What the Internet can teach us about the past - Part 3 - my own grandfather

We are all used to searching the Internet for information about what is happening today. And without the Internet to train on we wouldn’t have the current LLMs like GPT and BARD. But have you ever used the Internet to study the distant past? Well, I have, and want to tell a few stories I have uncovered. I have already discussed an old telegram I was given and an old book I own, but my last story is by far the most personal – it’s all about my father’s father, after whom I am named.

For the first half of his life my grandfather spelled his first name Jakób, and pronounced the first letter “Y” like I do. Before setting out on this research I thought I actually knew a lot about him, although he passed away two years before I was born. I knew that he was born in the 1880s, but just where was not that clear; my father told me that it was in Chortkov while my uncle insisted that he was born in Buchach. Both of these places were in Galicia, a country that no longer exists but was situated in southeastern?Poland?and western?Ukraine, and which was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an empire that also no longer exists. Both cities are now in the Ukraine. The distance between the cities is under 40 km. Nobel prize winning author Shai Agnon was born in Buchach and immortalized the town in many of his stories.

Jacob had a twin brother, who died in childhood after being kicked in the head by a horse. I was never able to discover this brother’s name, but have a guess that I would love to verify one day.

He was a polyglot although the accounts probably exaggerated the number of languages he spoke. Towards the end of his life he worked as a translator in the New York court system (New York was experiencing an influx of immigrants from all around the world) where he was able to communicate in Yiddish, German, Hungarian, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, Japanese, and English. That list is probably not exhaustive.

His knowledge of languages led him as a young man to aspire to be a language teacher, but teaching positions were governmental positions in Austro-Hungary, which necessitated previous military service. So, he joined the army of the Habsburg Emperor Franz Josef, where he moved up the ranks and became an officer (I have a cabinet photograph of him in uniform). Sometime during WWI he was captured by the Russians and spent five years in Siberian POW camps. I was told that as an officer and knowing so many languages (the prisoners were from all over!) he was treated somewhat better than the average PoW, and at one point even had his own office. But the experience still left him with ruined health for the rest of his life.

Somehow, I was not sure how, from Siberia he got to Japan, and from Japan to New York where he lived for a while with his cousin Philip Sommer and attended a course to improve his English. At that course he met a young woman who had immigrated from Galicia by herself and impressed her by immediately recognizing from her accent (in a feat that would have impressed Professor Higgins) that she was from the small city of Kolomea (now Kolomyia in western Ukraine). They married and had two boys, my uncle Phil and my father.

Oh, and one last thing. As a child I overheard something that really wasn’t meant for my ears. When Jacob passed away the first thing that my grandmother did was to go to his wallet and tear up the photograph of the “Japanese princess”. When I asked about her, I was told that she was someone who helped grandfather leave Japan. It was clear that there was more to this story, but those who knew didn’t divulge any more then, and are no longer with us now.

My grandfather passed away in 1953 aged 68. My grandmother was a widow for 32 years.

I had already found my grandmother’s birth registration from Kolomea in Galicia (now Ukraine) with the help of the Polish state archives AGAD. That was a simple task as the scans are all on-line and I knew her exact date and place of birth. I initially couldn’t find any mention of her, but then noticed that a page was missing. In response to an email, AGAD apologized for missing a page and promptly scanned and uploaded it. Unfortunately, there are no on-line records from either Chortkov or Buchach.

The Statue of Liberty―Ellis Island Foundation has an excellent passenger search tool where I had previously found the record of my grandmother entering the US in November of 1920. Once again, I had no luck; my grandfather had apparently not arrived via Ellis Island.

So, I turned to the most readily available source of information - US census data. My grandfather lived for the second half of his life in the US and so it should be easy to locate him. The US National Archives releases census records to the general public after 72 years and the scans are available free of charge. However, unless you know an exact address, searching in scans can be extremely time consuming. Luckily there are search engines – rather poor and hard-to-use free ones, and excellent and easy to use ones available to subscribers of various genealogical sites. After trying half a dozen such sites, I settled on Ancestry. It has the largest collection of databases, the best search engine, and supports serious research by allowing linking supporting documents to facts.

I found my grandfather and his family in the Bronx N.Y. records for 1930, 1940 and 1950. In 1930 he was a waiter, in 1940 a clerk working in a hospital, and by 1950 (aged 65) he had retired. Since he doesn’t appear in the 1920 census he probably arrived some time after April 1920. In all the documents his country of birth is listed as Austria while my grandmother’s appears as Poland, although they were born in cities no more than 100 km apart that were both Galicia at the time and are both in the Ukraine now.

The waiter entry surprised me since from family lore I knew that for the first few years of his marriage he worked as a morse code operator on ships until my grandmother refused to tolerate his disappearing for months at a time. So, he must have been married for a long time by then. A quick Ancestry search of the N.Y. state Marriage Certificate Index turned up certificate 14,364 dated 16 May 1922. This matches his age at time of marriage in the 1930 census (but my grandmother’s age is off by three years).

The job at the hospital rang a bell. I had been told that during the prohibition era he had borrowed supplies from a hospital and produced boot-leg whisky which he sold to make ends meet. Another search turned up a 1942 WWII US Draft Registration Card which listed his employer as Lincoln Hospital at 141st St. in the Bronx.

All the census records listed Jacob as being a naturalized US citizen. So, the natural next step was to search the US Federal archives where I found Declaration of Intention 277,801 from 1922, and US naturalization petition number 87716 from October 1926, wherein Jacob Stein, working as a waiter and living in the Bronx, stated that he had been born on 19 April 1885 in Buchach, Galicia, Austria and had entered the US at Rouses Point NY on 5 December 1920 after having departed Vancouver on 1 December 1920. He had arrived in Vancouver on “The Empress of Japan” which departed from Yokohama, Japan, and had proceeded by the D&H Railway across Canada to Rouses Point.

Some quick googling revealed that Rouses Point is a small village on the 45th parallel which marks the border between the US and Canada, and in this case between New York and Quebec. There still is a border crossing and customs office at the north end of the village. There is also a train station with lines crossing Canada reaching Vancouver.

D&H Railway is the Delaware and Hudson Railway company, nicknamed The Bridge Line to New England and Canada. This company was formed in 1823 by mine owners for a fast way to move anthracite from their mines in northern Pennsylvania to markets in New York. In 1876 they extended their lines into Canada through Rouses Point. D&H never got further than Montreal, so Jacob must have actually taken a Canadian Pacific train from Vancouver to Montreal, a line which had been running since 1887, and there changed for the D&H line to Rouses Point.

OK, so Jacob was born in Buchach (but it will turn out that this is not completely precise).

The next big question was to find where in Siberia he was detained. I found out that the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) maintained (from 1914 to 1918) a prisoner of war registry, to which the warring states submitted lists. For each prisoner they created an index card containing name, nationality, date of capture, etc. Scans of these cards and a searchable index are now available online. A short search turned up 2 cards bearing the name Jakob Stein with different information. One was handwritten, one typed. It took some cross-checking to figure out that the typed one was the correct one.

It reads as follows: STEIN Jakob / Korpl. / I.R. 95 / SBH 357.? That’s all. (It is actually unclear whether the third line is I.R. 95 or I.R. 96, but 95 turns out to be the correct reading.)

At first it didn’t seem possible since the Korpl. obviously meant the rank of corporal, and I had been sure that my grandfather had been an officer, not a low-ranking NCO. So, I compared my grandfather’s cabinet photo in full uniform with depictions of Austro-Hungarian rank insignia found online. The two stars on his lapel were indeed those of a Korporal = corporal, which was the third rank of enlisted men (after Infanterist = infantryman and Gefreiter = private first class). An exchange of emails with a researcher of Siberian war prisoners clarified this somewhat. She told me that due to the multitude of different rank insignia it was not uncommon for NCOs to be mistaken by the Russians as officers. She furthermore told me that his having his own office was plausible, but mostly due to his language skills.

The next notation I.R. 95 means Infantry Regiment 95. This regiment belonged to the 11th Infantry Division which was subordinate to the 2nd Army and was headquartered in Lemberg (AKA Lvov, now Lviv) and had a battalion stationed in Chortkov. From web sites on the Austro-Hungarian Army I was able to trace the line of command from my grandfather’s immediate superior officer up to Franz Josef himself, but I needn’t go into the details here.

The final line SBH 357 is the reference number of the prisoner list that reported my grandfather’s internment. Unfortunately, this particular list has been lost, or at least was never scanned. From comparison with similar notations one can conclude that SB stands for Siberia. I don’t know what the H stands for.

While researching WWI PoWs in Siberia I discovered that Dr. Frank Ferdinand Rosenblatt, the executive director of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), travelled to Siberia to visit Jewish PoWs there. The relevant JDC archives are available on-line. I discovered that the JDC had indeed visited my grandfather; in fact two scanned pages were devoted to him. These pages were evidently written by the same hand, but one earlier than the other. Both were rubber-stamped Auxiliary Branch of the JDC of the American Funds for Jewish War Sufferers, VLADIVOSTOK. So, at least at the end of his incarceration, Jacob was at the eastern-most reaches of Siberia.

Attached to the earlier one was a photograph from before his capture, and a later one with a photograph after years of captivity. The difference between the handsome young man with a tie and the emaciated prisoner is striking.

Vladivostok (literally The Ruler of the East) is a large city in the far east of Siberia?on the Sea of Japan. During WWI there was a PoW camp there called Pervaya Rechka (First River). On this same spot there was later a Soviet dissident transit camp (the poet Osip Mandelstam died in this transit camp while serving a 5-year sentence for insulting Stalin). Today the only vestige of the camp is a small park in memory of those who suffered in the Soviet transit camp; the plight of tens of thousands of foreigners has been forgotten. The denotation Pervaya Rechka lives on in the name of a train station.

90% of the PoWs captured in WWI by the Russians (over 2 million people) were Austro-Hungarian citizens, but these further broke down into ethnic groups. About half were Slavs (who were treated somewhat better by their brethren Russians), about a quarter Germans and about a quarter Hungarians, with much small numbers of Italians, Rumanians and Jews.?These PoWs were housed in hundreds of PoW camps, some in European Russia but the majority in Siberia. PoWs were constantly moved around between camps which were notoriously overcrowded. The camps in Siberia had only a minimal complement of guards since escapees had little chance of surviving outside the camps. Officers were treated relatively well and received a salary with which they could purchase food and other necessities. It is understandable that my grandfather had little incentive to dissuade the Russians of their belief that he was an officer.

From the JDC records I learned even more about my grandfather’s military career. The first document reads as follows (translated from the German with the help of Google translate):

First and last name: Jakób Stein

Rank and troop-corps: Korp. I.R. 95

Captured (when and where): Narajiv 28 August 1914

Born (when and where): Medwedowce 19 May 1885 (sic., should be April)

Responsible authority: Czortkow

Home address: c/o Berta Stein, Czortkow

Nationality and religion: Jewish

Occupation: Civil servant

Status and number of children: Married with no children.

Current residence: Pervaya Rechka camp

Departed on (with transport): 10 November 1920 via Yokohama to America (the last line is in a later hand)

He was captured at Narajiv on 28 August 1914. The location and date tally with the Battle of Galicia (AKA the?Battle of Lemberg), a major battle between?Russia?and?Austria-Hungary?during the early stages of?WWI. The Austro-Hungarian army was decisively defeated and the Russians held Eastern Galicia until their own defeat during the Gorlice–Tarnów offensive. Estimates put the Austro-Hungarian losses at between 100,000 and 400,000 dead, over 200,000 wounded, and between 100,00 and 150,000 captured. One of these latter was my grandfather.

He was listed, once again, as a Korporal in the 95th Infantry regiment, and having been born in Medvedivtsi (Medwedowce) and his home address was in Chortkov. Medvedivtsi?is a tiny village near Buchach which belonged to the Buchach district of the Ternopil province, so that someone born there could be said to have been born in Buchach. The?Vilkhovets?River flows through the village. It now belongs to Ukraine who in 2020 merged the Buchach district with the Chortkiv (the Ukrainian version of Chortkov) one, so that it now belongs to the Chortkiv district. So, both my father and uncle were right, but neither completely precise.

I pieced together that after my grandfather’s father left his wife and son in search of work, the mother and child moved from Medvedivtsi to Chortkov to be near Berta’s family. And in Chortkov was the headquarters of Jakob’s battalion.

There is a strange inaccuracy in his birth date as compared with other sources, 19 May instead of 19 April. In both documents there is a line over the Roman numeral V used to represent the month; does this mean anything? The XI representing the month of his departure has a line over it in one document, and both under and over it in the second, which leads me to believe that this is just a convention. I guess this is yet another example of inaccuracies in filling out documents.

His home address lists his mother as living in Chortkov. Did he really have any contact with his mother during the five long years in Siberia? Would he had heard had she passed away? In a slightly later document he lists a friend, R Rosenblatt from Vladivostok, as his closest relative. Does this imply that once the war was over he had learned that his mother had died?

But the most astounding element of this document is the marital status. Comparing the page with other JDC documents it is clear that this is not a misreading; and the horizontal line signifying no children clinches it. To whom was he married? Why had I never heard about a first wife?

The last line was filled in in a different hand and in a different type of ink, and was evidently filled in later. He had left for America via Yokohama Japan. If he was in Siberia - why Japan?

On 23 August 1914, Japan declared war on Germany and became a member of the WWI allies. In February 1918, the Japanese Army planned to capture Siberia to free Japan from Russian threat. When the British moved on Vladivostok, the Japanese moved quickly to be first.

On 15 October 1918 the Japanese took over the Pervaya Reschka PoW camp. Living conditions improved significantly. There was now running water and regular food deliveries. The prisoners could freely move around. On 30 March 1919 the prisoners held a concert with instruments they built themselves. While technically no longer prisoners it would take over two years to repatriate them all and empty the PoW camp. Many of the prisoners simply had nowhere to go. The empire that my grandfather had served no longer existed, and I believe he learned that he no longer had any family left in Chortkov.

While I can’t prove the sequence of events, the mostly likely scenario is something like this. Under the Japanese, Jacob continued his position translating between Russian, Polish, German, Hungarian, and now picked up Japanese. He befriended the Japanese commanders who were now running the camp. When Dr. Fred Rosenblatt visited the Pervaya Rechka camp he would have been an indispensable asset to him. Jacob asked Fred to contact his mother, but they discovered that she was no longer alive. Fred asked if he wanted to immigrate to the US where he could start afresh. Jacob said that he had an uncle, Max Sommer, somewhere in New York. Fred located this uncle in at 161 Attorney St. in Manhattan and helped with the travel procedures.

Amazingly I found extensive documentation of Jacob’s travel in Ancestry’s databases. The passenger arrival list of the Empress of Japan departing Yokohama on 19 November 1920 and arriving in Vancouver on 1 December 1920 has a line for second-class passenger number 3751, named Jakob Stein. It lists him as married and 35 years of age, of Polish citizenship and Hebrew religious denomination. His occupation is noted as contractor and his destination in Canada as transit. His entry is sandwiched between a number of people with Japanese nationality (laborers), destined for Vancouver; but on the same page there is a Russian merchant (of Hebrew denomination) in transit, and 4 Irish people (a missionary and his family). Assuming the Irish missionary picked up some Japanese, Jacob could have spoken with all of these people – I wonder if he befriended any of them.

This is not the only document in which Jacob is listed as having Polish citizenship. From the at the end of the 18th century, Poland ceased to exist as an independent nation for over a hundred years. Its territory was split among the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Prussian Kingdom, and the Russian Empire. In particular, Galicia was part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, which was part of Austria-Hungary. Poland regained independence on 11 November 1918, and so at the time of this journey Jacob’s homeland was now divided between Poland and what would later become Ukraine. The natural solution was for him to declare himself Polish. Years later, in his petition for US naturalization, he would renounce allegiance to both the Republic of Austria and the Republic of Poland.

Another document was Jacob’s passenger declaration. He stated that he was 36 years old, a year older than in the arrival list (he was actually 35 years and 8 months). He was born in Medwedowce and was a Polish citizen of Jewish religion. He was married. He was able to read. He paid for his ticket by himself and had $150 in his possession. He did not intend staying in Canada, and was in transit to his uncle, Max Somer of 161 Attorney St. New York. His nearest relative is listed as a friend named R Rosenblatt of 19 Komarovsy(?) Vladivostok. He was not mentally or physically defective, never had tuberculosis, and was not an anarchist.

Yet another document was the manifest of alien passengers destined for the US. In this document his name is spelled Jackob, his nationality Polish and his last permanent residence Vladivostok Russia. In handwriting his nearest relative is listed as his wife Mina, a citizen of Russia and Poland. His final destination is listed as New York. A much later handwritten annotation above his entry says Natz 2-6-26 (naturalized 6 February 1926), although his petition for US naturalization is dated 13 October 1926.

So, at last we have a name for this mysterious wife! Mina is not a common name, but unfortunately for my research it exists as a woman’s name in both Yiddish (alongside its pet form Mindel) and Japanese; as well as Chinese, Indian, Arabic, Persian, Greek, Cambodian, and who knows what else. It is not a name in Russian or Polish. The notation regarding citizenship seems to point to a marriage in Galicia before his capture, but the possibility of Mina being the Japanese princess is alluring.

There seem to be three possibilities. Mina could have been a Jewish Galician that he married in Chortkov before he was captured. Or Mina could be a Japanese woman whom he met in Vladivostok (perhaps the daughter of a high ranking army officer, explaining the princess epithet). Or Mina could have been a local Russian from Vladivostok.

Were he to have been married before being captured and his wife still in Chortkov, then why would his home address list his mother’s name, and why wouldn’t he have returned to Chortkov once freed from Pervaya Rechka? Were Mina a local Russian why would her citizenship be include Polish? A similar question exists for the Japanese option – why Russian and Polish?

From the number of strikeouts in the alien passenger manifest, and the fact that Jacob did not speak English at this point, one can entertain the possibility that this citizenship note is in error. Or perhaps it referred to Jacob himself (although already listed as Polish in the appropriate column). In any case the mystery remains.

And the big question is what happened to Mina. The last mention of her is the manifest dated 19 November 1920. ?In his Declaration of Intention (to become a US citizen), signed 13 April 1922, he asserts that he is NOT married and not a polygamist nor does he believe in the practice of polygamy. A month later, on 16 May 1922, he married my grandmother. It was very common practice in those years for men to emigrate to the US before their families, and once they had earned the cost of the tickets to bring them over. I know of several such cases in my immediate family. This didn’t happen in this case. His prior marriage was known to the US authorities and so he could not have covered it up. Unless it was possible to divorce at a distance of 7,000 km., Mina must have died in 1921 or early 1922. The mystery remains.

According to several documents Jacob entered the US on 5 December 1920, five days after disembarking in Vancouver. This means that he must have boarded the D&H trans-Canada train almost immediately as the duration of this train ride is over five days. Upon entering the US at Rouses point he stated that the intended length of his stay was permanent. He still had $140 in his possession, implying that the rail ticket was prepaid.

By the time he arrived in Manhattan his uncle Max was no longer living at the address at 161 Attorney street; there is no Max Sommer listed at that address in the April 1920 Federal census. In fact, I was never able to unearth him at all. But another maternal uncle, Philip Sommer, arrived in New York through Ellis Island about the same time. He is listed in his travel documents as travelling to his brother Max Sommer at 161 Attorney St. According to the Ellis Island records he arrived a day before Jacob’s arrival – 4 December 1920; but according to the SS Rotterdam passenger list it was two days later, on 7 Dec 1920. The difference between the dates is not difficult to explain, immigrants were routinely detained at Ellis Island for several days.

Confusingly, Phil Sommer is listed in most of these early documents as Filip Stein. Stein was his mother’s surname (Rose Stein), and in those days the authorities gave babies their mother’s surname if their parents had not paid the civil marriage license fee. Stein was also Jacob's father's last name (Leizer Stein). Were Jacob's father and his maternal grandmother related? Philip is listed as having been born in Chortkov on 20 December 1886, 20 months after his nephew Jacob, explaining why they considered themselves cousins, rather than uncle and nephew.

Another specious trap for researchers involves the scan of Philip’s passenger list. The year 1920 in the date has the final digit typed in as a zero, but someone has changed it in handwriting to make it into a 6. Not only can we be sure of the arrival year being 1920 from numerous other documents, but Philip married Clara in New York in February 1923, making a 1926 arrival date impossible. Why would someone mistakenly make this change?

Did Jacob and Philip coordinate their arrivals? The timing seems much too synchronized to be coincidental, but it just conceivable that they both showed up at 161 Attorney St. looking for uncle Max and bumped into each other. In any case Jacob and Philip lived together for some time, until Jacob married in 1922 and Philip in 1923. In the 1925 both families are living at 145 Attorney Street, 75 meters away from where uncle Max once lived (both addresses are between Stanton and E Houston streets).

Chronologically the next document is the 1930 census, and we have come full circle.

Summary

In my research I found out so much I didn’t know, but am left with many new questions. I never uncovered Jacob’s brother’s name, but found out precisely where he was born. I learned a lot about his military career (he wasn’t really an officer!) and his time in Siberia. I know about his trip from Japan to New York with resolution of ship passenger number and how much money he had in his pocket.

The main open question is about Mina and what happened to her. But other questions remain as well. Who is the Japanese princess? Are they the same person? And what happened to uncle Max? Were Jacob's father and his maternal grandmother related?

The 50+ documents I discovered are physically in New York, Washington DC, Vancouver, Paris, the Ukraine, and Poland. I never found relevant documents from Russia or Japan. Even were I to have known where to find all these documents I would have had to have travelled around the world to view them. In fact, I was once in Yokohama but had no idea where I could have gone to research Jacob’s time there.

It truly amazes me how much I actually could ascertain about someone so decidedly unfamous and remarkably unremarkable. In my previous two research reports I was relatively lucky; the people and events involved had some modicum of notoriety. I could possibly have carried out my research in a large enough library of reference books. But although my grandfather lived a life unremarkable for the time, his life left traces that I could follow with only minimal effort from the comfort of my home.

Without the Internet it would be prohibitively expensive and time-consuming for a causal researcher to carry out an investigation of this sort. Thanks to the Internet interconnecting the world, governments providing official documents after sufficient time, and general scanophilia, anyone with a strong enough interest and a smidgen of ability can perform incredible research.