Moritz Research Blog

In last week's installment , I wrote about my research into the whereabouts of two cousins that my grandmother remembered sledding with in Vienna when she was about four years old. All she remembered about these brothers was that they were called Pauli and Karli, and to the best of her knowledge, they had died in the Holocaust. I described how I was eventually able to identify these two brothers as Paul and Karl Teichner, sons of my great-grandmother's sister who had perished in the Holocaust. Through a Viennese probate record from 1967 for my grandmother's uncle, I learned that Paul and Karl did not in fact die in the Holocaust, but instead were still living, in Europe, unbeknownst to my grandmother.  This second part of the Teichner story addresses how I was able to locate what happened to Paul and Karl, both during the war and after the war, through the archives of three new countries. Paul Enlists in the War and Finds Himself in . . . England? After receiving the probat...

My grandmother's mother came from a very large Hungarian family. Her grandfather Samuel Hirschmann was born in Csóngrad in 1855 and married Netti Steiner of Abony in 1880 in the town of Tiszaföldvár. Between 1880 and 1907, Samuel and Netti lived in three different towns and had 12 children. My grandmother's mother Anna was the youngest, born in Kiskunfélegyháza in 1907. In 1909, the Hirschmann family left Hungary and relocated to Vienna, where my great-grandmother Anna grew up. In 1925, Anna met a strapping young Galician Jew from Lemberg named Lonek. They married within a few months of his arrival in Vienna, and one week after their marriage, they left Vienna for Mandate Palestine. Lonek was 20, Anna was 17. My grandmother was born the next year in Haifa. The rest of the Hirschmanns took different paths. Some came to Mandate Palestine like Anna, some remained in Vienna, another went to Budapest and yet another went to Prague. In 1943, when my grandmother was 16, her mother die...

Germany is one of the easiest countries for researching Jewish ancestors because the country's records have been so well-maintained. For Jews living in the largest cities of Germany ( Berlin , Hamburg , Frankfurt , for example), civil records have been indexed and are largely available on sites including Ancestry.com.   Other parts of Germany, though, are not so straightforward. One example is the town where I have ancestors from, called Bad Schwalbach. Bad Schwalbach (formerly called Langenschwalbach) is the district seat of Rheingau-Taunus-Kreis in the state of Hessen and near the border with Rheinland-Pfalz. Bad Schwalbach's location, near Wiesbaden, Mainz and Bingen Generally speaking, Jewish records from Hessen are quite easy to access. They include the following sources: Civil records beginning 1874/5 are available on Ancestry.com; those from Frankfurt date back even further, to the first half of the 19th century, in the horribly mislabeled collection " Rhineland, P...