Moritz Research Blog

My ancestor David Kronfeld was born in modern-day Łańcut, Poland in December of 1874. David and his family considered themselves Polish. All of his children went to secular school in Lwów (modern-day Lviv, Ukraine), with students of mixed religion, and they spoke in Polish. At the time of his birth, though, the places where David lived were not "Polish" per se; they were located in the province of Galicia, within the Austrian Empire. And like many other young men at the far edges of the Austrian Empire, David was drafted into the Austrian Army.  There is only one known large collection that survives of Austrian Empire soldiers from this time period that cover those living in the territory of Galicia, which are available through FamilySearch here . But they are not indexed and there are thousands and thousands of pages (although separated by letter, they are not in any easily managed order to find an individual's file). The only documentary evidence that I had that David w...

Sussya Klepper was born in Romania in 1884. She called it the “dark age”—literally, they had no electricity. When she was two months old, her father Aron boarded a ship to New York. After a year of making $6 a week with a push cart on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he had earned enough money to send for his wife, brother-in-law and baby daughter Sussya.  Sussya, or Susan as she went in New York, grew up on the Lower East Side. She eventually had three siblings, and they all shared a single bedroom in a tenement on Allen Street—the two boys shared a bed near the window and the two girls another bed near the wall. Her father ran a pawnshop on the ground floor, where her mother helped; and despite the limited space, they took in boarders to make an additional income. Years later, Susan described growing up on the Lower East Side as the absolute worst—how the streets were filled with mud; how the loud elevated rail passed right outside their bedroom window; how there was no privacy ...

When I started my genealogical adventures, all I knew about my grandfather's father's origins was that he was "from Kiev." I had no idea whether he was from the city  of Kiev or a nearby shtetl. I also was working with a remarkably common name: Louis Levine. Was the surname originally Levine? Did it change from something else? We did not know. Where Was Louis Born? The first important step was determining through US records where my great-grandfather had come from. The best sources to identify the birth place of an immigrant who came to the US in the late 1800s to early 1900s and who was born in the 1890s is one of three sources: (1) naturalization papers, (2) military registrations, and (3) ship records. Ship records are of course crucial to understanding an immigrant's background, but often times, finding the ship record without the first two steps listed above becomes more challenging (especially with a name like Levine , and without knowing the town of origin)...