Tag Archives: Gutstein family history

Celia’s Best Friend

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Previously on Entering the Pale (thanks, Merril!) Celia was living with Uncle Max and Aunt Anna Goodstein.

Before we move forward and look at Celia’s life in the United States in those early years, I want to mention Celia’s best friend.

She and Bertha Coleman met on board on their way to the United States. They were both young women in their late teens traveling alone, without benefit of family or friends. So it makes perfect sense that they would bond as they entered a new country and a new life for themselves.

According to the ship manifest, Bertha was a 19-year-old tailoress who hailed from Warsaw, Poland. She is on line 27 on pages 1 and 2.

This friendship seems important to me for many reasons. I imagine that it was much safer for two young women to travel together rather than to be completely alone. And I would think that they took a lot of comfort from each other. The manifest shows that Bertha was traveling to a friend, not to family, so I would think that Celia’s friendship meant a great deal to her. At least, Celia found a family for herself when she arrived. Celia, though, was 17, two years younger than Bertha, so it’s likely that Bertha being older was a help to Celia.

Do you think they remained friends after they got settled in the U.S.?

They not only stayed friends, but when Celia was elderly and in a nursing home in the Bronx, she lived with Bertha! Now that is a long friendship.

I tried to find records at Daughters of Jacob, but it has been changed to Triboro Center For Rehabilitation And Nursing and they claim to have no records of the “old days.” Celia passed away in 1982.

There are two possible buildings her room could have been in. One is the classic Daughters of Jacob building on Teller Avenue in the Bronx. It’s gorgeous, and the gardener remembers a rather grand entrance.

Here is a pic from Google Maps showing the overall layout of the unique building.

Or she could have been in the high rise that is next to it.

I wish our memories could be trusted to know for sure. But the gardener remembers red brick and not a building as tall as the tan one.

Celia’s Uncle Max and Family

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If you remember from last week (trying to sound like a TV show here), Celia was traveling to the United States to her Uncle Max in Brooklyn. But who was this Uncle Max?

A few years ago, the gardener and I tried to find Uncle Max through Ancestry, but we couldn’t find him, based on the information available at the time. All we had to go by was a copier copy of a photograph that cousin Charlotte had given us. The handwriting is Charlotte’s. We tried to match up the children in the photo with families on the U.S. census reports. Notice that Celia Goodstein is in the back row, second from the left.

This is what it says:

Taken in N.Y. Eileen’s mother [arrow pointing to Celia] her cousins [arrows pointing to the other girls in the back row]

This family were relatives on her side, not my mother’s.

Since Charlotte’s mother was Malka Scheshko (Molly Riskin), and since she was not related to this family, we had to assume that the family was from the Goodstein side of the family. What we didn’t know was what their surname was. This made it very difficult to search.

As luck would have it, Uncle Max was a Goodstein. The surname was Gutstein (Gudstein, Gutshteyn) before it was Goodstein. The man in the photo is Max Goodstein, the brother of Celia’s father. I love how she’s standing just behind his shoulder.

While Max’s immigration records have not yet been located, his wife, Neche Gutstein, and children Reisel, Iankel, Ettel, and Itzchok were on the passenger list from Liverpool to NYC: 11 July 1907. They traveled 3rd class.

 

On the manifest for SS Celtic, which sailed that day, the listing is:

 

Nuche Gutstein and children: Reisel, Iankel, Ettel, Itzchock (Neche?), and Golda

Notice that Golda, an infant, was not listed on the first document. What does that mean? It seems likely that Golda was born on the trip from Liverpool to NYC. Can you even imagine what Neche went through? And baby Golda, too. Makes me sad to think of how hard it was for them.

The name of the nearest relative in country whence alien came:

Mother? Gittel Gutstein K..skiy street Tiraspol, Russia

It looks as if it is possible that Max’s wife’s closest relative in Russia was Max’s mother Gittel Gutstein, located in Tiraspol! If this is the case, Celia’s grandmother’s name was Gittel Gutstein, and that would be the gardener’s 2x great-grandmother.

On this second page, it shows that Neche and children are joining her husband Max Gutstein at 349 Stone Avenue, Brooklyn, New York.

The next document is Max Goodstein’s Declaration of Intention to become a naturalized citizen from 1910.

This document gives some interesting information. For one thing, it gives his birthday as 6 March 1874, and states that he was born in Odessa, Russia! Again, Odessa! That means that both the Goodsteins AND the Scheshkos lived in both Odessa and Tiraspol. That seems like such a coincidence to me. Were there events that occurred that caused them to move from one place to other or back and forth? Maybe we will never know. If we can eventually map out a timeline, maybe it would be easier to research events.

Max was a tailor. He was also 5’6, so not a tall man. His 1910 Brooklyn address is listed. And, as of the filing of this document, Max was still a subject of Nicholas II, Emperor of All the Russias.That kind of makes me shudder.

On the 1910 census (so around the same time as the above document), Max Goodstein is listed at the 617 Sackman Street address of the declaration. His wife’s name is now listed as Anna, so Neche changed her name to Anna. The children are now Rose, Jacob, Ethel, Harry, Gertruda. They have all taken American names.

Look at the top of page 2 of the 1910 census. Nineteen-year-old Jennie Goodstein is listed as a daughter of Max and Anna! Celia must have tried out the name Jennie at the very beginning–or else her name was recorded in error.

So we have Celia now in the household of her Uncle Max and Aunt Anna. I wonder how comfortable she felt with them. She must have known them quite well from Tiraspol, so it wouldn’t have been as if she went to someone she barely knew–or didn’t know at all.

How did she get along with her cousins? Did they become like siblings to her? Or did they grow away from each other? Without a diary to read, some of these questions can never be answered. But I am always searching for clues.

To be continued again 🙂