The Paechter store succession reconsidered
Reviewing Paechter vital records for yesterday’s post has me rethinking some earlier information about which brother took over the management of the Paechter department store in 1891 after Meyer’s death.
We have been relying on the report of Otto Stobbe, the descendant of a famous Tiegenhof family, based on his recollections of distant events—the 1898 anti-Semitic attacks on the Paechter store.
Stobbe is right about Meyer dying in 1891. He died in Danzig, probably on business or to visit his sister Rosa Kleemann. Stobbe writes that Meyer’s brother Isaak then took over the running of the store.
The problem with this is that Isaak had previously moved to the fairly distant town of Crossen-on-Oder and was raising his family there. Based on the Stobbe information, I concluded that Isaak moved his family back from Crossen to Tiegenhif in that year.
But there is a further problem: Isaak himself passed away in 1896, not in Tiegenhof but in Crossen. Who then was running the store two years later when the arsons began? And made the decision to close the store for good in 1898 or ‘99?
The obvious answer is Salomon Paechter, whom we wrote about yesterday. I kept looking for evidence that he left Tiegenhof for Berlin or other city any time after the 1880s, but he doesn’t show up in any records in Berlin until 1913. On the other hand, his daughter’s children were born in Tiegenhof in 1898 and 1902.
I now think that Salomon probably was still in Tiegenhof to witness the birth of his grandchildren. If so, he would be the one Paechter brother still alive and living in Tiegenhof at the time of the arsons.
As a footnote, Salomon’s occupation is given in two of the Berlin documents as “privatier” and “rentier,” two words for someone living on investments. If Salomon was the primary store owner and was the one who shut down the business after 1898, he might have amassed considerable wealth by the time of his move to Berlin.
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