Many Jewish genealogists have wondered what happened to relatives who did not emigrate from Europe during the 20th century. Older family members typically report that “all communication was lost after World War II. They must have been killed in the Holocaust.” But good genealogical practice demands evidence, and that is not often easy to obtain. The search for the Chajkielsons of Suwalki is a tale filled with many genealogical lessons.

The Odyssey Begins

The odyssey began in 1983, when my wife, Rosalie, and I decided to trace our respective family trees seriously—and when we were both filled with youthful enthusiasm and naiveté. This article focuses on the family of Rosalie’s father, Wolfe Barnett.

Following the advice of Dan Rottenberg in his inspiring 1977 book, Finding Our Fathers: A Guidebook to Jewish Genealogy, we began our project by interviewing family elders and went straight to Rosalie’s father. Wolfe had been born in Swansea, South Wales, in 1910, under the name Wolfe Barnett. His father, Jacob, and his mother, Deborah, who both used the surname Barnett before marriage, were married in Swansea in 1907. They were known to be cousins, and both had immigrated to the U.K. from somewhere in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century. Wolfe knew that Barnett was an adopted name, but he did not remember the original family name and did not know where the family had lived in Russia.

Wolfe and his brother, Maurice, immigrated to the United States in 1927 and 1929, respectively, while their parents and three siblings remained in Swansea. At the start of our investigation, only Wolfe, Maurice, and another brother, Myer, were still living. Wolfe was the eldest. The facts in this paragraph were essentially the sum total of our knowledge in mid-1983 about the Barnett family origins.

Later in 1983, Wolfe’s brother, Myer, in Swansea, sent Wolfe two documents that had been inherited from their father after his death in 1970. They were written in Polish. Myer did not know what they said, only that they were important. A Polish-speaking friend translated them for us, and we discovered that they were official affidavits filled out in Suwalki, Poland, in 1928 attesting to the births of each of Wolfe’s parents. They also revealed the original family names of both parents as well as the names of their parents, effectively taking Rosalie’s family tree back three generations on her father’s side.

From the Suwalki affidavits, we learned that Rosalie’s grandfather, Jacob Barnett, was born Jankel Chajkielson, the son of Michel Chajkielson and Rocha Leja Waszkiewicz, and that Deborah Barnett was born Dora Tylanska, daughter of Berko Tylzanski and Chawa (maiden name not given). They were born in 1882 and 1881, respectively, both in the village of Kaletnik, near Suwalki in Suwalki gubernia, then Russia (now Poland).

We soon discovered that the Mormons had microfilmed many 19th-century vital records from Suwalki, and we started perusing those microfilms looking for the surnames we discovered in the two affidavits. We found marriage records for Rosalie’s great-grandparents (both Jacob’s and Deborah’s sides) and even great-great-grandparents, not to mention both of Rosalie’s grandparents’ birth registrations, in addition to vital records for several other family members. Of course, many records were missing and some new mysteries popped up but, overall, we were extremely fortunate in the records we uncovered.

Armed with the new information, we sat down with Rosalie’s father again in 1986 and interviewed him further about the family. We specifically inquired about siblings of Rosalie’s grandfather, Jacob. Wolfe clarified that one of Jacob’s brothers, Max, and one of his sisters, Bella (known in the family as Chai Beila), had also come to Swansea and later to the U.S. One would think that they had also adopted the surname Barnett, because both Jacob and his wife, Deborah, had taken on that name. Further adding to the name change confusion, we learned that Max used the surname Telzonsky, an apparent variant of Jacob’s wife’s family’s name (which was still “in the family” because Jacob and Deborah were cousins). According to Wolfe, Max used the name Telzonsky to avoid military conscription in Russia. Notwithstanding the confusion created by Max using his cousins’ surname, we also found his birth registration in the microfilmed Suwalki records, confirming that he was indeed Jacob’s brother; Max was born Mortchai Leib Chajkielson.

As for Bella, Wolfe knew only her married name and not the surname she used in Wales. It was only this year that we finally found her U.S. passenger arrival record, where she was listed as Bella Tegansky, apparently, a mangled form of her brother Max’s surname.

Meanwhile, we had discovered other siblings of Jacob in our microfilm searches, and in our 1986 interview with Wolfe, we asked him what else he knew about his father’s family and, in particular, other siblings. Wolfe was very clear that his father had at least three sisters and three brothers, that the only siblings besides Jacob who left Suwalki were Max and Bella, and that the other four had remained in Europe. He recalled a sister named Goldie and a brother called Misha Velvel, but couldn’t remember the names of the other sister and brother. In our microfilm searches for the Chajkielson surname, we had uncovered Goldie’s birth registration, and we also found one for another brother named Isser (which rang no bells for Wolfe), but that was all we had.

At that time, in 1986, we felt we had gone as far as we could go, and we started to concentrate on other family lines. On the Chajkielson front, not much more happened for the next 13 years. Then, in 1999, Wolfe’s only surviving sibling, his brother Myer, died. Myer had a number of family photographs that he had inherited from his father. Eventually, the photographs made their way to us. Five of them were taken in the early 1920s and in the decade before and were in the form of photograph postcards, with messages on the reverse written in Yiddish and Russian. We had no idea who the people in the photographs were, although we could partly decipher the names. They appeared to be Chajkielsons, but we were not sure how they fit into the family. Wolfe was then in the later stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and nobody we knew could identify the people in the photographs.

By this time in our lives, we had become so involved with other family branches—we were tracing at least 16 family lines, one for each of our great-grandparents—that we did not fully consider the potential significance of the photographs. We put them away for several years while we followed other genealogical quests.

Recently, we decided to look again into the Chajkielson branch, partly because we had discovered individuals in the U.S. with the surname Kelson who had originally been Chajkielsons from the same general area of Russia as Rosalie’s father’s family. In the process, I decided to submit the five photograph inscriptions described above to Viewmate. Viewmate is a service of JewishGen.org where you can post photographs or documents for translation by others.

Viewmate Lessons

The use of Viewmate was particularly instructive, and we learned several lessons. On average we received five responses for each of the inscriptions. The translators exhibited a wide range of linguistic abilities; English was not the native language of several of them, and the translations varied substantially. Because of my ability to read the Hebrew and Cyrillic alphabets, however, and my general knowledge of semantic and syntactical principles, I was able to ask pertinent questions for clarification and, ultimately, synthesize multiple differing responses into meaningful, coherent translations.

For example, here is a copy of the photo and associated inscription for the rather Bohemian-looking Gitke Chaj­kielson (a person with whom we were totally unacquainted). It was taken in Yek­aterinburg, May10, 1921

Lesson 1. Get Multiple Translations       

Different translators see the words in different ways, and those not familiar with English may use words incorrectly. Direct reading errors may also occur, in part because of sloppy handwriting in the original text. Sometimes translators will throw in common variants of names without explaining.

First case in point: The sender’s first name was translated as Gita, Gittel, Gitken, and Gitke. I already understood that Gita, Gittel, and Gitke were all variants of the same name, but I could see from the Yiddish spelling that the name actually was spelled Gitken. After asking my translators specific questions about the discrepancies, I learned that a final nun (ן) was often used in Yiddish as an emphatic at the end of a name and was to be disregarded when translating the name. I decided to use Gitke as the sender’s name, as that was how she was apparently known to her sister, the intended recipient.

Second case in point: Most people translated the month in the date as May, but one person said it was an abbreviated March. Whether the final letter was a yod (י) or a resh (ר) was the issue. After much e-mail discussion with my translators, the consensus was May.

Third case in point: Not just Gitke’s photograph, but all the other photographs I submitted, began essentially the same way: “As a ____ for my sister/brother…” The word in the place of the blank was variously translated as souvenoir, memento, keepsake, and memory. I consulted a good dictionary and looked up the definitions of each word so as to better understand the nuances, concluding that Gitke’s intent was to give her sister something to keep and to remember her by. It was not the result of a trip, a shared experience, or a direct memory; it was a photograph for the recipient to hold onto and view in the future so as not to forget the sender. Keepsake seemed the best word to use in that case. Final translation: “As a keepsake for my beloved sister Chaya Beila from your sister Gitke. Yekaterinburg 10 May 1921.”

So, this was actually one of Jacob’s siblings—the unnamed sister. How do we know? Because the photograph had been in Jacob’s possession, the inscription was addressed to Gitke’s sister, Chaya Beila, and that is the same name as Jacob’s sister who came to the U.S. and was known as Wolfe’s Aunt Bella.

Lesson 2. Apply What You Already Know

Look at the following photograph postcard of Golda and Sender Rubinshtein in Yekaterinburg, August 24, 1916.

None of the translators could read the name of the recipient, but the card was sent to “our dear brother,” whom we reasoned had to be Rosalie’s grandfather, Jacob. In fact, “Golda” could reasonably be the sibling Wolfe remembered as “Goldie.” Even though the handwriting was extremely sloppy, the first letter of the name looked to me like the Russian Я (pronounced “ya”), and I thought the name must be Yakov. Once I pointed out that the probable brother was named Jacob, the translators then agreed that the illegible Russian script must indeed be “Yakov.” Final translation: “As a keepsake for our dear brother Yakov, his wife and children from Golda and Sender. Yekaterinburg 24 August 1916.” (Note: although the surname Rubinshtein appears nowhere in the inscription, we later learned that this was, indeed, Golda’s married name, as explained below.)

Lesson 3. Get the Relationships Right

Look at the language in this photograph of Gita and Juda Tipografov presumably from Yekaterinburg.

Some translators thought it said “As a keepsake for my dear brother and sister-in-law,” while others thought it said “… for my dear brother and daughter-in-law.” After some linguistic discussion with a native Russian-speaking trans­­lator, I learned that relationship words in Russian can be very confusing, as the same word may mean different things depending on the context. We concluded that the “-in-law” was a sister-in-law and not a daughter-in-law, as that would be the appropriate context in a card sent to Jacob and his wife.

Lesson 4. Writing May Not Be Complete

In the above inscription, the sender wrote right to the edge. That is not an accidentally truncated scan. It turns out—and none of my translators could know this—that the actual surname was Tipografov, but everyone translated it as Tipograf. We only learned the correct name later.

Lesson 5. People Write in Haste

People writing in haste may leave words out accidentally. I thought, as did some translators, that the above photograph was from someone named Juda Gita Tipograf, because that is how the name is written. But at least one translator said “Juda and Gita Tipograf.” I wrote to him: “Why do you think there is an ‘and’ in there? I don’t see any word between ‘Juda’ and ‘Gita.’” He answered that Juda was a man’s name and Gita was a woman’s name, and the name Juda Gita wouldn’t make sense. Also, since there were two people in the photograph, it made more sense to believe the card was sent from two people. I consulted the other translators about this, and they all eventually concurred that it made more sense to say the card was from Juda and Gita.

It was even possible that since Juda was at the end of one line and Gita was at the beginning of the next that the word “and” (which is only a single letter in Russian) may have actually been written in haste off the edge of the card. Lastly, after this discussion, one translator pointed out that the Russian word for “loving” was in plural form—and that clinched it. There were two named senders. (This was later independently confirmed as explained below.) Final translation: “As a keepsake for my dear brother and sister-in-law, from your loving Juda and Gita Tipografov.” We believe this Gita is the same person as the “Gitke” in the first photograph shown above—after she married. With this photograph, we not only have Jacob’s sister, but her husband as well (and another family surname to explore).

Lesson 6. Be Persistent

Don’t assume the obvious. Look at the following photograph and the Yiddish text. It is of Myer Chajkielson and Dvora Geterman, Sverdlovsk, February 15, 1925.

This is a critical photograph because it gives the full name of the sender and the full maiden name of his wife. Inclusion of the wife’s maiden name seems unusual. One theory is that Myer was newly married and wanted to inform his brother of his wife’s fam­ily name. In any event, the wife’s surname created much confusion. I and all the translators except one saw her surname as Gellerman—but the one contrarian saw the name as Geterman. The whole issue hinged upon whether or not the second consonant in the name was a lamed (ל) or a tet (ט). I informed the one person who saw it as a tet that everyone else, myself included, saw that letter as a lamed, but he was adamant that it was actually a very sloppily written tet. As proof, he asked me to compare the letter to other known tets in the same text and to the lamed in the name Chajkielson. Upon closer re-examination, I too started thinking that the letter was a tet and not a lamed, but was still suspicious of the possible surname Geterman. Why? Because I was familiar with the name Gellerman, but I had never heard of a Geterman or Getterman. Still, I decided to see if the name Geterman (with one or two t’s) ever appeared as a Jewish name in the Russian Empire by turning to Alexander Beider’s A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire. Much to my surprise, the surname was listed there. So, I concluded, Geterman was indeed a possible and legitimate Jewish surname. Maybe that letter was a tet after all.

I wrote back to all the other translators who had seen the consonant in question as a lamed, and I asked them to re-examine the text in light of all the above. The overwhelming consensus was that it was a tet after all, and the surname was Geterman.. Final translation: (in Yiddish) “As a keepsake for my dear brother and his family from your brother Myer Chajkielson and his wife Dvora Geterman.” In Russian: “15 February 1925, Sverdlovsk.” Once again, we had identified another of Jacob’s siblings.

Lesson 7. Learn Your Geography

Some of the photographs above give the sender’s location as Yekaterinburg, but one says “Sverdlovsk.” After looking up the two locations, I discovered that they are one and the same place. Yekaterinburg was renamed Sverdlovsk between 1924 and 1991, after which it reverted back to its original name. One mystery solved.

Post-Translation Adventures

The photographs finally were translated. Now what? No one in the family had ever mentioned the town of Yekaterinburg/Sverdlovsk. As far as we knew, the Chaj­kielsons had lived only in and around Suwalki. All Eastern European documents we had located showed Suwalki and nearby towns as the places of family origin, never any place as remote as Yekaterinburg. In fact, after looking up Yekaterinburg on a map, I could see that this town was deep inside Russia, about 800 miles east- northeast of Moscow on the eastern side of the Ural Mountain range—nowhere near Suwalki, which today is in northeastern Poland. I began to think that if these siblings of my wife’s grandfather were living in Yekaterinburg/Sverdlovsk in the 1910s and 1920s, maybe they were still there during World War II. What ever happened to the Jews of Sverdlovsk during the war? Hitler never penetrated that far into Russia.

I started on a new quest. Maybe I could find someone knowledgeable about Yekaterinburg/Sverdlovsk, and I could learn what happened to the Jewish families in that city. Looking up the town Yekaterinburg in the JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF), I immediately found several people searching for relatives from that locality. The most exciting part is that one person, named Mark, was specifically researching the surname “Gitterman” from Yekaterinburg. That was close enough to Geterman for me to send him an immediate e-mail message..

Mark originally was from Yekaterinburg (then Sverdlovsk) but was now living in Israel. Our common genealogical pursuits led to an e-mail friendship. We could not find a Gitterman/Geterman connection between us, since that surname was only incidental (through marriage) to his family as well as my wife’s family—but it did serve as a springboard for a positive collaboration. For one thing, he was fluent in Russian, of course, and searched Russian websites on the Internet for me. He also explained to me how the Jews of Yekaterinburg/Sverdlovsk were very content there, as there had been little anti-Semitic discrimination. In fact, today the city has a thriving Jewish community with dozens of Jewish institutions. Furthermore, except for the general economic hardships throughout Russia during the war, the Jews of Sverdlovsk survived relatively well.

Lesson 8. Use the Native Spelling

If you know a name in its native spelling—use it. Disappointingly, my new friend said he could not find any Chajkielsons in Yekaterinburg—but then asked for clarification on the spelling of the name. He wanted to know if the first letter was a shin (ש) or a tet (ט). I had been communicating with him in English and using the original Polish spelling of the surname. He had been interpreting the sound of the name through his English, Russian, and Jewish filters and did not realize that the initial sound was that of a khet (ח). Moreover, from documents the Mormons had microfilmed, I had the correct 19th-century Russian spelling of the surname—and, from the photograph inscriptions above, I had the Yiddish spelling. I sent Mark that information, and he immediately responded that he had found several Chajkielsons with Yekaterinburg connections via the Internet.

Mark also sent e-mail addresses for three Jewish organizations in Yekaterinburg. One was for Michael Oshtrakh, President of the Jewish National-Cultural Autonomy of Sverdlovsk Region. I e-mailed him with the above photographs attached and received an amazing reply the next day. Michael had been astounded by my e-mail, because his sister was married to Vladimir Chajkielson, grandson of Myer Chajkielson and Dvora Geterman. Not only that, he said they had the same photograph of Myer and Dvora.

Chajkielsons of Yekaterinburg

Since July 2008, we have been corresponding via e-mail with several relatives in Yekaterinburg. We have learned that at least four out of Jacob’s five siblings who did not immigrate to the West not only survived World War II, but had families who remained in Russia and survived quite well in Yekaterinburg—to this very day. We also learned that some of the family ultimately settled in Israel, and we are in the process of trying to contact them.

For more than 60 years, my wife’s family believed all relatives who remained in Russia were exterminated by the Nazis. Now it turns out, they not only survived, but thrived. Relatives we have discovered so far include an accomplished Russian author, a CEO of a steam turbine manufacturing plant, a physician, and a law student.

Above is a family photo we received from Yekaterinburg with many Chajkielson relatives. It was taken in Sverdlovsk in 1955.

Myer and Dvora Chajkielson are in the second row down on the far left. Gita Tipografov is in the third row down, second from the right. The fourth of Jacob’s surviving siblings, Movsha Chajkielson (possibly the one to whom Wolfe referred to as “Misha Velvel”), for whom we had no previous photograph, can be seen in the top row, third from the left. Golda and Sender Rubinshtein had died by 1955.

Future Exploration

The remaining photograph has not yet been discussed. It portrays Isser Chajkielson and his wife, Esther, in Suwalki, March 18, 1923.

Translation of the message: “As a keepsake from your brother and sister-in-law, Isser and Esther Chajkielson. 18 March 1923.” Note from the stamp on the back of the photograph that the card is from Suwalki, not Yekaterinburg/Sverdlovsk. Isser is yet another sibling of my wife’s grandfather. We found his birth registration in microfilmed Suwalki records; he was born in 1891. What happened to Isser and Esther? No one knows, not even the relatives in Yekaterinburg.

One tantalizing fact is that the original affidavits discussed in the beginning of this article—the affidavits that revealed the original family names—were created at the request of an Izaak Chajkielson in Suwalki in 1928. Could Izaak be a more adult alternate name for Isser? (Usually “Isser” is a form of “Yisroel,” not Isaac, but maybe his full name was something like Yitzchak Yisroel in Hebrew or Itsik Isser as a familiar or child’s form. We just don’t know.) If Izaak and Isser are one and the same and he was in Suwalki in 1928, maybe he stayed there and did not move to Yekaterinburg/Sverd­lovsk like his siblings. If he stayed, then he and Esther probably met a horrible fate at the hands of the Nazis. The book is still open on that question.

All the foregoing suggests at least four lines of future investigation:

• We want to discover the fates of Isser and Esther and learn if Isser and Izaak are the same person.
• We still need to fill in the Yekaterinburg branch of the Chajkielson family tree with the relatives who moved to Israel and with collateral branches. Descendant surnames include Frimer, Diamont, Yahalom, and Zheleznjakov.
• We hope to uncover records that could link my wife’s Chajkielson family with the Kelson family we discovered in the U.S., whose forebears were originally Chajkielsons from Szaki (where my wife’s great-great-great-grandfather also resided) and nearby Kovno.
• A visit to Yekaterinburg may very well be on the horizon.

Generalization of Lessons Learned

Each of the lessons enumerated above, as well as the other specific ins and outs of our genealogical quest, lead to the following general suggestions:

• Interview and re-interview elders in the family. New details may appear that had previously been forgotten or overlooked.
• Get documents translated and photographs identified. Viewmate on JewishGen.org is an excellent resource.
• Think critically and be persistent. Ask questions. Do not automatically presume that the first translation you obtain is 100 percent correct.
• When seeking information from foreign countries, if you know the native-language spelling and orthography of the family name, include it, as English (or other) versions may be misleading.
• Communicate with other people researching your particular geographical area of interest. It may prove extremely helpful, whether or not you are related. The JewishGen Family Finder is an excellent resource.
• Most importantly, do not assume that just because all communication between family members ceased during World War II (or any war) no one survived.
• Never give up. After a quarter century of on-and-off investigation, our Chajkielson family tree doubled almost overnight. The same could happen to others. Genealogy is a never-ending adventure, and one never knows where or how the next big discovery will occur.