Data from England & Wales, Civil Registration Marriage Index
The surprising Ringel marriage in jolly old England
The Twiasschor story is fairly convoluted, and this will be part one.
In the Ringel's neighborhood, two blocks away on the other side of Lothringer, lived a Twiasschor family at Zehdenicker Str. 24/25. There was a son Pinkas Twiasschor and younger daughter called Dina though her given name was Diana. Betty Ringel was friendly with the two of them.
The Twiasschor family had settled in Berlin Mitte near the bustling Scheunenveirtel district in 1897, having come from Kolomea in eastern Galicia in the same manner as the Ringels had come to Berlin from Rzeszow in Galicia a decade earlier..
It is a funny name, Twiasschor, but the 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia tells us it goes back centuries to a Jew named Osias Tebu'at-Shor. The Shors were a rabbinical dynasty in southern Poland. In the 1600s, Ephraim Solomon Schor published his scholarly work, Tebu'ot Shor. Some of the family became Christianized in the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries, taking the name of Wolowski.
"Jewish members of the family bearing the name Twiaschor and Christian members of the name of Wolowski are still living in Brody and Lemberg," according to the Encyclopedia.
The Twiasschor family on Zehdenicker were not the only Twiasschors in Berlin. There was another Twiasschor family involved in the furniture business in the south of the city, which I am pretty sure was related to Pinkas and Dina's branch.
I set all this up because in March 1911, something quite surprising happened. Two marriages involving the Twiasschor siblings were recorded in a district of London, England, called St. George in the East. Yes, London in the United Kingdom. Dina Twiasschor wed another Berliner named Israel Goldstein, and her brother Pinkas Twiasschor married our great aunt, Pessel (Betty) Ringel. English marriage records are recorded differently than in other locales. But here is a view that shows all four names in one view.
What the heck were they doing in London? Well, they were getting married. But why there? They all returned to Berlin after tying the knot and took up married life in their home town. They had no intention the emigrate from Germany, not in 1911. But they married in London.
I have not yet come up with a satisfactory explanation. This was before the days of destination weddings. There would not seem to be any reason they could not be legally wed in Germany. We will have to let this remain a mystery for now and go on to the rest of their lives.
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