The Ringel side of the family

The Ringel side of the family

• Jul 23, 2018
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Unlike the Wohlgemuth girls, Hermann was a native Berliner, having been born in the city’s Spandauer district in 1885. At the time of Hermann’s birth, his parents Schija Ringel and Feigel Kaufler were not yet married. They officially wed two years later and had two other children after that. 

Schija was very likely also in the garment trade. He had come to make his living in Berlin during the socially mobile 1880s, having been born into a Galician shtetl family from the city of Rzeszów. He hired Feigel Kaufler, a young woman from Kraków, as his housekeeper. Evidently, they fell in love.

Thanks to the fantastic records kept by JewishGen/JRI-Poland and also to the Geni.com Jewish Families of Krakow project, I am able to trace both the Ringel and Kaufler lines back several more generations.

With the Kaufler family, we see that Fiegla Kaufler (1854-1921) was the daughter of Abraham-Moyzesz  Kaufler (b. 1829) and Chaja Esther Gruenberg (b. 1826). We can trace Abraham’s line to his father Schulim (b. 1798), his grandfather Isaak (b. 1771) and all the way to his great-grandfather Nachman Kaufler (b. 1755), who seems to have been the original Kaufler in Kraków. 

For the record, Nachman is nine generations back on my direct family lineage. He started a family that multiplied in Kraków for five generations before Feigel picked up and left to make her future in Berlin.

We know less about the Ringel genealogy in Rzeszów, going just one generation back before Schija Ringel. Schija was born in 1856 to Moses Ringel and Rose Lea née Reichman, the first of five or six other children, two of whom also show up in later German records. A brother Jakob Schia Ringel went to Hamburg and raised a family there, and a sister Basze Sure Ringel came to Berlin and married Josef Herzig in 1894.