The SCHEININ Family

In December 2013, I had finally learned a lot about the family of R. Zwi Hirsch KALISCHER’s youngest daughter Auguste SCHEININ geb. KALISCHER (1851-1920).  Auguste and Albert SCHEININ’s daughter Recha (FUCHS) had emigrated to England and her children had gotten to England and the US.  Their daughter Hanna was unable to emigrate and was murdered in the Riga Ghetto.  Their son Leo emigrated to New York; he never married and he died in New York in 1935.  And their oldest son Emanuel had moved from Leipzig to Erfurt.   From First World War Bavarian military records, I had learned that Emanuel had married Meta SCHLOSS and that they had four children.

From passenger lists and other online sources, I had learned that Emanuel and Meta’s oldest child was Max SCHEININ who had married Sylvia RESNIKOW (originally RESNIKOWITZ), and that the youngest was Hilde SCHEININ who had married Fred SANDER.   But there I was stuck.  I could find any children for Max or Hilde, though I had run into information suggesting that Hilde and Fred SANDER may have had a daughter named Arlene.

There things stood (for not too long), until cousin Leo FUCHS put me in contact with our cousin Irene FUCHS.  After asking Irene whether she happened to know anything about her cousins descended from Emanuel SCHEININ (which she did not), I did some additional searches in Ancestry.com for additional traces of the SCHEININ family.  I am not sure what changed; maybe I included the birth year based on what I had found earlier.  For some reason, this time, among the user-submitted family trees, I found a very small family tree consisting of Max SCHEININ and Sylvia, Sylvia’s parents, and a child of Max and Sylvia (no name) who had two sons (no names).  That little family tree had been posted on Ancestry.com in August 2013.  I could have run across it in my earlier searches, but had not.

I sent a note to the contact for that tree.  But I wasn’t willing to wait for a reply; and frequently no reply ever comes.  So I did a search for the person’s Ancestry.com user name and found reference to a Barbara from Kingston, NY.  A little more searching led to the obituary of the second husband of that Barbara from Kingston.  I also found a likely e-mail for the same person.  That e-mail elicited an almost immediate response.  I had found my 3rd cousin from the SCHEININ family.  Barbara was happy to learn about new family, and she helped me learn more about her SCHEININ family.

I learned that the other two siblings of Max and Hilde were a boy who died relatively young and a sister Hedwig who had been in England before coming to New York, and later settling in Israel.  And I learned that Hilde had had a daughter Arlene and an older daughter Roslyn.  Barbara’s information was 30+ years old; she did not have any contact with those first cousins of hers.

A little more digging led to the possibility that Arlene SANDER was the same-age Arlene living in the Boston area.  I sent an e-mail through a work-related website, and since I was not sure it would arrive, I also printed the same note to send by mail.  I had the letter ready to mail on Saturday when I was flying to North Carolina and decided to take it with me to mail from Chapel Hill, rather than mailing it from Point Roberts.  Soon after arriving in Chapel Hill, I had a response from Arlene — she was the right person.  Like her cousin Barbara, she was also happy to learn about new family and to get in contact with her long-lost first cousin Barbara.  (I never did mail that letter.)

It was very satisfying to make so much progress learning about the SCHEININ branch of the KALISCHER family, but it was even more rewarding to reunite Barbara and Arlene in their first-cousinship.