Expect and Accept the Unexpected!

In previous blogs I have explained how I got hooked on genealogy research. I have discovered a great deal about my immediate family, but as I am thoroughly addicted to ferreting out as much information as possible, I have continued to examine records on anyone who might be related, in particular to my great-grandmother, Annie Marleib Litwin who migrated at the age of 14 with her parents and siblings from Lithuania, or the Russian Empire as it was then, to London, England and on to Australia in 1911. I chose to make an extensive study of the Marleib family partly because the surname is not particularly common. On Jewishgen.org the name is written as Marlib and all the related family members came from Varniai, a small town or shtetl in the Telsiai guberniya with the current population being only 1,000. Annie’s father was born in 1850 and her grandfather around 1810. While I have the name of her grandfather’s father, there is no information available about him other than his death in 1872. These basic facts were found in Litvaksig.org records.
Over the past two years, I succeeded in tracking the lives of Annie’s siblings. Annie was the eldest and the first to marry – in 1894, just three years after arriving in London. One by one, between 1902 and 1911, the siblings left England and moved to Canada, some in later life, moving to the USA. The whereabouts of Annie’s youngest sister, Sarah, required assistance which was provided by some wonderful genealogists who showed me that one should not be shy to collaborate when a puzzle emerges. An article entitled “Searching for Sarah” which I wrote about this sister was published in Shem Tov, the newsletter of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Toronto in March 2024.
Reading relevant Facebook groups’ which focus on Jewish genealogy, I notice that members’ requests for information, presumably from those who live today in the USA, assume that the United Kingdom has immigration records and ship’s manifests similar to those kept by the US officials which are so helpful in determining when a person migrated, or at least when they arrived, the port at which they arrived, the persons they travelled with and most importantly of all the place of their last residence in Europe. Sadly, such records were not kept in the United Kingdom in the late 19th and early 20th century – the period when many of our ancestors were migrating. So how do we ascertain when they arrived in England? In the case of my Marleib family, I checked the 1891 UK census carefully. They were not listed in that census. They were however all in the 1901 census. A 10-year gap is too wide to be useful. I knew however that my great-grandmother was married in 1894 in London and I had purchased a copy of her marriage certificate. This helped close the gap. I also found a brief article, carried in several London-based newspapers, dated December 1893 which described how Max Marleib, Annie’s younger brother, aged 14 at the time, got into trouble with the law when he tried to cheat a market customer of her change after selling her some goods. I then stopped trying to find out exactly when the family arrived in the UK – it was after the 1891 census and before December 1893. Max’s story did not end well. Within a few years, he had joined a local regiment and was sent to fight in the Boer War in South Africa. He survived this messy episode, and continued to live in South Africa after his regiment was disbanded in 1902 until the outbreak of World War One, when he shipped to Canada, where his younger brothers were living, and joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps using the name Max Martin. He was killed at the Battle for Vimy Ridge in France, in April 1917.
Over the past two years, I succeeded in tracking the lives of Annie’s siblings. Annie was the eldest and the first to marry – in 1894, just three years after arriving in London. One by one, between 1902 and 1911, the siblings left England and moved to Canada, some in later life, moving to the USA. The whereabouts of Annie’s youngest sister, Sarah, required assistance which was provided by some wonderful genealogists who showed me that one should not be shy to collaborate when a puzzle emerges. An article entitled “Searching for Sarah” which I wrote about this sister was published in Shem Tov, the newsletter of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Toronto in March 2024.
Reading relevant Facebook groups’ which focus on Jewish genealogy, I notice that members’ requests for information, presumably from those who live today in the USA, assume that the United Kingdom has immigration records and ship’s manifests similar to those kept by the US officials which are so helpful in determining when a person migrated, or at least when they arrived, the port at which they arrived, the persons they travelled with and most importantly of all the place of their last residence in Europe. Sadly, such records were not kept in the United Kingdom in the late 19th and early 20th century – the period when many of our ancestors were migrating. So how do we ascertain when they arrived in England? In the case of my Marleib family, I checked the 1891 UK census carefully. They were not listed in that census. They were however all in the 1901 census. A 10-year gap is too wide to be useful. I knew however that my great-grandmother was married in 1894 in London and I had purchased a copy of her marriage certificate. This helped close the gap. I also found a brief article, carried in several London-based newspapers, dated December 1893 which described how Max Marleib, Annie’s younger brother, aged 14 at the time, got into trouble with the law when he tried to cheat a market customer of her change after selling her some goods. I then stopped trying to find out exactly when the family arrived in the UK – it was after the 1891 census and before December 1893. Max’s story did not end well. Within a few years, he had joined a local regiment and was sent to fight in the Boer War in South Africa. He survived this messy episode, and continued to live in South Africa after his regiment was disbanded in 1902 until the outbreak of World War One, when he shipped to Canada, where his younger brothers were living, and joined the Canadian Army Medical Corps using the name Max Martin. He was killed at the Battle for Vimy Ridge in France, in April 1917.

While it is true that people with the name Marleib are not many, I also kept in mind the multiple variations of the name either used by the individuals themselves, typically based on spelling the name how it sounds, or as transcribed by the wonderful individuals who prepare migration, census, birth, marriage and death records and so on for us to read. Hence, Marleib was also Marlieb, Marlib, Marlipp and Marleb, and who knows what other possibilities. Most of my Marleib family did not change their surname, except for two branches which became Marlows and Martins respectively. Attempting to match my ancestors with those listed in Litvaksig.org was tricky until it dawned on me that Annie Marleib Letwin, my great-grandmother, was not an Annie at the time of her birth. Her parents named her Gena Dushe! Where did this name come from? Who would have dreamed that Gena Dushe would become Annie in later life? This was not a Yiddish or Hebrew name with which I was familiar. I still do not know its origins but it is clear that she was named for her late grandmother, Dushe (who died in 1868), as was the custom at the time in Eastern Europe. This finding made me confident that another Dushe, born in exactly the same year, 1877, was my great-grandmother’s first cousin.
Possibly, because of name changes, some families become “ghosts”. My great-grandmother’s cousins seem to be an example of this phenomena. I believe that they may have left the Russian Empire (Lithuania now) at roughly the same time my great-grandmother, her parents and younger siblings left. The cousins may have arrived in the USA while the latter went to the United Kingdom (and later to Australia). However, the great-granduncle, his wife and children then totally disappear from the records. I have found absolutely nothing about where they went in the United States or what happened to them. I suspect that both their first names and their surnames may have changed. If I am right, finding them would take a miracle.
An example of the unexpected which I experienced when researching potential Marleibs, wherever they might be, relates to a Jacob Marleib, probably not a close relative of mine, who arrived in New York in 1902. I had spent weeks of intensive searching looking at his family, partly because a fellow-researcher was also interested in him and so we collaborated to find out what we could. He was supposed to have been met at Ellis Island by his sister Katy according to the information on his arrival documents, so we carried out a search for Katy and hit brick walls everywhere we went. We had census records for her and her husband as well as the marriage record of their only daughter. But was Katy the sister of Jacob Marleib, who had become Jacob Marble? I was very frustrated at our lack of results and decided to post on one of the well-known Jewish genealogy Facebook groups, Tracing the Tribe. What one gentleman found relating to “Katy” was a huge surprise. She had changed her given name from one name to another, although her previous name, Rose, was a popular one at the time. What was completely beyond my wildest reckoning was that her husband had also changed both his given and surnames. No wonder we could not find him or her and had come to a dead stop with our research!
A lot of well-meaning advice from genealogical experts is not always as helpful as it is meant to be. For instance, I have often read that when examining documents found on the various sites, whether subscription or free, one should scroll down to check for more information. Now to you SYTs (sweet young things) out there, reading this blog, this makes perfect sense. But to people like me, born in a different era, the suggestion was not very useful at first. I am not going to tell you how old I am, but I can vividly remember the days when my husband, working in the Mathematics and Computing Department of the same university in which I was teaching, invited me to come and visit the mainframe computer of which the university was very proud. I duly stood at the door of the huge room which housed an equally huge blinking, clanking, hissing machine which he said was a computer. I said, “very nice” and quietly returned to my faculty shaking my head at such a waste of space and money! A few years later, both of us were transferred to a branch of the university which had sufficient funds to provide each lecturers’ office (two to a room) with a personal computer. My younger room-mate, newly returned from studying in the USA seemed to be comfortable using it, but I had no such knowledge. Furthermore, as one of the most senior lecturers on the campus, I had no intention of letting my junior colleagues know of my ignorance. In the next semester break, I discovered that a colleague was organizing computer skills classes for the typists, secretaries and other administrative assistants on campus. I requested permission from the colleague to “sit in” on his classes purportedly so that I could observe his training techniques. This request was not likely to be rejected; after all I was teaching human resource management and training was a subset of this subject. The rest is history. I learned to use a personal computer and never looked back. Even so, I had not fully understood the idea of “scrolling down”. One weekend, a month or so ago, several of the large subscription genealogy sites gave free access to some or all of their content. I happily checked out a series of census and other records and suddenly realized that there were occasions when the person in the census record that I was interested in was on the very last two lines of a page of a census, together with his wife but no children were listed. I thought this odd, as I knew that they had young children at that point of time. The census record I was examining was in the centre of the screen and at the bottom edge of the same screen were a number of thumbnails. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the little thumbnail on the right of the one I was looking at and Yes! There, on the first three lines, were the “missing” children. Thus, I discovered that scrolling down can mean scrolling right or left on thumbnails. The same rule applies to applications for naturalization whereby while only one page will show on the screen at a time, there may be thumbnails for the other pages.
I learned that genealogical research can be an emotional rollercoaster. Sometimes, you just have to put in time and effort and cross your fingers that you will find what you are looking for. If you do, the satisfaction is immense and if you do not, stay positive, one day you may solve the puzzle or find the person of interest and the relevant documents. I was looking desperately for a potential family member but after an exhausting search, I had to face the reality that I might never find the documents I needed. The gentleman in question was a Hyman Kaplan living in Chicago. When I first set out to find him, I was confident that his records would pop up very speedily. What I was not aware of was the sheer number of Hyman Kaplans living in Chicago in the same time period – literally dozens, if not hundreds! I was looking for his naturalization documents and must have opened every single one available in every genealogy site to which I had access. Eventually, I found the document I wanted. What a relief! Celebration was called for, or at least a cup of tea and a well-deserved break. Other times, frustration is the outcome, and I need to accept that the document I want to prove or disprove a family relationship may no longer exist.
So, the moral of today’s stories – Don’t give up on your genealogy research. Stay calm and keep on looking.
Post-script: If anyone knows people with a possible relationship to any person with the surname Marleib, please contact me. The OCJGS will provide you with my email
Possibly, because of name changes, some families become “ghosts”. My great-grandmother’s cousins seem to be an example of this phenomena. I believe that they may have left the Russian Empire (Lithuania now) at roughly the same time my great-grandmother, her parents and younger siblings left. The cousins may have arrived in the USA while the latter went to the United Kingdom (and later to Australia). However, the great-granduncle, his wife and children then totally disappear from the records. I have found absolutely nothing about where they went in the United States or what happened to them. I suspect that both their first names and their surnames may have changed. If I am right, finding them would take a miracle.
An example of the unexpected which I experienced when researching potential Marleibs, wherever they might be, relates to a Jacob Marleib, probably not a close relative of mine, who arrived in New York in 1902. I had spent weeks of intensive searching looking at his family, partly because a fellow-researcher was also interested in him and so we collaborated to find out what we could. He was supposed to have been met at Ellis Island by his sister Katy according to the information on his arrival documents, so we carried out a search for Katy and hit brick walls everywhere we went. We had census records for her and her husband as well as the marriage record of their only daughter. But was Katy the sister of Jacob Marleib, who had become Jacob Marble? I was very frustrated at our lack of results and decided to post on one of the well-known Jewish genealogy Facebook groups, Tracing the Tribe. What one gentleman found relating to “Katy” was a huge surprise. She had changed her given name from one name to another, although her previous name, Rose, was a popular one at the time. What was completely beyond my wildest reckoning was that her husband had also changed both his given and surnames. No wonder we could not find him or her and had come to a dead stop with our research!
A lot of well-meaning advice from genealogical experts is not always as helpful as it is meant to be. For instance, I have often read that when examining documents found on the various sites, whether subscription or free, one should scroll down to check for more information. Now to you SYTs (sweet young things) out there, reading this blog, this makes perfect sense. But to people like me, born in a different era, the suggestion was not very useful at first. I am not going to tell you how old I am, but I can vividly remember the days when my husband, working in the Mathematics and Computing Department of the same university in which I was teaching, invited me to come and visit the mainframe computer of which the university was very proud. I duly stood at the door of the huge room which housed an equally huge blinking, clanking, hissing machine which he said was a computer. I said, “very nice” and quietly returned to my faculty shaking my head at such a waste of space and money! A few years later, both of us were transferred to a branch of the university which had sufficient funds to provide each lecturers’ office (two to a room) with a personal computer. My younger room-mate, newly returned from studying in the USA seemed to be comfortable using it, but I had no such knowledge. Furthermore, as one of the most senior lecturers on the campus, I had no intention of letting my junior colleagues know of my ignorance. In the next semester break, I discovered that a colleague was organizing computer skills classes for the typists, secretaries and other administrative assistants on campus. I requested permission from the colleague to “sit in” on his classes purportedly so that I could observe his training techniques. This request was not likely to be rejected; after all I was teaching human resource management and training was a subset of this subject. The rest is history. I learned to use a personal computer and never looked back. Even so, I had not fully understood the idea of “scrolling down”. One weekend, a month or so ago, several of the large subscription genealogy sites gave free access to some or all of their content. I happily checked out a series of census and other records and suddenly realized that there were occasions when the person in the census record that I was interested in was on the very last two lines of a page of a census, together with his wife but no children were listed. I thought this odd, as I knew that they had young children at that point of time. The census record I was examining was in the centre of the screen and at the bottom edge of the same screen were a number of thumbnails. Out of curiosity, I clicked on the little thumbnail on the right of the one I was looking at and Yes! There, on the first three lines, were the “missing” children. Thus, I discovered that scrolling down can mean scrolling right or left on thumbnails. The same rule applies to applications for naturalization whereby while only one page will show on the screen at a time, there may be thumbnails for the other pages.
I learned that genealogical research can be an emotional rollercoaster. Sometimes, you just have to put in time and effort and cross your fingers that you will find what you are looking for. If you do, the satisfaction is immense and if you do not, stay positive, one day you may solve the puzzle or find the person of interest and the relevant documents. I was looking desperately for a potential family member but after an exhausting search, I had to face the reality that I might never find the documents I needed. The gentleman in question was a Hyman Kaplan living in Chicago. When I first set out to find him, I was confident that his records would pop up very speedily. What I was not aware of was the sheer number of Hyman Kaplans living in Chicago in the same time period – literally dozens, if not hundreds! I was looking for his naturalization documents and must have opened every single one available in every genealogy site to which I had access. Eventually, I found the document I wanted. What a relief! Celebration was called for, or at least a cup of tea and a well-deserved break. Other times, frustration is the outcome, and I need to accept that the document I want to prove or disprove a family relationship may no longer exist.
So, the moral of today’s stories – Don’t give up on your genealogy research. Stay calm and keep on looking.
Post-script: If anyone knows people with a possible relationship to any person with the surname Marleib, please contact me. The OCJGS will provide you with my email