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.

Our family during the Nazi years in Berlin
  • February 1933 - September 1942

During the first five years of Hitler's reign of terror, Jewish families of Berlin faced one repression after another.

Ratner family in Albany
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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

Ringel vs. Ruby in World War I
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Herman Ringel and Walter Ruby wore opposing uniforms in the Great War

Rose Ratner's scar—the 1881 pogrom in Rostov
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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
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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.

Two Ringel sisters manage on their own
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The Ringel sisters, Betty Twiasschor and Rosa Schattner, lived with their children in adjacent apartments on Lothringerstraße.