Hil, if this pans out, it is amazing.

Four-minutes-flat amazing. Dayyyyyam.

I am doing a two-week trial on ancestry. Boy is this thing addictive. I haven't even finished entering all of the data I already have and I've found out all kinds of cool things. Old New England families have a lot of public records, apparently.

think I might have found something, under Welwel Lipowitz. Born about 1884, immigrated 1905, manifest lists his hometown as what looks like "Czaus," which I'm pretty sure must be Chavusi, Belarus.

HIll, that is amazing. I'll see if the date fits.

Hil is incredible, no doubt.

I need to step away from this site. I now have 299 people on my family tree (much of tonight was spent entering data I'd collected back in high school when I did a massive family tree project). Down the rabbit hole!

Cats just lost their nightly outside privileges, and it's not their fault. This is the second night/morning that I've been woken up by Ply growling only for me to discover a tiger cat exiting through the dining room window (my cats are tortoises). Grrr.

I bow before Hil's genealogy-fu.

HIll, that is amazing. I'll see if the date fits.

Thanks. I think I can email you links to the records on Ancestry. The immigration record was a bit of a hunch, but I found a couple of others that seem to support it being the right one.

edit: I emailed you a few of the records. I'm not sure why Ancestry won't let me email the others. Don't reply to the email address that's attached to those -- profile address is good.

My train of thought there, by the way, was first that William probably wasn't the name on the immigration forms, since that name really wasn't used in Eastern Europe. So I first searched for William Lipowitz, and found a census record that listed his immigration year as 1905. Then I searched the immigration records for Lipowitz, and looked through them until I found a name that could reasonably be Anglicized to William, in a year around 1905, and found Welwel. Then, to see if I could find other stuff to support it, I searched for all records under William Lipow, and found his death record, which lists his mother's maiden name (though, in my experience, the mother's maiden name on death certificates is frequently wrong), and his grave, which has his Hebrew name as Velvel ben Yitzchak Chaim.

Oh, and once I saw the town listed as Czaus on the ship manifest, I went to JewishGen.org, which has a database of Jewish communities. Searched for Czaus, and got a list of about ten possibilities. I think two of them were in the Russian Empire, and of those two, one of them had an alternate name of Czausy, so I figured that had to be it.

Which reminds me, I want to go and see who owned my house in 1900, 1910, et cetera. Trying to imagine the lives of the people who lived here through the years.

I'm in awe, Hil. I thought I was pretty clever when I found the Census records for my grandparents and aunt in 1940....

There are entirely too many people named Ephraim Hixson in my tree for my peace of mind, especially since they all seem to have married a Margaret at least once. And don't get me started on men surviving a marriage to one Mary Ann only to turn around and marry another Mary Ann. I mean sure, it saves on monogramming linens and you don't have to worry about calling out the wrong name at interesting moments, but c'mon now....