Obituaries

Obituaries and Remembrances
as Documentation for Lyakhovichi History
by Deborah G. Glassman, copyright 2007, 2008

The value of an obituary for an individual genealogy or family history has long been known, but researchers often neglect them – they are ordinary, pedestrian documents, which seem to be most available for people about whom you have the least questions. Jews, who immigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and died before WWII, often passed away without notice in the mainstream English press. Biographical material that might have been mentioned in a Yiddish language obituary is often inaccessible to American researchers who labor without the gift of that language heritage. Conceding the value of an obit for the mention of family particulars (the deceased’s surviving siblings as well as descendants; the name of the cemetery and the funeral home, evidence of religious observance at that juncture in the family’s history, et al.) it is often less clear that they play a role in our understanding of the life of a community. So how can we, as researchers in Lyakhovichi history – at least as it impacts our families – benefit from the systematic collection of obituaries related to the generation of emigrants from Lyakhovichi?

Benefits

1. We can create a new resource of names of Lyakhovichi emigrants and their surviving families at the times of their deaths.

2. We can create a collection large enough to provide new insights from the data sampled.

3. We can learn the names of organizations to which that generation belonged, so we can pursue information from another source.

4. We can learn the names of their siblings who might otherwise go undocumented as Lyakhovichi natives.

5. As researchers, it will be an incentive to look at obituaries of siblings and cousins who we might otherwise neglect, in our rush to proceed backwards in time.

6. The geographic range in which Lyakhovichi natives settled is immense. They settled in places where the attitude of the native population was very inclusive and consequently the obituaries are full of details about the life experiences of the deceased. They settled in places where the attitude of the larger population was very exclusive and disdainful, and the obituaries of these Jewish latecomers appeared in Yiddish language papers and the minutes of fraternal organizations. They left cousins in the Soviet Union and in all of Europe, and everyone who died before or after the Holocaust, may have an obituary we can eventually find.

The obituary of David Robinson of Detroit lists two synagogues with which he was associated, one the modern Conservative synagogue of Shaarey Zedek, the other a landsmanschaften shul built by people from the Lyakhovichi area and from neighboring communities around Lyakhovichi, called variously Beth Jacob, Beth Yakov, and Beth Yaacov in the heart of the old Jewish area of Detroit. It was this obituary that sent me searching for information on the synagogues, one of which was found to be a Lechovicher shul. The obituary below, for a member of Bnei Isaac Anshe Lechowitz, suggests a new way to search digitized newspapers, using not only family members' names but associations that you have identified from your research.

Process

1. Each person who is researching ancestors who lived in Lyakhovichi, goes back through their collected notes and sends us a copy of any obituary created for a person who emigrated from Lyakhovichi. We want obituaries for the entire emigrating generation, those born in Lyakhovichi who died somewhere else.

2. The webmaster will, in subsequent updates, post all obits that are older than twenty years old and will begin extracting the information for entry to a database.

3. This part of the project works very well on a collaborative basis. You share your findings. You expand the breadth of your coverage to include searches in your local jurisdictions for the aunts, uncles, cousins, that you know emigrated with your Lyakhovichi native.

Likely Consequences

1. In the short run, an un-collated collection of random-seeming obituaries begin appearing on the website. The amount of work to add them to the site is minimal, but if active researchers send those for one ancestor and two or three kinsmen of that ancestor, the number will begin building quickly.

2. Researchers participating in this collaboration, will have found that they have added a new type of data source to their own research as they use death dates to find digitized obituaries for family members as well as finding copies of their local newspapers in libraries close to home.

3. Over a series of updates, we will collaboratively create a new visual resource for Lyakhovichi researchers that begin to tie together the siblings and cousins of the emigrant generation.

The above two obituaries are the evidence of the value of new search techniques like optical character reading indices to newspaper archives. Help us get more eyes out there looking for people connected with Lyakhovichi. But none of those resources are as effective as you, sharing your family finds!

Contact us and remember to put Lyakhovichi in the subject of the email, using the Contact Us link below.

As all pages on this site, it is a work in progress, and some information is at a pretty basic level. You can make it into the valuable resource that it can become by contributing those you have found for your family. On this page - Bev Lipsitz contributed those of the listings related to her Kann and Lehman family of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Our goal is to get every document-image indexed. When you send your finds, take a few moments and include a list of those named in the document.

Help us get more eyes out there looking for people connected with Lyakhovichi. But none of those resources are as effective as you, sharing your family finds! Shirley Serota did just that, following up on photos she had already shared by sending this great obituary from Philadelphia in 1919 you see below. Solomon Slonimsky was her grandmother's brother.