11-01-2023, 02:08 AM
Sounds like antisemitism is winning over Islamophobia for now.
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Free event at my synagogue tomorrow
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11-01-2023, 02:33 AM
Mr645 wrote: My great grandparents immigrated, legally, from Prussia and Poland. The family name in Europe was Layefsky, but the story was when the boast arrived in NY, Ellis Island, my ancestors shortened the name to avoid antisemitism 1) During that period, there was no such thing as "illegal immigration." There were no quotas, and the only restrictions were bad health or the likelihood of becoming a 'public charge." 2) No names were changed at Ellis Island. Any changes were made either before embarkation, or after after arrival, and the changes were made by the immigrants themselves, not by immigration officials. 3) What specific towns did your people come from?
11-01-2023, 12:13 PM
Janit wrote: My great grandparents immigrated, legally, from Prussia and Poland. The family name in Europe was Layefsky, but the story was when the boast arrived in NY, Ellis Island, my ancestors shortened the name to avoid antisemitism 1) During that period, there was no such thing as "illegal immigration." There were no quotas, and the only restrictions were bad health or the likelihood of becoming a 'public charge." OK, I'm not well versed on the laws surrounding immigration at that time 2) No names were changed at Ellis Island. Any changes were made either before embarkation, or after after arrival, and the changes were made by the immigrants themselves, not by immigration officials. My family story is they boarded the boats with one name, disembarked with another, less Jewish sounding name. At the time Jews were typically sent to the "jewish ghetto" and my great grandparents had other plans. 3) What specific towns did your people come from?I don't have records of the town in Prussia they came from, but one great grandmother had 3 sisters and last year heard the town they lived in, in the Soviet Union, after breakup was part of Ukraine, had been destroyed. Obviously long deceased but no idea who their families were or if they still lived in the area. About ten years ago I was at a museum that was doing ancestry research but was not successful at finding documents from Prussia during WW1
11-02-2023, 02:47 AM
Mr645 wrote: My great grandparents immigrated, legally, from Prussia and Poland. The family name in Europe was Layefsky, but the story was when the boast arrived in NY, Ellis Island, my ancestors shortened the name to avoid antisemitism 1) During that period, there was no such thing as "illegal immigration." There were no quotas, and the only restrictions were bad health or the likelihood of becoming a 'public charge." OK, I'm not well versed on the laws surrounding immigration at that time 2) No names were changed at Ellis Island. Any changes were made either before embarkation, or after after arrival, and the changes were made by the immigrants themselves, not by immigration officials. My family story is they boarded the boats with one name, disembarked with another, less Jewish sounding name. At the time Jews were typically sent to the "jewish ghetto" and my great grandparents had other plans. 3) What specific towns did your people come from?I don't have records of the town in Prussia they came from, but one great grandmother had 3 sisters and last year heard the town they lived in, in the Soviet Union, after breakup was part of Ukraine, had been destroyed. Obviously long deceased but no idea who their families were or if they still lived in the area. About ten years ago I was at a museum that was doing ancestry research but was not successful at finding documents from Prussia during WW1 Immigration quotas for Europeans were instituted in the early 1920s, so if your people came before that there was no restriction. Once they got off the boat, they could use any name they wanted. People sometimes experimented with names before settling on a final choice. The family stories you have are good resources, but there’s always the possibility that they had been polished a little bit to make them into “better” stories. A lot of information is now available online and new material is being added all the time. You should be able to find your relatives in the federal and state censuses. One of the most useful is naturalization records, which are likely to have town of birth, ship name and date, and sometimes a legal name change. A lot of European records are also available online, many indexed on jewishgen.org. A persistent myth is that all the records were lost in the wars. In fact many of them have simply been difficult to access until recently. There is also a recent major project to scan and index Ukrainian records. Layefsky seems to be a relatively uncommon name in the available records, so it may be easy to identify the right ones.
11-02-2023, 05:19 AM
65 million records available for search for free:
https://www.statueofliberty.org/discover...ip-search/
11-02-2023, 12:36 PM
Tiangou wrote: Unfortunately, the search feature on this site works very poorly. There is better access to the same data through familysearch.org, stevemorse.org, and ancestry.com. familysearch and ancestry use different sets of scans with different quality, so sometimes it's worth searching on one site and then calling up the image on a different one for better legibility. A major challenge for searching these databases is spelling variations, poor handwriting, and errors of transcription. A robust and flexible search protocol is essential to finding things. familysearch is free, ancestry is often available free through public libraries, and stevemorse.org is the mother-of-all genealogical search platforms. Stevemorse.org is free, but some specific databases are only accessible if you have a subscription to that database (like if you want to use stevemorse to search ancestry). By the way, Steve Morse is also the architect of the Intel 8086 chip, and is co-author, with linguist Alexander Beider, of the Beider–Morse phonetic name matching algorithm. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_P._Morse |
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