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. 

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

People get hooked on genealogical research for many different reasons. Some have heard various accounts of grandparents or great-grandparents leaving the “old country” which seem to be contradictory depending on who is telling the tale and want to find the truth. Others simply want to know more about their family background. And then there is my story. As a child and a teenager, I knew only basic facts about my immediate origins, namely that I was born in Australia; that I had arrived in New Zealand, a short hop across the Tasman Sea, at the age of six months; and that I was an only child. I knew my maternal grandparent’s names and that of my maternal great-grandfather, a well-known figure in Melbourne, Australia. I also learned that the family lived in Lithuania prior to migrating first to England and then to Australia. And that was the sum total of what I knew. I certainly wanted to know more, but I sensed from an early age that my parents would not respond to any questions about our family. I had no contact with any member of the family in Australia except for one visit when I was three years old, and for which there were photos but, of course, I had no memories of that meet-up.
 
In my later teenage years, my need to know more increased together with my detective skills. I searched our home rigorously when my parents were out of the house, looking for any clues.  Nothing of any help was discovered. After that period life got in the way. I had other things to do and was not able to focus on my search. After completing my studies, marrying, and having my first child, I moved to Malaysia and was offered employment as a lecturer at a local university. Again, I had no time to concern myself with knowing more about my family history.
 
Once the internet came into my life, I paid for a subscription to ancestry.com and searched for my name. Nothing. I did not exist in their records. This was exceedingly strange to my mind; after all, I knew my name, my birthdate (1949) and place of birth. Again, I gave up for a while.
 
Then I decided to email the Registrar of Births in the State of Victoria, Australia providing them with the information that I had. Once more, I was told that I did not exist. Pinching myself with frustration proved that I did, in fact, exist so why was there no record of my birth?
 
In January 2016, at which point of time I was already a retiree, I received an email from an unknown person living in Melbourne who told me that she was my half-sister and that I had two other siblings, the eldest of whom had already passed away. She had discovered my email address on a website of an association of which I was a committee member. Admittedly, I could not help but wonder whether this message was a scam and yet the facts she provided seemed to fit the little I knew. We emailed back and forth and slowly I began to understand the secrets my parents had been keeping all this time. My first attempts at researching the basic data on my family was aided by the wonderful resource that is https://trove.nla.gov.au/search/. This is an effort to digitize nearly all the Australian newspapers dating back to the 1840s! It provides free access to a wealth of information, including at least four newspapers published by the Jewish community in Australia in the late 19th and throughout the 20th century. Australian historians are indeed fortunate to have this information available. One article published in a local newspaper in mid-1950 explained why my parents had kept family information to themselves and why we had left Australia when I was so young. They had created a scandal significant enough to warrant publicity. My very existence was the outcome of that scandal which had been carefully kept from me throughout my parents’ lives. The article not only described the scandal, it also provided my father’s surname – the one he was born with and which he had changed upon arrival in New Zealand.
 
By early 2018, I had a clearer picture of “who I was”. Armed with my new knowledge, I once again emailed the Victoria Registrar of Births. This time the result was immediate. Yes! They could provide a copy of my birth certificate which I had never sighted, providing I paid a small fee. I duly paid, and within less than two weeks, for the very first time in my 69 years, I held a hard-copy of my birth certificate in my hands, it having been posted to me immediately. This was an extremely emotional moment. I chose not to tell my mother, aged 98, still alive in New Zealand, that at long last I knew her secret. Nothing good would have come out of doing so. Indeed, she passed away some 12 months later.
 
From 2018 onwards, I became fanatical in my genealogy research (see the OCJGS Blog Post November 2023 and March 2024). In these preliminary forays into genealogy, I was quite ignorant. It took me a while to understand that different countries had different types of records relevant when looking for family. For example, the United States (USA), the United Kingdom (UK) and Canada all conduct a census every decade and the information on individuals in that census can be read online through a number of paid genealogy sites and one free site. However, for obvious reasons, I was more interested in records from Australia and to a lesser extent New Zealand. Both of these countries conduct regular censuses but, sadly, information on individuals is not made public. The census is analysed by the authorities in the two countries to examine statistical trends such as the number of persons in different age groups, the ratio of males to females and so on. While this data may be important for economic and social planning, it is of zero use for genealogy. Hence, the reliance on the digitized newspapers mentioned above which are fully searchable by name as well as other key words via Trove in Australia and a site named Papers Past in New Zealand. The same issue applies in Malaysia – a census is held on a regular basis but no information about individuals is divulged; neither are there any digitized newspapers. As a result, trying to develop a family tree for my husband’s family has met with failure, although a relative has done better on one side of his family by interviewing the “elders” who still have memories of who married who as well as the names and number of their children. He has also conducted research in a number of state archives which revealed the work history of several family members who worked for the Royal Palace in their state. For people with Eastern European backgrounds sites such as JewishGen, JRI Poland and LitvakSIG are the go-to sources of information with metrical records dating back to the early 19th century. However, finding one’s family in these records tends to be a matter of luck. With wars and pogroms and other disasters many of the records did not survive. I was able to trace my great-grandfather’s family back to 1775. Most fascinating of all was the revision list (a form of census) which showed that my great-grandfather’s grandfather and two of the latter’s brothers had been exiled to Siberia in 1849. I will probably never know why they were exiled, although my general reading suggests that most exile orders at that time were either because the persons concerned were found to be involved in illegal activities such as smuggling or because of political activities.
 
In early 2024, after I determined that the well-known genealogy sites had no more helpful information relating to my family, I discovered, for the first time Facebook. I was well aware of its existence but was not in the least bit interested in any social media site as I associated them with misinformation and shock-seeking exhibitionists. To my surprise, I found that there are many groups active on the website which specialize in Jewish history and genealogy. There are groups with a huge membership who willingly help solve puzzles and give answers to specific questions, including, most commonly, the reading of Hebrew names on gravestones or assisting to find records which the person posting has not been able to discover. Such groups include Tracing the Tribe, and sites which focus on particular areas of the world; for example: The Jewish East End of London, Jewish Genealogy in Lativa and Lithuania, and the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain. Joining these groups and reading the posts regularly taught me a great deal. One or two instances of my learning will suffice: Many records state where an individual was born. But I noted that researchers posting questions were often confused because one record they had found about one of their ancestors might state “Russia” and another “Lithuania” as the place of birth, thus they wanted to know which was correct. Without a knowledge of history, a person might not understand that both were correct at different times. A person might have said that they were born in Russia in 1890 and yet on naturalization papers in 1920 they stated they were born in Lithuania. Their descendants may not have realized that Lithuania was in the Pale of Settlement established within the Russian Empire in 1791, and that it only became independent of Russia in 1919 (and lost that independence once again after WWII when it became part of the USSR). Also from Facebook, I found that many people were disturbed by the different years of birth given on different documents of the same ancestor. This sometimes led them to believe that they were studying the documents of two different people with the same name. While that is certainly possible, it is clear that back in the 19th century Jews living in Eastern Europe did not know their exact year of birth, let alone the month and day. We find this more than a little odd today. Where I live, (and in many other countries too), all persons are issued with an identity card, first as a child, and later, at the age of 12, changing to an adult card. This document is necessary for all important transactions including registering for school, opening a bank account, applying for a passport or driving license and so on, and even registering when requiring the services of a hospital or private medical clinic. There is no room for guessing at birthdates.
 
If a researcher has the funds and time available, another source of information is the country of origin of his ancestors. I had long wanted to go to Lithuania and “walk in the footsteps of my great-grandparents and their families”. A previous plan had come to nothing because it was made during the era when Lithuania was still part of the USSR and visas were difficult to get, especially as there was no consular office of the USSR in Malaysia. I was informed that to get a visa I would have to fly to London in the UK and apply there. I was also told that the visa might or might not be granted. I was not willing to take the risk of taking an expensive 13-hour non-stop flight and yet fail to get a visa. By 2022, however, I was ready to do whatever it took to get to Lithuania. My eldest son was keen to accompany me, visas were not necessary, and we were roaring to go. Still, a major barrier had to be overcome. The only date that my son was willing to go was August 2022, as he was registered to participate in a marathon 5-day bicycle event, London-Edinburgh-London in that month and we were to fly to Vilnius immediately after and take a tour to Telsiai, the hometown of my great-grandparents. The barrier being the Covid virus. Entry into Lithuania by non-citizens was permitted a month or so before our departure date so no issue there, but we still had to pass a medical test three days before our flight to prove we were not suffering from the virus. Much to my great relief, we were clear and were able to leave on schedule.
 
When researching ancestors, it is essential to know the name of their hometown or shtetl. Luckily, I knew my family were from Telsiai from two records. In 1930, twenty years after arriving in Australia, my great-grandfather had applied to be naturalized, and he clearly stated in the required documentation that his birthplace was Telz (or Telsiai as it is now called). His younger brother who migrated to Canada in 1903 and then the United States in 1919, also wrote Telsiai (spelled Telz) in his naturalization application. The tour of Lithuania chosen by my son and myself only permitted us a visit to Telsiai for one half day, but this was better than nothing. We managed to visit the Old Jewish Cemetery in the town as well as the area which had been the market and central point of Jewish life there in the 19th century. 

​Of course, there was nothing much to see that would have existed in the 1890s when my family left Telsiai but it was exhilarating to be there nevertheless. The most significant landmark associated with Telsiai is the famous Yeshiva and this has been beautifully refurbished and is now a community centre.
 
My quest to determine who I am and where I came from continues but at a more leisurely pace now. I am focusing more on the history of Jewish migration and the struggles faced by people who migrated to adapt to their new countries, just as I did for a short period after I came to Malaysia. I do not expect to find much more information about specific ancestors, although I would be very happy if I did.

About the Author:
 
Marilyn was born in Australia, raised in New Zealand, and has lived in Malaysia for over 50 years. Since retiring from teaching at the largest university in the country, she spends all her spare time researching her family history. Marilyn, using the professional name of Maimunah, is the author of a number of books relating to industrial relations, employment law and human resource management. Her latest book, published in 2023, is the story of her ancestors, entitled Fears, Tears, Secrets & Successes, published by i2i Publishing UK.

Getting basic information about an individual or family from online websites is a good place to start any research. Some are free and others require a subscription. I have found that beyond these sites, there are some wonderful Facebook groups whose members help others find their ancestors. Some tend to specialize in certain countries but there are also those which are international. The members are outstanding in the help they provide on a wide variety of matters, including translations, ideas on where to source information, discussions on common practices in Eastern Europe and elsewhere. There are many lively debates on the more controversial topics which are enlightening. As I have family in Australia, Canada, England and the United States, I have joined several of these groups and am amazed how members go beyond the call of duty in assisting those who post queries. Some of those who respond are recognized as experts in their respective fields and sit on the councils of genealogical societies and other organizations such as LitvakSIG and JewishGen.

Collecting basic records to provide information such as place and date of birth, marriage, death and so on is a great start to building a family tree. But, if that is all you do, then I would describe you as being akin to a stamp collector whereby you are happy to see the collection get bigger and bigger with more and more albums neatly labelled but you know little or nothing about the background to the stamps in the albums. What was the event being celebrated on the face of the stamp? Who was the person on the stamp – why was he so famous that his face is printed on a stamp and so on. Similarly, in researching our ancestors we need to understand what was happening when a great-grandfather left Poland, or Prussia or Belarus at the time he migrated. Why did he leave? Was the journey easy or tough? What reception did he receive in his new home? Was he welcomed or did he find more of the same antisemitic behavior that he thought he had left behind? There are so many questions that need to be explored. I discovered that my great-grandfather, who left Lithuania in 1890-91, had a grandfather and two great-uncles all of whom were exiled to Siberia in 1849 and for whom no information is available after that date. Why were they exiled? Where were they sent in Siberia? What did they do in Siberia? So many questions which will probably never be answered satisfactorily. Perhaps one day, some new information or record will become available to provide answers.