Families to Follow
April 23, 2011Link to NewMexicast Video I
April 24, 201123 April 2011
Today, the focus was FRIEDLAENDERs from Namslau. The birth, marriage and death records in the LDS collection are not microfilms of original records. They are a set of transcriptions made in 1937 from records in the archives in Breslau; presumably, they were prepared by the archivist Bernhard BRILLING.
The original hope was to find an entry for the 1846 marriage of Heinrich FRIEDLAENDER and Philippine LAQUER to see if it would identify Heinrich’s parents. On the last page of marriage entries, it was there — his parents were Saul Nathan FRIEDLAENDER and Caroline SILBERSTEIN. As it turned out, an entry for their marriage was also in the same file. They married in 1822. Saul was a son of Nathan FRIEDLAENDER; Caroline (b.ca.1803) was a daughter of Heinrich SILBERSTEIN.
There are recurrent connections among SILBERSTEINs and the LAQUER family. (1) Here, Philippine LAQUER’s mother-in-law turns out to be Caroline (bat Heinrich) SILBERSTEIN. (2) Philippine’s father Loeser Joseph LAQUER was a son of Pauline SILBERSTEIN (ca.1764-1832). (3) Philippine’s uncle Jakob Joseph LAQUER married Nanni ROSENBARTH, a daughter of Nachme SILBERSTEIN (1765-1833). Nachme was my g-g-g-g-g aunt, a daughter of Chajim SILBERSTEIN of Brieg. Hence, the interest in trying to determine whether Pauline was a sister of Nachme. And now, the additional question: whether there is a connection between the SILBERSTEINs in Brieg and Heinrich SILBERSTEIN of Städtel, 30 km away.
No answer, yet.
Going back to Caroline SILBERSTEIN’s father, it turns out this same Heinrich SILBERSTEIN of Städtel was probably also the father of Handel (Hulda) SILBERSTEIN whose second marriage in 1836 was to Isaac LOMNITZ. Isaac was a son of Joachim LOMNITZ of Woitschachow (Kr. Rosenberg); presumably, this is the same person as Joachim Benjamin LOMNITZ, who was living in Bodschanowitz (Kr. Rosenberg) in 1812 — a further assumption being that Woitschachow and Bodschanowitz are just different spellings of the same town (or crossroads).
This family has been on my agenda for the last few months, since running across this notice posted in the January 7, 1944 issue of the Aufbau German refugees’ newspaper:
When I found that notice, I enjoyed the fact that Alfred knew something of his family history and used his new US citizenship to memorialize his gg gf’s 1812 Prussian citizenship (though I note that Joachim Benjamin LOMNITZ was not living in Breslau back in 1812). Contact with Alfred’s son and a nephew has unfortunately not yet filled in the missing generations between Franz LOMNITZ and Joachim Benjamin LOMNITZ.
The LOMNITZ family is also part of an ongoing search to help a man in Israel whose gg gm was Pauline (Blümel) LOMNITZ (b.ca.1825), daughter of “Johann” LOMNITZ (perhaps actually Joachim LOMNITZ).
Pauline was married to a FRIEDLAENDER, so the circle is complete; or more aptly, the spiral continues to turn.
