Our son found my paternal great-grandfather's immigration and naturalization papers which informed me that the paternal side of my father's family immigrated from Pruzany, Poland by way of Libau, Latvia in February of 1907. According to family lore the boat sank and all the papers were destroyed, so this is information I never thought I would know.
I also learned that my great-grandfather Jossel Fein, which was Americanized to Joseph Fine, signed his name with an X ("his mark"), which means that though he was a carpenter by trade he could not sign his name. He also might not have corrected the immigration form that spelled Anna's name "Annie" because he probably couldn't read English.
I never knew anything about Anna, my paternal great-grandmother. From this naturalization document I learned that she had just given birth to my grandfather Nathan just before leaving Poland (his birthday was the fifteenth of January, 1907); they reached New York on the fifteenth of February. Nathan's older brother Max was ten months old when the family arrived.
That means that Anna had back-to-back pregnancies, and that she must have had one hell of a time on that trip with two babies. But there was clearly no choice but to leave Poland.
My great-grandfather didn't become an American citizen until 1938. I imagine that the rest of his family became citizens at the same time, but who knows. Who knows about Anna? Was the path to citizenship for Max and Nathan, who were not born in the United States, the same as the path for their two younger siblings who were born here?
And who was Anna? (She is the elegant woman in the upper left). Nathan and Burton were musical, and I know that Max had musical children as well (one was a pianist who studied at Curtis). Did the Fine family's musical nature come from Anna?
The photo to the right of Anna is another Anna, my paternal grandmother. I know very little about her except that her mother was named Sadie Kwitch, and that she came from a shtetl near Kiev. Sadie's husband Philip died in 1931, a year after my father was born, and she married Joe Goren, a fishmonger who had a shop in West Philadelphia.
Anna Fine, My paternal grandmother, who died in 1963, spent the last fifteen years of her adulthood dealing with complications from multiple sclerosis. I heard that she was a great cook who never wrote down her recipes, but other than a story about her telling my father to keep his mouth shut so that he could ride for half fare on public transportation, and my Aunt Phyllis saying that she was like the character of Louey in Maureen Duffy's That's How it Was, I know nothing about her (but how I is wish I did).
The woman in the lower left is my mother's maternal grandmother, Fannie Feingold, who married George Bohrod. They immigrated together from Bessarabia (now Moldova), and had four children. The boys, Aaron and Milton, became important people (Aaron was a painter and Milton was a doctor), and the girls became wives. Lillian, my great aunt, was a happy party girl who liked to play cards. She spent her retirement (her husband's retirement) in Las Vegas, and Anne (my grandmother, who also liked to play cards, became a malignant narcissist. She isn't included in the photograph because I know too much about her.
The last woman is my mother's paternal grandmother known as "Machko," but the records show that her name was Elizabeth "Lizzie" Rabinowitz. She married Israel Blume who was known as the "merchant poet" of Chicago who ran the Cafe Royal (you can read about him here). Israel and Machko also ran a resort up in Michigan. It occurs to me, if only from looking at her face, that my great-grandmother was a person of consequence. I imagine that she handled the business end of the operation, and had something to do with the food. Her son, my grandfather Henry grew up to become an accountant.
I never knew anything about Anna, my paternal great-grandmother. From this naturalization document I learned that she had just given birth to my grandfather Nathan just before leaving Poland (his birthday was the fifteenth of January, 1907); they reached New York on the fifteenth of February. Nathan's older brother Max was ten months old when the family arrived.
That means that Anna had back-to-back pregnancies, and that she must have had one hell of a time on that trip with two babies. But there was clearly no choice but to leave Poland.
My great-grandfather didn't become an American citizen until 1938. I imagine that the rest of his family became citizens at the same time, but who knows. Who knows about Anna? Was the path to citizenship for Max and Nathan, who were not born in the United States, the same as the path for their two younger siblings who were born here?
And who was Anna? (She is the elegant woman in the upper left). Nathan and Burton were musical, and I know that Max had musical children as well (one was a pianist who studied at Curtis). Did the Fine family's musical nature come from Anna?
The photo to the right of Anna is another Anna, my paternal grandmother. I know very little about her except that her mother was named Sadie Kwitch, and that she came from a shtetl near Kiev. Sadie's husband Philip died in 1931, a year after my father was born, and she married Joe Goren, a fishmonger who had a shop in West Philadelphia.
Anna Fine, My paternal grandmother, who died in 1963, spent the last fifteen years of her adulthood dealing with complications from multiple sclerosis. I heard that she was a great cook who never wrote down her recipes, but other than a story about her telling my father to keep his mouth shut so that he could ride for half fare on public transportation, and my Aunt Phyllis saying that she was like the character of Louey in Maureen Duffy's That's How it Was, I know nothing about her (but how I is wish I did).
The woman in the lower left is my mother's maternal grandmother, Fannie Feingold, who married George Bohrod. They immigrated together from Bessarabia (now Moldova), and had four children. The boys, Aaron and Milton, became important people (Aaron was a painter and Milton was a doctor), and the girls became wives. Lillian, my great aunt, was a happy party girl who liked to play cards. She spent her retirement (her husband's retirement) in Las Vegas, and Anne (my grandmother, who also liked to play cards, became a malignant narcissist. She isn't included in the photograph because I know too much about her.
The last woman is my mother's paternal grandmother known as "Machko," but the records show that her name was Elizabeth "Lizzie" Rabinowitz. She married Israel Blume who was known as the "merchant poet" of Chicago who ran the Cafe Royal (you can read about him here). Israel and Machko also ran a resort up in Michigan. It occurs to me, if only from looking at her face, that my great-grandmother was a person of consequence. I imagine that she handled the business end of the operation, and had something to do with the food. Her son, my grandfather Henry grew up to become an accountant.
2 comments:
Naturalization info might be searchable. Years ago, someone on opera-l found Licia Albanese's naturalization record, which showed that she was four years older than she had been claiming!
Years ago there was a great deal of accessible information online. Now it all seems to be behind an Ancestry paywall, and I have found that some of the information behind that paywall is not as accurate as one would think. And so much of the immigration and naturalization stuff seems to involve only men, with women and children being part of their household. The job listed for women in so many of the census records I have seen is housewife.
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