Thursday, September 22, 2022

Why we examine multiple sources and carefully correlate their information

I'm slowly working on a biographical sketch of a couple, Barnet and Rebecca Herman, who immigrated in the early 1890s from Makhnivka (Махнівка), a village near Kiev (then within the Russian Empire), to New York City. There is an abundance of inconsistencies among the records and resolving them has been interesting (and challenging and somewhat fun).

Barnet made the trip about a year before his wife and children. First challenge: identifying his manifest entry, which I finally determined to be that of "Beer Hermann" arriving on the SS Sorrento in late August 1892. (This Beer = my Barnet is whole other blog post waiting to be written.) 

 

I would hate to admit how much time I spent trying to 1) figure out the name of a Polish(?) town on his incoming 1892 passenger manifest for New York, and 2) determine why he was identified as being of Polish origin when I knew he came from a village near Kiev.

Here he is in line 55, “Beer Hermann”:

 

 and an easier-to-read transcription of select columns:

 

Entry no.

Name

Age

Occupation

Native country

Hailing place or place of starting (as best I can read)

51

Kaspar Schimanski

18

Br[___]maker

" [Russia]

Neustadt

52

Moses Brostermann

19

[furrier?]

Poland

Slkow

53

Schimme Schafcick

20

"

"

Minsk

54

Te_nce Dechatzell

47

bookbinder

"

Kiev

55

Beer Hermann

39

Trader

"  [Poland]

[Stobzir?]

56

Yndel Port

52

"

"

Wilkomis

57

Moses Rosenberg

17

bookbinder

"

Kowns

59

Ossip Schimelover

40

labourer

"

"

59

Yirrgis Raikitzkais

19

"

"

"

60

Samuel Mehl

46

taylor

"

Pomives

61

Meyer "

10

none

"

"


The answer to the unexpected place of origin is buried in the more-challenging-to-read outgoing Hamburg manifest:



The person creating the New York list apparently was working off the Hamburg list and missed seeing a bracket indicating that passengers Brosterman and Schafzick were from the same town. This moved several subsequent town names up one row in the New York list, such that Hermann’s Kiev/Kiew origin was assigned to Dechatzell, and Yndel Port’s town of origin was assigned to Hermann.

Here's a comparison of the entries in the two manifests, just the pertinent columns. Passenger names and ages, and the order of the passengers in the list, matched between the two lists. Locations in red are the errors made in the clerk's transcription from the Hamburg list.

 

Name

Im Staate resp. in der Provinz

[state or province] (Hamburg list)

Native country (NY list)

 

Bisheriger Wohnort [previous place of residence (Hamburg list)

Hailing place or place of starting (NY list)

Kaspar Schimanski

" [Russl] [for Russland?]

" [Russia]

 

Neustadt

Neustadt

Moses Brostermann

apparently no entry, but the squiggle beginning the line below might be bracketing these two

Poland

 

[apparently no entry, but the squiggle beginning the line below might be bracketing these two, in which case it is Sklow]

Slkow

Schimme Schafcick

" [Russl]

" [Poland]

 

[squiggle or curly bracket] Sklow

Minsk

Te_nce Dechatzell

" [Russl]

" [Poland]

 

Minsk

Kiev

Beer Hermann

"[Russl]

"[Poland]

 

Kiew

Stobzi[_]

Yndel Port

" [Russl]

" [Poland]

 

Stobzin

Wilkomis

Moses Rosenberg

" [Russl]

" [Poland]

 

Wilkom[__]

Kowns

Ossip Schimelover

" [Russl]

" [Poland]

 

[unreadable but not inconsistent with something similar to Kowns]

"

Yirrgis Raikitzkais

" [Russl]

" [Poland]

 

"

"

Samuel Mehl

" [Russl]

" [Poland]

 

[nothing, but curly bracket at next entry prob. includes this entry]

Pomives

Meyer  "

" [Russl]

" [Poland]

 

{ [unreadable but not inconsistent with something similar to Pomives]

"

 

Consistent with his other records, the two passenger manifests document Beer Herman's origin in the area of Kiev (present-day Kyiv, Ukraine), not from a town in Poland. The New York manifest had errors introduced in copying from the earlier Hamburg manifest.


Sources:

Manifest, SS Sorrento (Hamburg to New York City), departing 11 August 1892, second unnumbered page, passenger no. 55, Beer Hermann; imaged records, “Hamburg Passenger Lists, 1850-1934,” Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : 4 August 2022); citing Hamburger Passagierlisten, Bestand [inventory] no. 373-7 I, VII (Auswaanderungsamt I [Emigration List-Indirect]); Volume: 373-7 I, VIII A 1 Band [volume] 081 B, page 1224; Staatsarchiv Hamburg microfilm K-1747.

Passenger list, District of New York, Port of New York, undated [29 August 1892], SS Sorrento, for Beer Hermann on second of seven pages, entry 55; images, “New York, U.S., Arriving Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Island and Ellis Island), 1820-1957,” Ancestry (https://www.ancestry.com/ : 2 August 2022); citing NARA microfilm publication M237.