/k/a Mendel Karp), who lived down the street from Isaac and Sarah Karp Kolnik. Mendel was listed on Sarah Karp’s manifest in 1902 as her uncle, and Mendel, on his 1899 arrival manifest, listed someone named “Her Kocier” as his own uncle. This was probably a reference to an 1899 New York immigrant named “Hersch Kaczer” who shows up as “Harry Katcher” in the 1910 census.

Going the Extra Mile

I decided to go the “extra mile” and see what I could find in Ancestry’s Hamburg Emigration Database. Because there were so many misspellings and index errors for the name “Kaczer,” I chose to look for this family by town, instead of by surname. I scrolled through everyone in the Hamburg database who came from Horodenka and came across an immigrant who was indexed as “Naftali Kascar.” He had arrived at the Port of Philadelphia in 1912 on the vessel Prinz Oskar. I could not find him under that spelling in Ancestry’s database for arrivals in Philadelphia, so I narrowed the search to everyone who arrived in Philadelphia in 1912 on the Prinz Oskar, with the name Naftali. (To do this, I first had to uncheck the box titled “exact search.”) The very first hit was an immigrant who was indexed as “Naftali Kaozar.” His manifest revealed that he was a 16- year-old boy from Horodenka named “Naftali Kaczar,” son of “Leib,” who was going to join his brother-in-law, Isaac Kolnik, in Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania! Since Naftali was not married, he could only have been Isaac’s brother-in-law if Isaac’s wife Sarah was his sister.

It was then that I was able to make a crucial connection between several pieces of evidence. Sarah Karp Kolnik’s headstone lists her father’s Hebrew name as “Mordechai Yehoshua.” I had been trying, in vain, to locate the index record of her birth in Horodenka in JewishGen’s All Poland Database. I found many children born in Horodenka to a “Mordko Karp,” but no one named Sarah. Then, I realized that I had been focusing on the first half of her father’s double name, Mordechai Yehoshua, and ignoring the second half. I took a second look at the database and found a “Sara Karp,” born in 1883 to parents named “Osias” and “Jutte.” I then remembered that “Osias” was an Austro-Hungarian synonym for “Yehoshua.” At this point, I realized that Sara Karp’s name, year of birth and name of father in the All Poland Database was completely consistent with the information noted on the ship manifest and the cemetery headstone. I was struck also by the fact that her mother’s name, “Jutte” (Yitta), matched the name of Moses-Lejb Kaczer’s wife on their 1925 arrival manifest. Yitta Karp, mother of Sarah Karp, had apparently been widowed, remarried (to Moses-Lejb Kaczer), and was visiting her children in America!

3. The U.S. Census shows that Isaac Kolnik and his brother-in-law, Harry Karp, were proprietors of a clothing store in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in 1910. Isaac’s oldest child, Maurice, was born in Pennsylvania in 1907 or 1908. Harry had an uncle, Max Karp, who lived in nearby Plymouth, where he worked as a retail merchant for a clothing store. Max’s daughter, Nellie, was the first of his children to be born in Pennsylvania, in 1905 or 1906.

The evidence seems to indicate that Max Karp was the earliest member of the family to settle in the Wilkes-Barre area, perhaps in 1905. However, the 1930 census shows another Katcher family, also in the clothing business, living just down the road from Isaac. The heads of the household, Isaac and Reba Katcher, had at least three children who were born in Pennsylvania: Mendel (born c.1901), Norman (born c.1905) and Nathan (born c.1907).

It would seem too much of a coincidence that a Katcher family, in the clothing business, lived just down the road from the Kolnik-Karp family, who had also been in the clothing business. However, the census states that Isaac and Reba were from Russia, while the passenger manifests of people who were known to be Katcher relatives indicate that the Katcher family came from three towns in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bukovina: Stanesti, Calinesti and Berbesti. If the census notation that they were from Russia is incorrect, and these Katchers are related to the Karps and Kolniks, then they would have been the first relatives of the Kolnik-Karp families to arrive in Wilkes-Barre.

The Kolniks, Karps and Katchers may have learned about business and employment opportunities in the Wilkes-Barre area through a network of trade unions, worker organizations or landsmanschaftn (town societies), whose national headquarters were usually in New York. Here is some information I found online about organizations with chapters in Wilkes-Barre and the records that they hold:

United Garment Workers of America (1893–1994). Georgia State University Library Series VIII: Index Card Files – Scope and Content of the Series. <http://www.library. gsu.edu/ spcoll/xml/L1992-17.xml>

The index card files consist of membership and death benefits records and UGWA card files related to organizing, locals, garments and companies. The membership files are in order numerically by local and then by member names. The overwhelming majority of the UGWA card files are in alphabetical order by city and contain information about locals, manufacturers, wages, garments and efforts to organize locals in those cities. Access to parts of Series VIII is restricted. For Wilkes-Barre, see Boxes 241, 379 and 397.

Workman’s Circle (Arbeiter Ring). American Jewish Committee Archives. <http://www.ajcarchives.org/AJC_DATA/Files/ 1908_1909_3_Directories.pdf>

Other Organizations with Chapters In Wilkes-Barre.

• Independent Order of B’nai B’rith
• Independent Order Free Sons of Israel
• Independent Order Sons of Benjamin
• Order B’rith Abraham

Wilkes-Barre Jewish Community Resources. Contact Aaron Roetenberg at: aaron@yrkpa.kias.com.