Rubinson or Robinson? You Have No Idea!

In October 2020, I stumbled across some records of interest to my Rubinson-Robinson cousins, and perhaps my Rothschild cousins, too.

My great-grandparents Emma Rothschild and Maurice Rubinson's 1899 marriage was arranged in Oskaloosa, Iowa, 40 miles southeast of Des Moines. My great-uncle Sam Rubinson, himself a family historian, explained that bride and groom were both related to Oskaloosa resident Morris Gould. I realized long ago that Emma was a first cousin to Morris's wife Ida, who is buried in a plot in Chicago with Emma's brother Kalman and whose monument actually says she was a Rothschild. As for Maurice's connection to the Goulds, that was still a mystery.

Wandering around the Ancestry website this past Saturday, I stumbled on several family trees that included Morris Gould under his original name Moshe Gold. His father was Jacob Gold and his mother was Devorah Garber. Devorah's father was Benjamin. 

The name "Benjamin" gave me pause. Maurice's father's father was supposed to be Benjamin Rubinson. My great-uncle Ben Robinson must have been named after him. 

A few years ago I searched Benjamin Rubinson on the Jewish Genealogy site (JewishGen.org). The only good search result was Benjamin Rubinovich of Vilkiya, Lithuania, who lived from 1824 to 1914. He was old enough to be the father of Rubin Rubinson, Maurice's father. In addition, some of the other Rubinson's in Des Moines, said to be related, had documents in Ancestry that said they were from Vilkiya.

There was just one problem. Uncle Ben Robinson was born in 1910. How could he be named for his great-grandfather who was still alive? For that reason, I was willing to consider a Ben with a different last name.

I knew from experience that some families in the 1800s had alternate last names.  Some last names are known as "patronymics." They originally referred to a father's name. Think of "Johnson" or "Davidson" or even "Rubinson." Other last names were derived from a place name or an occupation. "Garber" means tanner in Yiddish, and it is related to the German word "Gerber."

The Golds and Garbers lived in Cekiske, Lithuania, which is maybe ten miles from Vilkija. JewishGen has many translated vital records from Cekiske, including Benjamin Garber's death record, which tells us he lived 1806-1889, and he was the son of Rubin.

Another record is for Taube Garber, who lived 1811-1898 and who was the widow of "Benyamin Rubinovich" whose "paternal name was Rubin." This was an unusual notation, as if someone reporting Taube's death felt it was important to emphasize it.

By the way, Uncle Sam did say that Maurice's grandmother was "Tobey." I felt I was getting close to a big discovery, and when I checked the Garber birth records for Cekiske, there it was: Moshe Leib, born June 28, 1871, to Rubin (son of Benjamin) and Chaya. This was a perfect match for Grandpa Maurice, whose Americanized middle name was Lewis.

But how do we know for certain that it's not some wild coincidence that these Garbers had identical first names to my Rubinsons? I looked at the other families in Cekiske descended from Benjamin and Taube, and then I looked at Ancestry. Maurice had a cousin Aaron "Gerber" who sailed to Philadelphia in 1913. When the immigration officer asked Aaron to name the relative he was going to meet, Aaron said, "my brother Simon Rubinson." Sure enough, there was a Philadelphian who identified himself to the draft board as "Simon Garber Rubinson."

Simon himself immigrated to New York City in 1904. Asked at Ellis Island to name his nearest US relative, Simon said: Morris "Rubinsohn" of 142 Madison Street. I immediately recognized that address as belonging to Morris and Emma from about 1903 to 1907.

There you have it. Grandpa Morris was born Moshe Garber in Cekiske, Lithuania, in 1871, and he really lived to be 92. His Aunt Devorah was actually Morris Gould's stepmother, but for all intents and purposes, Moshe Garber and Moshe Gold were two cousins growing up in the same small town.  When Garber smashed the glass under the wedding canopy in Oskaloosa, he was "Morrice L. Rubinson." Morris Gould was the witness.

I still think our Garbers were related to the Rubinovich families of Vilkija. All were descended from an original Rubin who lived in the late 1700s and early 1800s. After reading up on the Jews of Cekiske, I think it is very possible that Benjamin and Taube moved there from Vilkija in the mid-1800s. When Benjamin was a child in the 1810s, surnames were not yet required, so he was simply Rubin's son.

Moshe Garber

1871-1963

Fanny Ginsberg of Lancashire

For Ashkenazi Jews, most DNA Matching tools are effective at identifying relatives near the top of the match list. Further down there are matches who are really not matches. They may have an insignificant amount of DNA from multiple ancestors which, combined, appears like a significant match. This can happen with all matching services, including Ancestry.

Sometimes the match includes DNA on the X chromosome, where matches rarely indicate a recent common ancestry. It may also include DNA that is so common to the ethnic group that again it does not signify an actual close relation. Ancestry avoids these errors, which is why I think it does the best job predicting cousins.

One match on my Ancestry list, listed as "J.C," is stronger than that of any documented third cousin. Ancestry also shows that all of our top mutual DNA matches are related through my paternal Grandma Mae or her mother Lizzie Chapman, nee Ginsberg. When I saw on 23andMe exactly where on the genome Joanne and I match, every large segment was in an area inherited from Grandma Mae.

Joanne Clarke is 22% Jewish. She knew that one of her grandmothers was adopted by the McCradiey family, which lived in a village south of Manchester, Lancashire, England. One story told by her family was that a Jewish couple boarded with them but left behind an abandoned baby girl later known as Florence McCradiey Birchall, mother of nine.

This story did not provide the names of these Jewish visitors. Meanwhile, for some reason, Joanne's uncle Harry Birchall had in his possession a 1911 naturalization paper for a 32-year old Russian immigrant tailor who identified himself as "Chiel Blum, also known as Leon Ginsberg." ("Chiel" would be a rare shorthand for "Yekhiel," a not-so-rare Hebrew name.) The paper did not name his wife, but did name his son, 3-year old David Ginsberg.

Searching the 1911 UK Census on Ancestry, I found Leon and David along with Leon's slightly-older wife Fanny. They went by Ginsberg. I also found the McRadiey's. Both families lived in Salford, Lancashire.  Searching the birth registrations, I found that both Florence McCradiey Birchall and David Ginsberg were born during the last three months of 1907.

In 1901, a Chiel Blum sailed across the North Sea from Hamburg, Germany, to Grimsby, England. His previous residence of Schweksne (the German spelling) resembled the name of "Swesni" given on Blum/Ginsberg's naturalization papers. Now it was indisputable that Leon completely changed his surname. There is no documentation showing Fanny was a Ginsberg, but that could help explain Leon's decision. It also could explain how Joanne's strongest Jewish DNA matches are all Ginsberg descendants.

Leon Ginsberg may have rented a room from the McCradiey's when his wife Fanny was expecting a child. Imagine if she unexpectedly had twins, a boy and a girl. Barely able to support one child, they offered the girl to their landlord for adoption. In 1916 Fanny had another girl named Minnie who in 1939 was a piano teacher still living with her parents in Salford. The 1939 Register notes Minnie's eventual married name: Simon.

Was Fanny a daughter of Avram Ginsberg and his second wife Gena Pakalniski? Their known children were born from 1870 to 1885, so Fanny would have been in the middle of the pack. Perhaps a death or marriage record will turn up to confirm. Meanwhile, we can guess that son David was name after Gena's father, as was Lizzie Chapman's son David, who was born ten years earlier.

Avram and Gena had two sets of twins: Lizzie and Sol was one, and Harry and Rae (Cohen) was the other. If the tendency to have twins is genetic, the possibility is greater that Fanny would have twins David and Florence.

"Avram," the original name of the Biblical Abraham, means "great father." Avram Yosef Ginsberg was known to be a prolific progenitor. If Fanny was his daughter, he had at least ten known children from two marriages. Fanny would be the only one of them known to settle in the UK.

Footnote: The magistrate who presided over Leon Ginsberg's naturalization was a Member of Parliament from the Manchester area named Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill.

DNA Origins of the Rise/Reis Branch

Since early 2018, I have spent an inordinate amount of my retirement time trying to use DNA matches to discover new family tree branches and to gain insight into ancestral origins. The return on investment of time has been paltry, but I did recently make a discovery of particular interest to my Marcovis 2nd/3rd Cousins and my Leon/Schevach/Reiss 3rd/4th Cousins.

This discovery was only possible by the willingness of my mother and sister to spit into a tube for 23andMe. That allowed me to identify which DNA matching segments were from my maternal chromosomes. 

It also helped that many of you cousins did the same autosomal DNA test and shared the results so I could see where in the genome we match. If they tested on Ancestry, which only gives the total amount of shared DNA, they uploaded their Ancestry DNA to Gedmatch (it's free), which displays the actual matching segments.

Thanks to all these available clues, I can usually tell if my mother's DNA match is from her mother's or father's side. In some cases, I can even identify which of her grandparents handed down a given DNA segment.

Getting to this level of "DNA Painting" (sorting the genome by ancestor) allowed me to better evaluate DNA matches with four of Mom's presumptive 3rd Cousins. 

Linda and Robin and their 1st Cousins Janet and Susan are all descended from a David Reiss (born 1853), who raised his family in Buhusi, Romania. Our ancestor Leah Rachel Reiss, later known in Des Moines, Iowa, as Leah Rachel Leon (born 1840), also grew up in Buhusi, along with her brothers David (born 1836) and Alter. Both David Reisses named a son "Wolf," suggesting a common ancestor by that name.

Ashkenazi Jews are believed to descend from a small number of people who lived about a thousand years ago. As a result, any two such Jews could share some DNA. Thanks to my "DNA painting," I could filter out matching segments that came down through my other maternal grandparent.

One of the remaining segments is near the high end of Chromosome 1, where my mother matches with Susan Reiss Roscoe. Also matching that segment are Barbara Gibian Heinrich and her 3rd Cousin Elyse Lipkin-Katz. Their common ancestors, from the Schaeffer and Wolensky families, were not from Buhusi, or even from Romania, but from a shtetl called Lunno, in the northwest part of present-day Belarus.

Yet another person matching our DNA in this region is Leo Kliot, a 90-year old Holocaust survivor from Dzisna in northern Belarus who now lives in Montreal. While we do not have a known cousin of his to confirm how we are related, his mother Esther Kulvarsky came from Pieski, a village very close to Lunno.

Ashkenazi Jews only began to arrive in Buhusi in the 1820s, meaning Leah Rachel Reiss's parents were born somewhere else. The DNA evidence says they most likely came from somewhere near Lunno and Pieski. In the days of the Russian Empire, those villages were part of Grodno Guberniya (province). In terms of Yiddish culture, they would be classified as "Litvak" (Lithuanian) Jews, whose territory ran far beyond today's Lithuanian borders.

Newly-arrived Jews living among the Romanians would eventually develop their own cultural features. Romanian Jews who moved to Israel, especially after the Holocaust, had to contend with distinct and not-always-flattering stereotypes. But when Leah Rachel's son Solomon Leon arrived in Des Moines in 1882, the cultural gulf between him and the Litvak majority may not have been so wide. Solomon wasted no time marrying a Litvak woman, and fifteen years later became a factional leader in the local Hebrew Republican Club.

Discoveries like this require as many clues as possible, both in terms of DNA and old-fashioned documentation. If you have done a DNA test, consider downloading the DNA file and uploading it for free to Gedmatch, which has many free tools. Here are the instructions: 

http://www.irelanddavis.com/dna/gedmatch/default.aspx

If you have not done such a test yet, I am happy to answer your questions before you order a test kit.