Who Are These Other Scheshkos?

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Here is a photo of Isidore and Celia Scheshko. I really love this portrait. It’s very small and wedged into the curved glass front frame for as long as I’ve known the gardener (and that’s a long time). I haven’t removed it to scan because I am afraid of damaging it. Any ideas on how to take it out carefully, with the hopes that I can put it back in the same frame? Alternatively, if a relative has this image scanned, please email it to me, and I won’t need to bother.

Although the gardener and I have only recently begun searching for his family history in a focused and determined way, for years we did stop by Ancestry looking for Scheshkos (grandfather Isidore) and Goodsteins (grandmother Celia).

Searching for the Goodstein family was very difficult because the name is relatively common and easily confused on documents with Goldstein, an even more common surname. Also, Celia traveled to the United States as a teen with her best girlfriend to live with her uncle. But we don’t have the name of the uncle–and we don’t think any other family members came to this country. We don’t even have the name of the girlfriend, although apparently, when they were elderly, they both lived together in a nursing home in the Bronx.

We had been told that Scheshko was not a common name, and that turned out to be true–at least in the U.S. We found a handful of other American Scheshkos, but they were apparently Christian and of no relation. We wondered if their family might have once been Jewish because we assumed it was a Jewish surname. In the case of Isidore, the only other family member who did come to this country (to our knowledge) was his older sister Malka who married, had one daughter, and no grandchildren.

I mentioned before that Celia used to get letters from the Soviet Union that had been shredded by the censors. The gardener and I always assumed that he had relatives behind the Iron Curtain. We even thought they might have been absorbed into the general population of that country during a period where religion was frowned upon.

Finally, at around the same time that I wondered about the grandparents’ headstones, I did a search on JewishGen, a genealogy website focused on Jewish history and ancestors.

There are 3 databases that revealed important information regarding the Scheshkos.

The first is a database that has been compiled of Jews who survived the Holocaust.

You have to understand where our brains were when we tried to process the idea that Scheshkos were anywhere near the Holocaust. For some reason, it never occurred to either of us that the Holocaust ravaged Ukraine and Moldova. We consider ourselves more knowledgeable about history than the average American. After all, it’s one of the gardener’s passions, and I have an undergraduate degree in history. In fact, one of my post-doctoral specialties was the Holocaust memoir, particularly written by those who had been children during those years.

But the Holocaust that I read about was always in Germany, Poland, Austria, France, Netherlands, and even Italy and Hungary. I suddenly realized I didn’t know much of anything about the 20th century history of the Pale of Settlement.

As I reread the list from Jewish Gen, I thought how the people didn’t seem familiar (how dumb is that?). But if Scheshko isn’t a common name, could they be shirttail relatives? We didn’t know. And where is or was Belice? I searched and searched and couldn’t figure it out. Eventually, we discovered it in the Grodno region of the Lida district in the country of Belarus.

A small detail of this list gave me pause, although I wasn’t sure if the gardener noticed it until I told him. I had found Isidore’s sister Malka (who became Molly in this country)’s marriage license (which I will produce in a later post)–and her parents were listed as Samuel and Ida. If Isidore’s mother’s name was Ida, was this woman in Belice his mother? I thought she was too old to have survived, but maybe it was another relative with her name–such as a niece of Isidore? Keep in mind that Jews customarily name babies with the name of a deceased ancestor, oftentimes a grandparent or great-grandparent. So if Ida, the gardener’s great-grandmother, had already passed on when a grandchild was born, the baby might share her name. This is strictly about Hebrew names, though, and Ida is not a Hebrew name.

A second database undercut our hope about the first one because it was a list of Scheshkos who died during the Holocaust. Start reading halfway down this list.

While this list is for those from Vilna, some of the same people are listed in one for Grodno (like Belice). Notice that these people are from Vasilishki, a town in Belarus.

Belice and Vasilishki are very close, but Belarus is very far north from where the gardener’s relatives in the Black Sea region lived (Odessa and Tiraspol, as we had been told).

We were tempted to dismiss these other Scheshkos as family because we couldn’t imagine traveling so far (and for what reason) in those days unless you were actually immigrating to a place like the United States. That was our thinking.

All throughout the previous years and even in the beginning of this process this year we have been very naive. Just know that I can’t reveal all in one or two posts. There is too much information.

But I will show you the third database on JewishGen.

Look at that! Malka and Itskhok Meyer (just another spelling!), born in the right decade. But in the right city? The gardener had been told they came from Tiraspol, which is in Moldova. This database is for babies born in Odessa, which is in Ukraine. How can they be the same then? Maybe Scheshko was more common than we thought.

But I did a little Google research. Apparently, Tiraspol and Odessa are 65 miles apart and, in those days, Tiraspol would have been part of greater Odessa for government and other purposes.

At this point, I felt we had a serious lead, but I could not figure out a way to search for eastern European records, particularly those that were written in various languages completely unknown to me. I am used to wiewaswie, a website devoted to Dutch history. It translates into English, and the collection of Dutch documents available is astonishing. All very conducive to researching. But I was at a loss for how to proceed in Ukraine, Moldova, and even Belarus.

I contacted a few people on JewishGen and one person led me to another who led me to another. The gardener and I ended up hiring a smart and knowledgeable genealogist named Inna who specializes in this area. If you want to know how to contact her, please email me.

Inna was now able to take these lists from JewishGen, the headstones, and the few facts or maybe-facts that we had and begin a search abroad.

STAY TUNED . . . .

24 thoughts on “Who Are These Other Scheshkos?”

  1. Fascinating, and I can’t wait to see what Inna found. People did seem to travel longer distances in those days than we might imagine. But often there were two few opportunities in one location or a pogrom caused people to leave or a woman married a man from another town and followed him, and so forth. It does make it awfully difficult to find people. Good luck!

    And what happened to the Scheshko name?

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    • Gomel is about 165 miles from Kiev, so I wonder if your family had Kiev connections. Eventually I will be blogging about the Shulman/Schulman family who came from Kiev and Kamanets-Podilskyi. Was your Molly a Malka? That seems to be a common Americanization of Malka.

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      • My father’s father was in Kiev. The story is that his father had permission to live there because he was tailor who made uniforms for the Tsar’s army. He left first for America, and then his wife and children had to leave. I grew up hearing stories, which I’ve discovered are not always true. 🙂
        I believe other family members were in Ukraine, but not necessarily Kiev.

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      • What an intriguing story. Even if the whole thing isn’t true, there is probably a seed of truth there that could lead to information. When I started this process I had no idea where anything was, including the distance between Kiev and Odessa. Nothing.

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  3. A few weeks ago a friend of mine, and a fellow Greek genealogy searcher, recommended I use JewishGen web site. I thought it strange, but sure enough I found my grandfather and the ship he arrived on. I had not seen it on the more common genealogy sites, such as Ancestry. The site looks like it will help you considerably as illustrated in your post. Good Luck on your new post, and so far is very interesting. Thank you – Spyro

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    • Hi Spyro! Thanks for coming over here. Wow, that really could have knocked me over with a feather. I had no idea that JewishGen would be useful to you. I wonder why. My curiosity is piqued. I am thinking it’s possible that’s because the other sites don’t do enough work with eastern Europe and that Greece is farther east than, say, Italy or France. Not sure, but it’s a good thing to know! Thanks for your kind comments, too!

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  4. I had to chuckle at Merrildsmith’s comment that family stories aren’t always true! So *much* of what I “knew” about my mum’s family seems to be pure invention. I’ll have to wander over to JewishGen and see what there is to see. My mum always claimed our family had been Protestant since the Reformation, but we have a bunch of Lindenmeyers and Dickmanns rollicking around the family tree; I once worked with a fellow named D. and some of his family stories lined up with my own. My mum’s mum looked so Jewish her friends would ask her what synagogue she attended. Hmmm.

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    • I love that the Ls and the Ds weren’t accounted for by your mum’s stories haha! You’re in good company since that is very true of British royalty ;). I do love the thought of that lineage from the Reformation though as that period of history was one of my interests when I was a history student.
      DNA is not completely reliable as a way to find out the truth of some of the stories that have been passed on because we can not get genes from certain branches just a few generations out (to my understanding), but it helps a bit–and in some cases it can help a lot. Of course, careful genealogical research is often best. Thanks for your interesting comments!

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  5. Pingback: The Places Behind the Faces, Part I: Vasilishki | Entering the Pale

  6. Oh! You asked about that photo. I have a picture of my great-grandmother in a frame that matches that one exactly. I’d suggest you take it to a professional to have it removed. If the photo has begun to stick to the glass it is NOT a job for me or thee.

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