The article was about my\ngreat-great-great-grandparents S\u00e1muel Goldschmid and Sarolta Burger on the occasion\nof their 50th<\/sup> wedding anniversary. Since I don’t speak Hungarian, I pasted the\ntext of the article into Google Translate and cleaned up the result with\nadditional help from a Hungarian relative: <\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n A trio of gold<\/strong>. Last Sunday there was a very interesting celebration in our town in the Mercur Hall.\nThere were three siblings in gold: 71-year-old S\u00e1muel Goldschmid and his wife, 66-year-old\nSarolta Burger; 78-year-old Bern\u00e1t Goldschmid and his wife, 68-year-old Regina Koritsoner;\nand 74-year-old \u00c1r\u00f3n Steiner and his wife, 79-year-old Netti Goldschmid. All three couples married in January 1826. <\/em>On\nthis golden anniversary there were 7 children and 30 grandchildren and 2\ngreat-grandchildren behind S\u00e1muel Goldschmid; behind Bern\u00e1t Goldschmid there were 9 children and 28 grandchildren. \u00c1r\u00f3n Steiner had no children\u2026 On this occasion, S\u00e1muel Goldschmid’s Granichst\u00e4tten\nnephews from Vienna presented him with a silver cup of value about 300 f.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n My great-great-great-grandfather was the S\u00e1muel\nGoldschmid of this newspaper article. The article, although short, is a\ngoldmine of genealogical information about his family. It revealed S\u00e1muel\u2018s brother Bern\u00e1t\nGoldschmid and sister Netti Goldschmid, and that allowed me to merge my family\ntree with an existing family tree for Bern\u00e1t Goldschmid that was on the\ncollaborative genealogy website Geni. Since Netti died after 1895, when Hungary\nbegan requiring civil records for life events, it was easy to find her death\nrecord on the Family Search website, which provided her father\u2019s name, N\u00e1th\u00e1n\nGoldschmid. I had not known the names of either of S\u00e1muel\u2018s parents (my\ngreat-great-great-great-grandparents) prior to this. Here is what I knew about this\nancestral family after a little more digging for dates:<\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n N\u00e1th\u00e1n Goldschmid\u2019s children: <\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n The newspaper article stated that, at the time\nof writing in 1876, S\u00e1muel had thirty grandchildren (I know of only eleven alive in\n1876) and two great-grandchildren (I know of none alive in 1876), so this provides\nme some very concrete and challenging research goals. <\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n But the most intriguing part came in the last\nsentence of the article. It mentions Viennese nephews with the surname\nGranichst\u00e4tten, a name that was previously unknown to me. Searching around on\nGeni, I eventually found a Franziska Granichst\u00e4dten (slight spelling variant), born\nGoldschmidt (ditto) circa<\/em> 1792 in\nP\u00e1pa, Hungary, where my Goldschmid family lived. She moved to Vienna and had eight\nchildren, who could have included the nephews that sent the silver cup\nmentioned in the last sentence of the newspaper article. Franziska would have\nbeen approximately eight years older than my great-great-great-grandfather S\u00e1muel,\nso could easily have been his sister. She died long before the 1876 newspaper\narticle, which explains why the silver cup would not have come from her but\nrather from her children. The facts that her birth name was Goldschmidt, that\nshe originated from P\u00e1pa, that her married name was Granichst\u00e4dten, and that\nshe had children in Vienna all fit the last sentence of the newspaper article so\nbeautifully that Franziska Granichst\u00e4dten seemed a very likely sister of S\u00e1muel\nGoldschmid. But this all appeared to be circumstantial evidence. <\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n What I needed as the capping evidence was some\ndocument that listed Franziska\u2019s father\u2019s name as N\u00e1th\u00e1n, the name I now knew\nto be S\u00e1muel\u2019s father\u2019s name. I found Franziska’s death record in the Vienna Jewish\nRegister on the Family Search website, but unfortunately it did not include her\nparents\u2019 names. I found most of her children\u2019s birth records, but again they\ndid not include Franziska\u2019s parents\u2019 names. I could not find any newspaper\nobituary or birth announcement for Franziska. What I really wanted to find was\nthe record of her marriage to Albert Granichst\u00e4dten, which would surely list\ntheir parents\u2019 names.<\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n I conjectured at the time that Albert\nGranichst\u00e4dten and Franziska Goldschmidt were married in Budapest around 1815. This\nprompted me to post a question to the Facebook group Zsid\u00f3\nM\u00falt->Csal\u00e1dkutat\u00e1s, which supports Hungarian Jewish family research, asking\nwhere I could find Budapest Jewish marriage records from 1815. The disappointing\nanswer I received was that Jewish records in Hungary before 1850 were rare, as\nthere was no law requiring such records to be maintained. A search of the\nVienna marriage records online also proved unsuccessful. Lacking Franziska\u2019s\nparents\u2019 names from a birth, marriage, or death record, Esther Toth from that Hungarian\nFacebook group suggested I locate Franziska\u2019s gravestone, as the inscription\nmight provide her parents\u2019 names. Her clever suggestion seemed to hold my last\nhope.<\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n Franziska died in 1842 and is buried in the Jewish\nCemetery in W\u00e4hring, Austria. That cemetery closed in 1879 and has fallen into\nextreme disrepair due to toppling trees, upheaval by roots, overgrown plants,\nexcavation during the Nazi occupation, and vandalism. Entry to the cemetery is now\nby permission only. I feared that her gravestone might have been destroyed or\nat least have become unreadable, and posted an inquiry to the mailing list of\nthe JewishGen Austria-Czech Special Interest Group. <\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n Wolf-Erich Eckstein, archivist of Vienna\u2019s Jewish Community (IKG), replied to my post, reporting\nthat the gravestone was indeed unreadable when he photographed it in 2000,\nanother disappointment to me. To my great surprise, though, he told me that there\nis a partial inventory of the cemetery’s inscriptions: “Around 1905 Dr.\nPinkas Heinrich, the archivist of the Jewish Community, founded an inventory\nabout the graves he found … He included parts of the Hebrew inscription from\nthe headstone[s].” Fortunately for\nme, Pinkas Heinrich had chosen to include a transcript of Franziska\u2019s\ngravestone, an image of which was sent to me by both Wolf-Erich Eckstein and\nRandy Schoenberg. <\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n I cannot read Hebrew, but a few people kindly provided translations, including my friends Dvora and Dov Harel. They reported\nthat the inscription states Franziska was \u201cdaughter of the officer Neta\nGoldshmid, blessed be his memory\u201d. At\nlast I had Franziska\u2019s father\u2019s name! A\nlittle more searching revealed that the name Neta is often a Hebrew alternative\nform of Nathan, my great-great-great-great-grandfather\u2019s name (N\u00e1th\u00e1n\nGoldschmid). I had finally accumulated enough evidence to convince me that Franziska\u2019s\nfamily tree and my family tree could be joined.<\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n One part of my obsessive persistence to connect\nFranziska Granichst\u00e4dten to my Goldschmid family was that she had a large, far-flung,\nand influential family on Geni. Several members of the Granichst\u00e4dten\nfamily appear in Wer Einmal War<\/em>,\nGeorg Gaugusch\u2019s treatise on the most influential Jewish families of Vienna\nduring the period 1800-1938. Another curiosity for me is that, while Albert\nGranichst\u00e4dten had married into my father\u2019s Hungarian family, his cousin\u2019s\ngreat-granddaughter, Anna Luise Granichst\u00e4dten, had married into my mother\u2019s Viennese\nfamily. I would never have noticed this odd coincidence had it not been for the\nunusual surname that had caught my eye in this 1876 newspaper article.<\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n It will be obvious that I had much help in this\nresearch from friends and collaborators in many quarters. I am grateful to all\nof them.<\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n February 2019<\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n Seattle, Washington, USA<\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n Martin’s story demonstrates excellent use of a\nvariety of online resources, networking with other researchers, and diligently following the trail until he found success.<\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n\n\n <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Martin Tompa\n
![](\"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/JGSS-TOMPA-Image-2.jpg\")
<\/a>
P\u00e1pai Lapok
March 18, 1876 issue
(click to enlarge image)<\/i><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/a>
Franziska Granichst\u00e4dten’s
Gravestone Inscription
(click to enlarge image)<\/i><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n
\nEditor’s Research Notes and Hints<\/strong><\/h4>\n
\n
\ngreat-great-great-grandparents. <\/li>\n
\ntreatise on\ninfluential Jewish families titled Wer Einmal War<\/em><\/strong><\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
\n\n\n
\n“\u2026 the most intriguing part came in the last sentence of the article. It mentions Viennese nephews with the surname Granichst\u00e4tten, a name that was previously unknown to me.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":724,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[37],"tags":[10,31],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":" Jewish Cemetery, W\u00e4hring, Vienna, Austria. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia)","source_text":"","source_url":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739"}],"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=739"}],"version-history":[{"count":84,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1786,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/739\/revisions\/1786"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishgen.org\/jewishgen\/testimonials\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}