LEUBUSCHER Discoveries – II

LEUBUSCHER Discoveries – II will also have to be a 2-part blog.  The first part was intentional; the second part was a by-product of reviewing LEUBUSCHER records on Ancestry.com.  

The starting point for this LEUBUSCHER research also came from documents copied in Berlin in the Archive of the Centrum
Judaicum; this time from the Breslau Todesanzeigen. The 2012 “get list” included Salomon LEUBUSCHER who died in 1866 and his wife Ernestine LEUBUSCHER geb. BLANZGER who died in 1869.  These documents did not name their surviving children, but indicated that they were survived by 2 sons and 3 daughters living in Breslau, Berlin, Polen (in 1866) / Warschau (in 1869) and Kattowitz.  From earlier research, those surviving children were Mathilde, Selma, Ulrike, Benjamin Julius and Mendel.  (Jette had died age 12 in 1836, and Dr. Berthold (Berel) LEUBUSCHER had died in Breslau at age 33 in 1860.)


The key piece of new information was the note that one of the children was living in Warsaw in the 1860s.  Earlier, piecing together information on the strands of LEUBUSCHERs living in the US (from Ancestry.com databases), I recalled finding information about a Stephen LEUBUSCHER who was born in Warsaw in 1878, according to his 1924 US Passport Application.  I had been surprised about a LEUBUSCHER being born in Warsaw.  Stephen’s father was Max LEUBUSCHER.


This led me back into a LEUBUSCHER family I had explored earlier in May 2011.  The family of Max LEUBUSCHER had settled in Milwaukee and later also lived in Chicago.  The FindaGrave website had a photograph of Max’s gravestone and the information that he was born on 31 January 1836.


Knowing that one of Salomon LEUBUSCHER’s sons had been in Warsaw led to the conclusion that the youngest son Mendel LEUBUSCHER must have been that son.  Mendel was born in Brieg on 31 January 1837.  Birth dates being frequently mis-remembered, particularly in the 19th century and before, it was clear that Mendel was the person known as Max LEUBUSCHER in the US.


Max and his wife Rosa geb. SALZENSTEIN had five children: Ernestine, Berthold, Dora, Stephen and Theodore.  Presumably, Ernestine’s birth date was also mis-remembered (though not necessarily).  She was born 5 December 1868.  But as her grandmother’s Todesanzeige confirmed, Ernestine died on 25 February 1869.  If the granddaughter was named in memory of the grandmother, she might have been born in 1869, rather than 1868, or perhaps she was not originally named “Ernestine”.


All of the children except Berthold married, but only Ernestine and Dora had offspring.  Ernestine married Leopold BLOCK, and Dora married Max GLASS.  Their descendants are still in the Chicago area, and I am working on making contact with living members of these families — MARCUS, BUCHBINDER, BLOCK, MELSCHER, STEINBERG and GLASS.

[Written at the Caffe Capanna in Point Roberts, Washington, USA.]