Jewish Will Extracts 18th – 19th Century

SynagogueScribes are delighted to announce a brilliant new addition to our special section featuring Secular Records. 

Ranging from 1682 to the late Nineteenth century, from towns across the United Kingdom and  places as far afield as New York, Jamaica, and Australia, from the wealthy slave-owner to the humble general dealer, from Silversmiths and Quill Dressers, Book Sellers, Publicans, Orange Merchants and  Cattle Salesmen, these abstracts reflect the extraordinary diversity of Jewish life across two centuries.

You can search for individual names by selecting "Jewish Will Extracts 18th – 19th Century" on the main search page for Secular Records - this will bring up persons of the selected name who have left a Will, or persons with that name featured in Wills left by others; or you can browse the full list from the link further down the same page.

We cannot always be certain of the "Jewish" bona fides of those we have included; some, such as Rebecca HART MYERS (NA 585) were clearly born Jewish but died outside the faith: others, such as Isaac SCHOMBERG (NA 612) were possibly even more removed from the faith of their forebears: others leave us pondering.   Our editorial policy in this matter has been based strictly on personal choice and should not be taken as conclusive one way or the other.

These extracts were prepared, and generously contributed, by David Alexander

Start your family tree week - your Jewish Family Tree!

We at CemeteryScribes and SynagogueScribes fully support the idea of the UK Family Tree week which starts tomorrow 26th Dec 2010.

With the holiday season giving us all time to get together with family we all have the ideal opportunity to make some notes on family relations and find new ones.

Websites taking part in Start Your Family Tree Week are:
Findmypast, Genes Reunited, ScotlandsPeople and Eneclann.
Supporting Start Your Family Tree Week are:
The Society of Genealogists, The Federation of Family History Societies, Pen and Sword Books, BBC Who Do You Think You Are? Magazine, Your Family Tree magazine, My History, Family Tree Magazine, Who Do You Think You Are? LIVE, Pandigital, from you to me and Francis Frith.

To start finding your Jewish family tree, go to www.cemeteryscribes.com and use the basic search at the top left hand corner. Enter your family name and see what you find.

We have included mini family trees to help you identify your ancestors and you will also find details of their burial place and transcriptions of tombstone inscriptions.

The top 20 family names found on CemeteryScribes are:
1. Levy
2. Cohen
3. Jacobs
4. Davis
5. Isaacs
6. Harris
7. Hart
8. Solomon
9. Nathan
10. Phillips
11. Samuel
12. Moses
13. Marks
14. Joseph
15. Abrahams
16. Lazarus
17. Benjamin
18. Emanuel
19. Myers
20. Alexander

Then to do some further research go to www.synagoguescribes.com and search through the thousands of Synagogue records we have transcribed with the emphasis being on pre-civil registration records. As civil registration of births, marriages and deaths began on 1st Jul 1837 these are a must to get you back further.

You can also take a look at our getting started pages found here http://synagoguescribes.com/blog/getting-started/
Happy hunting and a very Happy New Year.

Ketuba Mystery - Solved!

When it comes to requests for help with family trees, we at www.SynagogeSribes.com are a pretty hard-hearted bunch.   We have to be: if we weren’t, we’d finish up spending all our time on other people’s genealogies,  leaving none for our core work of finding, transcribing and publishing Jewish community records and, with our other hats on, recording cemeteries for our sister site, www.cemeteryscribes.com So, mostly,  we refer  such queries to organisations and individuals more dedicated to this kind of work. However, we couldn’t resist  a cri-de-coeur from a researcher concerning an unidentified Ketuba, passed to him by his grandmother.

A Ketuba (marriage Contract) is handed to the Bride during the Marriage Ceremony and would remain in her possession throughout her lifetime and be passed to her children on her decease and, thus, remain rather private documents

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=187&letter=K#552 http://www.galleryjudaica.com/articles/TradText.html
The Ketuba in question was quite plain and, fortunately, the personal details were easy to decipher.  As was to be expected, there were no English Family names on the document and the Hebrew patronymics, Moshe b. Meir and Hannah bat Uri (Aryeh), meant nothing to our correspondent.   That is until he looked at the dates on some civil marriage certificates that had, quite fortuitously, arrived by post that very day and, suddenly, the light dawned; the Ketuba belonged to his Great Great Grandmother’s sister, Hannah Emanuel, who married Morris Myers on 17 February 1864.

The matter might have rested there but, in writing to thank us, our correspondent gave us some details of  the parents of the Hannah Myers (nee Emanuel), whose Ketuba we had translated, and her sister Sarah, his own Great Great grandmother. They were Philip Emanuel and Abigail Simmons: two names which chimed with some records we had recently been studying.
The couple had married at the Great Synagogue on 1^st September 1841 http://www.synagoguescribes.com/persondetails.php?value=5363
Abigail’s antecedents, Levy Simmon(d)s and Sarah Cohen http://www.synagoguescribes.com/persondetails.php?value=2792 had been relatively easy to trace. Philip, however, had proved impossibly elusive.   And elusive he remains. But something our correspondent spotted concerning the father’s name on Philip’s civil marriage certificate, sent us scurrying back to our SynagogueScribes database [www.SynagogueScribes.com] and over the next week or two we will see if this new line of enquiry leads us out of this genealogical maze, or if we continue to go round in circles, following one false trail after another.



ALS 6 September 2010

An Englishman in New York - a success story

The SynagogueScribes and CemeteryScribes websites were born out of our personal interest in Anglo-Jewish genealogy.   We put our work out there on the Web in the hope that others will find it useful.  But forget about altruism: we do it because we love it!  And, of course, we are always delighted when we hear of success stories from researchers who have used the sites or, as in a recent case, when we were able to help a recent poster to one of the specialised forums, who did not know of our work,and had hit a seemingly inpenetrable brick wall.

The poster’s 3^rd great-grandfather, Aaron Samuel, had evidently left London with his family for the United States around 1857 and, from there, she had successfully traced them until their deaths. On the UK side, she had located him, with wife, children and a named brother-in-law, Elisha Gottheil, in the 1851 Census, and with his father and sibs in the 1841 census.  And that was it.  No civil marriage had been found, and of course, Aaron’s birth in circa 1823 would have pre-dated the advent of mandatory civil registration in the UK.

Like her, we were unable to locate a civil marriage.   Nor did we find one on the SynagogueScribes website

Basic Search

Family Name = SAMUEL (or SAMUELS)

First Name = Aaron

Result = 0

But basic search identified an almost certain marriage for Aaron Samuel’s father, Lazarus.

Family Name = SAMUEL

First Name  =  Lazarus

Result = 2, of which one was for 1837 so much too late for him to be a father of Aaron born c 1824

http://www.synagoguescribes.com/persondetails.php?value=2554

Shows that Lazarus SAMUEL (Eliezer Lezer b. Moshe Jacob Aph\Akl\Aachen) married

Saratse NATHAN  (Sarah bat Meir Fishman) at the Great Synagogue London on 28 June 1815.

Assuming this is the correct marriage – and it seems safe to do so – we now have a name for Aaron Samuel’s grand father (Moshe Jacob) and the full name for his mother Saratse NATHAN

To see if we could find out more about Saratse’s family, we went to Advanced Search\Keyword and entered the word “Fishman”.  This produced 16 results, of which 3 had the family name of NATHAN.   We immediately ruled out the 1812 burial record for Elizabeth as she was a daughter of Solomon Fishman, whereas we were looking for a Meir Fishman.  That left Saratse’s marriage and one for an evident brother Simon http://www.synagoguescribes.com/persondetails.php?value=2053 Finding a sib, particularly a male sib, is always helpful as their records, both Community and Civil my contain additional information.

The lack of a civil or community marriage record for Aaron continues to create questions over the true identity of his wife, but this should be overcome if the poster orders civil birth certificates for one or more of their children.

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Governmentcitizensandrights/Registeringlifeevents/Familyhistoryandresearch/Birthmarriageanddeathcertificates/DG_175628

In the meantime, we thought it might be helpful to find out more about the 1851  Elisha GOTTSEL Brother In Law Married M 30 1821 Shoemaker  b. Germany  so we conducted a further search in the SynagogueScribes database as follows.

Because of the uncertainty of the exact spelling of both his Family and First Name

We entered three letters only in each field

Family Name  = GOT

First Name = ELI

This produced one result which can be found at http://www.synagoguescribes.com/persondetails.php?value=6622

From this we learn his wife’s family name and patronymic and, more importantly Elisha’s father’s Hebrew Name: Issachar Berel.  If Elisha is Phoebe Samuel’s brother, then that would indicate that she was nee GOTTSEL\GOTTSHEIL\variant spellings and that she, too, would have been bat Issachar Berel.

Another serious possibility arises, however that must be considered.

It may have been that Elisha GOTTSEL’s wife, Anne nee LEVY, was a sister of Phoebe SAMUEL.  Phoebe is shown on her tombstone as having been born in London and again on the 1851 census as being born in Whitechapel, whereas Elisha GOTTSEL who is only two years older than her, was born in Germany, so the jury is still out on this one and the Poster still has much work to do.

Harold Lewin ( Birth Records of the Great & Hambro Synagogues London, Second Edition. Harold & Miriam Lewin 2009. ISBN 978-965-91261-0-1) records the birth of their daughter Rose GOTTHEIL (Rahel bat Elia) on 18 July 1850.

The Poster might wish to obtain  the will of Elias Gottheil, died 1899 to see what, if any mention is made of additional family members and also his Naturalisation Papers  which can be ordered and downloaded online

http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/catalogue/displaycataloguedetails.asp?CATID=-2201034&CATLN=7&Highlight=%2CGOTTHEIL&accessmethod=0

We do not normally conduct research enquires but, since the Poster did not live in the UK and was, apparently, unaware of our websites, we were more than happy to introduce her to them and show her how she might use them to help with her research.  Our work in this respect was far from exhaustive and by some judicious use of the Advanced Search and Keyword options, she may find more of her ancestors therein.   She kindly provided us with a photograph of Aaron Samuel’s tombstone in Washington cemetery in New York and this can be found here.

…………………………….

Our records are regularly updated:  further BANCROFT ROAD\MAIDEN LANE burials are in the pipe line on www.cemeteryscribes.com

Searching SynagogueScribes.com - Basic Search

First in the series of our step-by-step guides to searching SynagogueScribes and getting the best results.

Example 1: Finding a Burial Record for Sarah Nathan CemeteryScribes ref I970

In SynagogueScribes, using basic search which is the search present on every page of the site. The results will cover all the sources, births, circumcisions, marriages, burials.


Enter Family Name =  NATHAN           First Name = Sarah

Produces 15 results, of which the last BSGSBUR32 102 is a match.

Note the very slight discrepancy between the dates, probably due to variations on whether these refer to the date of death or the date of burial, and occasional imperfections in the calculations between the Hebrew and the English date.

Example 2.

Looking for a Synagogue marriage for Simon Magnus [1851  6, New Street, Saint  Botolph Without Bishopsgate RG number: HO107 Piece:1524 Folio:  670  Page: 7] with wife Julia and Father Nathan.

In SynagogueScribes Using basic search

Enter Family Name = MAGNUS                 First Name =  Simon

Produces one result GSM 222/15.   But this cannot be the correct marriage.  Why? Because, apart from the fact that this groom’s bride is Sarah, the father in this record is Eliezer.

But don’t give up yet.  Why not try an alternative spelling for either Family or first name.

In SynagogueScribes (www.SynagogueScribes.com) Using basic search:

Enter Family Name = MAGNUS           First Name =  Simeon

Produces one result, GSM 299/60, where the bride’s name is Julia and, most importantly, the groom’s father is Nathan

Over the coming weeks, we will look at more complex searches.   Meanwhile, we hope you enjoy using both our databases and that they help advance your family history.