Using overseas records to learn about our ancestors in the UK

Posted on 28th Jun 2024 by English Ancestors

In my last post I showed how we can use DNA matches to home in on a common ancestral homeland. I then used a different DNA match to follow up on a document linking an immigrant entering the US with the name Nachman/ Nathan Zirklin to another with the name Solomon Rudow, to prove that these two men were, respectively, the son and brother of a certain Fanny Chirklin née Rudow in England.

In this post we remain with Solomon Rudow and Nachman/Nathan Chirklin, but leave the DNA behind, focusing now on documentation about them.

Now confident of the connection between Solomon and Fanny (brother), and also between Nathan and the Chirklin family in England (son), there was another way of using these connections. Certain documents in the US required citizens to provide information that was not, at that time, required of UK citizens. These relate to languages, countries of origin and on some documents, the naming of parents. It’s clear why this was necessary in the US at the beginning of the twentieth century. The large numbers of immigrant families from all over Europe meant that the authorities needed to know what languages were spoken, and what facilities needed to be put in place to accommodate the needs of these diverse populations. In my own family research – Irish migrants in my case – I’ve used this method to learn more about the life and language of my County Mayo ancestry through responses of ancestors of my DNA matches to questions asked on US censuses and death certificates. Now, I would be looking for information about Eastern European languages and Jewish migration. My goal here was not just to learn about Solomon and Nachman/ Nathan for their own sake, but more particularly what this said about their close family who, like them, had migrated from an area within modern-day Belarus but had settled in the UK. The fact that, through these US documents, I’ve learned that my own great great grandparents would have spoken Irish Gaelic rather than English, along with information needs of the London-based family of Solomon and Nachman/Nathan suggest that it would have been worthwhile if the UK authorities had included this on UK censuses too.

This is what I found.

Solomon
The following records were consulted, all via Ancestry.co.uk:

US City Directories: New York
US Federal Census 1910-1950
New York State Census 1915, 1936
New York Death Index

The following information was revealed:

No precise birthplace is given on any record so far located: he is from ‘Russia’. Solomon was naturalised, but no Naturalisation record has been located online.
However, the Naturalisation application of Solomon’s daughter’s husband gives her place of birth in 1900 as Dzisna, Russia. In my last post it was established that at least two of Solomon’s sister’s children had been born in this town.
Two ‘mother tongues’ are given: Polish and Yiddish. The language question is also asked with regards each individual’s parents (even if they are not in the US), and for them Solomon gives the same information: Polish and Yiddish.
Initially, Solomon and his wife are unable to speak English. Despite immigrating in 1902, as of 1910 they still do not speak English. This changes by 1920.
In 1930 only, the birthplace changes – now all parties concerned are stated to have been born in Poland rather than Russia.
Solomon and his wife have seven children, all born in ‘Russia’, and no records located for any of them that gives a more precise birthplace.
If I had been able to locate a death certificate for Solomon, or indeed a gravestone, these would likely have confirmed the names of his parents. Unfortunately these have not so far come to light.

Nachman/ Nathan
The following records were consulted, all via Ancestry.co.uk:

US City Directories, Minnesota
US WW1 Draft Registration Cards
Naturalisation documentation
US Federal Census 1930-1950
Illinois Death Index

The following information was revealed:

Once settled in the US, Nachman adopts the name Nathan and amends his surname to Sirkin. My enquiries indicate that both Nachman and Nathan are names in use in the home countries, but since Nathan is also in common usage in the English-speaking world, a person originally named Nachman would often adopt the more usual ‘Nathan’ after immigration.
From Nathan’s US census records we learn that his birthplace, and that of both parents, is alternately Russia or Poland. However, his actual place of birth is given on his Naturalisation Declaration: “Disna, Russia, Poland” (sic.), confirming without doubt his connection to the London Chirklins.
On that declaration Nathan has to renounce all allegiance to his former nation, and here two nations are stamped: ‘The Republic of Poland’ and ‘The Present Government of Russia’.
Also on this document he gives his last foreign residence as Poland, but this is at odds with information on the ship’s manifest (see last post), and a period of eight months with his family in London seems probable. A likely explanation is that the purpose of the US requesting the previous nations was not, in fact, about residence, but about allegiance; and Nathan had never sworn allegiance to the UK during his eight months of residence.
His mother tongue, and that of his parents, is given as Yiddish.

Conclusions: What we can extrapolate from these US records about the UK Chirklin family?

Clearly, there is now a good deal of documented evidence for two distant family members: Fanny’s brother Solomon, and all his descendants in New York; and Marks and Fanny’s son Nathan, who settled in the US and did not marry.

We have evidence that, at least for a specified period when two of their children were born, the Chirklins lived in Dzisna, now in Belarus, but at various times considered to be in Russia and/or Poland. If the descendants of the family would like to research further, we now know that a researcher local to this town would be the best starting point. A local researcher would understand all of the national and local history, including movement, settlement, persecution and emigration of Jewish families.

We also have evidence that Solomon was living in Dzisna, at least at the time his final daughter was born, in 1900. This seems to suggest the two families – the Rudows and the Chirklins – could have been settled in Dzisna, and may have known each other before the marriage of Marks Chirklin and Fanny née Rudow.

As mentioned above and in the previous post, Nathan’s entry on the 1907 ship’s manifest, and the reference to eight months living in London suggests a likely immigration date for the whole family of around July 1906.

We can also narrow down the original Cyrillic spelling of the Chirklin surname. It is only the initial sound that is in question, since all versions of this surname end with IRKLIN or ERKLIN. Enquiries via a Belarusian genealogy group on Facebook indicate that the likely original spelling would be Цирклин. This is an important piece of information that might help in any ongoing search for records in Belarus.

Language, Culture and Nationality are also of interest. Whilst Yiddish and Hebrew languages were to be expected, with a confirmed homeland of what is now Belarus, and usual birthplace citations as ‘Russia’ on UK records, the Polish language was unexpected. Standing back, all of this explains the family belief that the Chirklins were from Lithuania or Poland. What we are seeing here is evidence of the fluctuating borders and overlapping cultures between these countries. This is evidenced by information on a few Wikipedia pages, although more in-depth research would provide further detail and will now be undertaken.

Drawing upon Solomon’s experience in New York where he would have been surrounded by people from the homelands and therefore did not develop his English as quickly as he might have hoped, it seems likely that the same would have applied to the Chirklins in London.

*****

Together with my last post, this shows how we can benefit in several ways from targetted research of distant cousins and closer relatives found via DNA matches. Although these two posts have focused on Eastern European and Jewish ancestry, I have used the same methods for Irish emigrés and indeed people within the UK who have a connection to my own ancestral lines. It’s a question of getting to know the basic records and learning what information is requested on each. We also need to bear in mind that online availability of these various record sets varied from state to state.

Many of us will have the odd ancestral family member who emigrated from or immigrated to the UK. If this applies to you, I hope you will find something in this post that will help you to progress.

Embracing 3rd and 4th cousin DNA matches!

Posted on 7th Jun 2024 by English Ancestors

I’ve often heard people who are interested in their family history say they won’t take a DNA test because they’re not interested in connecting with 3rd or 4th cousins: they just want to know about their own ancestors. This is a misunderstanding of how DNA matching works. The point is that we share 2x great grandparents with our 3rd cousins, and we share 3x great grandparents with our 4th cousins. Unless our ancestors have lived extraordinarily long lives and reproduced the following generation at scandalously early ages, none of those ancestors of ours will still be living. However, if we can connect with other people who are descended from them via siblings of our direct line, we might learn new stories about them that were passed down their line but not ours. We might even find new photographs or documents, or a family bible. If we’re not absolutely sure that we have the correct parentage assigned to one of our forbears, the DNA will prove that and help us to work out who the correct person is. If all this seems like an impossible puzzle – well, yes, there is a lot to learn. Sometimes the connection is very clear; other times we have to work hard to find it. But it’s worth it.

In my own family research I’ve used DNA to home in on birthplaces in Ireland (from where my ancestors migrated before the advent of civil registration and before the big fire in Dublin); to verify a hypothesis I had about a mysterious ancestor; to help several other people to find missing grandfathers; and to connect with people who had photos. However, this post is not about my own ancestry.

Today I’m going to share with you how I used three unknown DNA matches of a person whose DNA I manage:

to identify beyond doubt the birthplace in modern-day Belarus of certain named individuals;
to identify beyond doubt two family members, brothers of direct ancestors, about whom very little was known.

All this is published here with that person’s permission.

The case is complicated because it involves several countries, constantly changing national boundaries, two continents, several languages and two types of script: the Latin script we use in English, and the Cyrillic script used in Russia and Belarus. It involves people of Jewish heritage, where the high incidence of endogamy can skew estimates of cousin matches, making them appear closer than they really are. At no time did I make contact with any of the DNA matches. All research was carried out using only the sparse information they each had on the trees linked to their DNA results as my starting point.

The research relates to Marks Chirklin, his wife Fanny Chirklin née Rudow and one of their daughters, who I will not name here.

The Chirklins immigrated to the UK early in the twentieth century, and were believed by their living descendants to have come from Poland or Lithuania. In the 1911 census their country of birth is recorded as ‘Russia’. None of this is incompatible, since boundaries changed regularly. However, the Russian Empire was huge, so this documentary evidence did nothing to permit a homing in on the actual birthplace of the family.

In all UK records the name of this family is written as Chirklin or Cherklin. This too is not without complications. For any of our ancestors originating in a non-English speaking country, names may have been anglicised. If they have come from a place where an alphabet other than our Latin script is used, the complications are even greater. Often in such cases we lack a letter to write the sounds required to pronounce the original word. In the case of immigrants this will impact on names of people and also place-names. As we shall see, both of these were an issue in this research.

Using records and DNA matches to locate a birthplace for the Chirklins

In the 1921 UK census Marks and Fanny gave their birthplaces as Vilna. Vilnius is the capital of Lithuania, but ‘Vilna’ is a government district, or ‘Oblast’. Although it did include Vilnius, it was much larger, including territories in present-day Belarus as well as Lithuania. At the time the family came to the UK it was part of the Russian Empire.

However, in the same census, the now-married daughter of Marks and Fanny gave her birthplace as ‘Dishna, Russia’. This was problematic for the linguistic reasons outlined above. Just writing this down involved transforming the sounds of her homeland and somehow finding a way to make sense of these sounds in English language and script. So ‘Dishna’ was unlikely to be entirely correct, but it was a starting point; and since the rest of the family were born in the Vilna Oblast, this narrowed down the search for a town within Vilna with a name that sounded like ‘Dishna’.

I had already noticed that the Chirklin descendant whose DNA I manage had two reasonably close DNA matches with names in their trees similar to Chirklin. Specifically, those names were Tsirklin and Tzerklin. One was in the US; the other location not known. Both were showing with a probability of a 2^nd-3^rd cousin match. For reasons outlined above, this estimated match level needed to be taken with a pinch of salt to some extent. Even so, a DNA match stretching back far enough to be just out of reach as far as our UK and US records are concerned seemed likely – perhaps a 3^rd-4^th cousin match.

Should my linking of Chirklin, Cherklin, Tsirklin and Tzerklin require any explanation, it’s easily explained by the linguistic conversion of the sounds of one language family to another. There is often even a difference between the way surnames were recorded upon immigration into the US and immigration into the UK. (For example the name pronounced phonetically in the US as Pet-Raow-Skee is both spelled and pronounced differently in the UK: Piotrowski and Pee-Ot-Roff-Skee.) In a new language which doesn’t have an equivalent sound, ‘Tz’ could easily be the same sound as ‘Ch’.

I had no way of knowing how these Tsirklins and Tzerklins were connected to the Chirklins. The family trees linked to the DNA results were sparse, and it seemed clear that any connection would be back in the old homeland. What I could see, however, was that the earliest known Tsirklin was from ‘Volintsi’ in Belarus, and the earliest known Tzerklin from Polatsk in Belarus. These towns are about 35 km apart – but Polatsk is a much larger town and could easily have been a ‘shorthand’ for “I come from a tiny settlement called XXX about 10 miles from Polatsk”.

Locating these on the map I then searched for ‘Dishna, Belarus’ and found it: Dzisna – just a short distance south of Volyntsy. By combining the documentary evidence of the placename given on the 1921 census with the location of these reasonably close DNA matches with the same family name, we finally had a definite birthplace for this Chirklin daughter and possibly for her siblings and parents too.

Google map showing the locations of three towns in Belarus. The towns are Volyntsy, Dzisna and Polatsk. The place names are recorded on the map with Latin script and Cyrillic script. — Location of Volyntsy, Dzisna and Polatsk in Belarus. Google Maps.

There are various spellings of this town’s name. I have come across Disna, Dysna, Dzisna (Polish), but also in the Russian Cyrillic script Дзісна in Belarusian (which is pronounced Dzisna, as in the Polish pronunciation), and Дисна in Russian, which would be pronounced as Disna. Today, the boundaries of the Oblasts have also changed. Dzisna is now within the Molodechno Oblast of Belarus.

Using records and a third DNA match to identify and locate two missing family members

In addition to the known siblings living with the family at the time of the censuses, the Chirklins were thought to have another son: Nathan. The descendants of the family knew of him only from a reference on a memorial headstone. He was generally assumed to have gone to America, but no one knew for sure. One of the descendants found a new document via Ancestry.com, and thought this could be him.

The new document was a ship’s manifest, dated 1907, including the passenger Nachman Zirklin. Could ‘Zirklin’ be yet another anglicisation of Chirklin/ Cherklin/ Tzerklin/ Tsirklin? And could ‘Nachman’ be the missing person thought to be Nathan?

Entry for Nachman Zirklin on the Shop's manifest for his ship from Liverpool to Philadelphia, PA, arriving March 1907. The entry gives name, occupation of watchmaker, last residence of London and the name and address of an uncle with whom Nachman will be starying upon arrival. — Nachman Zirklin, Ship’s Manifest entry, March 1907, Liverpool to Philadelpia PA.
CLICK FOR BIGGER

According to the ship’s manifest, Nachman Zirklin was 21 years old in 1907 – the right sort of age to be the missing brother. He was departing from Liverpool, bound for Philadelphia, PA, and his last place of residence was London, where he had lived for eight months. The immigration date of the Chirklins into the UK was not known but was likely to be around this time. Therefore if this Nachman was the correct person, this record would also give us a likely immigration date for the whole family of around July 1906. Nachman’s birthplace is noted as ‘Lisna’, which is very similar to Disna and an easy mistake to make if the clerk has never heard of the place and has noted down what they thought the person with very little English has said, or indeed if that information is being copied from another document where the upper round stroke of the ‘D’ was very faint.

There was one other very interesting piece of information. Nachman was heading for New York City, where he would be staying with his uncle, a Mr Rudoff. Rudoff, of course, is a phonetic spelling of Rudow, which is, as we knew, the maiden name of Fanny, the mother of the Chirklin family in England. It looked very much like Fanny had a brother in New York, and that her son Nathan/ Nachman was going to stay with him.

As luck would have it, there was another DNA match, estimated 2^nd-3^rd cousin, to a US-based person with Rudow ancestry. Again the linked tree was very sparse, and while acknowledging the obvious surname link between that family and Fanny back in London, there were no clues at all as to how they might fit in. The earliest known Rudow ancestor on that tree was a Solomon, with an estimated birth year of 1866 and a birthplace of ‘Russia’. However, when I went now to look at this DNA match again I saw that the Ancestry algorithms had been hard at work, and had found a link between ancestors that this match didn’t even have on her tree and two people on the one I had created for the person whose DNA I manage. The two people were Fanny’s parents. I had been given their names by family members and knew nothing more about them. However, Ancestry was suggesting these people were also the parents of Solomon Rudow in New York. If correct, this would make Solomon Fanny’s brother, and therefore the uncle of Nathan/ Nachman.

We should never simply accept hints on Ancestry or any other genealogy website. Hints are suggestions, nothing more. It’s up to us to prove or disprove them. So I now set about researching Solomon Rudow of New York. Through a series of US Federal and NY State censuses I tracked him from his arrival circa 1902 to his death in 1956. On the 1906 US directory I found his address: right next door to that given the following year by Nathan/ Nachman as the address of his uncle Mr Rudoff, on the ship’s manifest. We have our man! This Solomon Rudow is indeed the uncle of Nathan Zirklin/ Chirklin, younger brother of Fanny née Rudow; and Nathan is the son of Marks and Fanny.

Extract from the family tree chart, showing all the people who have been named in the text of this blogpost.

This post has looked at how DNA was used to confirm birthplaces, plus connections to two missing people who had emigrated to the USA. In view of the lack of information amongst the living descendants of the Chirklin family, I couldn’t have proven any of this without the DNA.

While in this post we have been looking from England to find out more about people who went to America, in my next post I’ll be staying with Solomon Rudow and Nachman/ Nathan Zirklin/ Chirklin, and investigating what might be learned about the family back in England and their origins in Dzisna/ modern day Belarus by looking at the US records about the two of them.