My husband’s maternal great-great aunt, Feige Cohen, spent the Fourth of July of 1905 in New York harbor, waiting to clear immigration. She was onboard the S.S. Statendam (built for Holland America by Harlan & Wolff Limited, Belfast, Northern Ireland, 1898). The Statendam sailed from Rotterdam, Netherlands, on June 24, 1905, and arrived in New York on July 2, 1905.

Were there fireworks in the harbor? Did Feige see them? Not sure. But thanks to Ancestry.com,  we know she was released by immigration on July 5, 1905, at 1:10 pm, to be met by her brother, Harry, who paid her fare. Feige, who gave her last place of residence as “Ostrow,” could read and write. She was 17 years old and had $15 in her pocket.

One-hundred years later, Feige’s great-niece Maxine (Shanbar) Marshall, my husband’s mother, cruised on the successor Statendam (same name, different ship), now a luxury cruise ship for tourist travel.

Have you taken a special journey on the Fourth of July? Do you have a travel story that happened on the Fourth? Let me know.

And have a great Fourth of July!

They were talking about how difficult it is to trace family genealogy, especially if you are Jewish. They made it sound hard to get information, so hard  there’s no point trying. I want to show them otherwise.  

“I don’t know anything about my family,” Artie started. “My father never talked about his parents.”  Artie’s father was born in Russia.

“Let me show you,” I said, opening up the laptop as we sat around the kitchen table. I logged into my account at Ancestry.com.

“What is your father’s name?” I asked.

“Saul Fleishman.”

I went to the “search” bar at the top of the screen on Ancestry.com and clicked “search all records.” The search form appeared. I typed in the name.

“When was he born?” I asked.

Artie knew the date within a year.  I entered his father’s birth year and then “1” in the +/- dropdown menu to indicate that we were sure of the date plus or minus a year.

“Do you know when he died?”

Artie gave me the year of his father’s death. He knew this exactly. I entered the year into the search box and clicked “exact.” We added Artie and his siblings in the search box under “children.”

“Where did your dad live?”

Artie wasn’t sure of all the locations his father had lived in around the Boston area. We put the one location we were 100% sure of— Massachusetts. Then I pressed “search.”

 “You’re not going to believe this,” I said.

We watched as the screen immediately filled with document after document about Artie’s father. I saw Artie’s  mouth open wide. For the next hour, we scrolled through the search results—city directories, business listings, birth certificate,  census listings showing Saul as a young man, and naturalization papers, to name a few.  

“Look, here’s your dad.” I showed Artie the 1930 Census document. It showed that his grandfather owned the house his father grew up in. It was worth $14,000.

“There it is—the egg business,” Artie pointed to the occupation and industry column in the 1930 Census. His grandfather was in the egg business, as was his father, and then Artie himself. Artie recognized addresses, names of colleagues, names of nearby businesses, his father’s lawyer. He began to recall things his father had said about these people. There were names of business associates which Artie had heard his father mention. He hadn’t thought about these names in years. We were so engrossed that we ignored everyone else  for more than an hour.

 “I’ve never seen my father’s name so much in all my life,” said Artie. I promised to email him his father’s naturalization papers and other documents. Ancestry.com is addictive.  But there are worse addictions.

When I moved to Japan, my name changed to Maa-sa Jyu-e-tto, and was written in katakana (not Roman letters), the alphabet reserved for foreign words imported into Japanese. Out of deference to the exigencies of Japanese, I (mis)pronounced my name the way the Japanese did.

Immigrants in the big wave of American immigration (1880-1911) often had their names changed by English-speaking officials. “The Census taker’s ability to understand the non-English speaker is the key to how the name gets spelled,” says Sara Weissman. Sara is a research department librarian, who offered a class on genealogy research at the Morris County Library in Whippany, New Jersey, which I attended last week.

When you're doing family research, you have to look for other spellings of family names. Misspellings were common and depended on the country of origin of the official. When reviewing ship manifests and other shipping records, keep in mind that the different shipping lines used different transliterations. The German lines had the most thorough information and the best understanding of languages that don't use Roman letters. The US and British shipping lines were the worst. The Dutch somewhere in the middle. In official records, one name could be spelled Dansick, Danzig, and Dangiz.

The names are slippery. Don’t think of the name the way it is spelled now. You have to try non-Roman-alphabet spellings of names and use a name that sounds like the name, but is not an exact match. Try name variations. Use the transliteration system called Soundex Indexing System in Census (soundex, as in, sounds like). See link below. If your ancestor’s name includes a German O, use O. In the case of an  umlatted O, use an O and U. “My great-great grandmother’s name is spelled JohannA in her sons’ baptismal records in Norway. But I couldn’t find her marriage record until I used the older spelling JohannE,” said Weissman.

Officials also took it upon themselves to change names. We saw an example from Sara’s ancestors. When her Irish paternal grandfather boarded the ship to come to America, the ship’s official wrote Kenney but then changed his mind, crossed it out, and wrote O’Kenney. She showed us the record: Kenney was crossed out and in the margin was O’Kenney. Her grandfather kept the O’ through his naturalization, after which he reclaimed his actual name.  

Be creative and resourceful. Your immigrant ancestors were.

Association of Professional Genealogists

Soundex Indexing System