Showing posts with label Kosow Lacki. Show all posts

I've mentioned in the past that I have been in touch with several of my mother's second cousins and that we are trying to piece together our family tree to solidify all the connections. Well last night a big piece of the puzzle fell into place.

My mother's second cousin, Michel, who lives in Paris, updated our Geni.com family tree and with those updates I was able to connect an entire group of people that up until a few weeks ago I only heard about maybe once or twice in the past. Turns out that my great grandmother, Bella Kreplak was part of a very big family. I didn't even know the names of most of her brothers and sisters, only their descendants and usually two generations away. I definitely didn't know the names of her parents, Avram Kreplak and Dobe Jablonka.

Bella was one of eight children in a family that lived in Kosow Lacki, Poland. The children in the family were (in no particular order, because I have yet to verify all the birth dates): Bella, Moshe, Yossel, Rivka, Chaya, Esther, Meir and Noeh. Some of you reading this are scratching your heads and thinking to yourselves, what kinds of names are these? Well they are Jewish names used in Poland about 100 years ago. And because everyone had several names and nicknames, putting it all together is sometimes very frustrating. Here's an example.

I usually rely heavily on the GNDBs page on JewishGen. You plug in the name and the country and try to find a translation. But it's not always so easy. Let's take Yossel, Bella's brother. If you plug in Poland and Yossel, it doesn't find anyone. But I know that Yossel, is a nickname for Yossi or Yossef or actually Joseph. So instead, I looked for Yosiel and got this:

Legal/Hebrew: Yoseyf Manso Gender: M Legal Origin: Genesis 30:24
Yiddish: Yosef / Yoysef / Yoyzep / Yozep / Yusef / Yehosef / / Manso
Yiddish Nickname: Josiela / Osip / Yesl / Yos / Yose / Yosefke / Yosefl / Yosek / Yosh / Yoshe / Yoshk / Yoshke / YOSIEL / Yosk / Yoske / Yoskhen / Yoskhin / Yosl / Yoslin / Yospe / Yosye / Yoyze / Yoyzfe / Yoyzl / Yozep / Yozl / Yozlin / Yozpe / Yusl / Yuzek
Local Secular: Jesef / Jojzyp / Josef / Josif / Josyf / Yosif?
Local Secular Nickname: Ios / Iosko / Iospa / Jojze / Jojzel / Jos / Josek / Josel / Josk / Joska / Jospa / Joszk / Joz / Jozek
European Secular: Iosef / Iosek / Iosif / Iozef / Iozek / Josef / Jozef / Josek / Jusef / Yosef / Yossef? / Yousif? / Yozef
European Secular Nickname: Iosel / Iozel / Joscha? / Josiel / Josjek / Joss / Yosek / Yosel?
US Name: Jack / Josef / Joseph

See what I mean? How many ways can you spell this name? And who knew that Joseph translates to Jack? And if you change the output to Argentina you get Jose. And these aren't even the tough ones. Bella's mother was Dobe Jablonka. Dobe to me sounds like Doba, which sounds like a female bear in Hebrew. So here is what I found in the GNDBs:

How do you get to Dorothy from Dobe?

Anyway, back to the second cousins. I am not done yet. There is an entire branch of Kreplak's in Argentina that I want to link up. I think Michel knows the connection to them. He's visited them a couple of times and has a lot of information. It's tricky again, because all their names have taken on a South American flavor. There are Carlos and Julio and Federico in that branch. But at least it seems that the ancestors are still known by their original Yiddish names of Enoch and Pinjes. Enoch is Hanoch and Pinjes is also Pinkus and I already found a few of those in the JRI Poland database on JewishGen.

When I started to compile and rebuild this family tree I had no idea I would run into so many living relatives. This is truly an amazing experience.

So here's a great big warm welcome to all my new relatives, my second and third cousins I never even knew I had.

It's been a while since my last post, but boy have I been busy. I have been diving into some Polish geography and finding a lot of links to long lost relatives. I have found a lot of these people on Geni.com and it is proving to be a truly valuable resource.

As I have written here before about my grandfather's Dombek family, there are few leads to follow. But then I started to investigate his mother's side of the tree. Bella (Beile) Kreplak was born about 1884 in Poland (according to a page of testimony, she was born in Warsaw). So far I have not found any Kreplak's in Warsaw. So I started looking in other places. I found Bejla Kreplak, born in 1885 in the Kosow Lacki PSA BMD 1863-1904 in the Siedlce Gubernia / Warszawa Province database on JewishGen. You'll see why this is interesting in just a bit.

From speaking with my mother and grandmother, but also from personal acquaintance, I know we have Kreplak relatives in Paris. They are the children and grandchildren of Herschel Kreplak who is (supposed to be) my grandfather's first cousin. I need to verify who his parents were to confirm this, but I would say this is pretty certain. There is also another family in Paris that are descendants of a female Kreplak and they were also considered first cousins. Then there is a Ritz family in Israel.

Today I found out that Chaya Rydz (nee Kreplak) was the mother of Yehuda Rydz of Herzelia, Israel, and perished in Ciechanowiec, Bialystok, Poland, along with Yehuda's wife, Faiga Rydz (nee Plisky). All this is based on the Ciechanowiec Yizkor Book. You can read a chapter written by Yehuda here. So I have some research to do there, but I am pretty certain I can link them all back to the same family as well. I think Yehuda Rydz is the Idel Ritz in my tree?

There are two other Kreplak trees I am working on. They all lead back to families in Kosow Lacki, Poland. I found records of Kreplak families there and I need to see if I can find them at an LDS center and actually see who the parents were. I think I'm on the right track.

And then there are a few Dombek families that track back to Ostrow Mazowiecka.

One of the interesting things I found out is that all these villages are within a 20 mile radius. Check out this map:



By the way, I created this map by looking up the town Sterdyn on this site: http://mapy.eholiday.pl/. I guess you can also go through Google maps but this site actually does have a type-ahead feature that helps you if you have no idea how to spell in Polish, which I don't. Then I used a FireFox plug-in called FireShot that let's you grab either your current browser view or the entire page and add highlights and comments. There's a free version and it is extremely useful.

Last tech-tip for today. If you wind up in a foreign language site, like the one above, right click somewhere on the page and select the bottom option "Page Info". Then choose the "Translate to English" option at the bottom. It runs the entire page through Google Translate and does a pretty good job. This only works in FireFox (because you really should not use Internet Explorer), but doesn't work on Google's new Chrome browser. I'm certain it will be added very soon.