The first of our Ringel family in America
Four of the five Ringel siblings from Rzeszow relocated to Berlin and the German capital became the center of Ringel family life for sixty years. The fifth sibling, Jakob Schia Ringel, went instead to Hamburg. I figured out his story a year ago, and it led to making a connection with a branch of American Ringel relatives that we had not known of. Someimes in this work there are happy endings.
Jakob Ringel married Rosalie Saffe in Hamburg in February 1890 when he was 29 years old. They had four children in five years (two survived) in Hamburg. Their address during part of this time is in Altona, which is the old city of Hamburg, probably the Jewish district. I don't know how long the family remained in Hamburg but they next show up in a census record in Glasgow, Scotland. That may have been an interim stop on an intended journey to America. Another daughter was born in Glasgow in 1901, and then they emigrated to Montreal, Canada, in 1908, according to a 1911 Canadian census.
The oldest daughter Bertha was 18 years old when she arrived and I don't know what became of her. The two younger daughters, Leah and Bella, went to school in Montreal and both of them married Jewish men in that city. Leah married Hyman Irving Shear in 1922, and they had a dughter Jacqueline there in 1924. In 1926, Hyman came to the U.S. and established the family in Booklyn. Jacqueline married Morton Brody in 1946. They had a son and a daughter, Madalyn, who later married Steven Kates.
Bella marrried a former Austrian, Frederick Glesskann, in 1929 at age 28. This couple came almost immediately to the U.S., because they show up in the 1930 U.S. census in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. They had a daughter Renee in 1934. She may have shortened her name to Gilkan. In 1954, she married Gerald Kissler in New York City. The Kisslers had four children—Sharon, Barry, Glenn and Steven—born between 1957 and 1963.
All of this I figured in a few hours one day in early April 2019. Besides my usual databases and search tools, I benefitted from a public family tree posted on Ancestry. It was a revelation to discover that my mother had two first cousins (once removed) who lived in the New York area at the time she and my grandmother arrived.
But it was what happened next that was even more rewarding.
