Four new family members spread across the world

I now had four names and four email addresses for new family members spread across the world.

These four family members are all descended from my mother's great uncle, Eliezer Scholem. He had six daughters. With the help of my newly found cousin in Australia, I now had living descendants for five of these daughters.

Once again the power of the internet was harnessed for my research. Just searching on individual names can provide a surprising amount of information.. The amount of information on the web is an ever increasing feast for the family geneaologist.As time goes by additional resources are added to the web so a keen family researcher should revisit  the search on names of important relatives in their  tree. 

These sisters were born in Czernowitz. Searching again whilst writing this blog, I have discovered that there is now a Czernowitz BMD database available on the web, for which I must thank all of the volunteers working on that project.

Cemetery records, school websites, news stories,  genealogical websites, social networking sites and other sites all combine to throw up interesting stories and useful information. As usual the results were variable. This depends in part on what the individual or their family has done to actually feature on the web but more significantly is dependent on the country where they are or were living. Some countries are less advanced and do not have as much information available electronically and others are more restrictive and careful with privacy and restrict access to some of the available information.

If genealogical websites come up in the search, they can provide a lot of useful information. Geni is one such family tree website. However I have learned that care should be taken using information from this and similar websites. Not all family trees are compiled with validation to ensure accuracy.

I sent off introductory emails to the four new contacts and waited to see what response I would get.
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Henry goes to Australia

My mother had another uncle, Henry. He was the older brother of Max, Jack and my mother's mother.

I have found a P&O passenger manifest showing that Henry with his wife, Margarethe, and teenage daughter, Ilse, sailed from London on 1 September 1939 aboard the Stratheden bound for Brisbane.

They had been in England for about 4 months.

They were in Australia by October 1939.

War in Europe was declared while they were travelling. A family story says they were also shadowed by a German U-boat. The Stratheden returned to Europe as a troop ship loaded with young Australians bound for the European War. Ilse had joyful memories of the ship and her many young friends she made en route. It was such a welcome relief and total change from the chaos, violence and persecution in their home city of Vienna, Austria, and an anxious Britain, with war clouds gathering rapidly.

Australian records for family history researchers, particularly those for South Australia, are not as readily available on the internet as they are for other countries such as the UK and the USA.

Fortunately my Australian family have remained in contact with us so I know that this branch of the family settled in Australia and Ilse married, having two sons.

Unfortunately she died at only 52 in a tragic accident whilst swimming in the sea.

One of the two sons married and he now has a family of his own.

They in turn are in contact with another family member in Australia and through him I have been put in touch with living relatives in New Zealand, Israel, Canada and the USA.

The discovery of these other families was even more rewarding because very little of my mother's family was known to have survived the war and she did not previously know of their existence.

The challenge was now to see if I could make contact with my newly discovered family, to see where these new lines would fit on the family tree and to continue this family history journey with any additional information I could gather.

I had four names and four email addresses for new family members spread across across the world.

So Jack had reached USA with his family via Ellis Island.

My mother told me that her uncle, who was Jack's brother, had made it to the US via the Far East.

My cousin, Jack's son, still lives in California and is in contact with us in the UK, particularly my mother. Recently he made a chance remark to her. He had read a book that had mentioned a person in Shanghai who could have been this uncle's first wife .

With the power of the internet, I followed up on this mention and discovered that they were both involved with the International Committee for European Immigrants in Shanghai.

The International Committee for European Immigrants in China was a refugee assistance organization in Shanghai that was founded on August 7, 1938 to deal with the wave of Jewish refugees arriving in Shanghai from Nazi Germany. Established under the aegis of Sir Victor Sassoon, a wealthy Iraqi Jew with British citizenship, the committee was organized by Hungarian businessman Paul Komor, together with Eduard Kann, Aladair Kelen and Michael Speelman. The International Committee was referred to as the I.C. or Komor Committee, after its first secretary. I.C. headquarters were first located at Komor's firm, but was soon moved to the Hotel Cathay owned by Sir Victor Sassoon. Initially, the I.C. provided housing, meals, jobs and financial assistance for the Jewish refugees in Shanghai. Later, after the establishment of the Committee for the Assistance of European Refugees in Shanghai under the direction of Michael Speelman (the Speelman Committee), the I.C. focused its efforts on providing international identification cards to the Jewish refugees whose passports had been confiscated or invalidated. These documents, which bore the I.C. stamp and Komor's signature, gave the refugees "legal" status in Shanghai, and were used in lieu of regular passports for those applying to emigrate.

Photographs of the Committee staff were given to Paul Komor in 1941 and have since been made available to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Valerie S. Komor.

Max, full name Maximillian, left Shanghai on 17 June 1947 aboard SS General MC Meigs arriving at the port of San Francisco on 3 July. I know that my great uncle had a second wife, but I have not yet managed to establish what happened to his first wife. She did not accompany him on the ship from Shanghai to San Francisco.

My mother's tree - following the US trail

Two of my mother's uncles had left Austria and ended up in California. I believe that they left before my mother.
I knew that one uncle, Jack, had travelled west to the UK and then on to the United States.
I already knew that he had settled in California with his wife, a son and a daughter.
Following his first wife's death in 1969, he remarried and died in 1982.
His daughter married in 1962, had a son in 1967 and sadly died when he was only 10 in 1977.
His son married in 1975 and he in turn had a son in 1983, who was named after Jack.

I discovered that most Europeans arriving in the United States at that time came to New York by ship and entered through Ellis Island.
Ellis Island has been maintained as a museum with a lot of information available on the Ellis Island website. This site includes a free facility to search for passengers. For those just starting out there is also a genealogy section with some useful links.From this passenger search, I was able to find my great uncle. I could access an image of the actual passenger list that showed that he had sailed from Southampton to New York in 1939 aboard the Lancastria with his wife and two young children and proving that he entered the US through Ellis Island and New York.

Although not directly linked to my tree I discovered on Wikipedia that a few months later this Cunard liner was commandeered by the UK government for war use and renamed HMT Lancastria.After a short overhaul, she left Liverpool on 14 June 1940 under Captain Rudolph Sharp (born 27 October 1885) and arrived in the mouth of the Loire estuary on 16 June. She anchored 11 miles (18 km) south-west of St. Nazaire. By the mid-afternoon of 17 June, she had embarked an unknown number (estimates range from 4,000 up to 9,000), of civilian refugees (including embassy staff, employees of Fairey Aviation of Belgium), line-of-communication troops (such as Pioneer and RASC soldiers) and RAF personnel. The ship's official capacity was 2,200 including the 375 man crew. Captain Sharp had been instructed by the Royal Navy to "load as many men as possible without regard to the limits set down under international law".At 1350 hrs, during an air-raid, the nearby Oronsay a 20,000-ton Orient liner, was hit on the bridge by a German bomb. Lancastria was free to depart and the captain of the British destroyer HMS Havelock advised her to do so, but without a destroyer escort against possible submarine attack, Sharp decided to wait.
A fresh air raid began before 4 p.m. Lancastria was bombed at 1548 hrs by Junkers Ju 88 aircraft from II. Gruppe/Kampfgeschwader 30. Three direct hits caused the ship to list first to starboard then to port; she rolled over and sank within twenty minutes. Over 1,400 tons of fuel oil leaked into the sea and was set partially on fire, possibly by strafing. Many drowned, were choked by the oil or were shot by the strafing German aircraft. Survivors were taken aboard other evacuation vessels, the trawler Cambridgeshire rescuing 900. There were 2,477 survivors, of whom about 100 were still alive in 2011. Many families of the dead knew only that they died with the British Expeditionary Force (BEF); the death toll accounted for roughly a third of the total losses of the BEF in France. She sank around 5 nmi (9.3 km) south of Chémoulin Point in the Charpentier roads, around 9 nmi (17 km) from St. Nazaire. The Lancastria Association lists 1,738 deaths.

Tracing my mother's family in Vienna

My mother had told me that that her family had been quite extensive in the 1930's. Many of them had lived close to each other in Central Vienna.

I discovered that the  establishment of an autonomous Jewish religious community was officially sanctioned by Emperor Franz Josef in 1849. This distinction was the first of a series of measures culminating in definitive establishment of the Jewish Community (Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde) vesting the highest diplomatic status in the Jewish Community (Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde) as an official representative serving the Jewish population of Vienna as well as the Jewish community of Austria.

In 1938, the Vienna Jewish community had more than 185,000 Members, at the end of 1990s only 7,000 were registered in the Community.  While leaving their entire immovable and movable property behind, more than 130.000 Jews succeeded to escape Austria by the end of October 1941. Altogether more than 65.500 Jews from Austria are known to have been "eliminated" in the Shoah. Only approximately 5.500 of the Jews that were still in Austria in 1941 remained in Vienna at  the end of the Second World War.
Due to the autonomous nature of the Jewish community in Vienna, the Israelitischen Kultusgemeinde had maintained its own records of births, deaths and marriages. This information is not available online. I received no response to an emailed initial enquiry so the only way forward with these records would be a trip to Vienna. This would be further complicated by the records being entirely in German, a language that I don't speak. (Vienna Jewish Records Office)

I discovered that as Vienna grew in size the old local cemeteries has become too small and in 1874 the Central Cemetery known as Zentralfriedhof was opened. This is reportedly one of the largest cemeteries in the world, largest by number of interred in Europe and the most famous cemetery among Vienna's nearly 50 cemeteries. There are graves of many of Austria's most famous people in this large cemetery and there are also jewish sections. 

Fortunately the records for this cemetery are accessible online (Zentralfriedhof) and I was able to find details for some of my relatives, including my maternal grandparents.

Getting started on my mother's family tree

My mother was able to help me with the people who had come to England. Based on the information that she provided, I was able to trace a few events in the General Records Office registrations of births, deaths and marriages. I found entries by using FreeBMD to search the index. Two of my great aunts had died too recently for their deaths to show up using FreeBMD.

Apart from these few people who had come to England, I knew that my mother had three uncles who had managed to get out of Vienna. Two had found their way to the USA and settled in California and had lived quite close to each other. They had both married. In fact, one had remarried. One of them had had a son and a daughter and then grandchildren. They had visited the UK so I knew that I had some family in California.

The other Uncle had managed to find his way to Australia. We had contact with his grandsons in Adelaide.

So now I had four avenues to follow;
- To see if I could find more information and family links in the UK. I decided for now that getting actually copies of register entries was a costly exercise that could wait,
- To see what I could trace in Vienna,
- To see what more I could find out to add to the USA branch of the family, and
- To see what I could find out about the Australian branch of the family.

My family tree - the first steps

I had now made the decision to start to record my family tree.

By now the internet was well established and, as with any question, I explored the web for alternative ways to store family tree data and for online data sources. I was amazed by what I found.

There were various possibilities for how to keep the data and an incredible variety of data sources.

Before I decided how best to store my data, I wanted to gather some more information

My cousin gave me a copy of the family tree he had prepared in a gedcom file.
This was very exciting because his information was stored in a linked database, which, with a gedcom file reader, showed the relationships between family members in a tree like structure.

This tree meant that there was already a record of some of my family on my father's side so I wanted to start by seeing how much of my mother's side I could put together.

I knew that I had had some great aunts who had come to England from Austria and were related to my mother. Unfortunately they were no longer around so I could not talk to them to gain more information. They had not had any children who might know more. Apart from anything more that I could find out from my mother, I would need to find another way to gather information.

Whilst looking on the web, I had discovered that a lot of UK genealogical data was available online. Some of this information could be accessed without charge.

I knew that births, deaths and marriages need to be registered and I discovered that records were maintained by the General Records Office. The recording of births, marriages and deaths was started in 1837. There is a Civil Registration index and copies of certificates can be ordered from the GRO website but at a cost, so this would be an expensive way to gather information so I considered that it was not the way forward at this stage.

The GRO site referred me to another site, Free BMD, that I had already discovered. The GRO does not have web access to the index and suggests that the Free BMD site can be used to explore the index to get reference numbers which then makes ordering a certificate easier. Certain libraries also provide access to the index.

The aim of Free BMD is to transcribe the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free Internet access to these transcribed records. This is an ongoing project carried out by teams of dedicated volunteers and so far contains index information for the period 1837-1983. It is not yet complete.

I knew that two of these great aunts had died more recently than 1983 so their deaths did not show on Free BMD. I realised that although there was a lot of useful information that I would be able to get from Free BMD, I needed other sources to progress this search.