ROOTS & BRANCHES

There are times—too many times—when social media is an unwelcome rabbit hole, wasting both time and interactions.

But that wasn’t the case earlier this month when Linda Katz, granddaughter of a Jewish immigrant to Philadelphia, obviously checked out my profile information after I commented on a comment she had made.

“You have a very cool job!” Katz privately messaged. “Would you be willing to answer a question for me?”

 I kind of held my breath but was somewhat relieved when Katz posed her inquiry.

“My Russian-born Jewish grandmother’s maiden name was Gordon, and that was also my father’s middle name,” Katz wrote. “I believe she was already married when they arrived at Ellis Island (where my grandfather’s name was changed). How would a Russian Jew end up with a Scottish name?”

I told Katz there were several possibilities but most likely is some phonetic shifts or a clipping of the name happened, e.g., Gortonsky morphs into Gordon. I also cautioned her that overwhelmingly immigrant name changes happened after the immigrant was in America and wanted to fit in, popular legends about Ellis Island to the contrary.

After Katz gave a little more information about her immigrant grandfather Samuel Katz (perhaps originally Cohen) as well as names of siblings of her father, I had enough to go to work searching some scans of original records on Ancestry.com.

 In fairly short order, I was able to find the family in the 1930 U.S. Census, a naturalization paper, and passenger arrival manifest.

The 1930 census included information on year of arrival for immigrants, so seeing that both Samuel and his wife Rose supposedly arrived in 1910 was consistent with Katz’s thought that they were already married before arriving in America.

The immigrant’s declaration of intent to naturalize in 1940 was a huge trove of information. It confirmed his occupation as a house painter, and added information such as is his birthplace in Dwink, Russia, and that he married his wife Rose there on Aug. 12, 1910, before arriving in Philadelphia on Oct. 11, 1910, aboard the ship Merion.

He also noted his name when he arrived was Jeschie Katz (and he signed both Jeschie and Samuel on the naturalization document).

The Philadelphia passenger arrival manifest confirmed his name as Jeschie and his wife’s name Ruche. So once again the myth of “surnames changed at Ellis Island” was disproved; it was not uncommon for many ethnic groups to “simplify” their given names into ones more common in English after arrival.

None of the documents gave a maiden name for Ruche/Rose, but the naturalization did give her precise birth date as March 15, 1887, which may enable a vital record to be found in the town that’s now Daugavpils, Latvia.