Paul Bloom and I have been friends for more than 30 years. We attend the same synagogue, sit on the same bench every Friday night, and have attended each other’s children’s bar and bat mitzvahs and weddings. For a time, we worked for the same company, and for a couple of years Paul was even my supervisor. We both do genealogical research on families from Lithuania, but only jokingly referred to the fact that people surnamed Gordon appear on both Paul’s and my wife Helen’s family trees. “Perhaps we’re related,” we have said.
This is not such a far-fetched thought. In religious circles, many a shidduch (match leading to marriage) is made when one family’s child is introduced to another family’s relative. Friends often end up connected through common relatives linked by marriage, or sometimes directly related. I can point to several people in my community to whom I can draw a convoluted dotted line; a daughter-in-law’s cousin
| We both do genealogical research on families from Lithuania, but only jokingly referred to the fact that people surnamed Gordon appear on both Paul’s and my wife Helen’s family trees. |
married to a friends’s daughter, a cousin married to a cousin of a neighbor and the like. We may be joined together, even if we are not related.
Here is the specific background of this story. My wife Helen’s grandmother’s Lubinsky genealogy from Lithuania developed with some difficulty. It is interesting but not unique. When I first questioned my father-in-law, he couldn’t even remember his mother’s maiden name. She had died when Helen was an infant. He could recall little about his uncles, aunts, and cousins. Only by being persistent did I discover the existence of five Lubinsky sisters, including Helen’s grandmother, who immigrated to America with their parents, William and Stera, around the turn of the 20th century. William’s death certificate provided the names of his parents, Chaim and Hinda, left behind in Lithuania.
Later, a distant cousin provided some additional branches of the tree and identified the ancestral towns of Shadove (Seduva) and Keidan (Kedainiai). When the Ellis Island records were posted online, I found the family’s record of immigration in 1904, showing that William was actually Nochum Wolf. Hamburg emigration records pointed to an earlier immigration by Nochum Wolf all by himself. When the 1874 revision lists for Kedainiai came online in the All Lithuania Database (ALD), I was able to add two more generations back and some siblings hanging off our Lubinsky ancestral line, starting about 1770. At this point, I thought I knew everything I could about the Lubinsky line. Tucked way up the tree was Helen’s great-great-grandmother, Rosa Gordon.
Two major breakthroughs came during the 2003 International Association of Jewish Genealogy (IAJGS) Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Washington and the 2006 conference in New York. In New York, I met Barbara (Barbie) Meyers, who also was researching Lubinskys from Lithuania. When she briefly described her Lubinsky ancestry, I recognized that her great-grandfather, Zoruch Lubinsky, was one of the siblings identified in the 1874 revision list from Kedainiai in the All-Lithuania Database (ALD). It was fun pointing Barbie to the ALD site, about which she had previously been unaware, and ultimately merging our trees. Zoruch was William’s uncle, and his descendants also had emigrated to the U.S., primarily settling in Kentucky.
The other breakthrough occurred in Washington where a preliminary version of the Yad Vashem database was made available. I found Pages of Testimony for several members of a Lubinsky family in Kedainiai. Benjamin Lubinsky; his wife Elka Klenovsky Lubinsky; and their children, Liba, Chaim, and Hinda, all had perished in Kedainiai. A surviving son, Shaul Lubinsky, had submitted the Pages of Testimony in Israel in 1956. Benjamin’s parents were also Chaim and Hinda, the same names as those I found on William’s death certificate and the ALD—but Benjamin was too young to have been listed in the 1874 revision list. This made Benjamin the much younger brother William had left behind in Lithuania.
The fact that William had, in fact, left behind a family, a family that mainly perished, a family about whom his grandchildren knew nothing—all this was startling. The fact that a cousin had survived the Holocaust or escaped it altogether, and could possibly be living in Israel, excited us, and I tried to find him. The Israel Genealogical Society put his name on their website specifically designed to locate those who had given testimony. I posted a request on the JewishGen discussion group, but my request sat and bore no fruit. I was distracted with other research and did not follow up on the search for Shaul or his family.
Other research proceeded. The results of a vital records project for Kedainiai revealed, among other things, a birth record for Benjamin in 1879, confirming the information at Yad Vashem, and one for Shaul in 1914. When I mentioned the records to my friend Paul, he asked me to check for his family named Novikhovich, and I found a few, though none of them direct ancestors of Paul. I passed the information along to him. When I received similar records from nearby Datnovo many months later, I went through the same routine: check for Lubinskys for me and Novikhoviches for Paul. Whereas the Kedainiai records were exciting, the Datnovo records were startling. They listed:
- The 1913 birth of a son, Izrael, to Benjamin and Elka Lubinsky, showing that Elka’s father was Izrael Klenovsky
- The 1873 marriage of Izrael Klenovsky to Chana Leybman, daugher ot Eliash Leybman
- The 1881 marriage of Zusman Novikhovich to Sheina Leybman, another daugher of Eliash Leybman
These facts seem to show that Chana and Sheina are sisters and connect the Klenovskys and Novikhoviches. I called Paul to tell him—and learned that Zusman Novikhovich was Paul’s great-grandfather. So, if Paul’s great-grandmother, Sheina, is the sister of Shaul’s grandmother, then Shaul not only is Helen’s first cousin twice removed on Shaul’s father’s side, he also is Paul’s second cousin once removed on Shaul’s mother’s side. That makes Paul and Helen distantly “not related.”
Then came the most unexpected development of all. Out of the blue, I received an e-mail message from Deborah Cicone who somehow had found my four-year-old request for information on Shaul Lubinsky. Deborah said she was related to Shaul and had corresponded with him as recently as 1982. Deborah’s grandmother was the sister of Shaul’s mother, Elka. Although Deborah had few details about her genealogy, she knew that her grandmother Sarah Klein’s name had been changed to Klein from Klenovsky upon or around the time of her emigration to the U.S.
Deborah knew that Shaul had died, but she also had information about his children and grandchildren. She had four letters written in Yiddish, which when translated confirmed that Shaul, who had lived in Petah Tikva, had a son, a daughter, at least four grandchildren, two nieces, and a nephew. I had only the name of one grandson, but a reasonable expectation that at least some of his descendants were living and that they remained in the Petah Tikva area.
On the JewishGen Discussion Group, I asked for volunteers to find members of the Lubinsky family in Petah Tikva. One volunteer called every Lubinsky in the telephone book until she found the son of Shaul. He offered the name and telephone number of his sister. The volunteer called the sister, explained who I was and what I was doing, and obtained her interest in receiving a call from me—all within hours of the JewishGen posting.
The circle is complete after more than 100 years. We are finally in contact with the family that Nochum Wolf left behind in Lithuania. I have spoken with Shaul’s daughter and learned that Shaul and his brother Israel left for Palestine before the Holocaust. We hope to meet in the future.
Not only is Helen not related to Paul (her great-great-uncle married Paul’s second cousin twice removed), she is also not related to Deborah (that cousin of Paul’s is also Deborah’s great-aunt). But we are all related to Shaul and his descendants.
Steve Stein is a software architect living in Highland Park, New Jersey. He has been researching his and his wife’s families for more than 30 years, following the path into seven Eastern European countries. He is on the Executive Council of JGS in New York and has volunteered for JOWBR, Hungarian-SIG, and the Nesvizh (Belarus) Study Group.
