Unraveling the Puzzle of my Scottish Relatives

All genealogists have loose ends that they periodically tug on.  I’ve written a bit about my British and Scottish connections and recently revisited that information through the use of  ScotlandsPeople .  As its name implies this site is focused upon Scotland ancestry and provides vital records.

As I’ve written in the past, I began by tracing a family story from a late cousin of my father.  He recalled getting a gift of boxing gloves from relatives in England named Kodish.  He recalled the names Jacob and Louis.  When this cousin died I was given his old photos and discovered an inscribed picture of Louis Kodish.  “From your cousin Louis Kodish” it read.  When I first began working with family history I asked others who had been doing this for longer than I, what they did when they finished it.  They assured me it is never finished, you just move on to research cousins.  I am now at that once distant point in the horizon, tugging on threads that once seemed quite remote.

I’ve since found immigration records for Louis who came to the US in 1929 with his wife and returned to Glasgow in 1934.  He came to another family member confirming a family relationship and the Glasgow connection expanded my search still further.  It also offered his father Marks/Max as his closest relative in Scotland.

Genealogy is a process of building on each new piece of information to deepen one’s knowledge.  At the site Scotlands People, I found the death record for Louis’ father Marks or Max Kodish submitted by his brother Jacob.  In that it gave his parents names as Barnett Kodish and Sarah Rothchild Kodish.  My Raichels from Dunilovichi who came to America changed their last name to Rothchild.  They were in contact with their British relative so this shared name change seems like a legitimate linkage. I now had new names to search and to use to validate relationships.

Some records are immediately available on the site while others need to be ordered from the General Register Office for Scotland.  Among the documents that I was able to locate was the 1923 marriage record for Louis and his wife Katherine.  I was able to validate the record as it listed the correct parents of Louis, consistent with the birth record I received in his previously ordered visa file.  Interestingly the record states that rather than being done in a synagogue it was done by declaration and “warrant of Sheriff”.  Upon doing some research I learned that this was termed an “irregular” marriage similar to our civil ceremony.   They went ahead with an irregular marriage by declaration and then paid a fine to the sheriff in order to register it.  This practice went away in 1939 when civil marriages were permitted in a Registrar’s office.

A few years ago I had access to the Jewish Chronicle, a publication of the Jewish community in Great Britain.  I had copied all entries for Kodishes figuring I’d find the missing link eventually and it would then make sense.  Much of genealogy is prospective, getting ready for the big discovery that unlocks earlier data. I now went through the copied documents looking for Barnett.  There in December 1916 I found the obituary for Barnett which noted he was of both Glasgow and London.  It reported that he was the father of Max and Solomon of Glasgow and Jack of London.  A search of the Jewish Online Worldwide Burial Registry turned up a record at the Edmonton Cemetery in London for his burial.

Armed with this information I began to search the Scottish database.  I soon found the death record for Solomon that noted his parents, wife, address, cause of death and the submission of the death by his son-in-law. Working backwards with the name of his son-in-law I found the marriage record of Solomon’s daughter Lily which occurred at the Cromwell Road Synagogue as a “regular” marriage.  Solomon was a master cabinetmaker, a profession he shared with his brother Max.  Similarly my great-grandfather who was their cousin reported his profession as a joiner in his immigration manifest. I now  also have a synagogue name that may also have family records.

The brother Jacob (Jack) has a bit of a story.  Some time ago I found an immigration record for a Bloome Kodish with her three children Joe, Sid and Anna.  They came to the US in 1923.  She listed a brother with the last name of Silverman as her nearest relative in Glasgow (even though she had a husband in Glasgow as well, perhaps an early sign of trouble) and was going to another brother in Chicago.  I last saw the children listed in the 1930 census.  Then in May 1938 Jacob set out for NY to see his wife Bloome noting his brother Solomon as his closest relative in Glasgow.  He notes his original birthplace as Vilna, Russia.  The gubernia in which Dunilovichi was located was Vilna and is typically given as the place of birth by those from Dunilovichi.  His visit was short-lived as he returned in March 1939.   Working back I discovered the original Kodish-Silverman marriage in 1912.  A few years after his visit in the late 1930s he is listed as divorced as he enters a second marriage in 1941.  This marriage fared better, lasting until death parts them in 1967 as reported in his death record.

I’ve made considerable headway on a mystery that I once had little hopes of resolving.  I now know the relationship between our families and have identified many family members. I’ve also learned that the Rothchild name was assumed in both England and the US.

I was unsuccessful in finding the death record for Barnett Kodish even knowing where he is buried.  The records office had nothing on file. I decided a photo of Barnett’s tombstone would be worth locating as he likely came from Dunilovichi as well and contacted Gaby Laws of GenPals to get a photo and to see if there were other Kodish tombstones nearby.  Three days later I had the photo and confirmation that there were not other Kodish tombstones in the area.

Interestingly Barnett’s Hebrew name translated to Eli Dovid Ber son of Yehuda.  With this information I went back to the database from the Dunilovichi cemetery that I had posted on the Shtetlink I had created for this town.  While there are few surnames I did find an Abraham Hedesh, son of Yehuda who died in 1936.  I have found that names with an H, G or K are often interchangeable so I would suspect that this is a younger sibling. 

I’d like to find the death record for Sarah Rothchild Kodish as it would likely tie to the name of my great-great-great grandfather, but I’ve had no success finding a record of her death nor a tombstone near Barnett.  As Gaby pointed out, it is quite possible that she didn’t come to London and only the father and the older sons made the journey.  In the Dunilovichi cemetery there is a Sarah, daughter of Moshe (same father's name as my great-great grandfather), but no surname to offer assurance that it is the right Sarah.  She died in 1914 so may well be the elusive Sarah Raichel/Rothchild Kodish, sister to my great-great grandfather.

If you trace the threads of this journey you will find the following path:

1)    We begin with an anecdote about Louis Kodish
2)    Then discover an inscribed photo from him
3)    Examine Immigration records and find his father’s name
4)    Order a visa file from the US Citizenship and Immigration Service that provides the birth record with both parents’ names
5)    The Jewish Chronicle provides an obituary of Louis’s grandfather with related family members (obtained earlier, but made sense at this point)
6)    The Jewish Online Worldwide Burial Records offers burial information on the grandfather of Louis Kodish
7)    Scotlands’ People provides his father and uncles’ death records and various marriage records including that of Louis
8)    Back to Immigration records to explore his uncle Jacob’s first marriage and possible descendants in the US
9)    And then on to Genpals for a tombstone photo
10)    And back to the Dunilovichi cemetery to see if there are tombstones that are potentially related now that I have more information on earlier descendants.

It is this path of working one’s way through a puzzle, building on each successive discovery which keeps me so enthralled in this search.

Prior Research Solves the Mystery: More Scottish Discoveries

Yesterday I wrote about my discovery of a branch of my Belarussian family that settled in London and Glasgow.  That discovery sent me back to my files to see what I may have gathered previously that might now make sense in light of this new information.

A year ago I had access to the records of the Jewish Chronicle.  This UK publication documents many of the important life events within the Jewish community.  When I went through it, I recorded any record that noted a Kodish as well as articles on family ancestral towns.  Now I had some new names to search, Sarah and Barnet, Max and Jack.  My searching proved fruitful as I discovered an obituary for Barnet in 1916 which told me that he had come to the U.K.  It named his three children, Max, Solomon and Jack, but didn't mention his wife who presumably predeceased him.  Then in 1974 I stumbled across the obituary for Max's second wife that names all their children, spouses and grandchildren.

I find that much of the time I put into genealogy research is prospective.  I record all the records for family names in a region or time period where I knew they lived, trusting that at some future point it will all make sense.  It is like laying out all the pieces for the center of a puzzle which just look like a jumble until I get the straight edges into place to anchor them.

In reviewing information I had collected on the Kodish family I found one piece of information that looked intriguing.  In 1938 Jacob Kodish, presumably the brother of Max, immigrated from Glasgow to the US. He noted he was born in Vilna, the district that branch of the family came from and which was the larger area around Dunilowitz.  He was 47 at the time so would have been born in 1891.  He was going to his wife Bloome in Chicago and noted that he had been in the US in 1923 and 1925.  An immigration record for Bloome shows up in 1923 with their children Joe, Sid and Anna going to her brother in Chicago.  So what causes me to think this is the correct record?  Three things aside from the Glasgow linkage...He gives his nearest relative in Glasgow as his brother Solomon. At this point his other brother Max has died as has his father so Solomon would have been the only one left.  The other detail that causes me to think this is a family member is the way he came over.  He worked on the ship as a waiter in exchange for passage, exactly the same way that his nephew Lewis Kodish came over.  The fact that he went to Chicago where Lewis also went seems to indicate family members that both may have accessed. As the 1940 census isn't out yet, I can't check to see if they were still in the US at that date, but I do have a plan of attack to secure more information.

In 1938 he would have needed to have obtained a visa to come to the United States.  In fact he would have needed one in 1925 also.  A visa file can be ordered from the US Citizenship and Immigration Service which will typically include a birth record and other identifying information.  As Jacob was born in Eastern Europe it would provide the link I've been seeking to the original ancestral town.  It may also provide more information on the original name of his mother who is where the relationship to my family resides. 

So one death record opens up the door to 25 new members on a family tree and a likely linkage to the Eastern European community from which they originally came.

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.

Finding My British Family

I am often as fascinated with the process of solving a puzzle as the resolution itself. I love the way it evolves over time and the way each new piece of information moves me along a path of discovery.

For many years I have been exploring a link to British relatives. A cousin of my father’s spoke of family by the name of Kodish and recalled receiving boxing gloves from them for a holiday gift. My parents went to England many years ago and copied down the Kodish names from the phonebook. Not quite sure what to do with the list, they held onto it until I started my genealogy research years later.

A few years ago my father’s cousin died. Without children or a spouse, there was no one to take responsibility for his photos so I was “bequeathed” them in my role as family historian. I went through them with my mother and identified many. Others remain a mystery, fodder for future artworks as they are interesting photos even if unknown subjects. One photo stood out however, for on the back of it was signed, “Your cousin, Louis Kodish”.





I still wasn’t sure if the Kodish family was related to my side of the family, but decided to see what I could find. Over time I stumbled across an immigration record for Louis Kodish and his wife Katherine. They immigrated in 1929 to Louis’s cousin Abraham Singer in New York. Through my research in Dunilovichi, Belarus, I now knew that Abraham Singer was related to me. In genealogy speak he is a first cousin twice removed which means my grandparents were cousins to him and I’m two generations removed.


My father recalled his cousin saying something about Louis working on a ship and in fact he immigrated before Katherine and worked as a waiter on the ship. He was born in London, but lived in Glasgow prior to immigrating. His father’s name was given as Marks Kodish, along with his address in Glasgow. One other detail that may prove helpful; Louis had a visa issued in Glasgow, for which I can try to find the file from the US Citizen and Immigration Services. I had previously gotten a copy of the visa file for my great-grandmother and it was quite extensive including a birth record with parents’ names. My longer-term objective is to tie Louis back to Dunilovichi through his parents’ records so this may help me do so.

Katherine followed Louis to his cousin’s address in Brooklyn. By 1930 they had made their way to Chicago where I found them in the US Census. Louis' parents were noted as being from Russia although he was born in England. Here he worked as an insurance salesman, but I would guess that the Depression didn’t treat them kindly as they returned to Glasgow in 1934.

On a recent visit to the Family History Library I was able to access the 1911 British Census which was newly released. The library offers access to many pay databases for free so I made use of findmypast.com. Here I found a Marks and Chai Kaddish from Russia who would have been born around 1866, but no son listed named Louis. A few Kodishes were listed as being from Vilna which sounded promising as my grandmother referred to being from Vilna even though she was actually from the nearby shtetl of Dunilovichi. The larger area was known as Vilna so these families likely came from the same region. Unfortunately there was no tidy solution to my puzzle. My hoped for discovery of a listing for a son named Louis and a father named Marks from Vilna didn’t prove out….yet.

I decided to check one more avenue called the B-M-D index. This references birth, marriage and death records by each quarter of a year. Here I enlarged my search to include another mystery traveler from England. Annie Singer, niece to Abraham Singer, came over from London via Palestine in early 1929 to stay with him. I was never quite sure what happened to her after immigration, possibly she married and without her new name I lost the trail, the perennial difficulty in tracing women. In looking at birth records, I found one Lewis Kodish in 1903 and several Annie Singers in the expected timeframe. For a small cost I can order the birth records from which I will likely identify the parents’ names.

While I was in the B-M-D Index, I decided to take a look at the Kodishes who might have immigrated from Russia. As I wanted to locate an earlier generation, I pulled up the death records for each year from 1904 to 2005. From these records, I also have the birth date and in some cases the mother’s name. Just as with my Radom database, I don’t know what they tell me yet, but as I get more information they may click into sharper focus.

So what was my process? It began with oral histories which revealed the existence of a Louis Kodish as well as his experience working on a ship. It further solidified with a photo. Immigration records for both Louis and Annie tied them to relatives of mine who originated in Dunilovichi and gave me an estimated birth date. It then lead me to my next step of ordering visa records which should tie to their parents and hopefully back to Dunilovichi. Along the way I had some dead ends and collected information which may prove meaningful as I learn more. I also had to wait several years before I could seek the visa for Annie Singer. The Office of US Citizen and Immigration Services will only release records if the person's birth date is over 100 years ago. An appreciation for the process is what keeps me on the trail.