Discoveries - No. 1 in a Series - FEIGE / STENZEL

7 June 2011

One of the things I have wanted to do on this blog is to make a record of the discoveries and process of discovery that added new ancestors to the family tree.  Here is one from 18 months ago.

4 December 2009

On 4 December 2009, I received an e-mail from my cousin Jonathan PERL with the sad news that his mother Ann PERL, née MESIANO, had died the day before.  Looking at the family tree, I noticed Ernst PERL's middle name Salo in a way I had not before -- seeing the connection to Ernst's grandfather, my great great grandfather Salo (Seelig Salomon) PERL, who supposedly died in 1907, supposedly in Kattowitz -- just in time for Ernst to have gotten the name Salo in 1908 in memory of his grandfather.

From Salo PERL, my eye moved up the tree to his mother-in-law Mariane FRIEDENSTEIN, geb. FEIGE, my great great great grandmother who was just a name at the top of one line in the family tree.   A year earlier (29 September 2008), I had found an entry in the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR) database full of question marks:

"FRIEDENSTEIN?, Mariane?", buried in the Kozilska Street Cemetery in Kattowitz; Reg. Page 48, Line 855, who died in "1904?"

Seeing this earlier note, which had contained too much uncertainty to act on, I did a simple internet search on: Mariane Friedenstein Katowice.  This time, the first hit had the heading "Katowice – Grobowiec Mariane Friedenstein".   When I clicked on the link, I was on a webpage of www.sztetl.org.pl -- the Virtual Shtetl website of the Museum of the History of Polish Jews -- looking at a beautiful photograph of the gravestone of my great great great grandmother Mariane FRIEDENSTEIN, geb. FEIGE, with her full birth date and death date, and in clear Hebrew, her name and the name of her father -- my newly discovered great great great great grandfather Aron FEIGE.  The photograph:

It was good timing.  The photograph was posted 5 months earlier.  The same search 6 month earlier would have just led to the same old uncertain information.

The JOWBR data turned out to have identifed the right person, but with the wrong death date.  The real death date of 6 March 1894 meant that my great aunt Marianne HERTHEL, geb, BACH (1896, Breslau - ca.1944, Auschwitz), was named after her great grandmother.

A little easy digging, mostly in the JRI-Poland database, led to information on Aron FEIGE's death, his father Jisheja(hu), his wife Rosel (Reisel) STENZEL, three other children, and their descendants (tying together some prevously unconnected FEIGEs).   So, overall, this led to:

great great great great grandfather Aron FEIGE (ca.1772-1849)
great great great great grandmother Rosel (Reisel) STENZEL (d.1845)
great great great great great grandfather Jisheja(hu) [FEIGE]

including a new family surname to ponder (STENZEL) and a new family town (Beuthen),

a new line of FEIGE cousins which happened to lead to Marion KRONER, geb. LEDERMANN (1913-2004), my mother's third cousin once removed, already in the family tree as the wife of my father's first cousin,

a possible new line of cousins descended from Rebecca FRIEDMANN, geb. STENZEL (b.ca.1795), who might have been Rosel's sister,

and another possible new great great great great great grandfather, if the Joseph STENZEL living in Brzezinka, Kreis Tost in 1812 turns out to be Rosel's father...

So, Jonathan's e-mail about Ann's death, led to considerations of the origins of Ernst's middle name Salo, which led to Salo PERL and then, just-because, to his mother-in-law Mariane FEIGE, and to an internet search which had great results because of the activity of people in Poland documenting the Jewish history of towns, including Kattowitz / Katowice.