LEUBUSCHER Discoveries – II – Part 2

The unintentional part of the LEUBUSCHER discoveries came from reviewing all the LEUBUSCHER “hits”, under various spellings and misspellings, in the Ancestry.com databases.

I had seen the 5 listings in the JewishGen Online Worldwide Burial Registry (JOWBR) (via Ancestry.com) of LEUBUSCHERs buried in Vienna, but I had never been able to connect them to my LEUBUSCHER tree.   But, this time, adding in details available from the records indexed at GenTeam.at and recently digitized Vienna Jewish community records in the LDS microfilm archive, this strand of the family fell into place.  The Todesanzeigen for Salomon LEUBUSCHER and Ernestine LEUBUSCHER geb. BLANZGER also played a role.


From the JOWBR data, the LEUBUSCHERs buried in Vienna were Julius, Johanna, Benno, Karl and Max.  I had earlier noted that Julius might have been the same person as Benjamin Julius LEUBUSCHER born on 10 December 1834 to Salomon LEUBUSCHER and Ernestine geb. BLANZGER since the Julius who died in Vienna in 1892 at age 57 would have been born ca.1835.

The digitized pages of the Wiener Sterbregister 1891-1892 (p.127) contained an entry for the 1892 death of Julius LEUBUSCHER:
1477  13 Mai  4 uhr Morg. (yom 6 16 Iyar)  15 Mai 10 Uhr Vorm.  Julius Leubuscher ___ Kaufmann aus Brieg in ___ Schlesien gebürtig   M. Vereh.  57 J


With the information that Julius was born in Brieg, it became clear that Julius was the same person as Benjamin Julius.  From there, I was able to add his wife Johanna geb. WOLFF (1838-1903), and then their daughter Hedwig.

Hedwig LEUBUSCHER seems to have led an interesting life.  The Vienna Jewish community birth records, death records, and conversion records, include three children of Hedwig and Joseph Samuel REICH:  Elsa (1882), Alfred Karl (1883) and Adeline (1887); then three children with no father given:  Max (1895), Karl (1897) and Helene (1899).  Hedwig also apparently was married to Joseph LAVALLE who died in Vienna in about 1901. Perhaps he was the father of the children born in the 6 years before that, but that is never apparent from the records.

One of the birth records for Hedwig’s children has an extensive note about Hedwig giving her parents’ names and her 1863 birth place as Kattowitz.  That nicely ties back to the information in the Todesanzeigen for Salomon LEUBUSCHER and Ernestine LEUBUSCHER geb. BLANZGER that one of their children was living in Kattowitz in 1866 and 1869 — that would be Hedwig’s father Julius / Benjamin Julius.

Hedwig came to the US in 1922 as Hedwig LEUBUSCHER-LAVALLE.  Her daughter Helene was also referred to by the LEUBUSCHER-LAVALLE at that time; she was her mother’s personal secretary.   Hedwig was, or had been, an actress.  She and her eldest children converted to Christianity in 1900 / 1901.  It is not clear whether the later children also converted.


The eldest daughter Elsa married Count Zsigmund TOLDALAGI of Maros-Vasarhely, Romania.  She was living in Vienna in 1926.  Based on an advertisement in the New York Times, she was living in Paris in 1930 and was involved in “haute couture”.


The last (for now) twist in this family is that Hedwig had a granddaughter – but from which child?  When Hedwig travelled to the US in 1926, she was listed in the S.S. Berengaria passenger list as being accompanied by a 9-year-old granddaughter Salem LEUBUSCHER SKYUM, born in London.  I do not know who Salem’s parents were or what became of her.

I almost forgot one of the most satisfying parts of that search.  When I first looked at the Vienna birth records on the LDS website, I paged through one year’s records after the other without finding anything, while noticing that they were not in chronological order.  After a couple days of that, I paid more attention to the indexed information on the GenTeam.at website and realized that the record numbers in the GenTeam data were the document numbers on the birth records — and that they were in number order.  With that information, I could find all the birth records I was looking for.


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