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.