A Discovery in Scotland

This morning when I checked my e-mails, I had an exciting surprise.   As I’ve been preparing for our upcoming trip to the Ukraine and Poland, I had placed a message on the Ukraine Special Interest Group of jewishgen.org.  In that I had asked if anyone had been to Kamenetz-Podolsk or Chotin and if so if they could share any information.  One of my responses was from a name that was familiar to me.  Harvey Kaplan, the director of the Scottish Jewish archives, was on my list of people to contact to pursue my British/Scottish roots.  An e-mail exchange followed and this morning I was greeted with an e-mail from Harvey with the death record of a relative who links back to my Belarussian shtetl of Dunilowitz.

A little back story follows, but you can also find more detail in the following blog entries: Finding my British Family and Finding my British Family Take2.  A cousin of my father remembered family in England and receiving a gift of boxing gloves from them.  He remembered their name as Kodish.  Upon his death I found in his photos one signed “from your cousin Louis Kodish” and the search ensued.  Since then I have found immigration records to and from the U.S. of Louis and his wife Katherine.  In 1929 he came to a relative in NY and then moved to Chicago.  In 1934 he returned to Glasgow which was the home of his father Marks Kodish.  I obtained his visa file as a visa was required for immigration in 1929.  Within that was his birth record which gave his mother’s name.  I traced him back to Glasgow in 1934 at which point I lost the trail.

I shared this information with Harvey who checked several sources and while not finding Lewis discovered a death record for Marks/Max Kodish, his father.  The first thing I do when I receive such a record is try to confirm that it is the correct person.  A few things lead me to believe that it is.  Listed by his name is the name of both his first wife and his second.  The first wife’s name is Kate which corresponds with the birth certificate for Lewis Kodish.  The person who submitted the record is Jack Kodish.  When I went back to my notes from almost ten years ago, I discovered that my father’s cousin also had remembered a Jack or Jacob Kodish.  According to the death record this is the brother of Max.  After confirming these details I noted something unusual.  The record gave the names of Max Kodish’s parents.  They were listed as Barnet Kodish and Sarah Kodish with a maiden surname of Rothschild.

My great-grandfather’s original name was Raichel, but upon coming to the United States he followed the lead of another cousin and changed it to Rothschild.  Did this happen in England as well?  It is quite possible that Barnet and Sarah did not immigrate, but their names were Anglicized by the person providing information in the death record.  My great-great grandfather Pesach Mordechai, who never left Dunilowicz,was listed as Peter and Max in the death records of his children.  As there was contact between the family in Great Britain and the US they would have known of the name change to Rothschild and may have updated the maiden name in their family retrospectively.

The record contains additional information which may prove useful in the future.  It tells me that Max Kodish was a furniture manufacturer and his father was a “restauratent”.  At first I assumed that he ran a restaurant, but in combination with his son’s profession, I wonder if he might have restored furniture.  While Max died in Glasgow it lists both his address in Glasgow as well as his usual residence which is an address in London.  Given that his son was born in London, he appears to have lived in both Glasgow and London at different times.  It also provides the address that he died at in Glasgow which could well be that of his brother Jack.  He died at age 58 in 1936 so would have been born in 1878.

So now I turn to the question of how I’m related.  To figure that out I had to map out the relationships and group them by age, not always foolproof in a time when families were large and childbearing often an extended period.  To counter that I listed ages of siblings when possible to capture the broad range for comparison.  By working my way backwards I concluded that Sarah Rothschild Kodish was a sibling to my great-great grandfather, Pesach Mordechai.  Max was a cousin to my great-grandfather and Louis a cousin to my grandmother.  And so a mystery is solved about that mysterious British connection.  Still many puzzles to explore, but the relationships are now explained.

In 1997 my parents went to London for their 50th wedding anniversary and copied down Kodishes from the phone book.  Fourteen years later we've identified relationships.  Answers unfold over many years.

Puzzles that I will continue to explore are whether Barnet and Sarah immigrated to the UK.  With their names identifed, I can now begin to explore that question. I also can explore the history of Max's brother Jack and any family he may have had in the UK.  The puzzle of what happened to Louis and Katherine also remains an open question.  New answers raise new questions and no dearth of puzzles to explore.

Finding My British Family - Take 2

Today I received another thread in my continuing search for my relatives in the United Kingdom.  As you may recall (see entry: Finding My British Family 11/28/2009) I have been following the history of Louis Kodish and Annie Singer.  Louis Kodish was born in London around 1900, immigrated to the US in 1929 with his wife Katherine and returned to Glasgow in 1934.  He came to his cousin Abraham Singer who was also my grandmother’s cousin and returned with his wife Katherine to his father Marks Kodish in Glasgow.  This much I had learned from immigration records to and from the US.   

As his relationship was to my relatives from Dunilovichi, I am operating under the assumption that his father was also from Dunilovichi and have hopes of linking yet another family to mine.  I know that there were Hedeshes from Dunilovichi in the Dunilovichi cemetery and names spelled Khodis or Khodos in the 1834 and 1850 Revision Lists for the town.  No linkages yet, but I remain hopeful that a puzzle piece will click into sharper focus.

In February of this year I sent for the visa records of both Louis and Annie from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.  Two months later I received Annie’s record and today, six months later I received the record for Louis. This is relatively fast compared to the year or more it used to take before they started charging for their services.

The file for Louis was interesting, but didn’t provide anything new for me to pursue.  Included in the visa file was a photo that was clearly the same person who sent a photo to one of my father’s cousins signed “your cousin, Louis Kodish”.  The application provides his address and that of his father.  His mother was deceased by 1929 when he was submitting this record.  His father’s name was given as Marks.  Most of this I already knew from immigration records. The one new piece of data came from a copy of his birth certificate which gave his mother’s name as Kate Epstein.  The last name of Kodish was spelled Cordis. Back to the cemetery where I found no Epsteins.  Quite possibly his mother was not from Dunilovichi..

Annie’s file also showed a photograph of a young woman in her 20s. She was born in London in 1907 and lived in Jerusalem from 1923 to 1928 when the visa was issued.  I did the math and found that she went there at age 16.  Her mother Sarah was indicated as deceased and her father Meyer was no longer in London, but back in Diniavolitshe, Poland, presumably Dunilovichi.   Perhaps he returned after his wife’s death and his daughter decided to venture into Palestine rather than return home with dad.  Now in 1929, tiny Annie, at 5’1 ½ “ was leaving Palestine to go to Brooklyn to stay with her uncle Abraham Singer, my grandmother’s cousin. I am struck with the sheer adventurousness of her journey.

Her birth record indicated that her mother Sarah Singer was also formerly a Singer.  Communities were small and marriages to cousins were common.  In addition to the birth record there was a certificate showing that she was free of trachoma and a Certificate of Character from the Department of Police and Prisons.

So from the visa files, I now have a little piece of additional information for both Louis and Annie on their mother’s names.  I can continue to search for Louis and his father Marks in Glasgow.  Annie’s trail in London seems to have grown cold with her departure and her father’s return to Dunilovichi.  I may see if I can find a record of her original immigration to Palestine and some further trace of her father in Dunilovichi.  She appears to have vanished in America, no doubt marrying and changing her name, the curse of genealogists.

And while on the subject of my Dunilovichi relatives, I did have one ah-ha moment recently concerning the timing of my great-grandfather’s immigration.  I knew that my great-grandfather came to the US in 1904.  What else happened in that year?  It dawned on me that my great-great grandfather died in 1904 in Dunilovichi, a fact I learned upon my visit.   No doubt there was  a relationship between those dates. To test that theory I checked the month in which my great-great grandfather died against the month in which my great-grandfather immigrated.  Sure enough, my great-grandfather waited until his father’s death to immigrate leaving just a month or two after his death.  Somehow that is a humanizing detail.  Now I picture a son waiting for his father to die before he felt free to leave, perhaps waiting out an illness to be at his father’s deathbed. It is in these dribbles and drabs of information that we begin to piece together a story, a narrative about our ancestors’ lives that reminds us that they really lived with all the human emotions and drama that can accompany our own journey.