Etymology of names

Many of the names that the authors lists above are correct, but he also makes several errors (for example, the old canard about names changed at Ellis Island by an immigration inspector when most were in fact quite accurate)

I have, for a long time, tried to figure out the origin of my last name. Broniatowski could mean "from Brunatewka" or it could have something to do with the word "Broni" meaning "weapon" or "Brun" meaning "Brown." It may also be a combination of the names "Braun" and "Natowski (son of Nathan)"

There's a fantastic resource (several in fact) for both given and surnames of Jews in Eastern Europe compiled by Alexander Beider. I bought the ones for the Russian Empire and they are my Bible.

This is why when you do Y-DNA testing you find that your male relatives match men with wildly different surnames. Surnames are not that useful in Jewish genealogy and for that and other reasons, many of us hit a brick wall at around 1800.

Another very interesting thing I learned in the past few years from doing genealogy has to do with double / triple given names such as Judah Leib or even Judah Arye Leib or Zvi Hirsh. You can find one or the other or both in records in some areas and eras. Also you have to be aware of the many nicknames used such as Judko and others less obvious.

Oh yes, for quite a few years after surnames were imposed, families might use several surnames. Mine used a toponymic (place name) -- Kalwaryiski (from Kalwariya the town in Lithuania) as well as Margolis (Hebrew word meaning "pearl"). Either / or or together in some branches of the family.

And to avoid conscription into the Tsar's army, sons might each have a different surname, borrowed from a family that didn't have sons.

Add to all that, the name modification or substitutions when they immigrated and it makes genealogy complex.

Also, men often took their wives surname -- perhaps to escape the law or conscription, perhaps because their father-in-law paid them to since he had no sons, or perhaps because it was an illustrious family.

I posted this last month - very similar !!!!

http://jewishcurrents.org/the-origins-and-meanings-of-ashkenazic-la...

1. the article has major mistakes.
2. It completely ignores Sephardic names.
3. It has been published numerous times in different formats with misleading titles.
4. It perpetuates the Khazar myth that KAGAN is Khazar but it is really KAGAN-KOHEN.
5. So many mistakes that I find it hard to list all of them.
6. You may wish to visit Tracing the Tribe - Jewish Genealogy on Facebook to see all the comments of specialized researchers.
7. ABSOLUTELY NOT TRUE: "Finally, there may have been Jewish names changed or shortened by immigration inspectors (though this is disputed) or by immigrants themselves (or their descendants) to sound more American, which is why "Sean Ferguson" was a Jew." NOT ONE NAME WAS EVER CHANGED AT ELLIS ISLAND, AND THIS SILLY ARTICLE PERPETUATES THAT MYTH. THE INFORMATION ON NOT ONE NAME CHANGED NAME COMES FROM THE INS SENIOR ARCHIVIST MARION SMITH WHO STRESSES THIS EVERYTIME SHE SPEAKS ANYWHERE.
8. Somewhere in there is what he claims is WIENBERG as coming from Vienna (WIEN). However, it is really WEINBERG (vineyard.)
9. Please do not believe everything you read.
10. Copying an entire article and posting it is a COPYRIGHT VIOLATION. If people are online they know how to click on a link. As a journalist, I take copyright violations very seriously, and this was blatant.

Schelly

WOW how right you are, Hatte Anne about the brick wall of 1800 !!
What does one do to find a way around it ?

I use Beider dictionaries.
http://www.avotaynu.com/books/DJSRE2.htm
http://www.avotaynu.com/books/DJSG.htm
http://www.avotaynu.com/books/dagn.htm#Trilogy

In addition to all of the errors identified by others, he omits and neglects a variety of common Hungarian Jewish names like MOSKOVITS and NEUMANN, and incorrectly identifies BERKOWITZ as having something to do with bears, when it is a patronymic like the Hungarian version BERKOVITS. It's a shame that folks have been distributing this article when there are so many superior resources available including several on the JewishGen website.

Private User - I have been reading all the criticisms of the article on Jewish Gen groups, but my attitude is that it's great that especially young people are interested in their heritage and if this piques their interest -- which apparently it did because of all the Facebook posts I saw among my young friends and family -- that's first step. After that they can research their own surnames and get to Jewish Gen webpages and eventually to Beider's great reference books. Beider himself is either just wrong or totally speculating in a few cases :)

What I am doing about the brick wall of the 1800s is two fold -- one I am learning everything I can about the families who lived in the same small villages as mine. I have projects on Geni. I do not concentrate on only my family since in a small village where people lived for 100 - 200 years, there was tons of intermarriage so the families who were in the same grouping as my family undoubtedly were intermarried with them over and over.

Also, that is why I do genetic genealogy, even though the tools are in their infancy. Eventually we will begin to break down brick walls with hypotheses based on shared DNA.

Finally I am a linguist and with some training in naming conventions of Eastern Europe and migration and history, I can tease out some new information by studying patterns of given names over generations as well as recognize that people have changed their surnames or that surnames were unstable and varied. So in my family Stein / Zirilstein / Bernstein are all the same family. Ditto Margolis, Kalwaryiski, Kalwar, and others.

I read that my husband's South Ukrainian ancestors might have come from Courland (Latvia) and I started seeking them in lists from prior to their emigration to Kherson and then I started looking at DNA matches on Chromosome 4 that listed Latvia. I noticed however that while there were many from Latvia who shared the same segment on that Chromosome, others were of Prussion origin. Well it turns out that the early Courlanders were from Prussia.

It takes a lot of context and years to do Jewish genealogy. One thing I have been wondering about this week is the known existence of Sephardic families in the small village in NE Poland / Lithuania that my family has connections with so I have been looking at Sephardic surnames and thinking about those families.

I think you have to be creative and very patient.

I believe that Geni is part of the answer because each family has a part of the puzzle. For instance, my great grandparents showed up in Muscatine, Iowa in 1885 from "Russia". I found that they listed Belogorodka (Volhynia) on several documents but Reib was a name found in Zagare / Vieksniai (Siauliai) hundreds of miles away and in fact Muscatine was mostly settled by families from Zagare / Vieksniai and nearby towns except for the handful of families related to my Reib/Rubenstein family. I looked for Reib and Reeb on the Internet and found families with family trees but they didn't go back far enough. But when my second cousin got tested, she and I and my sister matched a descendant of the Lithuanian Reibens SIGNIFICANTLY which with the Muscatine facts is suggestive that I need to look in Lithuania for my Reib family.

This journey seems to take years. I only started in 2009 and was fortunate that some of my family are well documented in published books. But those who have been doing research for decades have broken through brick walls.

Sorry I missed your post Private User! Yes, those and other things are wrong with the article, but again, for many of the people who got enthusiastic about the article and they are MANY, I hope they are now curious enough to learn more.

Speaking of Sephardic names, my sister tells me that her husband just learned that their surname in Alsace used to be Leon but was changed at some point. I know that Leon is a Sephardic surname but it's also found among non-Jews and in italy and could have some other source such as being Levis or tribe of Judah, etc.

This is a great discussion to follow. I admit I find Jewish genealogy in Europe very difficult and rely on the fantastic work of more hard core researchers.

The more we can distribute resources and arouse enthusiasm, the more we share findings, the more we will all learn.

I can attest to how useful geographic approaches are from "my other side" - and how we have to take the "surname search" with MAJOR grains of salt, as it's a start and a clue only to "who a person really was."

Hi, Hatte. In Sephardic genealogy, de Leon is the surname. Derivation can be various, but de Leon is Sephardic. I do not think, in my experience, that it has anything to do with being Levis or from Judah. EBREO LEON is a Sephardic name in some places that may indicate descent from ABRAVANEL, who was called the Hebrew Lion.

Hattie, re the Sephardim in Poland. Stanley Diamond, who heads Jewish Records Indexing-Poland with more than 4 million records going back to the 1600s, carries a blood mutation that is only found among Sephardim and a few Persian families in Israel. Sephardim were everywhere. In some places there were enough to establish synagogues. Zamosc, Poland, is known to have been established by Spanish refugees post-1492. That information is in the town archives. There are other communities that had Sephardic kahals if the group was large enough. However, many families moved in small groups and wound up marrying locals who did not have a tradition of coming from Spain.

When I began investigating Mogilev, Belarus, I found some 2 dozen families with Sephardic origins, including my own. Until we started doing DNA and researching in Spain we could not confirm these connections.

As accessible records and better DNA screening become available, we will find out much more. Your friends (de Leon) should definitely do Y-DNA testing at FTDNA and join the IberianAshkenaz DNA Project. At least 37 or 67 markers (in some cases) are required.

Thanks so much. I already told my sister to have her husband Y-DNA tested and I was looking at that project yesterday on FTDNA so I'll make sure he joins.

The town my Margolis family has connections to is Bakerlerzewo in the Suwalki Gubernia, which I believe is known to have had Sephardic families. What I found is the the group of families that intermarried was fairly small, with lots of connections between Margolis and families in that village. I was there in 2012 and found the cemetery but there are only a few visible, fairly recent graves.

On my Frankel side (married Margolis), one of the entries in our small, Ashkenazi Y-DNA group is Portuguese.

Hatte Rubenstein Blejer: Thank you ! Now at least I don't feel that I am alone in my (long term, patience-requiring) quest..

Regarding your Margolis branch: there was a family by that name in Bucharest, Romania of Sephadic ascent.. The Bucharest Sephardic families are said to have arrived here in the 16-th & 17-th Century with the Christian administrators of the Otoman Empire from the the Phanar Qurater of Isthambul.

I belong to a German Jewish list serve, which is part of jewishgen. The experts on the list serve said there are many errors and falsehoods in the article.

Someone else on Geni is starting a Margolis Y-DNA group. A male cousin of mine was tested, but he didn't match other men named Margolis. It would be good to have many families tested to see if there are connections between any of them. I'm always skeptical about other Margolis families being related to ours and so far we have no evidence that any are in fact.

I don't know how anyone can claim that..."no names were changed at Ellis Island"??? Just look at any census 1890, 1900, 1910 and right through the "Free" 1940 Census. They were all handwritten and I dare you to find a relative that's first and/or last name was correctly written. Especially when an "Irish" census or Ellis Island official was trying to get some info from someone who spoke Yiddish/Lithuanian/Russian but pigeon or no English!!!
I just checked a 1940 census on my 25 year old uncle/aunt with a one year old baby born in 1939....right next to to 25 year old parents 1939 birth date it states the baby is 12 years old!!!...and they spoke perfect English with a "Boyle Heights" accent....go figure.

It's hard to see how ships' manifests for arrivals at Ellis Island, or other ports of entry, which can contain phonetic or otherwise creative spellings of what may have seemed difficult-to-pronounce names, can be equated here with Census records. They are not part of the same process. A fair number of errors of various kinds afflict all censuses, as well as in the transcriptions thereof which appear in some places online (compounding the problem of name/date accuracy) -- but that has nothing to do with Ellis Island. (For 1890, there is no individual-level data available, since the original documents were destroyed by fire and/or by Congressional order.)
During the early 20th century in/around Ohio (to give one example), some central European immigrants' first and last names evolved from their original spellings toward more phonetically "English"-like spellings, strongly influenced by "the postman" in many cases. Such evolutions can be seen in records running from Port of Entry ships' manifests through City Directories, Censuses, Marriage Records, and WW I & WW II Draft Registration Cards. So which version of someone's name is to be considered "correct"? Fact is, they all are/were, in their day and time.

http://mosaicmagazine.com/tesserae/2014/01/jewish-surnames-supposed...

Thanks, Debra. Passenger manifests are not census records. On Passenger manifests the lists were pre-written based on the passengers' travel documents, all the clerks did was check off the names. Most clerks were foreign-born and some 60 languages were spoken at Ellis Island. Census Records are basically info supplied by the respondent who answered questions by an enumerator who either understood or didn't, their language or heavy accents. Two different record groups created in two VERY different ways. NO DOCUMENTED NAME CHANGE HAS EVER BEEN FOUND AT ELLIS ISLAND OR OTHER US PORT. That was not the job of the clerks and there was no legal way for a clerk to do that. All such claims are bubbe-meises (grandmothers' tales).

Susan, thank you for referencing Dara Horn's excellent refutation and debunking of the original very silly article!

GIVE ME A BREAK...
I wasn't referring to ship manifests although immigrants had a tendency to lie about anything that might keep them out of this country. If they had typhus they would lie about it!!!
I'm speaking of a sitting official at a desk at Ellis Island asking people they don't understand all sorts of questions. AND I was referring to census takers walking door to door through tenements in NYC and sitting at a kitchen table and asking questions of people they barely understand and writing it down longhand. Look at any "actual" census on line ....1900....1910...1920, etc. look up the same people and children living 10 in a two bedroom apartment...with roomers....you'll find all sorts of errors and misspellings. It's only human nature!!!!!

.......and another thing...

Watch the movie "Hester Street" and the wonderful Carol Kane as Gitl who stands in front of the "Officious Minor Official" trying to understand what the hell he wants from her. She would have agreed with anything he said.
That was FACT, I still had surviving relatives at the time it came out....

The boys name was Yossele, Yossel, Joel, Joey???...Shmendrick???..."who cares... let me off this island!!!" These WERE my family...they didn't arrive on the Queen Mary...they came steerage.....they were escaping pogroms they weren't given respect they were looked at as lowlifes, greenhorns trying to snatch a piece of the American Pie from others that got here the week before.

Both sides of my family claimed their names were changed at Ellis Island!!!
You wanna fight with them?

You're welcome Schelly.

Ha ha, Norm.
You had a Shmendrick in your family? Me too! Maybe we are landsman!

Keep it light, everyone...it's an interesting discussion. No fighting, please.

Immigrants to the UK also spoke of having their names changed by officialdom on arrival. Mostly these claims were dismissed as "urban myths". I do, however, feel that the truth may lie somewhere in-between. When I was much younger my parents had two acquaintances who could hardly speak English. One was Mr. Carter and the other, Mr. Paterson.
I found the answer from these gentlemen, who had escaped together from Nazi Europe when I was told that arriving in England, they had seen a large lorry with the name Carter Paterson on its side. They agreed to take one each of those names, to be more English and thus became almost a walking advert for one of the largest parcel carriers in the UK.

MY POINT WAS VERY SIMPLE...the so called officials had a job....they were earning what???...50 cents an hour...they did their job and wanted to get home...they were overwhelmed with lines of people mumbling in variations of many languages a lot of them, illiterate...but they knew they had to tell the "clerks" what they wanted to hear.

FROM "Jewish Surnames...":
"Immigration officers at Ellis Island were accompanied by interpreters who were required to know at least three languages, while ancillary interpreters with knowledge of more obscure languages circulated to ensure competency— Yiddish, German, Russian, and Polish were far from obscure."

They went to all that trouble in the 1890s?
After 911, the CIA & FBI couldn't even find anyone to interpret Arabic languages to prevent terrorism...but clerks at Ellis Island had every language in the world available at a moments notice? And they double checked the ships info...because we all know the ships clerks also had all those language experts available also!
So all those immigrants who for years insisted that their names and those of their children had been miswritten by harried & hurried clerks at Ellis were lying? That Doesn't Sound Kosher to me!!!

Although it was a movie - in the Godfather - young Vito goes through Ellis Island and the translator reads Vito Andolini from Corleone - and the inspector changes his name to Vito Corleone. I've known a number of Italian families that have last names the same as cities in Italy. In some movie a Yiddish speaking European arrival can't remember what his new American name is suppose to be, and he says "Ich fergessen" and thus Ike Ferguson was named.

Godfather Ellis Island clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20zToMCzFw8

this is is an interesting message thread.

I find lots of misspells in names from US Census to US Census - some are phonetic and some are translations from Yiddish spelled English to the American equivalent of the name - ie Yakob or Yacob to Jacob.