Researching a Rare Family Name Shared by Levites and Israelites

Shkarovsky is an uncommon Jewish surname. This can be a blessing, as the focus of research is limited; or a curse, as there is limited material with which to work. The rarity of the name is made more challenging by the creativity that has been frequently shown in transliterating and abbreviating the name, primarily in North America but also in Europe and Israel. For example, the five Shkarofsky brothers in Montreal – my small branch of the family – alternatively used the spellings Shkarofsky, Skarofsky, Scarowsky, Shkarowski, Schkarofsky, and Skarf. This branch, which emigrated from Pohrebyshche (Russian/Ukrainian: Pogrebishche Погребище) in Vinnyts’ka oblast Ukraine, came to Canada in the 1920s and was the starting point for this research project.

[Ed. Note: Avotaynu Online adopts Google Maps version of place name settings in its articles, providing alternative spellings when needed for clarification.]

With the exception of a Canadian passenger list, there are no existing online sources for Shkarovskys from Pohrebyshche. However, there are online records that mention Shkarovskys from nearby towns. Though there was no known connection, tracing several other immigrant families proved to be a fruitful investment.[1] The method at this stage was straightforward – passenger lists, census records, emails and Facebook messages to descendants – and yielded several different Shkarovsky trees, primarily in Philadelphia. Many of the people contacted were vaguely aware of an extended family in the Philadelphia area, although without clearly defined relations. This family of Shkarovskys had immigrated to Philadelphia in the early 1900s from the city of Bila Tserkva (Beyala Tserkov) and its environs, some 86 kilometers from Pohrebyshche. Most members of this family had ultimately shortened their surname to Skaroff, Scaroff or Scarf.[2]

The shared rare last name and geographic proximity would normally cause one to hope that there was some familial connection. However, in this case there was a red flag: while the Montreal Shkarofskys were run-of-the-mill Israelites, the Philadelphia Shkarovskys were all Levites. Since priestly lineage is transmitted through the male line, as are last names in most cases, this put the brakes on any assumptions of a paternal connection.

Why would it be that two families from the same general area share a last name, but not a tribe? There are several possibilities. The first, and perhaps simplest solution, is that both families had adopted the last name independently. If they were both from the same area, perhaps there was a nearby town named Shkarov from which both families drew their name? An inspection of the area revealed that just south of Beyala Tserkov there is a small town name Shkarivka.[3] There were no Jewish records from that town, but this seemed like a very possible solution.

In 2013 I visited the town with my father, hoping to find some link that might hint at the origin of our family name. As luck would have it, we showed up the day before the town was celebrating its 500^th birthday. When we explained that our last name was originally Shkarofsky, the townspeople got excited and invited us back the following day to join the festivities. We returned and were shown a book in the town library which explained the origin of Shkarivka’s name. Much to our surprise, the town originally had a different name. In the late 1800s a man from Bila Tserkva purchased the town manor and its factory and renamed the town “Shkarivka” after himself. Rather than the family name coming from the town, it was the town’s name which came from the family! In an ironic twist, this obliviously Jew-free town was named after a rich Jew from the nearby big city.

What else could have led to two families with the same last name but different lineage? Perhaps one family had at some point taken on a mother’s family name. While this is a less-common practice, it is not unheard of and would explain the situation. Another possibility was that one of the family members was beholden to the other family, as a patron of sorts, and had adopted the last name out of gratitude or due to the connection. A final, though unlikely, possibility was that one family had someone forgotten its lineage and lost the tradition of being a Levite.[4] The question remained temporarily unresolved.

In addition to the extended family in Philadelphia, several other unlikely Shkarovskys from the same region came to light. These Shkarovskys turned up not in genealogical documents, but in published books. A Yiddish author, Shaye Shkarovsky, was born inBila Tserkva in 1891 and wrote several books of short stories. The books contained little biographical information, with the title page lacking even a patronym, but Shaye’s father’s name in the Yad Vashem names database. On the other side of World War II, a Soviet pathologist named Favst Shkarovski performed the autopsy on Adolf Hitler’s charred corpse. A search in the Historical Jewish Press archive also uncovered a handful of Shkarovskys living in the region, mostly in the newspaper Hamelitz.

The most helpful book found was published in 1900, titled Ohr Chadash. It was penned by Menachem Nachum Shkarovka[5], who exhorts all religious Jews to wholeheartedly support the nascent Zionist enterprise for religious reasons. It is a kind-of proto-Religious Zionist piece. The book was published on a small printing press in Odessa and distributed by a network of friends and family. As a genealogical resource this is crucial, because in the back there is an extensive list of people from whom any interested party can purchase a copy of the book. This list is organized by city, and describes how each person is related to the author. It includes uncles, cousins, parents, grandparents, in-laws, and nephews. This one resource alone facilitated the reconstruct one branch of the Shkarovsky family, showed how it spread out geographically, and even gave some rare maiden names for some of the women. It is not clear how typical this type of list is for books published in Odessa in 1900, but it was a very valuable resource.

Even with a large database of Shkarovskys, the only way to move the search backward was to turn directly to the archives. Starting with the Pohrebyshche family in the 1897 census, the family could be traced backward through Ruzhin in 1875 and to Bila Tserkva in 1858. In that year, two Shkarovsky families appeared in Bila Tserkva, listed one immediately after the other. The paper trail eventually led to the 1818 census which, rather than showing two families, listed them together in the same household, with a note that one patriarch, Elya Shkarovsky, was the uncle of the other, Leib Hersch Shkarovsky.

This information fit in with the previous research and explained how the families were related despite differing tribal lineage. First, it is important to acknowledge the at the term “uncle” is a woefully vague term that actually describes four distinct relationships: father’s brother, mother’s brother, father’s sister’s husband, and mother’s sister’s husband. Of these four options, the first can be ruled out, since the census information and patronyms showed that Elya’s father and Leib Hirsch’s paternal grandfather were not the same person. While it is not possible to determine which of the other three types of uncle applies, it is still clear how the two families are related. Your uncle’s children are your first cousins, so Elya’s son was Leib Hirsch’s first cousin, and the subsequent descendants’ relationships proceed accordingly. It is also simple to understand that if the two families don’t share a paternal grandfather, then there is no question about tribal lineage – one paternal grandfather was a Levite, and the other an Israelite.

The joint household also explains why the two families share a last name even if they do not share a male ancestor. In 1809, when legislation in the Russian Empire mandated the adoption of a last name, these two families were living together as one household. Presumably, the household, as a unit, decided to adopt a single last name. From the point of adoption, the family name continued down the male line as per the “normal” mode. In all likelihood, this scenario is not unique, and might be an important option to take into account during Y-Chromosome DNA studies for a shared surname.  For those with similar surnames interested in comparing our DNA results to theirs, our branch preliminarily falls within Y-DNA haplogroup R1b1b2a1a.

When comparing the information from the various Russian censuses to the family tree prepared for the “other” Shkarovsky family and to the genealogy from Ohr Chadash, it was clear that the family trees were the same. Leib Hirsch had three sons, who were the father and two uncles mentioned by the author of Ohr Chadash and who corresponded with the three patriarchs of the Philadelphia Shkarovsky families. Putting it all together resulted in one grand family tree of Shkarovskys, originating in Belaya Tserkov at the end of the 18^th century.

Notes

[1] Even if no connection was found, tracing other families accomplishes several positive things: a) it increases your knowledge of life in a similar time and place as your own family; b) you can collaborate on shared puzzles, such as figuring out the origin of the surname; c) it helps eliminate false leads in your own investigation – if you know that a family that is definitely not your own lived in a certain city, you won’t be tempted to invest resources in procuring records from that town;

[2] One family member anomalously changed the name to Martoff. Another moved to Philadelphia in 1907, only to decide that America was not for him. He returned to Russia in 1912 and his family was stuck there until the 1970s, when they again immigrated to America, this time to Chicago.

[3] A member of the Philadelphia clan initially suggested this town as the origin of the family name.

[4] Unlike Kohanim (priests), there is no mechanism in Jewish law for stripping Levites of their lineage.

[5] Several male members of the family atypically spelled their last names with an ‘a’ suffix in Cyrillic, or an ‘ayin suffix in Hebrew.