Where is my missing Jewish relative?
Richard Ashby had already done a great deal of research into his ancestors, but needed our expert’s help to trace an elusive relative
QMy maternal ancestors are reputed to have come from Alsace-Lorraine, and were grain merchants who supplied Napoleon’s army on the invasion of Russia. They then escaped into Russian-occupied Poland on the winter retreat from Moscow.
Their son, Myer Kresner, married Meriam Moerling in the early 1840s and reportedly had six surviving children, but I can only trace five sons and not the missing child – probably a daughter. In the 1900 US census Meriam Krasner, aged 73, is living in New York with her son Israel, wife Leah and their children. Meriam states that she has six out of eight living children.
Five of these children, including Israel (born c1844), were born in Poland: Louis (c1846), my great grandfather Woolf (born 3 January 1855 in Skepe,˛ Poland; changed name to Alfred and became a UK citizen in 1907), Aaron (c1857) and John/Jonas (born c1859). My guess is that the missing children were born between 1848 and 1853; one survived while two died as infants.
I have found that Israel travelled alone from Hamburg to Hull in 1864, and then he married Leah on 4 August 1869 at the Great Synagogue, London. In 1873 Israel sailed from Liverpool to New York, followed by Leah and their three children in 1875.
By 1880 Israel, Leah and their family were living in New York with brothers Aaron and John but no widowed mother. According to the 1920 US census the brothers emigrated to the USA c1875, but I can find no matching travel records.
My guess is that Meriam and an unnamed daughter followed them in the early 1880s. The daughter may have been married or was married before 1900. But the 1890 US census was destroyed in a fire, and New York marriage records are incomplete. Richard Ashby
AUsually people researching their family from Poland and the Russian Empire hit a brick wall because they do not know the exact location in the Pale of Settlement where their family originated, and most records are held in town or regional archives.
Knowing that your family is from Skepe˛ should make finding vital records fairly easy. However, my research of Skepe˛ using the Polish State Archives search facility ( szukajwarchiwach.
pl) found no specifically Jewish records for the town. Even when refining the search to ‘Vital records and civil registers’ (‘Akta metrykalne i stanu cywilnego’) the results were limited to nine Roman Catholic registers.
Another search filter used was for the denomination ‘Mojz˙eszow’ (Mosaic/Jewish) records, which found no uniquely Jewish records. However, this does not mean that there is none, because Jewish vital records were sometimes recorded in the local church books.
The Polish State Archive is digitising its holdings and putting scans online, but it has not yet added the Skepe˛ records. There are two options for finding what might be in the Roman Catholic registers. The first is to contact the archive holding them at Archiwum Pan´stwowe w Toruniu Oddział we Włocławku (State Archive in Torun´ Branch in Włocławek): wloclawek@torun.
ap.gov.pl. The second is to use the familysearch.org films for Skepe˛ for the period 1826–1883. The film numbers are: 534113 (1851–1860); 1895294 Items 3–5 (birth records 1826–1848 and 1850–1865, death records 1853–1862); and 2404953 (death records 1851–1870).
I also did a broader search for the name ‘Kresner’ in Poland on JewishGen ( jewishgen.org) and Jewish Records Indexing – Poland ( jri-poland.org). Firstly, on JewishGen, I used the JewishGen Family Finder ( JGFF) to look for other people researching ‘Kresner’, but there were only two people looking for a family with that spelling, and neither was in Skepe.˛ The second JewishGen database searched was the Family Tree of the Jewish People (FTJP), which has thousands of trees, but only 12 records for Kresner.
My search on JRI-Poland produced three matches. One of these records was for the birth of Fraindla Kresner in Kraków, Poland, in 1842, and the source was FHL film no. 718915.
It is worth bearing in mind that Jewish last names in Eastern Europe tend to have multiple spellings. A phonetic search of JRI-Poland for ‘Kresner’ produced variants such as ‘Krasner’, ‘Kreschner’, ‘Krizner’ and ‘Krajzner’. None of these results matched with your family. Phonetic searches on JGFF and FTJP produced 33 people and 480 results respectively.
Other potential locations for Jewish records include the Consolidated Jewish Surname Index (CJSI) at avotaynu.com/ csi/csi-home.htm, which has collected instances of names from 42 different databases and books. The CJSI search produces name variants, and suggests the relevant databases to look at. JewishGen’s All Poland Database and JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry may also help. Jeanette Rosenberg OBE