by Howard Gluckman
When my father, Irwin, was two years old, his 32-year-old father, Samuel, passed away from medical complications shortly after surgery. In the aftermath of this tragedy, my grandmother’s brothers stepped into the paternal role for a decade until my grandmother, Mollie, remarried Samuel Schultz. My father had the good fortune to form a close bond with his stepfather, the loving paternal grandfather I knew growing up.
With little or no contact from the Gluckman side of the family, not even a family photo or stories of Samuel Gluckman’s youth, this biological father became a forgotten figure in our family’s history. Interestingly, that family had the last name “Glickman” due, as the family story goes, to an error when Samuel Gluckman entered the United States as a toddler with his parents. It was likely a mix up between the last name of the baby boy and his parents in the transport ship manifest, since the spelling of “Gluckman” used the German umlaut (two dots) above the “u”, which is pronounced as “i”.
Curious about this missing family link, I once asked my father if he knew where his father was buried. He didn’t, nor did he express any desire to find out. But he didn’t object if I wanted to search. As far as he was concerned, the question could remain open indefinitely.
It wasn’t until after my father’s passing in December 2011 that I found the time and motivation to seriously pursue the mystery. I had no knowledge of how to go about such a search, and I did not seek help as I should have. With my wife’s assistance, I first searched the JewishGen Worldwide Online Burial Registry database (https://www.jewishgen.org/databases/cemetery/) for New York City where I knew Samuel lived when he passed away. What little I knew from my father came down to: the name Samuel Gluckman, Hebrew name Shmuel, father’s given name Sussman, and the story that he supposedly died of a blood clot following a hernia operation when my father was two years old. Considering my father could have been three years old at the time placed Samuel’s death sometime between 1920 and 1923. I had no addresses but knew my grandmother was living in The Bronx before remarrying and moving to Bayonne, New Jersey.
The informal online search of the JewishGen Worldwide Online Burial Registry was unfruitful. I searched for both Samuel Gluckman and Samuel Glickman. The first break came from turning to a different source, an online search of the U.S. Federal Census Records (https://www.archives.gov/research/census/online-resources). The 1920 Census revealed a Samuel B. Glickman, age 30, born in Russia, and living in Manhattan with his wife, Mollie, and two children, Ruth and Irwin. My father had never mentioned a middle name for his father and there was no one alive to ask what the “B” stood for. Taking this more specific information back to the JewishGen Worldwide Online Burial Registry, I found no Samuel Gluckman but did find thirty-four Samuel Glickmans buried in New York City. Only one died during the years in question who appeared to have the age of my grandfather when he was thought to have died. That Samuel Glickman died August 15, 1922, and was buried in the Mount Hebron Cemetery, Flushing, New York, Block 14, Section E, Line 4, Grave 6. A call to the cemetery confirmed this information but they had no date of birth, date of burial, nor family information.
With no further details, I felt compelled to see the grave myself. Chances seemed high to me that this was the grave of my grandfather. I didn’t consider at the time first trying to find a death certificate, which could have helped verify place of burial. On a hot July day in 2012, my wife and I traveled from New Jersey to New York by bus and then subway and another bus through Flushing to the Mount Hebron Cemetery.
When we exited our last bus ride we saw nothing but a residential street behind us and a high-speed highway ahead of us – no sign of any cemetery. Luckily. I had my smart phone with me, or I would have had no idea where to go next. We followed crosswalks crossing one highway and underneath another to the obscured entrance of the Mount Hebron Cemetery.
The clerk at the cemetery pulled out a map and provided us directions to the grave, noting that their records indicated the age at death for this Samuel Glickman was eight. We thought that perhaps the written age could be erroneous. Besides, we had come too far in the heat to forgo seeing for ourselves. With the help of a gardener at the cemetery we found the headstone, which clearly showed death at age nine (not the age eight of the cemetery records). Also, the Hebrew name was Shalom Bar Yitzchak, not the Hebrew name of my grandfather. We had reached a dead end, literally and figuratively.
Disheartened but not defeated, I expanded the online search to individually look at the website of each of the Jewish cemeteries in New York City except for Staten Island (Richmond), which, considering the lack of any bridges at the time of burial, I believed to be an unlikely location. I couldn’t fathom a death in The Bronx followed by a final journey to Staten Island using ferries and a hearse. Some of the cemeteries had no online database. Again, the search revealed nothing useful. I needed more specific information of the death. It was time to seek an official death certificate.
Some quick inquiries of where to find New York City death certificates led me to the New York City Municipal Archives. There was no central New York City archive of death certificates online at the time of my search in 2012 (today there is a central website, the New York City Vital Historical Records, for years prior to 1950: https://a860-historicalvitalrecords.nyc.gov ). I did not consider the possibility of going to the archive, or going to the New York City public library, to look through microfilm of death certificates or indices, respectively. Instead, I made a request for a search by the municipality. That required an order for each borough for each year in question.
Since I didn’t have the specific year of death, I ordered a search for each of the years 1920 through 1923 for the boroughs of Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. There was a fee for each search for each borough for each year. The online application was easy, and the total fee for all those searches was only $50.50. Meanwhile, I searched the New York City Vital Historical Records (see link above) to see if I could find information on the marriage of Samuel Gluckman to my grandmother, Mollie Horowitz. There I found summary information of their marriage in Manhattan on May 24, 1913, certificate number 14111 with the name Samuel Glickman (Note: copies of original marriage certificates for New York City are currently being digitized and linked to a different site than the one I searched in 2012).
A few weeks later, I received a Standard Certificate of Death for Samuel Glickman who died June 23, 1922. The date of death was plausible, but while his wife’s name was Mollie and he was born in Russia, everything else was wrong, namely he was age 65 at death, and the name of the deceased’s father was wrong. Frustrated, I wrote to the New York City Municipal Archives pointing out the likely incompleteness of their search. I could only hope they would try again more intensively and track down better candidates.
I waited a few more weeks and when nothing showed up, I sent an additional follow up letter with more details about my search and complaining that I didn’t think it was possible that they only found one death certificate with the parameters I had requested.
Finally, during Rosh Hashanah 2012, a second envelope arrived with a death certificate for a Samuel B. Gluckman who had died on May 31, 1922. I was able to verify the deceased as my grandfather based upon the age at death of 32, the deceased’s father’s name as Sussman, and the cause of death listed as pulmonary embolism following bilateral inguinal hernia surgery. The facts fit and the family story about the cause of death was now proven true. Interestingly, the certificate named my grandfather in one place as “Sam Glucksman” and elsewhere as “Sam Glicksman.” He is listed as married but my grandmother’s name does not appear anywhere. I also learned from the certificate that his mother’s name was Sarah Klein, something I did not previously know.
The place of burial indicated on the death certificate was Baron Hirsch Cemetery, Staten Island, a borough of New York City that I had previously discounted. To my surprise, the cemetery was just a 20-minute drive from where my father had lived with his mother and sister in Bayonne, New Jersey. Since the Baron Hirsh Cemetery website did not have any computer burial information, I called the cemetery office. Initially, I was told that my grandfather was not buried there. Only after clarification on the exact date of death was the cemetery clerk able to confirm he was indeed there.
When I arrived at the Baron Hirsch Cemetery, I discovered that the 1922 record for my grandfather did not have a legible grave location. The clerk laid out on a table a map of the cemetery three feet by three feet in size containing thousands of plots, each represented by a rectangle one inch by a half inch. The names and locations were so small that they could only be read using the magnifying glass handed to me. I began to worry that I would be there for days, bent over that map. But this time luck was on my side, and I found “Samuel B. Glickman, 5-31-22, Plot 252, Row 10, Grave 10” after only a few hours.
I braced myself for a small, weathered 1922 stone in need of repair, but instead found a large elegant black stone monument in excellent condition, carved to resemble a tree trunk. I was overcome with emotion. After all these years, I had found him. Not one person — not his wife, not his children — had visited this grave for nearly a century. The name on the tombstone is “Gluckman” despite the cemetery record showing “Glickman.” Why my grandmother had kept this grave, so close to where they had all lived, a secret from her son and daughter would remain a mystery to me, though I was aware that she, as a Jewish widow, would not have visited the grave of her deceased husband after remarrying.
That very day, I made a quiet promise that this grave would not be forgotten again. As long I am alive, someone will visit the resting place of Samuel Beyer Gluckman.
Editor’s Research Notes and Hints
Howard had very little information about his grandfather ̶ most importantly his name, approximate date of death, and city where he was living.
Without any prior experience in doing such searches, he went directly to online burial databases, moving on to the 1920 Federal Census when the burial data led nowhere.
Searching the census, Howard located a family that had all the correct names and ages; using this, he returned to the burial database and located a person who was likely his grandfather.
Rather than getting a copy of the death certificate to confirm if he had the right person, he went directly to the cemetery, only to be disappointed.
After this false lead, Howard requested the archive to do an extensive search, ultimately successful.