The Descendants of Jacob and Chaya Benjamin Compiled by Stan Birnbaum St Anthony, Minnesota March 15, 2018 for Mickey Birnbaum and Lorraine Frank the Benjamin elders Corrections and additions are always welcome. The author can be reached via email at [email protected] The Descendants of Jacob and Chaya Benjamin Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................. 5 Jacob Benjamin ........................................................................................................... 11 Families of Jacob’s Descendants .................................................................................... 13 First Generation ........................................................................................................ 13 Second Generation .................................................................................................... 17 Third Generation ....................................................................................................... 23 Fourth Generation ..................................................................................................... 29 Fifth Generation ........................................................................................................ 35 Sixth Generation ....................................................................................................... 41 Index of Individuals ..................................................................................................... 43 - 3 - The Descendants of Jacob and Chaya Benjamin Introduction This partial listing of members of the Benjamin family starts with Jacob Benjamin, the earliest known Benjamin ancestor. Jacob was born in Siuliai, Lithuania in about 1825. This listing of his descendants uses a standard genealogical format known as register style. This format lists his children as the first generation (Jacob is considered “Generation 0”), followed by his grand- children as the second generation, his great-grandchildren as the third generation, etc. I am a great-great-grandson of Jacob and am therefore listed in the fourth generation, along with my siblings and Benjamin cousins. My mother and her sister, are great-granddaughters of Jacob and are therefore listed in the third generation, along with their first and second cousins. The listing for each generation also identifies the children of each member of that generation. Therefore, members of the family who have children appear three times in the register: 1. Each person is first listed with their parents’ generation. 2. Each person is then listed in their own generation, which is the primary listing for that person. 3. Each person who has children appears one more time, identified as parents for their children’s entry in the next generation. Each person’s children are shown in chronological order if dates of birth are known. When dates are not known, the order is arbitrary. If there is a mixture of known dates and unknown dates, children with known dates appear first followed by children with unknown dates. The gender of each person, which is not always clear from the name, is also indicated by a lower-case “f” for female or “m” for male when the child is first listed. Like all genealogical documents, persons are listed by their full name at birth. My mother, for example, is listed as Muriel Benjamin and not Mickey Birnbaum, which is how her family and friends have known her for the last seventy years. Identifying birth names for the immigrant generation is often impossible, as the original Yiddish names have generally been forgotten and are seldom recoverable from available documents. There is one exception to listing names at birth: adopted children, for whom birth names are generally not known, are listed by their legal name after their adoption. When available, birth names for adopted children (one case in this register) are also provided. Sources I have relied on four sources to compile this listing: 1. Genealogical work available on Ancestry.com which has been submitted by other family members, including very distant relatives whose interest in the Benjamin family may be peripheral. The quality of information on Ancestry.com varies from questionable to outstanding. I have used my best judgment to assess and attempt to validate the available data. Because Ancestry.com protects the privacy of information on living persons, most of this data pertains to persons who are deceased. 2. Publicly available information, which includes census records, vital record repositories, city directories, immigration records, passenger ship registries, obituaries, and dozens of additional sources. Many of these records have been indexed or are available online. I have just scratched the service of these repositories, relying on Ancestry.com tools to accelerate the process of finding data. This body of data also helps validate or refute information submitted by other family members on Ancestry.com. One limit of vital records (births, marriages, and deaths) is that they are maintained by counties and often omit place locations for life events that are more specific than the county of record. As a result, many of the entries in this registry are identified only by - 5 - Introduction county and not by city. For example, many births of Benjamins that took place in Chicago are identified as occurring in Cook County because that is the most specific documentation we have. 3. A family register compiled by Laurel Benjamin Sorman, Mort Benjamin’s oldest child, who in the 1990s compiled information about Sheftel Benjamin’s descendants. While Laurel covered a lot of ground, she was unaware of the importance of collecting formal names rather than nicknames, as well as maiden names of women who married into the family. In some cases, she knew how many children there were in a family without knowing their names, which I have included in this document. Despite these gaps, her data was critical for documenting a number of living relatives whose data is not publicly available and is widely referred to by the community of Benjamin family members submitting data to Ancestry.com. Tragically, Laurel died in 2001 at the age of fifty and was not able to continue her work on the Benjamin family history. 4. I collected a limited amount of information directly from family members in the early 1980s (which I then put aside for about thirty-five years) and more recently while preparing for a joint celebration of my mother Mickey’s ninetieth birthday and my Aunt Lorraine’s ninety-fifth birthday. Family origins For most Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, documentation of place of origin is weak or non-existent. We often rely on family stories that have only a vague recollection of place of origin, typically identifying Russia, Poland, or Austria as the ancestral home. Family memory may be more specific, but is seldom documented. In the case of the Benjamin family, there is persistent memory of origins in modern-day Lithuania, with place names of Kovno or Shavel coming up most often. Two additional factors further complicate the challenge of understanding Jewish immigrants’ places of origin: 1. Place names like Russia or Austria refer to different geography at different times and are therefore ambiguous. Austria today is a much smaller place than the boundaries of the nineteenth-century Austro-Hungarian Empire from which my father’s family emigrated at the turn of the twentieth century. The modern country of Poland, home to millions of Jews at the turn of the twentieth century was not even a country at the time our ancestors arrived in the United States. 2. Names of cities and administrative districts have not only changed over time, but were also identified differently by the different ethnic groups that lived side-by-side in these areas. The region surrounding the Benjamin’s ancestral home in modern-day Lithuania included Yiddush-speaking Jews, Russians, ethnic Lithuanians, Poles, and Germans. Each had their own name for the cities and surrounding administrative areas. In this registry, I have listed modern place names and accepted data provided by other members of the family. While that data reflects each researcher’s understanding of family memory, those attributions are not based on clear evidence. However, I believe a key document clarifies the question of Benjamin family origins and supersedes the understandings of others who have worked on this problem. The key to interpreting this document is understanding the geographical organization of Lithuania at the turn of the twentieth century, when the Benjamins made their way to the United States. - 6 - The Descendants of Jacob and Chaya Benjamin The chart below provides a detailed listing of place names relevant for understanding the Benjamins’ origins. Note that this area was part of the Russian Empire when the Benjamins arrived at the turn of the twentieth century. With the help of this chart, we can reconcile differences in family recollections about origins: • When family members described their origin as Kovno, they were likely referring to the province of Kovno (the “Kovno Gubernia”) and not necessarily the city of Kovno • When family members described their origin as Shavel or Shavli, they were referring to the municipal district (uyezd in Russian) of Shavli, for which I use the modern Lithuanian name of Siauliai. It is reasonable to assume all members of the Benjamin family before their emigration to the United States