Selma Ruby census for 1940

Access to images of the 1940 census enumerations has just been made available though Ancestry and probably other sources. So far, the records are not searchable by name, but the actual enumeration sheets are browsable by population center.

So, I went to Long Beach in Nassau County NY and found six enumeration districts listed. Using Google Maps, I was able to figure that District 30-207 would include the section of West Walnut St. where the Ruby family resided. Clicking that link leads to 79 pages of image files, but I was lucky to find 138 West Walnut on just the third page. It is below.

 There's nothing very surprising here but interesting nonetheless. The enumeration date is April 3, 1940. Selma, age 40, is the head of household. The other household members are Stanley, son, 15, and Ruth Ratner, sister, 35. Selma is widowed, Stan and Ruth are single. Stan is an active student who has completed his third year of high school. (Is that right, or is he currently in his third year?) Selma and Ruth both finished four years of high school. All three were born in New York. All three have lived in the same home since 1935.

Selma and Stan are not in the work force because one is a homemaker and one a student. Ruth was employed full time as a stenographer for a book printing company and earned $1248 per year. Selma is the owner of the home at this address, and the home is valued at $15,000, which is the highest valued home on the page. Selma was not selected to be asked supplementary questions.

 Zach, as our resident census expert, do you see anything else that I may be missing? How does the 1940 enumeration form differ from the 2010 census you worked on? It seems surprising to me that they get income and home value/rent payment information for every citizen. If I'm not mistaken, this is the first year that used supplemental questions. It appears they are asked of everyone who falls on the 2nd or 6th line of an enumeration sheet, or five percent of all the names on a sheet.

 Click the image to enlarge. Our family members appear on lines 37-39.  

Download full-size image here

We Had Em All the Way!

Dan,

Brilliant work! I'm pretty sure thats what got him fired. That's two times Coca Cola comes into Ruby family lore and things turn out badly; let's not forget that our great-grandfather Abraham Bloch (Walter's eventual father in law, who was in the seltzer business in Albany around 1910) was offered the franchise for upstate new York by a small upstart company from Atlanta that offered a syrupy new carbonated drink and he said, "Naw, I've got more than enough business already." For the rest of his life, whenever he had an idea or made a suggestion, people would say, "Yeah, yeah, and you're the guy who said no to Coca Cola." I drank a Diet Coke today (eveybody in Georgia still seems to drink Coke in support of the home team) and it tasted kind of weird to think of all the pain and grief those corporate SOBs caused our family!

On a happier note, see this New York Times article on Bing Crosby's vintage taping of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, which ends, of course, with Bill Mazeroski's epic game winning blast! 50 years ago in just a couple of weeks! Time flies when you're having fun. Certainly that was one of the very happiest moments of my life; the purest ecstasy and exaltation. The unheralded, scrappy Pirates upending the mighty imperial awful Yankees. Sublime justice for at least one moment. Miracles do come true, after all.

To paraphrase the Passover song: 'If the only great moment in my life had been Maz's homer slaying the Yankees, that would have been enough!' Not really of course, but its a good line.

Rattner ship manifests

Considering that both Walter and I had spent a good deal of time trying to find the records of our Ratner ancestors' passage to America, the story of how they finally came into our possession is somewhat anticlimactic. Ancestry.com now has a nifty feature of hints that automatically conducts searches and alerts users to information they may not yet have discovered.

Last week I received just such a hint for our great-grandfather Abraham Ratner pointing to an inter-European voyage from Hamburg to the Port of Hull near Liverpool. At first, I was inclined to disregard it: There were many Abram Ratners, and importantly we thought the Ratner name didn't come into use until Abe's arrival in America. Thus, a pre-arrival record for that name would not be him.

The 1890 date was the right year, however, and I clicked through to read more and view the actual document—the "directory" of passengers aboard the Esperanza sailing out of Hamburg on July 2, 1890. My excitement immediately grew as I saw the names of Abram's travel mates, listed as Schifre, age 42, and Rosa, 18. Abram was listed as 20. Exactly the right three names and ages for Abe, his bride Rose and mother-in-law Sophie. Here's the document (click to view close up):



At first, I thought the Esperanza sailed through to New York after a stop in England, but reading closer I realized that they disembarked at the Port of Hull and must have taken a different ship to New York. My quick reading about the Port of Hull supported that thought:

During the period 1836 - 1914, Hull developed a pivotal role in the movement of transmigrants via the UK. During this period over 2.2 million transmigrants passed through Hull en route to a new life in the US, Canada, South Africa and Australia. Originating from Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Russia and Sweden, the transmigrants passed through the port, from where they would take a train to Glasgow, Liverpool, London or Southampton - the UK ports which offered steamship services to the 'New World' they had dreamed of.

On the document, New York is listed as "the aim of the emigration." But where was the record for the second leg of the journey? Easy. Now having the correct last name, the right month and year and departure port, another Ancestry search quickly came up with this passenger manifest for the July 16, 1890, sailing of the SS Teutonic.

Page 1 is included so you can see the cover information and column headings. Schrifre and Abraham Rattner appear about one-third of the way down on the second page, which is actually Page 3 of the manifest.



You'll see Sophie (Schifre) and Abe have the right ages. Oddly she is shown as a citizen of Finland, but that looks to be a random anomaly. More surprising is that Rose is not listed together with her family members. I've taken a quick scan of the rest of the manifest to see if she is listed elsewhere but didn't find her name.

So that remains as a loose end, but still we've made a big step forward in documenting our ancestors' journey to America, including finding an important clue to their previous lives that Walter follows up on in the next post.

Oh, here's a couple images of the Teutonic and a link to the Wikipedia article. She was a new state-of-the-art cruiser at the time of the voyage.




One last comment on why we hadn't found this information before. First, we weren't searching on Rattner. Second, the Esperanza record was not in any database we searched. Third, Ancestry's ongoing acquisitions in its international collections has exposed more existing records to its excellent search technologies. I'm pretty sure that Teutonic manifest must have been discoverable all along but we had missed it because the tools were not as good then as they are now.

Did the Ratner/Tulbowitz family really come from Novocherkassk?

Here is a belated posting, with historical records that should have been placed on the blog three years ago, but that is relevant again following Dan's discovery of the Rattner passenger lists.

Just over three years ago, Tanya and I went to Rostov-on-Don to look for records of the Tulbowitz clan, which we had known from family lore to have lived there prior to Raizl (Rose) (the daughter of Shlomo-Aron and Sifra (Sophie) Tulbowitz) and her new husband Abe Bloch heading out to America in 1890 with Sophie. Shlomo-Aron and their son Eduard follow several years later and the family ended up in Albany.

Tanya and I had hoped to find a good number of documents in Rostov, including their address, synagogue membership, a record of the tavern that Shlomo-Aron and Sophie ran—and perhaps something to authenticate the story of Rose having been kidnapped by Cossacks as a child. However the first class genealogist we took on, who worked with us for two days, Yevgeny Gimodudinov found only the two documents seen here, which show in reverse chronological order, the death of Shlomo-Aron and Sophie’s son Isai in 1879 and the birth of another son Gavrill (Gavriel) in 1878.

Somehow, we forgot to put these precious records up on the blog, so are doing it only now. Sorry, everyone. See directly below the English translation of these records done by my life partner and wonderful translator Tanya:

In the Rostov-on-Don metric book of vital records, which listed deceased Jews of 1879, there is a record #41 about the death that occurred on 8/13/1879.

The son of Rechitza Meschanin, Isai Solim-Aronovich Tulbovich, 3 years and 5 months, died of scarlet fever.

Search data: GARO; fund 72; list 1, case 27, Pages 19 - 20.


In the Rostov-on-Don metric book of vital records of 1878, there is a record #100 about the birth of the son Gavriil on 9/28/1878.

Parents: Rezhitsa Meschanin (Vitebsk Gubernia) Solim-Aron Peysakhovich Tulbovich and his wife Sifra-Ita Meerovna.

Search data: GARO; fund 72; list 2; case 14; Page 54.

If one reads my postings from Rostov at the time and then the follow-up postings in the ensuing few months (under Tulbowitzes of Rostov-on-Don, Tulbowitzes of Rezhitsa), one shares the excitement we felt then over the following information gleaned from these two short accounts:

Shlomo-Aron and Sophie Tulbowitz were registered as meschaninee (a social classification that could be translated as ‘townspeople’) from Rezhitsa, a place we were eventually able to identify as being modern-day Rezenke in Latvia (a genealogist in Minsk Belarus, Maxim Mill was able to find records of Shlomo-Aron’s parents Peisach and Sora in the 1850 census in Rezhitsa, together with Shlomo-Aron himself then aged 5.)

So thanks to Gimodudinov’s discovery of these precious documents in the Rostov municipal records, we were able to determine that Shlomo-Aron and Sophie had moved nearly 1000 miles from the northern climes of Latvia to the southern plains of Rostov as a young couple (presumably around 1870 and then depart for the U.S. 20 years later). Until my trip with Tanya to Rostov, no one alive today had any idea where the family had lived before moving to Rostov, which was a late 19th Century boomtown, on the Don River near where it flowed into the Black Sea and a place to which a lot of people, including many Jews, came in search of economic opportunities and increased social mobility, outside the more constricting Pale of Settlement.

We can imagine the family's decision to leave for America about 20 years was greatly influenced by the growing anti-Semitism in the area, which was also the center of the Don Cossacks and had been made a Cossack military province in 1888 by order of the Czar. But first and foremost there was the salient fact (which came to us through family lore) that Abe was apparently in danger of being drafted into the Russian army, a fate he wanted desperately to avoid—and emigration may have been the only way out. They may also have left in search of increased economic opportunity, although they were likely making a better living with the tavern than most poverty-stricken Russian Jews.

Certainly, their meschanin status and other indications that come down to us through family lore give the impression that the family was not without means or upward mobility. Sandy Brenner, our father Stan’s cousin, and the only member of the family who knew Rose who is still with us today, remembers that her grandmother Rose used to tell her proudly that Rostov was the most beautiful city in the world. Also, Rose was said to have preferred speaking Russian, not Yiddish, an indication that as a young girl she wanted to be part of the world of high Russian culture, of Tolstoy and Dostoyevski, and not the shtetl world of Shalom Aleichem. Of course, when she and her husband arrived in the Lower East Side of New York in 1890, Rose saw a real shtetl world and was deeply unhappy, leading Abe, Sophie and Rose to pick up stakes and move to the more all-American, less overtly Jewish environment of Albany, even before Shlomo-Aron and Eduard come over. (We are not sure what happened to Gavriel.)

But to bring this story up to date, several days ago we received startling news via Dan Ruby, who, unlike me, actually peruses Ancestry.com, Jewishgen and the other sites. Here is what Dan found:

This just popped up in my email. It looks promising for Abe, Rose and Sophie's ship manifest, which we've been missing. It shows that they sailed aboard the Esperanza from Hamburg on July 2, 1890, bound for New York via Liverpool. Among the passengers are Schifre (age 42), Abram (20) and Rosa (18) Rattner.

Surprises, if this is them: Their previous residence is listed as Czerkask, not Rostov. Also, they are already using the name of Ratner before their arrival in New York.

- Dan

In subsequent postings Dan finds other records which show that the Esperanza took them only from Hamburg to Hull (near Liverpool in England), from which they sailed to New York two weeks later aboard the ship Teutonic, from Liverpool to New York. Dan, can you put that stuff up on the blog as well?

So Dan’s find brought us not only the exact story of the Tulbowitzes voyage to America—from Hamburg, not Bremen, Germany as had come down to us, with no previous mention of the stopover in England, with some strange added details, such as Schifre being identified as a citizen of Finland, which was then a province of the Russian Empire, not an independent country. It shows that they chose the name ‘Ratner’ for reasons unknown even before they arrived in America; not that it was given to them by a U.S. immigration official at Ellis Island, as we had believed earlier.

Why Abe would have changed his family name from Bloch to Ratner is not known to us, but given that he was of military age and desperate to avoid being conscripted, securing fake documents with a different family name even before he left Russia made eminent sense (According to family lore he crossed the border on a wagon under a haystack, whereas Rose and Sophie came out in normal fashion and met up with him once they were all out). In fact, I knew a fellow in 1990 in Moscow who secured false papers and hid out in his dacha to avoid being taken into the army so such behavior still happens today.

The document unearthed via Ancestry.com also lists the emigrants' hometown not as Rostov as we had always believed, but ‘Cherkassk’ which likely referred to one of two smaller towns close to Rostov; Starycherkassk (Old Cherkassk) or Novocherkassk (New Cherkassk). It happens that I have visited both places, the first in 1992, on my first visit to Rostov to report on the resurgence of the Don Cossack movement in the region in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union, and the second in 1999 when I was doing some similar reporting. Starycherkassk is a tiny, largely agricultural, stanitza or Cossack village—and so seems unlikely to have been the home of any Jews, including during the late 19th century when anti-Semitism was at its peak.

But Novocherkassk, which was founded in 1805 and is located maybe 30 miles north of Rostov, was, then as now, a larger and more cosmopolitan place, with a large Cossack population, but with a mainstream Russian majority and quite a few Jews, most of whom were rapidly emigrating to Israel and America (that was true in the 1890s as well as the 1990s). For more on Novocherkassk, see the Wikipedia article.

When I visited in 1999, I hung out with Anatoly Iasenik, a fearless Jewish activist and newspaper editor who had built personal and communal ties to a particular local Cossack ataman (leader) who was friendly to the Jews (several of the ataman's competitors had renewed longstanding Cossack anti-Semitism). Several years later Anatoly, whose own life was threatened by powerful business interests whose corruption he had exposed in his newspaper) fled to America and found me by complete accident when he met with Tanya, who then worked at NYANA, a not for profit agency that helped resettle arriving Russian Jews. Anatoly showed her my picture as someone he wanted to locate, and the amazed Tanya said, ‘That’s my significant other.’ When I met Anatoly, he informed me that the ‘good’ Cossack leader he had taken me to meet was later murdered by his rivals.

So Novocherkask was a dicey place in 1999, just as it had been 110 years earlier when Rose (who according to family lore had been kidnapped and held for ransom by Cossacks as a young girl—as an adult she would show family members scars on her legs from an incident when she was accidentally burned by hot water from a samovar during her captivity), Abraham and Sophie presumably left the place and began their ‘honeymoon’ escape to America.

So the historical parallels are compelling and not a little chilling and ESPish, and I feel privileged to have been able to go back there a century later and gain some inkling of the life they must have had then. (I guess that is the book I need to write before too long).

But in any case, if the Tulbowitzes lived in Novocherkassk instead of Rostov, that would explain the dearth of records concerning them in the Rostov archives. Likely they came to Rostov (the capital of the province) for Sophie to give birth to Gavriel in 1878 in a decent hospital, and maybe came back a year later to try in vain to save the life of Isai. That would explain why those two mentions of the Tulbowitzes are found in the Rostov municipal records today, but no other mention of the family, which was presumably living and running their tavern in Novocherkassk. Tanya and I are now going to re-contact Gimodudinov, the Rostov archivist to see if he can go to Novocherkassk to check the records there for mentions of the Tulbowitz family.

But why would Rose have left her grandchildren Stan, Sandy and their descendants with the impression that she came from Rostov, “the most beautiful city in the world”, rather than the decidedly less renowned and glamorous Novocherkassk 30 miles away? Probably for exactly that reason. In Russia, even today, there is a phobia about being ‘from the village’, or ‘from the sticks’ and thereby be seen as a ‘peasant’. Tanya, who was born and raised in the provincial town of Shostka, Ukraine, 300 miles northeast of Kiev, used to tell Americans who would ask where she was from that she hailed from Kiev (where she went to college and subsequently as a young adult) without mentioning Shostka, a rather rough and tumble, working class place about which she had decidedly mixed feelings.

Tanya points out that if she mentions ‘Kiev’ to Americans, they would have heard of it and be able to relate to her origins, but would not have heard of Shostka. But it is also the case that Tanya left Shostka at 18 for Kiev and a better (more cosmopolitan) life, and didn’t necessarily want others to know from whence she came. It seems to me likely that Rose might have been animated by the same way of thinking.

In the meantime, thanks to Dan, we are much closer to figuring out the ‘Tulbowitzes in Rostov (province) story”. We’ll post the news of Gimodudiov’s search of the Novcherkassk records as soon as we have them.

New Ratner family branch discovered

New information (for us) about a branch of our Ratner family popped up on Ancestry.com, and as a result I have now made a connection with a new second cousin once removed. She is Nicole Richner, a great granddaughter of George Peyser Ratner, the older brother of our grandmother Selma.

We had known about Peyser's daughter Marjorie Decker, and knew that she had been alive in a nursing home near Albany until recently. Walter made an unsuccessful attempt to contact her. We also knew Marjorie had married Robert Ken Decker and that they had two sons, and thus we had conjectured that there could be another generation of Deckers. However, my efforts to discover who and where they were had gone unrewarded.

Then a week ago I am scanning Ancestry for new leads on the Rabinowitz side when I am presented with alerts that new information has been posted about people in my family tree. Clicking through, I see that George Pizer Ratner is a part of a new Decker Family tree that was posted on October 3 by an Ancester member named Nicole Richner. Attached to his record are several familiar census citations that confirmed that this was the same George Ratner that is our great uncle.

Clicking further into the tree gave me several answers to open questions. First, Marjorie passed away at age 91 a year ago, in October 2008. I'm sorry that our project began too late to have reached her when she was able to contribute her memories. (Nicole has her photo albums, though.) Second, we now knew what had become of Marjorie's sons Ronald and Curt.

Well, sort of. Ancestry has a policy of not showing full information about a living people in members' family trees. The tree's owner can allow access to other members to see the full names and personal information, but I was viewing Nicole's tree as an unprivileged user. So all I could see was profiles labeled "Living Decker" for each person. Still, I could deduce that one of the two sons was unmarried and childless and that the other had had six children, three sons and three daughters. Two of the daughters had last names other than Decker, including a Living Alexander and a Living Richner, who had presumably married and taken their husbands' names.

So this living Richner was obviously the Nicole Richner that posted the Decker Family tree. Delighted to have learned this information but wanting to be able to see the full information, I sent off a message to Nicole through Ancestry's Member Connect feature. I identified myself as her second cousin and told her a bit of our Ratner genealogy and asked her to reply.

Today her message came back. Here is an excerpt:

Most of what I have has been due to my grandmother, that you so kindly mentioned in your email. She was an awesome women! I had the opportunity a few years back when both my grandparents were still living to visit with them for a few days. I went specifically to just sit and listen. They were the ones that gave me the framework for every peice of information that I have. I very grateful that I was able to do that. She also sent me her photo albums and other documents that I have yet to fully go through. She had a memory like an elephant. I was amazed at the information that she was able to share.

I've written back again and hopefully soon will be able to get photos and other information about Marjorie's Ratner family. With all the progress we've made about our Rabinowitz family as a result of Harriet finding us, it is exciting that we are positioned to learn more about our Ratners now that Nicole has turned up.

Abraham Ratner & Sons in Albany business directory

Walt, you should get a kick out of this because of the other entries under Bottlers—Carbonated Beverages, including Albany Coco-Cola Bottling Works and Orange Crush Bottling Co. This is interesting in light of the family story that Abe turned down the opportunity to become a Coca Cola franchise.

Abe Ratner was from Minsk

In the 1920 census form for the Ratner family, the enumerator first wrote down Minsk and then crossed it out and wrote Russia for Abe's birthplace. Similarly, Rose is noted as born in Rostof, which is also crossed out and replaced. I'm not going to put up the image, since the quality is very bad and will not be legible at blog size and resolution. If you want to check for yourself, look up the 1920 census in Ward 5 of Albany NY.

So then I did a quick look for the name Bloch in the JewishGen Belarus database. What pops up are lots of people named Blokh in the Minsk guberniya. On a first pass, I didn't find a Abram Blokh born in May 1869, but I think it is pretty likely we now have the original home region for another of our eight great-grandparents.

To recap:

Selma Ratner's parents came from Rostov by way of Rezshita in Latvia (Rose) and the Minsk area of Belarus (Abe).

Walter Rabinowitz's parents came from Lithuania probably Kovno (Joseph) and unknown but probably also Kovno guberniya (Lena).

Hermann Ringel's parents came from the Rzezow area of Poland (Schija) and Krakow (Feigel).

Elly Wohlgemuth's parents Julius and Bette resided in Koenigsberg but we don't yet know where they were born.

Rezekne Family List turns up trove of Tulbowitz kin

Walt, I just looked again at the 1900 U.S. census record for Solomon and Sophie (and Edward) Tulbowitz, and noticed a couple of interesting things. First, the census includes information for "Mother of how many children" and "Number of those children still living." In Sophie's record, the responses are 5 and 3. Second, Solomon and Sophie are both listed as having been married 34 years.

That's a lot of years. Since they were 52 and 49, respectively, at the time of the census, they would have been 18 and 15 at the time of their marriage. I don't remember what we know of exactly when and why they left Rezhitsa. Can you remind me?

On the number of children, I have Rose, Gavriel, Edward and Yitzhak (who died young). That's four, not five. I'm not sure where my information is from, but I have both Gavriel and Edward with a birthday in September 1876. Were they twins? Also, little Yitzhak (Isai) is 3 years, 5 months at the time of his death in August 1879, which does not compute. There are some mysteries there.

Twyla got me started on this today trying to talk up a trip to the Baltics in September. Intriguing idea. She'll have been in Finland with Kate, so maybe I would meet her in Riga and try to take in a circle from Rezhitsa to Kovno to Königsberg.

Anyway, that's what got me looking up Rezekne information today and I surprised myself with what I turned up. I'm not sure why I hadn't found the Tulbowitz stuff before. I guess because I hadn't searched the Latvian SIG. By the way, the info that came from Maxim on Tulbowitz in the all Russia census is also in Jewish Gen, but I have a hard time matching those names with the ones from the Rezekne Family List that I sent earlier.

My working theory is that our ancestor Sholom Ahron Tulbowitz' father Gavriel had a brother Leiba. The two brothers had sizable families that accounted for most but not necessarily all the Tulbowitz population of Rezhitsa.

On Gavriel's side, there were four sons (information is less available about daughters)-- Peisach, Salman, Eliasch (the eldest) and Abram. Peisach married Sara (not Sora?) and had Sholom Ahron, apparently an only child or at least only son. (From there, in our direct lineage, Sholom Ahron married Schifra Ita, also known as Sophie and later Bubbie, and they had Rose Ratner nee Tulbowitz as the first of their five children.)

Piesach's three brothers produced a total of five other sons and at least five grandchildren. Thanks to the Rezekne Family List, I have complete birth dates and spouse names for all of them. Same for Leiba's three sons and their offspring. One reason that branch is interesting is that two of the names Manzik (or possibly Manzin) Tulbowitz (son of Mowscha son of Leiba) and his wife Beila are also on another list of people in Riga with travel documents in 1900.

So that establishes that other Tulbowitz relatives of ours made the journey to America, and presumably accounts for the number of Tulbowitz sightings in places like Bayonne NJ and Wilmington DE. Not all came to the U.S.--a Sergio Tulbowitz is a musician and Marcelo Tulbowitz a professor, both in Montevideo.

The Jewish history of Rezekne is pretty well documented and memorialized, and there is an archivist who seems to be the major expert. He also does videos about Jewish historical subjects. Here is the catalog.

photos of graves of Solomon and Sophie Tulbowitz

Here are photos of the grave of our great-great grandparents Solomon (Shalom-Aharon) and Sophie Tulbowitz, which I took at the Beth Abraham Jacob Cemetery in Albany last month. Solomon Tulbowitz lived from 1845-1918 and Sophie from 1846-1928. We are not yet sure where they were born. According to documents Tanya and I found last month in Rostov, which I will shortly post here as well, which record the birth and circumcision of a son, Gavriel in 1878, and the death of a three and a half year old son Isai in 1879, the couple was described as "meshanene (townspeople) from Rechitsa, a town in southeast Belarus. So given that the bulk of Rostov's Jewish population growth came in the 1860's and 1870's as the trading and manufacturing town on the southern reaches of the Don, just above the Azov and Black seas, making it "the Chicago of Russia", my guess is that the couple was lured there in search of prosperity, which is also why they would be still registered as belonging to Rechitsa. According to Ruby family lore, they ran a tavern there and their oldest daughter Rose (1874-1949)was kidnapped by Cossacks as a small child. The Tulbowitzes could not have been thrilled by an ukaz (degree) by the Czarist government in 1888 that henceforth Rostov (which was formerly part of the Pale and attached to a province centered in Ekaterinaslav (today Dnieperpetrovsk) in Ukraine, would be part of a new Don military province. When the law came down, it looked like the Jews would be forced to leave en masse but by 1891, clearly fearful of destroying Rostov's economic vitality, the regime ruled that all Jews registered as Rostov residents could stay. We know that the Tulbowitzes were still registered as being from Rechitsa as of 1879. Were they able to change that in the ensuing decade? If not, their anonamlous status would go a long way to explaining their pull-out from the city to America--first newly married Rose, her husband Abraham Bloch and mother in law Sophie Tulbowitz in 1890 and Solomon and the rest of the family three or four years later. We know they were gone by 1895-96, as no Tulbowitzes show up in the all-Russia census taken in those years. Certainly, given Rose's traumatic experience as a small child, and a small pogrom in 1883, which took place at a tavern when a drunken Russian refused to pay the Jewish owners, they couldnt have been confident that Cossack control of Rostov made the place a safe bet for the long run.

The 1900 U.S. census shows Solomon, Sophie and son Edward (born 1876 and probably the twin of Isai) living in Albany near Rose, Abe and their own growing family, with Solomon and Edward working as tailors. Did all the rest of their children die in childhood? What about Gavriel? We know from Sandy Brenner, who heard from her mother Lillian Ratner Klein, that matriarch Sophie in her later years was known as the "scoial worker" because she was concerned about everyone's welfare and got involved in trying to solve the problems of others. Thats not a lot, but its something and we;ll keep digging. Love to you, Shalom-Aharon and Sophie Tulbowitz, from across the centuries.

Four generations

Now that the focus is back to Albany, how about this great photo from the Sandy Brenner collection? Here we have a photo from 1941 with matriarch Rose Ratner (seated), her daughter Selma (right), Selma's daughter Joan (left), and Joan's daughter Wendy (on Rose's lap).

Albany 1915 census

Here is one interesting lead, a Sofie and Morris Tulbowitz in Albany Ward 3 in a special NY State census in 1915. I can imagine that Sofey might be Sophia, but Morris doesn't sound right for Solomon.

Albany, New York State Census, 1915 Record
Census
Name: 
Morris TULBOWITZ
 
Albany, New York State Census, 1915 Record
Census
Name: 
Sofey TULBOWITZ

Whether or not they are related, the 1915 census is worth looking into deeper. Here is info about the census database.

Description:
Although not the largest city in the state, Albany, New York is one of the most important urban areas along the Hudson River. This database is a collection of state census records from the city in 1915. It includes information regarding residents of the city's first eight wards. Researchers will find the resident's name, election district number, and ward number. Page and line numbers are provided to aid those wishing to find the original state document housed at the capital. This update adds nearly 65,400 names, making a total of 108,000 names now available. For those Ancestry.com patrons seeking ancestors from Albany, New York, this can be a useful collection of records.

Source Information:
Lommel, Brenda, ed.. Albany, New York State Census, 1915 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: MyFamily.com, Inc., 1999. Original data: State of New York. State Census of 1915. Albany, NY, USA: New York State Government, 1915.
 

Tulbowitz search

So far, I have not found more than the 1900 census document Walter discovered. Here it is blown up and divided into three panels left to right. The Tulbowitzes (Solomon, Sophia and Edward) are the bottom three rows in each image.

a few new findings--The Bloch-Ratners arrived in 1890 or 1891

Dan gave me the password to Ancestry.com and showed me around a little bit, and I managed to make a few findings from the census. The 1900 census lists the arrival date of Abraham and Rose Ratner in America as 1890 (whereas the 1930 census says 1891). Assuming that one or the other is correct it solves the Ellis Island mystery--they arrived shortly before the opening of the Island on January 1, 1892 and were probably processed in the barge office that served as the site between the closing of Castle Garden on April 18, 1890 and the opening of Ellis Island. We see from that census that their oldest child was Peyzer born 1891 followed by Hyman (George?) 1892 and Lillie (probably Til ) 1896 and Sadie (clearly Selma) 1899 and Dora born 1900, who probably died soon thereafter. At that time they lived at 42 Broad Street, are renting their house and Abe is already listed as a soda water manufacturer. The 1930 census, by the way, has Abe, Rose and Thelma (Til) at 16 Cuyler Ave, which has a net worth of $14,000 and mentiones that they own a radio set (one of the few on the this page of the survey to do so). Amazing stuff.
Well, lets collect a lot more of this stuff before I get back to revising the Ruby Family Histories.

Ancestry.com researches

I mentioned yesterday that I signed up for a 14-day trial period with Ancestry.com. It has proven very useful so far, turning up various census and death records. If it continues to be useful, I will have to consider paying the very expensive membership fee--more than $300 a year or about $40 a month for access to their worldwide databases. I'm going to try to get as much use of it as I can in the trial period.

Two things of note I discovered today. I was doing searches on some of the Ratner children and was able to follow George and wife Emma to Englewood Cliffs, NJ, in 1920, where he was listed as a grocery proprietor. Household members were wife Emma, daughter Marjorie (age 2) and Emma's mother Louise Paeglow. From there I can follow Marjorie into her marriage with Robert K. Decker, evidently known as Ken. Marjorie and Ken appear to still be living at age 89 and 91 at 20 Willow Dr. in Delmar NY, outside of Albany. The phone number listed is 518-478-0208. We know that Marjorie (Stan's first cousin) and Ken had two sons, Kurt and Ronald, but I have not yet been able to find them among the many Deckers with those first names.

But much more exciting than any of that is this morsel, Walter Ruby's draft registration card from June 5, 1917, apparently filled out in his own hand. He lists his name as Walter Ruby Rabinowitz. It provides an exact birthdate for him, October 15, 1893, a datum we may not have had. He lists his occupation as "salesman" with (as best I can make out) Lenox Novelty Co., located at 109 Lenox Ave. in New York City. He is 23 years old and writes that he is a "natural born" citizen.

Here's the image.

Rose's name in Rostov was Raizel

Just to record here the other wonderful discovery from our visit to the Hebrew Tailor's Assn cemetery--the Hebew inscription on Rose Ratner's grave refers to her as 'Raizel', which is Yiddish for 'Rose'. Some Google accounts say Raizel is actually Hebrew for Rose, but I had always thought of Rose as Vered or Varda, but my Eevreet is lamentably more rusty than it used to be. Anyway, its exciting to have the correct name to go with the young woman from Rostov-on-Don during her girlhood and when she was looking out the upstairs window to check if her would-be suitor Abraham Ratner was sufficiently presentable for her to come downstairs and make an appearance. (He was). The name Raizel tangibly connects us to the mysterious pre-American life of Rose and the whole Tulbowitz clan and that makes it very precious to me.

Thanks, Jo, for providing Mom and Dad's anniversary. June 7, 1947, five days after Helga received her American citizenship. It must have been an incredible week.

1930 census

Here's a snippet from the 1930 census listing Walter, Selma, Joan and Stanley Ruby. A few interesting things to note here. On April 26, 1930, they were listed as living at 685 West End Ave. in Manhattan. According to our manuscript, Walter purchased the Long Beach home a year earlier. Also listed as residing with the family is Bertha Denkut, a servant. The census enumerator screwed up the ages of the Joan, Walter, and Bertha. Presumably, Joan was 11, Stanley 5, and Bertha 30 on the day of the census. Walter's occupation is listed as owner and his industry as jobber, or wholesaler.

Ratner 1910 census record

I just spoke with Sandy and she said she had found an old notebook. The family name had been Tublowitz with a "u," not Tablowitz. I did a quick look on Ancestry.com and found some interesting hits for Tublowitz. More on that later.

I also looked for Abe and Rose Ratner and immediately discovered their 1910 census record. Here is an excerpt of it, from Ward 5 in Albany, listing six children as Peter (Peyser?), Hyman (Herman?), Tillie, Sottie (Selma?), Ruth, and Nellie (Lil?). Abraham's occupation is listed as "mineral water manuf." Here is a closeup of the document.

Transliterated tailors

Walter pointed out this surprising aspect of the cemetery plaque. Though written in Hebrew characters, the words are transliterated from English. Albany Hebrew Tailors Organization. It is right there in Hebrew.

The headstones

From the headstones, Walter determined that Rose's father was named Shalom while Abe's father was Chaim. Rose's middle initial is for her maiden name, Talbowitz.

The Ratner grave site