Family Story Finder

The sweep of family history across the generations

From Rezitsa to Rostov
  • 1875 - 1892

Sholom and Sophie Tulbowitz left their ancestral town in the 1870s to settle for 20 years in Russia near Rostov-on-Don.

Internment on the Isle of Man
  • February 1940 - October 1940

German refugees in the UK, even Jews like Gerhart Feidt, were deemed potential enemy aliens

Last Christmas in Berlin
  • -

In December 1937, the Feidt and Lewi family members share a last holiday together

Ratner family in Albany
  • -

Rearing eight children in Albany’s Third Ward

Ratner family passage to America
  • July 1890 -

Abe Blokh became Abe Ratner to avoid conscription and get out of Russia. With his young wife and her mother, they voyaged from Bremen to Leeds to New York

Rosa’s fateful choice
  • 1936 - 1940

Rosa Feidt was the only Lewi sibling who got out, to her everlasting remorse

Rose Ratner's scar—the 1881 pogrom in Rostov
  • -

The Tulbowitz tavern in Novocherkassk was overrun by Cossacks during the Rostov pogrom of 1881

Shtetl life in Russian Rezhitsa
  • 1790 - 1875

Today it is Rezekne in Latvia. In the 19th century, it was the village in Vitebsk Province where our Tulbowitz clan lived in the old Yiddish way

Tulbowitz in the USSR—an alternative history
  • -

If Sholom Tulbowitz had gone to Dvinsk instead of Rostov, as his cousin did, his Ratner descendants might have grown up in Perm instead of Albany.