Behind the Marriage of Max and Mae Feinberg

Behind every marriage is the question, "How did they meet?" According to the norms of "Traditional Marriage," they met by arrangement of their parents or extended families. This clearly was how things worked in the "Pale" of Eastern Europe, as many weddings turn out to involve families related by earlier weddings.

The arranged marriage did not necessarily give way to the love marriage on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. In an earlier blog, I showed how the earliest Romanian-Jewish immigrants in Des Moines arranged the marriage of my maternal great-grandparents Aaron and Clara Marcovis in 1888.

The Feinberg-Ginsberg Connection

I have long suspected that the 1915 marriage of my paternal grandparents Max Feinberg and Mae Chapman was also arranged. Mae's mother was a Ginsberg. Two years earlier, in 1913, Max's older sister Anna married Mae's Uncle Hyman Ginsberg. Seven years before that, in 1906, Max's maternal uncle Hyman Cohen married Mae's Aunt Rae Ginsberg.

What's with the Feinbergs and the Ginsbergs of Des Moines and Centerville, Iowa? I have not found any Feinberg ancestors of Mae Chapman, nor Ginsberg ancestors for Max Feinberg's ancestry. As for Max, we are not even sure who his mother was.

The Feinberg-Goldring Connection

While my father Ted Feinberg was stationed in San Diego after World War II, he visited his Aunt Fannie. Schutzbank and her husband Leo in Los Angeles. The Schutzbanks introduced him to a Goldring family. Dad knew from his father that the Goldrings and Feinberg were connected, but neither of them knew how. One relative speculated that David Feinberg changed his surname from Goldring to appear as an only child in order to avoid conscription in the Russian Army.

Long ago I called up Aunt Fannie's daughter Pat Engle. Pat recalled a Minnie Goldring Wolfe who attended her wedding. I tracked down Minnie's niece Sarelle Riave Friedman (1932-2017) who remember the name Fannie Schutzbank. "Who could forget it?"

Minnie's Wolfe's father was Maurice Samuel Goldring (1862-1937). His obituary said he was born in Sakiai, Lithuania, and when Sakiai birth records were found and translated, Moshe Shlomo Goldring was there. Death records included Moshe's father, who died in 1867. David Feinberg was reportedly born in 1871. They could not be full siblings, but they could have been half-siblings, born to the same mother but different fathers.

The birth record shows Moshe's mother was Khaya Hinda, maiden name unknown. Both Maurice Goldring and David Feinberg had daughters named Ida, a common translation of Khaya. Ida Goldring was born in 1888, and Ida Feinberg was born in 1896.

The Goldring-Markson Connection

Maurice’s first wife Hannah (Kert) had a sister who lived in Lewiston, Maine, named Ethel Markson, the wife of Nathan. Together in 1882, the Goldrings and Marksons migrated from “Budkin” in Lithuania to Montreal.

The Markson-Ginsberg Connection

Nathan Markson (1857-1943), born in Pilviskiai, Lithuania, was the son of Moshe Tzvi. The Hebrew "Tzvi" corresponds with the Yiddish "Hirsh."

Abraham Markson (1839-1901) was also from Pilviskiai, Lithuania, and he also lived in Lewiston, Maine. His parents were "Harris and Fanny."

Itsko Markson was listed in the resident book for the town of Zapyskis, Lithuania, but the book notes he was born in Pilviskiai in 1843 to Hirsh Markson and Feiga Ginsberg. Itsko (Isaac Lewis Markson) died in Polk County, Iowa, (which includes Des Moines) in 1899.

Seeing Ginsberg and Zapyskis in the same record, it is likely the Feiga Ginsberg Markson was the daughter of Avram and Khaya Ginsberg of Zapyskis. Because so many Zapyskis-Ginsberg descendants settled in Des Moines, I believe they are also my Ginsberg ancestors. That would make Feiga the great-aunt of my Grandma Mae.

The Zapyskis resident book includes many Feinbergs, including the Mordechai Feinberg who I believe was Grandpa Max’s grandfather. The resident book also reveals a marriage between the Ginsberg and Feinberg families.

Theories

The foregoing examples showed a close familiarity between the Ginsbergs and the Feinbergs. I made several attempts to explain more specifically why David Feinberg's two eldest children both married into the Ginsbergs. These were laid out in previous versions of this post. 

For my latest theory, see the more recent post (2021) about David Feinberg’s first wife.

The "Pop" Star and the Music Professor

2012 marks the centennial of the death of Hyman Chapman, an older half-brother of my great-grandfather Nathan. Their nephew Himie Voxman's life span filled almost this entire 100-year period.

Samuel Hyman Chapman was born Shmuel Khayim Tsipanyuk in the early 1860s in Rozhev, Ukraine, a Jewish agricultural colony between Kiev and Zhitomir. Granddaughter Sue Dreier was told he attended the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, but a likely passenger record shows he sailed into New York in January 1882.

Either way, Hyman was the first of dozens of Tsipanyuks who relocated from Rozhev to the Midwest, especially Chicago, over the next 30 years. All of them followed his example and became "Chapman." If you are Jewish, a Chicagoan and a Chapman, we're probably related.

Hyman's marriage to Esther Ginsberg in Des Moines on August 7, 1882, constituted the oldest record  in Iowa of my known relatives.

In 1884, Hyman and Esther moved to Centerville, a coal-mining town in south central Iowa. Joining them there were Hyman's oldest brother Abraham in 1887, Nathan in 1891 and their younger sister Mollie Voxman in 1906. Also arriving in 1891 was Esther's half-sister Lizzie. Hyman's half-brother married Esther's half-sister in 1892, and they would become my great-grandparents.

"Hy" Chapman grew from a tool manufacturer to the biggest soda bottler in Southeast Iowa. In Iowa, we say "pop" instead of "soda." "Chapman Pop" had a line of 35 products according to a researcher commissioned by his grandson, Lawrence "Punky" Chapman.

Len Rosenbaum, a nephew of Hyman's son-in-law Sam, said Hyman started up by purchasing bottling equipment by mail order in 1885. Len's other claim, that Hyman was one of the first bottlers in the country, would be difficult to verify, as the bottling of soda water in America began around 1800. Nevertheless, an antiques web site sold off a Chapman Pop bottle earlier this month.

Hyman Chapman died of kidney failure January 12, 1912. Early that Sunday, mourners accompanied the body on a special train to Des Moines for burial at Glendale Cemetery. My paternal grandparents, Max Feinberg and Mae Chapman, first met at that funeral.

The following September 17, Molly Voxman gave birth to a boy whom she and Morris would name after her brother, Hyman Chapman.

At first, Himie Voxman played and taught the clarinet to pay tuition at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. His first degree was in chemical engineering, inspired perhaps by Hyman Chapman's son Lazarus Chapman, who ran a metals company in Chicago.

Himie's graduate study of music psychology took him in a different direction, and from 1954 to 1980 he was Director of the University of Iowa School of Music.  Outside of Iowa, he was most famous for the exercises he composed for wind instruments. I you'd like to buy them, you can easily find them online.

I discovered the Voxman branch of the family from the obituaries of Abraham and Hyman Chapman. When I first called Himie in 1996, his wife Lois had died just six weeks earlier. Over the next 15 years, I may have been the only cousin in touch with him, and I believe he enjoyed the chance to share family stories with me.

I visited him four times, twice in his house near the top of a hill east of the Voxman Music Building and twice at the Oaknoll Retirement Residence.  On those last two visits he could not remember what he just asked me, but he could still play the clarinet. Last September, a few days after his 99th birthday, he let me record a short music video.

Just as Hy Chapman's death was front page news in Centerville, Himie's death on November 21, 2011, was a major story in Iowa and in the wind instrument world.

From my 2009 visit with Himie Voxman, who never needed a cane.