Intermarriage with the Jacobi family from Neuteich

Intermarriage with the Jacobi family from Neuteich

• Feb 15, 2024
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I've suspected for a while that there was some intermarriage in the Paechter lineage connected with their Jacoby relations. Now I raise the possibility that Meyer Paechter and his wife Emilie Jacoby were not only first cousins, but double first cousins. 

That would be so if Meyer's father was the brother of Emilie's mother, and Meyer's mother was the sister of Emilie's father. In other words, two pairs of siblings married and then their children also married. Sounds like it could be a genetic nightmare, but Meyer and Emilie had five children with no birth defects we know about. 

As we know by now, Meyer Paechter's parents were Julius Paechter and Rahel Jacoby Paechter. Emilie Jacoby's parents are uncertain, but I believe that Rahel Jacoby is probably her aunt or cousin once removed. That would make Meyer and Emilie first or second cousins. But imagine that Julius had a sister who married Rahel's brother. That would make them double cousins. 

What do we know about the Jacoby family in Tiegenhof? Besides marrying into the Paechter family, I find no signs of them there. But there is a very strong presence of Jacobys in the next town up the river, now called Nowy Staw but known as Neuteich in the Prussian days.

Neuteich is the much older town in the Vistula lowlands, having been founded by the Teutonic Knights in the 14th century. Tiegenhof was first settled in the 16th century and was annexed into Prussia in 1772 in the first partition of Poland. By the 1800s, Tiegenhof began to eclipse Neuteich as a commercial center. 

The 1812 West Prussian Citizenship and NALDEX name adoption databases reveal that three brothers from Neuteich—Isaac, Hirsch and Abraham, the sons of Salomon—adopted the surname Jacobi in 1814. JewishGen's Family Tree of the Jewish People lists 11 members of the Iassc Salomon Jacobi family, including a Moritz Jacobi, whom we learn from Googling, was the owner of the brewery and malthouse in Neuteich. 

Thus, the Jacobis were a prominent Jewish family in Neuteich and the Paechters were a prominent Jewish family 10 miles away in Tiegenhof. It seems natural that there might have been marriage matches made between these families two or three times across the middle decades of the 1800s.

Julius Paechter married Rahel Jacobi in about 1837. Their third child, Meyer was born in 1845. He married Emilie Jacobi in about 1868. Were Emilie's parents siblings of Meyer's parents? We don't know but it is an intriguing possibility.