The progenitor of the Rabinowitz/Ruby/Robbins family in America descended from a branch of the Yesersky family believed to be related to the famous Kovno Rav, Isaac Elchanon Spektor. He raised a large family in New York City while trying to maintain Orthodox traditions
The founder of our Ratner family in America was born Abraham Bloch in Minsk. He came to Rostov, where he married Rose Tulbowitz. He avoided military conscription by changing his name and sailing for America with his wife and her mother. After a short time in New York City, the Ratners settled in Albany, where Abe ran a bottling business and fathered a large family.
One of the benefits of publicly sharing the results of my research the way I do on this blog is that occasionally interested parties will find the information and then get in touch with me.
Such was the case a month ago, when I received an email from Dr. Michael M. Topp, a professor of history at the University of Texas El Paso. He had read my decade-old old blog reports about our grandfather's history at the American Spirits Co. and about the various characters involved in the related story about Carioca Rum.
There were two significant breakthroughs in the last 24 hours. It may take me a while to write them up fully, so I will just give the summaries for now.
The collection of West Prussian address books linked in the last post includes a substantial number of directories from the city of Elbing, 39 years of them between 1820 and 1942. We know that our Wohlgemuth family lived there in the late 1890s. Isaac was listed as a mill owner living in Elbing on his 1898 marriage record. Our grandmother, Elly Wohlgemuth Ringel, was born in Elbing in July 1900.
Rodney Down Under came through again. After I showed him the marriage record for Rosalie Paechter and Jacob Kleemann, showing her father as Julius, Rodney took a look himself in one of his go-to resources, a collection of address books for Danzig and selected other towns in West Prussia. Listings of Tiegenhof are available for the year of 1858, and only that year. On the second page of Tiegenhof addresses was the listing you see above for Julius Paechter.
I had expected to find the Wohlgemuth's mill building near to the Elbing River that flows north-sourth on the west side of the city. Instead the address books placed them inland to the east of the center city.
I looked for a period street map that might let me identify the location of Mühlendamm 8/9. The image above is from 1911 and gave just enough clues to point to the answer.