Where My Ancestors Lived: Varalmas, Hungary / Almasu, Romania

I am writing a series of posts where I provide information about the towns where my ancestors lived. Geography is an essential part of genealogy and family history. We need to know where to look for records, and what we learn about the towns fills in information about how our ancestors may have lived.

Váralmás / Almașu (Transylvania)

Latitude: 46.950
Longitude: 23.133

In 1907 my maternal grandfather, Martin Deutsch, was born in Váralmás (or Nagy-Almás), Hungary - which is now Almașu, Romania. The photographs on this page were taken in 2012.

The Jewish population, as recorded by census, was 11 in 1880, 51 in 1900, 35 in 1910, and 30 in 1930. As long as the census recorded all ages, my grandfather's family of 8 may have accounted for the entire drop between 1910 and 1930, if there were only a handful of births. While the Jewish population was small, nearby towns had larger populations. 

9 miles away in Huedin (where the train picked up my great grandfather and his family when they left) the Jewish population was 1,073 in 1900. 

Historic sights include a castle, and a citadel.

In May of 1944, the remaining Jewish population was moved 49 miles away to the Cehei ghetto, then to Șimleu Silvaniei. They were deported to Auschwitz between May 31 and June 8.

Sources and further information:

• Almasu, Salaj County - IAJGS Cemetery Project (which actually contains a link to one of my earlier posts.)
• Varalmas Castle
• Castelul Csaky, Almasu
• Almasu Citadel

Transylvania 2012

As our honeymoon continued in Romania, Jenifer and I met up with my parents, siblings, two nephews, a niece, and some cousins. There were 15 of us in total, and using Oradea, Romania as a base, we spent two days touring a section of Transylvania where my Deutsch and Lichtman ancestors lived. When they lived there, it was part of Hungary. Now it is part of Romania.

One day we visited Huedin, Almasu (marked by the A), and Cluj. The other we visited Marghita and Simleu Silvaniei. My maternal grandfather, Martin Deutsch, was born in Almasu. The nearest train station from which the family likely departed in 1913 was in Huedin. My great grandfather's passport was issued in Kolozsvár (Cluj). In 1977 my great-uncle Ted Deutsch was recorded singing a song in part-Hungarian and part-Romanian about Kolozsvár. My great grandmother, Helen Lichtman Deutsch, was born in Marghita. Two nieces of Helen's, who remained in Romania, survived the concentration camps, but returned post-war, and settled in Simleu Silvaniei. They weren't allowed to leave under Communist rule until the 1960s. A daughter of one of the survivors, who grew up in Simleu Silvaniei, now lives near Tel Aviv. She joined us and acted as a tour guide.  

Almasu, Romania (Varalmas, Hungary)



About all we know about the home my grandfather was raised in until age 7 is that it was situated by the river. The Valea Babiu runs through Almasu. My parents took a photograph of a different house when they visited previously back in 2000. Either could be 100 years old; both have clearly seen better days. My great-grandfather was a tenant-farmer, so even if some depository had land records, his name wouldn't likely be on them.

Huedin, Romania (Bánffyhunyad, Hungary)



I like that the train station still has the Hungarian version of the town's name on it in addition to the Romanian. I also took photographs of two old benches that theoretically could have been there in 1913. One of the two benches isn't very useful anymore.  The sign on the red box says, "Pastrati Curatenia," which means, "Keep Clean" in Romanian. (There were newer benches at the train station, in addition to the chairs which can be seen in the first photograph.

Marghita, Romania (Margitta, Hungary)



We know the exact address in Margitta where my great-grandmother, Helen (Lichtman) Deutsch, was raised. However, sometimes streets get renumbered. There's a photograph of the Lichtmann leather shop prior to WW2. Is this the same building? While the front has been remodeled somewhat over the years, I believe it is.  While the building is occupied, we didn't knock on the door.

Update

Here's another archival image of the Lichtmann leather store, obviously taken at a different time than the one above because the sign above the door is different. The similarities between it and the current building are more noticeable.

Cluj, Romania (Kolozsvár, Hungary)

While in Cluj, I took a photograph of a monument. I couldn't read what it said at the base, but I figured I could look it up later.

It is a quote from Ioan Raţiu, one of several Romanians who petitioned Emperor-King Franz Joseph in 1892 for equal rights for Romanians.

Existenţa unui popor nu se discută, se afirmă!

which translates to:

The existence of a people is not for discussion, but rather for affirmation!
Photo Credits: 
John Newmark - June 2012 
Lichtman Leather Shop: Unknown photographer, Unknown date

Central Database of Shoah Victims Names

The Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names is a unique international undertaking led by Yad Vashem. It is the endeavor to recover the names and reconstruct the life stories of each individual Jew murdered in the Shoah. It is our moral duty to respect their last behest and remember them. We estimate that the number of Jews commemorated in the database to date is 4 million. The database is comprised of Pages of Testimony, historical documentation and additional sources.

"The online Names Database creates a link not only with the dead but also among the living, within the Jewish people," said Nobel Laureate Prof. Elie Wiesel after filling out a Page of Testimony for his father, Shlomo. "It strengthens the connections between families, between cities, between communities. Furthermore, it brings a heightened awareness and a deepened sense of remembrance."

More information

Yad Vashem is the Israeli Holocaust Memorial and its name derives from the Biblical verse, Isaiah 56:5: "and to them will I give in my house and within my walls a memorial and a name that shall not be cut off." Yad Vashem means: a memorial and a name.

Their database of names was initially put online in 2004, and has grown since then. It's easy to search.  The basic search function has three input fields.  You can enter data in only one, or all of the fields, though the search results will only provide the first 1000 records, so searching by first name alone is likely only useful for unusual first names.

The Advanced Search provides several more input fields

You're also able to specify the accuracy level of each input field (The defaults are shown above, and the four choices below)

For Year of Birth, or Year of Death, you have an option of +-2 or +-5.

Here's what the results page looks like if you search for every individual born in Almasu. (The town where my maternal grandfather was born.) I didn't specify a country, as it varied depending upon the year. If I specified Romania or Hungary, I'd only get about half the results.  However, the synonyms option yields many variations of the town name (Almasu, Almas, Almasz, Nagyalmas, Varalmas).  For those entries below with a different town, the other town was their residence in 1938.  The actual record indicates Almasu as their place of birth.

My grandfather, Martin Deutsch, was the son of Samuel Deutsch and Helen Lichtmann.  So a few entries in these results were of great interest:

Szeren Serena Deutsch
Laszlo Lichtmann
David Lichtmann

Helen had a half-brother named David, and all the information I have on his birth was "After 1882" as I knew Helen was the oldest. Helen was born in a different Transylvanian town (Margitta), but they're not too far apart. I thought all the Lichtmann children were born in Margitta, but since David was in his 40s by the time of his death, birth place and residence prior to the war could have been confused.


The information on the David Lichtman in the database, unfortunately, doesn't include parents.

Original Record No.:	BU-1/2.
Last Name:	Lichtmann
First Name:	David
Gender:	Male
Date of Birth:	14/08/1892
Place of Birth:	Varalmas, Cluj, Transylvania, Romania
Place during the war:	Buchenwald, Camp
Place of Death:	Buchenwald, Camp
Date of Death:	03/11/1945
Victims' status end WWII:	murdered/perished

Note: Clicking on the magnifying glass image searches by that input field, and clicking on the green image shows you the location on the map.  The links above work, however, the search for all those born in Varalmas, Cluj, Transylvania, Romania yields only 4 results, as it searches for no synonyms.

This could be my great grandmother's half-brother, or someone else with the same name. There's no way for me to be certain yet.

My guess is that the Laszlo Lichtmann in the results was David's son. It doesn't indicate this as a fact, but both are indicated as having died at Buchenwald.  Laszlo on Feb 22, 1945 and David on November 3. (It's important to be careful when reading dates - they are presented in the European Date-Month-Year format.)

***
There are two pages of testimony for Serena Deutsch, which appear to have been submitted by two different daughters.  Scanned images of the testimony are viewable, though the documents are in Hebrew. Szeren appears to have been the daughter of Simon and Betti Tantzos, and she married Mor Deutsch.  I do not know if or how Mor was related to my great grandfather, Samuel Deutsch.
***

I searched for several other family names at the website, and will share some of the results in future posts.

Part II

1913 Deutsch Family Manifest - SS Rhein

Here's details from the Passenger Manifest I mentioned in my Amanuensis Monday post earlier today. (Found at Ancestry.com)

Page One

Page Two

Click to enlarge either one

The names on the far left are very difficult to read. However, there is enough detail otherwise to identify this as the correct passenger manifest without any doubt.

In the middle of the first page you can clearly read Varalmas, Hungary as their town of origin, and 'Hebrew' as their nationality. But the clincher is the 'nearest relative' in country of origin, as they listed "father in law" and "grandfather" Israel Lichtmann in Margitta, Hungary. If I didn't know what to expect to see there, I probably wouldn't be able to read it, but it is clear. On the far right it lists Chicago, Illinois as their destination.

The names are supposed to be (from oldest to youngest) Salomon, Jean, Ted, Ed, Martin, Maurice, and Berta. However, those are the English names of the children, which would have varied from their Hungarian names. I know my great grandfather went by both Salomon and Samuel at different times. The manifest says he was 45 years old, but he was likely closer to 52. He may have lied out of fear they wouldn't let him in the US if he was too old to earn a living.

A few columns to the right of their ages we see whether or not they could read or write. In the rows for Salomon, Jean, Ted, and Ed it says yes for both. This is the US Passenger Manifest implying they all could read and write English. I'm not certain this is accurate. Though I believe the father could read and write Romanian, Hungarian, Yiddish, and German - at least to some degree. The three elder children, ranging in age from 14 to 9, would have had varying skills.

On page two we learn (on the far left) that the 'wife' and 'mother' paid for their passage. Which isn't a surprise, as I knew my great grandmother came over to America a year earlier specifically to raise the money for the rest of the family's passage.

The column for friend/relative they are joining is another instance where if I didn't know what it was supposed to say, I wouldn't be able to read it. It says "Helen Deutsch" and I believe it says "435 (or 1135) Christiana Avenue." If it weren't for the section of the audio tape which I posted this morning, I would have no idea what the street is, but I believe this does confirm Ted's recollection.

Finally, I learn my great grandfather was 5 foot 4 inches, black hair, brown eyes. Jean was 4 foot 8 inches, and Ted was 4 foot even. It doesn't indicate the height for any of the other children.

Amanuensis Monday: Sauerkraut, Palascinta, the Titanic, and the Rhein

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue transcribing in ten minute segments the tape my grandfather, Martin Deutsch, and his older brother, Ted Deutsch, recorded in 1977.

They had begun talking about their immigration to America in 1913 (at ages 6 and 11), but have returned to talking about the farm they lived on in Transylvania.

---

1:05:00

Ted: We had a place we called the cellar, but that was under the barn.
Martin: The cold storage
Ted: Where we kept sauerkraut
Martin: And the apples, we’d save during the winter
Ted: We had enough to last the winter anyhow. In the spring we had to live out of the garden. New stuff coming up. Cucumbers.
Martin: You always had enough sauerkraut, cabbage I guess
Ted: Yeah we had that, we had a barrel of sauerkraut.
Martin: I remember you had to cut up your cabbage and throw in the stuff, and
Ted: And take a rock and put it over it
Martin: I thought you went in there and stepped on it to squeeze it down. I know you did that with wines and grapes.
Ted: We did that when we made wine, yeah. We’d get in barefoot and press the wine. I don’t recall doing it on sauerkraut. I didn’t make that much of it.
Martin: I had a recollection of that, but I might be wrong.
Ted: I know we had to keep it in a barrel in the basement, and we had a big rock to keep the cover on it.
Martin: And we probably had several barrels of it, so if nothing else you were going to have sauerkraut.
Ted: That’s right.
Martin: I don’t know where we got bread, wheat, and flour
Ted: Dad got that in trade. The bread and the wheat
Martin: Did we have to make our own flour
Ted: Yeah, we had to grind it. We had that grinder. A primitive grinder. Two kinds of wheel connected to a rod, turn the wheel around.
Martin: It was probably a heavy stone that ground it
Ted: We made our own flour. Or if you wanted to there was a mill over there. Next to the river there was a mill.
Martin: The old mill stream.
Ted: The mill was built way down below the level of the river so we had a waterfall driving the wheel of the mill.
Martin: Which was the common thing of course.
Ted: You could take it there and they’d grind it for you for a small amount of money. So we had wheat stored, and we had corn stored. And when we wanted to use it we would grind it ourselves. The corn we ground ourselves, but the wheat we didn’t. I think the wheat we took to the mill.
Martin: I know in later years I remember we kept chickens, so we had some eggs I suppose. If nothing else.
Ted: Yeah we had eggs.
Martin: We probably didn’t have much meat of any kind.
Ted: We also made…during the season we made cheese from goat milk, or we also had lambs. People had lambs. We went up and they made cheese in big brown cakes, and we’d take the cheese home. That would last a long time.
Martin: We’d probably have something like they have in Mexico, what do you call it, palacsinta. You can always bake those
Ted: You always make that, and they stay a long time. But they have those big brown wheels of cheese they make up in the mountains and bring it down. They’d hang it up in the home to dry.
Martin: I was just trying to figure out how we got our meats. We didn’t have any.
Ted: Meats. We had a butcher that opened up once on Friday every week. That was the only time you could get meat.
Martin: And your meat was probably poultry mostly.
Ted: Poultry we used at home. We had poultry at home we raised. But if you wanted meat you could buy it at the butcher shop that was open once a week on Fridays.
Martin: They probably would slaughter a cow or something, kosherized course.
Ted: If you wanted a chicken killed you would have to go to the shochet who would kill it for you. You couldn’t kill it yourself. That’s how we got our meats.
Martin: Well, Jean then took care of the crowd. It was only for a period of a year. Mother left there and I still haven’t – you showed me that passport, but I couldn’t figure out the year. I think the year was omitted in some way. Or it gave a year, of course a passport needn’t be used the time it was issued. You can have it in your possession for a year.

1:10:00

Ted: We got here in this country in February 1913.
Martin: February 1913. It sounds approximately. I saw a movie just a few nights ago on television of the sinking of the Titanic which was in October or November of 1912. I do remember from my own memory about discussions about the ocean vessel sinking. It was a deterrent at the time.
Ted: I remember too. We had newspapers. Hungarian papers had the story about the sinking and the life lost on the Titanic. And the news came to us finally. It rippled down to the villages.
Martin: It must have been a deterrent to most people that were thinking of coming over.
Ted: It didn’t hit me as a kid. It didn’t mean much to me.
Martin: It was still an adventure to you, I imagine.
Ted: Even when I read about the disaster I didn’t realize at my age how many people died. It didn’t register with me even at my age.
Martin: I’m trying to figure out a sort of…if mother came over one year before, which was 1912.
Ted: She came in 1912
Martin: Then she must have earned enough to put a down payment.
Ted: That’s right. She was here a year before
Martin: Suppose she earned 2-300 dollars, that would do it, wouldn’t it as a down payment.
Ted: Of course she lived with her sister, and she probably didn’t have to pay too much board or lodging with her.
Martin: She probably borrowed some too.
Ted: She put everything away. But she signed up and they gave her credit for the entire family if it …. I really don’t know what the amount was for the entire family. Maybe they got a rate for kids. You know, smaller kids didn’t have to pay, or half fare. But I would say the amount of at least 500 dollars. Which was a lot of money in those days.
Martin: Especially for her and she had to live on it
Ted: Which would also include train fare.
Martin: After all Chicago is quite a ways
Ted: From New York, and the train from Varalmas to Bremen.
Martin: Yeah I was wondering about the ride from Varalmas to wherever you’re going
Ted: Bremen
Martin: And you’re covering a thousand miles there.
Ted: Maybe it cost more, I don’t really know.
Martin: I think you had to come through Hungry and Austria, and then cross over through Germany to Bremen, which was on the West Coast of Germany.
Ted: We crossed to Germany. We went to Germany.
Martin: We had to get through Austria to get to Germany.
Ted: I doubt it. We had to go South
Martin: You had to go North. That area where we were was almost the southeast corner of Austria Hungary. You see it ultimately was ceded to Romania, which was southwest of Hungary. Southeast I mean.
Ted: We had to get to Bremen and I know we went through Berlin. That I know.
Martin: You might have gone through Berlin. You might have gone up to Vienna and across to Berlin and over to Bremen. That’s my thought what happened. And do you think we took a train then?
Ted: We were on a train
Martin: That’s right, I don’t have any kind of recollection.
Ted: That was my first trip on a train. I’ll never forget it because we took the train. We went to Huedin, we got on the train. And I remember going through Berlin because they told us on the train this is Berlin, and I saw the first time electric lights over there in Berlin.
Martin: I imagine that’s where I saw my first automobile.
Ted: Well we didn’t get off in Berlin
Martin: We stayed on the train all the way
Ted: We stayed on the train to Bremen. We didn’t get off until Bremen. And waited there for the ship. The Bremen Rhein was the name of the ship.
Martin: You think the Bremen Rhein. A German passenger ship.
Ted: That was the name of the ship, the Bremen Rhein. We were on the ship for two weeks.

---

One of the difficulties of transcribing audio is running across an unfamiliar word, and trying to figure out what is being said. For example, I heard what sounded like "polechenta" and from context sounded like it should be a Mexican dish of some sort my grandfather was familiar with and reminded him of a Hungarian dish. But it took several creative searches to come upon Palascinta - a Hungarian crepe.

Recipes for sauerkraut do indicate pressing is necessary, but nowhere do I see any suggestion to use one's feet, as with grapes.

The route from Varalmas to Bremen is definitely Northwesterly.

I like how Ted's memory of the train ride to Bremen is reinforced through his recollection of the first time he saw electric lights at the stop in Berlin.

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If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post below, or in the comments.

Amanuensis Monday: Cousins, and Coming to America

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue transcribing the tape my grandfather, Martin Deutsch, and his brother, Ted Deutsch, recorded in 1977.

---

56:00

Martin: Well then, here we are now, you’re about 10 or 11 years old say in 1912
Ted: 1912
Martin: 1911, 1911 is when mother came over by herself, am I right about that?

Ted: She had a sister here in Racine
Martin: That’s...what was her name?
Ted: Gold
Martin: I forget her first name
Ted: Bertha. Bertha Gold.
Martin: She was a half-sister. She is Emily Fox’s mother.
Ted: She was from the same father. They had the same father. And she was here in Racine, and she was doing pretty good here
Martin: Had she been here more than a year or two?
Ted: Yeah, because, well she had grown children. Not grown, but she already had children born here. At least two or three.
Martin: I think she had three all together, didn’t she Emily, Bill, and I forget the
Ted: Al. Albert. She must have been here for some time I would say five six years at least
Martin: And there were others in the family I think that came over
Ted: There were, she had also had another sister and she was out here, and she came back to Hungary. Her name was Rose, I believe, Rosa.
Martin: Did Rosa come over at the same time with us, it seems to me
Ted: She’d been here before us. Then she went back to Europe, she went back to Hungary. And she got married, and she stayed there.
Martin: Whose sister?
Ted: Mother’s sister.
Martin: Mother’s sister. I remember her. She came over, but
Ted: She came over. Her husband had two great horses, grand horses he bought after he came back from America. He had money, so he bought himself two horses and called them Chassar and Chular. I remembered that when they visited us they drove a two horse wagon.
Martin: Of course, there were still other relatives too, including Mrs. Newman, Bertha Newman.
Ted: Yeah, well her father was Dad’s brother.
Martin: Her father was Dad’s brother. She was a niece of Dad’s then.
Ted: That’s right
Martin: And she had been here awhile, I don’t know how she came.
Ted: Her father was here.
Martin: Oh, I see.
Ted: Dad’s brother, his name was Dovid Leib, Dovid Leib they called him in Hebrew. His name was David. His brother David was here, and then he went back also. What they did was they came here and they made some money
Martin: A few dollars and went back

60:00

Ted: They saved their money and went back. He bought himself a saloon over in Buchem, which wasn’t too far from Varalmash.
Martin: And settled down there
Ted: And settled down there. And then his daughter Newman, Bertha Newman, and his son came out here, and they got married here and stayed here. His son’s name was, changed his name to Dexter.
Martin: Oh, that was Dexter. So that was another nephew of Dad’s.
Ted: Dexter and Bertha Newman were brother and sister, and their father was Dovid Leib they called him.
Martin: That was then the brother of Dad’s. Dexter and Bertha Newman were niece and nephew of Dad’s, they were our cousins in other words.
Ted: Yeah, they were our cousins. They came here and lived here, but the old man went back and stayed.
Martin: That’s what it was. I get the idea now. With all that coming and going, I can see there was in the air the atmosphere a familiarity of the
Ted: That’s right, Dad, had a brother who was here and went back, and they made money. And mother had a sister who came here and went back, and they made money. So mother got an idea. She ought to go because she had a sister here, and Dad was too old. He was twenty years her senior. So she figured it woud be better for her to go. And it worked out that she had Berta at that time – 1911, and soon after Berta - she was born in 1910, I believe, as soon as she was a year old she made up her mind that
Martin: She was going to do it
Ted: She was going to do it, and she wrote to her sister Bertha, Mrs. Gold, and arranged for her to buy a ticket for her to bring her around
Martin: How much do you guess a ticket would cost - $100-$200 for a person to come over in steerage.
Ted: At that time I believe it would cost about $100
Martin: At least that
Ted: In steerage.
Martin: In the steerage of course we all know what that…
Ted: They always bought it on the installment plan, So that it took $25 and the rest a dollar a week. They had these agents.
Martin: It was still a real accomplishment. And took a lot of intelligence and knowhow to leave the backwoods of Hungary and get to wherever you could board a ship and you didn’t know the language.
Ted: Never saw a ship before.
Martin: You still had to cross those mountains to get over somewhere
Ted: Mother had a lot of guts
Martin: She did, there’s no question about it
Ted: No question about it
Martin: And she must have been the prime
Ted: To leave six kids and all, and a one year old child in care of a twenty year old man…a fifty year old man.
Martin: A fifty year old man, and of course
Ted: Of course she had Jean
Martin: Jean was the oldest, she was about 11
Ted: At that time she must have been, If I was 11, she must have been 13
Martin: Which isn’t bad if that’s true
Ted: She was 2-3 years older than I am, she could have been 14
Martin: Well..
Ted: But she took care of the kids at home while she was here.
Martin: There’s a lot of cooking and sewing, of course there wasn’t much washing of clothes or anything
Ted: No, we didn’t need much of that. The cooking and making the dinners and food, was enough.
Martin: That sure should be enough for six or seven or eight kids
Ted: They had to start from scratch when they made something to eat, they didn’t have no place to go to buy it.
Martin: Not only that but you didn’t have the facility of being able to turn on the gas stove, where would you get your heat?
Ted: Every time you had to make a fire you had to go out and get some wood.
Martin: You couldn’t get any canned peas.
Ted: Nothing. Everything came from the garden.
Martin: The garden, and of course we didn’t have any money to go buy anything

1:05:00

---

Martin and Ted get confused with ages often. It was established earlier in the tape that their sister Jean was likely born in 1899, which means she would have been 13 in 1912 when their mother left for America. Ted, born in 1902, would only have been 10, while Berta, born in 1911, was 1. The rest of the family followed a year later in 1913.

Relatives mentioned:

Sisters of Martin and Ted's mother, Helen (Lichtmann) Deutsch: Bertha (Lichtmann) Gold, and Rosa Lichtmann

Children of Bertha Gold: Emilie (Gold) Fox, Bill Gold, Albert Gold

Brother of Martin and Ted's father, Samuel Deutsch: Dovid Leib (David)

Children of David Deutsch: Bertha (Deutsch) Newman, and Herman (Deutsch) Dexter.

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If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post below, or in the comments.

Amanuensis Monday: The Accident in Transylvania

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue transcribing the tape my grandfather, Martin Deutsch, and his brother, Ted Deutsch, recorded in 1977. Back in October of 2007 I posted a couple entries describing a horrific accident that claimed the life of one of my grandfather's brothers back in 1908 or 1909. In my description, I included brief transcriptions from the tape, though I summarized much of it. The full transcript follows.

Recently I learned of an alternate version of the story with some dramatic differences. I'll discuss this below the transcript.

---

45:00

Martin: August 24, 1977 and we just finished the other side of this tape and got through with what we think is the place or the area where we came from near Cluj or Kolishvar and I think we might start on another subject. Possibly to decide how we came from there – how did we come. How was it decided. How was it arranged. There’s quite a story in that background. I was about five and a half years old, I think, when I came around. You were ten.
Ted: I was 11.
Martin: You say you were 11. You say you were born 1902?
Ted: Yeah
Martin: I was born in 1907. Anyway, there were several months in there where the differences make up the one odd extra year, I guess. To start with, before we come away, I think its important to establish how many were there in the family. There were actually six kids. Six kids.
Ted: Well, let’s see. There were five boys, no four boys and two girls.
Martin: And of course father and mother. The seventh in the family was of course born in the United States. That’s how it arises. But before the six there were seven in the family, until the accident, which I think we may as well cover that now. What was the basis of that accident? Ed and the seventh member of the family born there. Armin A-R-M-I-N? Is that what you would call it?
Ted: Yeah, Armon, A-R-M-O-N.
Martin: A-R-M-O-N? You say A-R-M-O-N?
Ted: Yeah.
Martin: And how old was he? And where did he come in?
Ted: He was two years older than I.
Martin: He was two years older than you, so he might have been born in 1900?
Ted: 18…yes. About 1900.
Martin: In that case, do you think that Jean was born before him? How long? Was she the oldest?
Ted: Jean was the oldest, and she was born about 1899.
Martin: I think that would establish it as 1899 although there is some thought that it should be 1900. And I’m not sure just what happened there.
Ted: Because mother and father were married in 1898.
Martin: 1898?
Ted: Yeah, so she was born in 19…1899.
Martin: It probably is true because they sure didn’t miss any periods inbetween to get seven kids.
Ted: That’s right. Armin must have been born in 1901 or 2. No.
Martin: He could be 1901
Ted: 1901
Martin: And Jean could be 1900, but it would have to be a stepped up operation to get it done.
Ted: 18 months.
Martin: Yeah. Well, anyway, when that accident happened, I don’t recall the details of it. Do you have pretty good…
Ted: When the accident happened I was only I would say about six years old
Martin: So I would have been between two and three years old.
Ted: But I recall the accident because I was involved in the accident.

50:00

Martin: You were involved.
Ted: I was there at the time. And I saw.
Martin: You were the oldest one there?

[note: Armon was the oldest, if their sister, Jean, had left with the parents.]

Ted: Yeah, that’s right. It happened that Dad always carried a gun when he went out of the village. He carried a gun with him because you travel through the mountains
Martin: Highway robberies
Ted: Not robbers, but
Martin: Hunting
Ted: Protection. Not not hunting, Protection from wolves.
Martin: Animals.
Ted: There are wolves around when you cross the mountatins. He always had a gun
Martin: A revolver. A pistol.
Ted: A revolver or handgun. For protection. Not from robbers, but he did run into wolves. Wolves run in packs and you never know when they will attack you. Especially if you camp at night.
Martin: I wondered about that and how a gun got into the house.
Ted: If we camped at night, if we camped he always kept a fire going, but he always had a gun also.
Martin: So it’s wolves you were mainly afraid of. The wolves were around there for
Ted: Plenty of wolves around.
Martin: Goats and Sheep, were there a lot of sheep there?
Ted: Yes there were a lot of sheep in the mountains. So this day he didn’t go very far, he left the gun at home. When he left his home he had a chiffonier. And in there he locked up the bread and locked up any other stuff the kids might take. And his gun. So he forgot to lock it this time. We were there, Armon and I. And I think somebody else, but I don’t recall.
Martin: Ed?
Ted: Ed was there.
Martin: I suppose I was there too.
Ted: You might have been there too. Ed was there, and Armon. So Ed. I went to the Chiffonier. It was open so I went to get the bread. If it was locked we couldn’t get the bread, but if they left the key open, we’d go in and look for bread.
Martin: Something to nibble on
Ted: Yeah, so we found a gun in there. We didn’t know what the hell it was. I thought it was a plaything. Armon was older than I and I don’t know if he knew what it was. But he wanted…he took it away from me.
Martin: He was older
Ted: And showed it to me. And then Eddie got it, and he was looking at it. He thought it was something to whistle in because the barrel was there, and if you blew your breath in there you could whistle.
Martin: I see
Ted: So he tried to whistle into it.
Martin: Oh, into the barrel
Ted: Yeah, he held it up against his mouth like that and suddenly the damn thing went off and it went through his upper jaw and through his nose. It came out thorough his nose.
Martin: I see. I wondered how that all happened. I see now from your explanation.
Ted: That’s exactly what happened. He wanted to whistle. What the hell did we know about it? Anyhow. Because Armon was the oldest and
Martin: taking care of him
Ted: he was supposed to know better. But what the hell did he know. seven or eight. He couldn’t have been more than seven or eight years old. So he got scared because Ed was bleeding and there was no doctor around there to take care of it. Nobody knew what to do. Anyhow, after awhile, Dad and Mother blamed him, and he got scared and he got depressed that he was to blame for the entire thing.
Martin: Depressed and distressed and afraid I suppose
Ted: Afraid and for a couple of weeks he wouldn’t eat properly.
Martin: Do I understand he hid out somewhere where he wasn’t
Ted: He hid out where nobody
Martin: Where nobody could find him.
Ted: He was depressed in every way. He wouldn’t eat right. Finally about a month later he passed away.
Martin: That’s really something
Ted: He was just scared. He was just scared stiff. It actually wasn’t his fault.
Martin: He died of fear or something like that. It wasn’t his fault other than he was afraid he’d be blamed. He was blamed.
Ted: Eddie, Luckily he wasn’t hurt much. Its
Martin: It’s amazing
Ted: He always had a spot around his nose where it came out.

55:00

Martin: It’s an amazing accident the way it happened. It went through his upper palate and through his nose and out.
Ted: He didn’t take the thing in his mouth, he just pointed it this way where you’d blow into it.
Martin: Oh, yeah
Ted: That’s the lucky thing. If he had shot himself in the mouth…
Martin: And it was amazing he recovered completely because actually it didn’t bother him except for a slight….
Ted: I don’t know how mother … when Mother came home he was bleeding a lot but they took care of that.
Martin: That’s amazing
Ted: That’s the story
Martin: So there were actually six of us after Armon died. I have a very faint recollection…because I was possibly between two and three years old at the time myself. I was possibly three lets say. And I might be able to have that memory about it. I remember a coffin in the house when he died. I remember that. But I don’t have any other recollection at all except a coffin in the house.
Ted: We had the coffin, and he was buried on the mountainside in a cemetery there. Buried in the cemetery over there. Of course in those days the pallbearers carried the coffin all the way to the cemetery.
Martin: For a short distance anyway, there were of course no hearses
Ted: It wasn’t more than two blocks, the entire distance.

---

A couple months ago Ted's son mentioned in an email that he had heard a dramatically different version of the story. His father had told him as a child that when Eddie pulled the trigger, the bullet went through his lip, ricocheted off the wall, and then hit and killed Armon.

Two completely different versions - both originating from the same individual. Everyone in the family alive at that time is now gone, so except for the tape, everything is second-hand. About a week ago in a phone conversation my mother asked Jean's daughter for the version of the story she heard, and she recalled Armon dying from depression/starvation as well. She also recalled being told Armon had hid in a kiln, which is probably the clay oven Ted mentioned earlier in the tape, and may have only been used infrequently or seasonally.

While she corroborates the story on the tape, it doesn't explain the story Ted told his son. I can create some reasons he might have fabricated the more dramatic version. (To reinforce the lesson about how guns are not a toy; Maybe he was uncomfortable with explaining what could be considered suicide.) But these are just hypotheses.

I've created a chronological index to these weekly transcriptions I've been posting since February 16th.

---

If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post below, or in the comments.

Picture-in-Picture

Last week we received a packet from the daughter of Jean (Deutsch) Kamerman - Jean being the eldest sibling of my maternal grandfather, Martin Deutsch. The packet contained many wonderful photographs.

Here's one of them - a photograph of Jean with her mother, Helen. We estimate Jean to be 16 or 17 in the photograph. Jean was born in 1899, so this wasn't taken much after Jean's arrival in America in 1913. (I've tried to do some internet research on Humboldt Studio in Chicago without success.)
Going through the stack of photographs, I stopped at this one and wondered if I was going to be able to enlarge the photograph enough to identify the photograph Jean was holding. And then I smiled as I proceeded to the next photograph in the stack.

There's no question it's the same photograph - and the label says it is my great grandfather, Samuel Deutsch - Helen's husband, and Jean's father. I find it curious why Samuel's photograph is given a central spot in the other photo. Helen did arrive in America first, in 1912, but Jean and the rest of the family arrived in 1913 together. So the photograph wasn't being used to indicate an absent family member. (I have a few family photographs from the 1940s where that was clearly done.)

It occurred to me that what made the photograph special might not have been who was in it, but when and where it was taken. Might it have been taken in Transylvania? Perhaps in a studio in Cluj - the nearest large city to the Deutsch's rural home village of Varalmas?

I compared Samuel in the photograph above to a family photo taken in the early 1920s. He definitely appears to be younger in the photograph above, though I am unable to judge how much younger. (The darn hat obscures how much if any hair Samuel has, though the color of his mustache suggests a number of years.) The youngest boy in the photograph below, Allen, was born in 1914. So the Deutsch family had been in Chicago for about 6-10 years when the photo was taken.


Something else that catches my attention is the changing hairstyles of Helen and Jean. I'm no expert on hair styles, but I suspect the first photograph illustrates a more European style which they had Americanized by the time of the second photograph.

Wolfram|Alpha for Genealogists

It's only been three months since I wrote a post on Wolfram|Alpha, but I received an email from them Thursday announcing their work in preparing the site for the "Fall" -- explaining they released the site in early summer to give themselves time to work out bugs before the expected increased usage by returning students.

I thought I would review my discoveries in May, and see what changes there have been.

The Name Command

The input: "Name Smith" still results in similar demographic information on the surname Smith in the United States. W|A is still clueless about what the input "Surname Smith" is supposed to represent.

As W|A admits:

"Close to half the time that Wolfram|Alpha doesn’t give a result, it’s not because it doesn’t have the necessary knowledge, or can’t do the necessary computation. It’s because it doesn’t understand what’s being asked."

Place names

This may currently be the most useful input for genealogists. It doesn't provide much more than a location on a map, population, elevation, and current weather. Still, if you come across a new town where your ancestors lived, this at least situates the place in your mind.

I am still surprised by which towns are recognized, and which ones aren't.

Recognized

1. Varalmas

Population 2801. This is the Hungarian name for the town my maternal grandfather was born in. The Hungarian name is no longer in use, however, W|A knew it was Almasu, Romania.

2. Truth or Consequences

Population 7,071. W/A assumes you mean the town in New Mexico. W|A has cast information on movies, but not television shows, so it doesn't realize you might mean something else.

3. Kyle, TX

Population 23,905. Understandably, I have to indicate the state for this input, otherwise it assumes I want information on the given name. My maternal great grandmother was born in Kyle.

4. Warka, Poland

Population 11,048. The town from which my Newmark ancestors originate. It is near Warsaw.

Not Recognized

1. Garfield, NM ; Maxwell, TX ; Berclair, TX

All towns my maternal grandmother's family lived in - though the population of these three towns range from 300-600, so it's not surprising that W|A doesn't know them. W|A is familiar with the counties in which these towns reside.

2. Losice, Poland

The town of Losice has a population of 7,252. However, the County of Losice has a population of 32,769. W|A is oblivious to both. A paternal great grandmother was born in Losice.

I actually was unaware how small the rural towns in Texas were until I looked them up via Google after not finding them on W|A.

Dates

My original test input was my birthday: January 21, 1969

Three months ago I was told no notable events occurred on that date - which is acceptable, as my birthday isn't considered notable yet. However, today they list several 'anniversaries' of events. For example the 176th anniversary of the beheading of King Louis XVI of France in 1793, or the 13th anniversary of the birth of actress Geena Davis. This is a good addition.

However, it still tells me that there are no holidays or major observances. It says this for the input: "January 21, 1969 Worldwide" as well. I still have to enter "January 21, 1969 Poland" to discover that it was Grandmother's Day there.

January 21 of every year is Grandmother's Day in Poland. January 22 is Grandfather's Day.

Date Conversion

W|A understands the input: Hebrew date for January 21, 1969
As well as the input: Muslim date for January 21, 1969

I'm not sure what other calendars it recognizes.

Source Citations

Wolfram still cites itself as the source for all of its data. ("Wolfram|Alpha Curated Data 2009") They still provide 'other resources' but with the disclaimer that these other resources aren't necessarily where they got their data. The link they originally provided to request more specifics about the source has been removed. Of course, three months ago the link led to a 404 error page, so no link is arguably better.

It's possible Wolfram|Alpha will never be a source one can cite for scholastic or professional purposes. Wikipedia, despite its naysayers, is arguably a better resource since the original source for content is often cited in the entries.

Amanuensis Monday: A Language Lesson, Johnny Appleseed, and local villages

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue transcribing the tape my grandfather, Martin Deutsch, and his brother, Ted Deutsch, recorded in 1977. The Deutsch family immigrated to America in 1913, and the brothers are recalling their youth in the Transylvanian town of Almasu or Varalmas - depending upon whether you chose the Hungarian or Romanian language.

---

30:00

Martin: I think everybody has difficulty trying to go back to really know of Hungarian beginnings and how we as a family – how did we ever get to Hungary. I have absolutely no idea and I don’t suppose you have any idea
Ted: I don’t have any idea where we came. We never touched that subject even with Dad. He never mentioned
Martin: He couldn’t explain it, I’m satisfied. Now, we do know there were ancestors, however, grandfathers and great grandfathers still in that country.
Ted: Now I remember his father, he used to come and visit us. he lived in a town called Torda TORDA. Torda. In the vicinity around there. It was past Bucium.
Martin: That was maybe 30 miles aways
Ted: And that was where Pa was born
Martin: And maybe 30 miles away from
Ted: I would say 30
Martin: From where we were
Ted: Exactly, I wouldn’t know
Martin: Now, we talked about Cluj and Kolishvar, but we didn’t live in Kolishvar, did we?
Ted: No.
Martin: Now, do you know what the closest town was, there was a town
Ted: There was a town. If you crossed over the mountains that had a railroad, it was called Hunyad, HUYAD, or something like that.
Martin: That means Great-something. HUN. You know…you’ve read about the huns in the dark ages who overran a lot of Europe and actually gave their name to the word Hungary, Hungarian. This word Hunyad sounds like a Great Hun.
Ted: It was bigger than our town, and it had a railroad stop, and if you wanted to go anywhere you had to drive your horse and wagon to Hunyad, where there was a station. And you could take the train to go somewhere.
Martin: Now would that be say 10-15 miles away
Ted: Well, I would say around that, 10, 15. It was a day’s trip. No matter where you went around that it was a day’s trip
Martin: Well, because it was mountainous
Ted: I wouldn’t know. First you had to go way up, then you had to go way down.
Martin: It depends upon how many valleys you had to cross over the mountains.
Ted: We made many trips. We made trips to a place called Margitta, where mother’s parents lived.
Martin: Now that would be MARGITTA
Ted: Something like that. Margitta. That would take 2 days or three days, it was so far away.
Martin: Maybe 50 60 miles away.
Ted: And we would have to camp on the road outside on the street overnight.
Martin: On the road…In the car (laughs) horse and buggy
Ted: On the wagon or on the side of the road. All the sides of the road had apples, we had plenty of apples to eat on the way.
Martin: There were a lot of orchards.
Ted: They weren’t orchards. They actually had apples growing along the road.

35:00

Martin: They didn’t have a Johnny Appleseed. Though Johnny Appleseed for some reason in my mind makes me think of somebody who’s a Romanian. But I don’t know where I got that idea.
Ted: Who was Johnny Appleseed
Martin: Johnny Appleseed you know was famous in this country, I think he was from the state of Iowa. He roamed the state and planted apple seeds. I don’t know what his purpose was, he thought he was doing good for the countryside for the natives to pick apples.
Ted: Maybe he --- somebody was over in Hungary too, because every road I remember they had these white little kilometer signs, so many kilometers to Margitta, and I remember the roads of apple trees along the road.
Martin: Of course some of them were cultivated orchards. Apples. I wonder how they marketed them. Of course, you say there was a railroad.
Ted: In those days of course those apples were – we had a market in our village, they’d bring their stuff to the village and sell it.
Martin: I imagine that was it, there was a public market.
Ted: We had a what they call Pizza…Pizza
Martin: Piza, for Italian, yeah marketplace in Italian I think it’s called…the word Plaza, Piazza
Ted: It’s a place. Piza is a place, that’s all it is. Going to the Piza means you’re going to the marketplace. Right there in front of the marketplace were the city village hall, the church, all the finances
Martin: Banking
Ted: In German. The financiers were not financiers, they were the police. Police department. Finances they would call them. Just like the French word for their police department.
Martin: I’m trying to think of the French word. I know it but I can’t think of it.
Ted: We would call them…they were the guys that collected the revenue, and they would call them finances.
Martin: They were part of the establishment
Ted: They represented not the village but the country…state of Hungary.
Martin: The royalty
Ted: They represented the administration, the crown, that’s right. They represented the crown…Dad, when he was cooking this alcohol, and looking at his permits, collecting
Martin: I just thought of the word – Gendarmes in French
Ted: (pause) We used to call them by the German name...That was in the Pisa
Martin: The marketplace.
Ted: The administration buildings for the village.
Martin: Probably they did have a county seat town which was Kolishvar. They didn’t call it a county, Would you have a word for it.
Ted: The county? Kolosz megye would be the county
Martin: But the word for the organization – I guess it’s similar to a county.
Ted: I wouldn’t know.
Martin: They apparently kept records of births and marriages. And they probably had records of real estate, I’m satisfied of that. They must have had some word.

---

The language lesson is frustrating. The Hungarian word 'megye' means county, so Ted was able to answer my grandfather's question, even though neither may have realized it. I couldn't believe my grandfather interrupted his brother with the French word, Gendarmes, just as Ted was about to speak again about their father's plum whiskey (slivowitz). I did find it interesting that Ted associated tax collecting with the police.

Naturally, I found the discussion of nearby towns more interesting. Huedin is about 7 miles from Varalmas, and is today the nearest train station. My parents visited it on their trip in 2000. It is most likely the train station from which the Deutsch family left in 1912 and 1913.

Turda is about 40 miles from Varalmas, Bucium is about 46 miles away, and Margitta is 47 miles. I know Margitta is the correct town, as we have letters sent from there to my great grandparents after their arrival in America, and it is further confirmed by cousins. I am only guessing at Bucium and Turda, though they are nearby, and fit the pronunciation on the tapes. It's not clear from the tape whether Ted thought my great grandfather was born in Turda or Bucium.

Johnny Appleseed is associated with Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. While there is no Romanian connection I can find, the discussion may illustrate the different ages of my grandfather and his brother when they arrived in America. My grandfather was 6 when they immigrated, and perhaps would have been more 'indoctrinated' with the American mythology they taught in the Chicago primary schools than his brother, who was 11. Of course, my assumption he learned about Appleseed in his youth may be wrong. There was a series of postage stamps released in 1966, two years prior to my grandfather retiring from the postal service.

---

If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post below, or in the comments.

Amanuensis Monday: of pioneers, languages, and song

Amanuensis: A person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another.

I continue transcribing the tape my grandfather, Martin Deutsch, and his brother, Ted Deutsch, recorded in 1977. The Deutsch family immigrated to America in 1913, and the brothers are recalling their youth in the Transylvanian town of Almasu or Varalmas - depending upon whether you chose the Hungarian or Romanian language.

[Anything in brackets are my own notes]

---

20:00

Martin: Well I just wasn’t sure how big the house was, but it did have a fairly good roof I imagine
Ted: It had shingles, and didn’t leak. We never had trouble with leakage.
Martin: It was all one room. We did have a barnyard or something I’m sure to house the horse and buggy.
Ted: Well the horse and wagon was in the barn, and we had goats in the barn
Martin: We did raise chickens, I’m sure of that
Ted: Up in the loft we had hay stored for the animals
Martin: I think we raised chickens
Ted: Chicken coop right next to the barn
Martin: That was a big deal there I think for eggs
Ted: That’s right. Coming back to the room, it was a pretty large room and it had what you would call one room where we kept some utilities you might say. A little room added to the one room where we lived.
Martin: You saved the holiday dishes, the Pesach dishes, I’m satisfied. That had to be saved somewhere. We would take out once in a year.
Ted: It was more of a utility room – we kept things in there. Supplies, like flour and wheat.
Martin: When it came time to go to bed, of course you didn’t have electric lights
Ted: No we had gas lamps.
Martin: Oil lamps of some kind
Ted: We would burn lamps with kerosene.
Martin: But the kids…here you had about six seven kids, not older than 10, 11 years old.
Ted: That’s right, they didn’t all have beds either, they had to sleep down on the floor or alongside the floor.
Martin: Seven in a row.
Ted: That’s right we didn’t have seven beds or things like that. Two or three of us would sleep together in one.
Martin: Cot like things I suppose, we did have some padding of some kind I imagine
Ted: We had some kind of padding, I don’t recall what they were. We slept near the stove where it was warm. And there was one bed in the room for the parents. That’s about it.
Martin: That’s something. That’s really talking about a hard life. Talking about the parents being pioneers. Think about the pioneers in the new country. They didn’t have anything more difficult than that.
Ted: I’ll tell you, we weren’t the only ones living like that, everybody lived about the same way.
[...]
Martin: We occasionally had to struggle with the local population who didn’t have a high regard for Jews.
Ted: Well, there wasn’t very much of that at that time.
Martin: Well, that would go and come, because the background was there.
Ted: During the reign of Franz Joseph there was very little of that
Martin: It quieted down
[...]
25:00
Martin: Yeah, but, were we far away from Romania border
Ted: No, we were right on the border
Martin: Yeah, that’s what I thought too. And the river was probably the border.
Ted: No, that wasn’t he border. The section where we lived there were a lot of Romanians also living there with the Hungarians. They had their own school. They had the Romanian school. The Hungarians had a Hungarian school. And the Jews had a Jewish school.
Martin: Now, I know that we all could speak or spoke Romanian almost just like the native tongue. Because we were right there.
Ted: Well we were neighbors to the Romanians. On one side our neighbors were Romanians and the other side were Hungarians. We had to talk Hungarian and Romanian both.
Martin: And you had to talk Austrian which was German, which resembled Jewish [Yiddish] in any case, fortunately.
Ted: We talked Jewish to Jews in town. There were many Jews there.
Martin: Almost without any difference you might say you talked Hungarian and Romanian as if it were the native language.
Ted: Dad talked Hungarian. He talked Romanian just as fluently.
Martin: I would think so. You probably at one time knew Romanian just as fluently.
Ted: I do remember a few words
Martin: I remember a few words myself, but I sure can’t remember any ones I can repeat, but I think that what stayed in my mind were swear words like dunya bata zo [?] that’s god damn you, isn’t that. And that’s all I can remember. Laughter.
[break in tape]
Martin: You were saying, I’m on the record again, you were saying something about knowing a song you can sing which was half Hungarian and half Romanian. Go ahead and repeat that.
Ted: That’s the way they did when you went into conversation, sometimes you used both terms in a conversation, Hungarian and Romanian. Even songs were written and some of them went like this half Hungarian and half Romanian. For instance this song [link to mp3].

---

My grandfather mentioned frequently to me that his family had to know four languages: Romanian, Hungarian, German and Yiddish. I've tried to use Google Translate to figure out the curse he said. 'Zeu' is one of the Romanian words for 'god', so that might fit. I can't figure out the rest. Perhaps I'll have a reader with some understanding of Romanian who can help. I'd also love to get the half-Romanian/half-Hungarian song Ted sings translated.

My grandfather was six when they left for America - just about the right age to be learning the curse words from the older kids. I find it funny he says that none of the words he remembers he can repeat, and then he goes ahead and repeats it on a tape he meant to be preserved for the family.

My grandfather told me more than once they left Europe for economic, not religious reasons. I suspect my great grandfather, Samuel Deutsch, may have been proud to serve in Franz Joseph's army. However, while Emperor Franz Joseph granted the Austrian Jewish community equality of rights in 1867, the Deutsch family did live on the border of Austria-Hungary and Romania, and there was greater anti-semitism at that time on the Romanian side.

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If you choose to join me in Amanuensis Monday and post your transcriptions, feel free to add a link to your post below, or in the comments.