All our Rabinowitz names can be found at Mount Hebron Cemetery

Walt, I started looking at the Mount Hebron cemetery records again, and am feeling hopeful that the Joseph Rabinowitz who died August 31, 1920 and is buried in the Isaac Elchonon Independent Society plot may be our guy after all. You might recall that I had chalked it up to a near miss when I blogged about it on August 1. The problem is that Italiangen shows a Joseph Rabinowitz who died that day at age 46. Our Joseph would have been 66.

Now I am considering the possibility that Italiangen has an error. We've seen other cases of transcription errors. It wouldn't be hard to believe that 46 was entered by mistake instead of 66.

Besides the name of the burial society (that society buried about 100 people at Mount Hebron between the years 1913 and 1987--no other names that I recognize), the other indicator is that there are people in that cemetery (all buried by other societies) that match the names of every member of the family except Blossom.

Actually, though there are two Julius Rabinowitzes there, we know our Julius is in Montefiore Cemetery. And sure, each name by itself is common enough to have many occurences, but what is the chance that there would be a Joseph, Lena, Sadie, Abraham, Henry and Seymour Rabinowitz along with a Meta Cannold and of course Walter Ruby? It looks to me that this must be the family cemetery.

Also, I just ran a search for Joseph Rabinowitz in the 1920 census (we had not previously found a Rabinowitz family record for that year) and I discovered that a Joseph Rabinowitz was a patient in Montefiore Home & Hospital in The Bronx as of January 5, 1920. I did a little reading on the history of Montefiore and learned that before it became a world-class research hospital it was a rest home for Jewish patients with chronic diseases like tuberculosis and diabetes.

I am going to order a copy of the death certificate for $10 from NY Municipal Archives. And it looks like you will have another field trip to do. I can provide you with all the plot numbers or you can do the searches yourself here. By the way, there are seven Lena Rabinowitzes buried there. The best bet appears to be the one who died January 30, 1948, when she was a ripe old 87 or 88. At first, I thought that might not be her because I recalled that she wasn't listed as a survivor in Blossom's obituary, which I thought was earlier, but I just checked and Blossom died on November 4 of that same year.

I've got a good feeling about this. If this is the right Joseph, his death certificate and/or gravestone should give us the answer we have been seeking.

Dan