![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/Gelber_01-750x1024.jpg\")
Tillie was a small child who grew up to be a small adult \u2014 most likely from malnourishment in childhood. She went to work at the age of eight, sewing in a factory after her father died. After learning about the Kishinev pogrom, Tillie\u2019s mother sent her away to some relatives in America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Tillie thought her uncle was supposed to meet her at the dock, but he wasn\u2019t there when she got off the ship. She stood on the dock, alone, not speaking any English, and holding a piece of paper with her uncle\u2019s address. She didn\u2019t know what to do or where to go. Anything might have happened \u2014 more likely something terrible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As she told me the story, \u201cA black man came along. I had never seen anyone with dark skin before. He read the address on the paper and took me by the hand to my uncle\u2019s house — I can never be prejudiced against black people or understand people who are prejudiced.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 1904, the man who rescued my grandmother might very well have been born a slave \u2014 and most certainly was born in the era of slavery or shortly afterwards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was all I knew of the story, and it seemed destined to be all I ever would know, before the advent of the Internet, Ancestry.com, and JewishGen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sixty years after I heard about my grandmother\u2019s arrival, and after much research on Ancestry.com, I found the manifest of the Haverford, the ship on which she had traveled. I had previously spent a long time looking fruitlessly on the Ellis Island website, before it came to me from my dim memories that she was the only one of my relatives whose entry point had been Philadelphia, not New York. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her name had been transcribed in the Ancestry.com records as \u201cJanbe Wolfezan\u201d on the Haverford departure list and as “Taube Wolfszain” on the passenger manifest, which made her almost impossible to find. In the tiny handwriting crowded into the line with her name, the ship manifest indicated that it was \u201cExpected\u201d that Tillie would be “met by uncle Albert Stern at the wharf”. It was almost uncanny to see my grandmother\u2019s story from the perspective of the time before it happened \u2013 and to see her expectation of her uncle\u2019s arrival confirmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Now I had a clue: her uncle\u2019s last name was Stern. This was a name I didn\u2019t recognize from family stories or photographs, so I didn\u2019t know exactly how he might have been related to her. At that time, the term \u201cUncle\u201d was not reserved only for the brother or brother-in-law of a parent. For example, a parent\u2019s first cousin might be called \u201cUncle\u201d as a sign of respect.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then a startling coincidence \u2014 there was someone on the JewishGen Family Finder page for the town of Hrymayliv who was looking for families named Wolfson and Stern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This was Mark Alsher, a translator and teacher of Yiddish. In our email correspondence, Mark recognized the first names of my grandmother and her four siblings from stories his own grandmother had told him.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We were able to determine that our grandmothers were first cousins. \u201cUncle Alber Stern\u201d was Mark\u2019s great-grandfather, Alter Stern. Alter\u2019s wife, Sarah Wolfson Stern, was the sister of Tillie\u2019s father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/Gelber_02-727x1024.jpg\")
Gertie & Nathan<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
Mark and I are third cousins, and we share an interest in genealogy and in the Yiddish language. He was able to translate the Yiddish inscriptions on the hundred-plus-year-old postcards and photographs that I had inherited from my father \u2014 one of the photographs he recognized as a baby picture of his own father. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We never did find out why Uncle Alter wasn\u2019t at the wharf, but Mark helped to solve another mystery. Another of the photographs was of an old man with long side-locks, a dreamy facial expression, and shoes that showed the effects of a pilgrimage. On the reverse side, the studio was identified as \u201cSelim Cohen, Photographe [sic], Saffed (Palestine).\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n
My father had told me that his mother\u2019s grandfather had left the family in Rimalov sometime before 1900 and gone to Safed (Tzfat), where he died. My parents looked for his grave when they were in Safed in 1971, but they never found it. I think they were looking for someone named Wolfson, Tillie\u2019s father\u2019s father. But Mark knew that it was not someone from the Wolfson family \u2014 he would have heard about it from his grandmother if it had been. So now I think that the photo was of Tillie\u2019s mother\u2019s father, whose last name was Nissenbaum or Nussbaum, although I still haven\u2019t been successful in finding his grave in the various Jewish burial records.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Mark also kindly introduced me by email to several other Wolfson-Stern descendants, who were glad to know of a new relative. I have been attempting for several years to determine the genetic haplotypes of all my great-great-grandparents, by testing their descendants in the male or female line with 23andMe. With the help of a female first cousin of Mark\u2019s, I was able to find out the maternal haplotype of our shared great-great-grandmother. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
What a surprise to find a whole family of long-lost relatives \u2014 thanks to JewishGen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
September 2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n
La Jolla, California, USA
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Research Notes and Hints<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
Marilyn could not find her grandmother\u2019s ship passenger log on the Ellis Island<\/a> database. Later she recalled that her grandmother had arrived at the port in Philadelphia, not New York, and she found the departure list and the ship passenger manifest on Ancestry.com<\/a>. See line 11 of the manifest<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Passenger lists are helpful tools in family history research. As Marilyn experienced, however, we need to keep an open mind when searching for or relying upon them. Sometimes the spelling of surnames or other information may be incorrect. The clerks who completed these records wrote down what they heard the passengers say, often passengers who didn’t speak the same language as the clerks. Sometimes the person indexing the handwritten documents might have misread the clerk’s handwriting. In Marilyn’s case, the passenger records offered several anomalies. Her grandmother’s age was listed as 10, when she was probably 11 at the time of the voyage, her surname was spelled differently on two different passenger records and, on one indexed record, her given name was unrecognizable. Her grandmother never lived in the town listed as her last residence, the address of her destination in Philadelphia was changed on the manifest from Spruce Street to Race Street, and the handwritten note about her uncle was difficult to read. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Marilyn\u2019s breakthrough came as a result of a previously unknown third-cousin\u2019s posting on JewishGen\u2019s Family Finder. If you haven\u2019t already posted your ancestral towns and family surnames on Family Finder<\/a>, we encourage you to do so. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Information about Hrymayliv, Ukraine, can be found on the JewishGen KehilaLinks webpage<\/a> and the JewishGen Communities Database<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
![manifest<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nPassenger lists are helpful tools in family history research. As Marilyn experienced, however, we need to keep an open mind when searching for or relying upon them. Sometimes the spelling of surnames or other information may be incorrect. The clerks who completed these records wrote down what they heard the passengers say, often passengers who didn’t speak the same language as the clerks. Sometimes the person indexing the handwritten documents might have misread the clerk’s handwriting. In Marilyn’s case, the passenger records offered several anomalies. Her grandmother’s age was listed as 10, when she was probably 11 at the time of the voyage, her surname was spelled differently on two different passenger records and, on one indexed record, her given name was unrecognizable. Her grandmother never lived in the town listed as her last residence, the address of her destination in Philadelphia was changed on the manifest from Spruce Street to Race Street, and the handwritten note about her uncle was difficult to read. <\/p>\n\n\n\nMarilyn\u2019s breakthrough came as a result of a previously unknown third-cousin\u2019s posting on JewishGen\u2019s Family Finder. If you haven\u2019t already posted your ancestral towns and family surnames on Family Finder<\/a>, we encourage you to do so. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Information about Hrymayliv, Ukraine, can be found on the JewishGen KehilaLinks webpage<\/a> and the JewishGen Communities Database<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n\nInformation regarding the Kishinev pogrom mentioned in Marilyn’s story can be found here: Kishinev Pogrom<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Marilyn Goldenberg Gelber<\/p>\n“My father\u2019s mother, Taube (Tillie) Wolfson Goldenberg, was probably 11 years old in 1904, when she came by herself to America \u2026 Tillie thought her uncle was supposed to meet her at the dock, but he wasn\u2019t there when she got off the ship. She stood on the dock, alone, not speaking any English, and holding a piece of paper with her uncle\u2019s address.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":1845,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[47],"tags":[43],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1821"}],"version-history":[{"count":40,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2036,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1821\/revisions\/2036"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1845"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/09\/gelber_manifest.jpg\"){kind=link}