Friday, September 25, 2020

The Three Sisters of Selig Dudelczak Feinstein

 Back in 2018 I found the obituaries of my 2nd great grandfather's sisters - Sylvia Dudelczak Blufston Babchick, Lottie Dudelczak Getz Goldstein, and Rebecca Dudelczak Portnoy. While I had found photos of some of the gravestones online, I didn't have a chance to visit the cemetery to look for them myself, until today.

When I looked up online the locations of the sisters' graves, I learned they were all in the same numbered section of the cemetery, but that's all I knew. I wondered how close they would be to each other.

This close. 
All three were married, but none of their husbands are buried next to them.

Here lies Woman, Baila, daughter of R. Shmuel Zvi, Portnoy...
Ylota, daughter of R. Shmuel Zvi...

Shprintze, daughter of R. Shmuel Zvi...

I did find Sylvia/Shprintze's husband. 

I was under the impression that Sylvia had two husbands. A Jacob Babchik and a Jacob Blufston. Her death certificate records her name at death as Sylvia Babchik. Her obituary states Sylvia Blufston Babchik, and lists her children with the surname Blufston. Jacob's death certificate lists his name as Jacob Babchik, and his father as Wulf Babchik.

His tombstone has the additional surname of Blufston on it. I guess there is a small chance his children put their father's surname on their step-father's tombstone - which would be highly irregular. It makes more sense that there is only one husband, and at some point he changed his surname from Blufston to Babchik, and his wife followed suit, but not the children. Why did he change his name? That is not what I would consider an Americanization of an Eastern European surname.
Yakov Meyer, son of Zev Babchik...
(Zev is Hebrew, and Wulf is Yiddish. They are the same name.)





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