Who are Lipschitz and Bernstein and do I Really Need to Know

There are many aspects to researching your family history. There are the basic facts like birth date, birth place, marriage dates, death dates, burial places, etc. Facts like these are generally documented and can be found on one of the genealogy websites. These documents will help build the family tree and depending on your ethnicity you can go back to the revolutionary war or only as far as the 20th century. The emergence of DNA testing has connected people with their unknown relatives to various levels of excitement. It can also create some shock and disbelief when a previously unknown person shares a high level of DNA with you or another family member due to an ill advised dalliance by an ancestor. If you have enough of all of these components you can build a person’s life story even if you have never met them. However, with all of this information at our fingertips there are still questions.
          My grandmother, Tova Kaganovich was born in the small town of Eishoshok, Lithuania. Eishshok is the Yiddish name of the town and it is now known as Eisiskes. Tova left Europe in 1904 at the age of 18 and travelled by herself to New York City. She is line 18 on her ship manifest and it shows that she arrived in the USA on March 17, 1904. Eishoshok is the name of her hometown. She was 18 and was being met by her Uncle, M. Lipshitz. HUH? Until I saw this document the name Lipshitz was not a part of the family tree and still isn’t. I looked into the 1905 New York State Census for M. Lipshitz to see if he still lived at 231 Cherry Street, the address that was listed on the manifest. I found the Lipshitz family there but Tova was not living with them nor was there a Tillie Cohen. Tillie Cohen was the name Tova used when she came to the USATheir names were Berryman Abramowitz and Gottl Samowitz. Did Tillie travel with them from her hometown and were they related? That will be another story.

         The 1910 US census listed several Tillie Cohens living in New York. I was able to whittle it down to a handful but there was only one that had the correct birth year, the correct immigration year, and the proper occupation. The address was 216 Henry Street in Manhattan. She was a boarder in the apartment of Isador and Dora Bernstein along with their three children, Isadore’s parents, and his sister Saide. Tillie is on line 13. Who are these Bernsteins that Tillie lived with and why would they invite her to stay with them. I still was not convinced that this was the right Tillie Cohen but then I thought that maybe my grandfather lived near that address. I checked the previous page and did not find him but lo and behold I was staring at the name of Simon Muckler, his wife Rachael, and their four children living right next door at 214 Henry Street. Simon was my grandfather’s Uncle and had met him at Ellis Island. He is also the man that I am named after. This led to all kinds of speculation on my part. Did my grandfather, Louis Levine come to visit his uncle and meet Tillie on the street and they fell in love or did his Uncle know the Bernsteins and got them to accept Tillie as a boarder as a favor to his nephew? In an interview that my grandfather did with my cousin and uncle, Louis did say that Tillie lived on Henry Street. Also, on lines 14 and 15 there were two men who also came from Eishoshok.

       I’m not sure I will ever really know who Lipshitz and Bernstein were. I did find their family tree but I have not yet found the common ancestor. I found, with some help, that the Lipshitz family did hail from Eishoshok. I also found the Bernstein family on several family trees on Ancestry but failed in any attempt to contact people from those lines. I don’t know if I will ever connect with any of their descendants of either of these families who could answer my questions. I don’t know if it really even matters if I do but I just love to think about my grandparents in their early years when their ages are younger than even my own children are today.