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Sometime in the middle of
1996 I was in the Morristown County Library in New Jersey, which has a large
amount of genealogical material. They had a few books about old Jewish shtetls
and my interest was piqued. Sure enough, I found entries on Polaniec and
Staszow (the current-day Polish names) and also Varkovitchi, now in the
Ukraine, where my mother’s parents came from. It was the first time I had ever
actually seen these names in print anywhere. The places were real! I Xeroxed
what little information I came across that day. Little did I know then that I
had been bitten by a very persistent and time-consuming bug called the Genealogy
Bug. My next discovery, about a year later, was the JewishGen website. I realized then that there were thousands of Jews like myself who were interested in finding out about their ancestral families and towns. I was able to post some inquiries, and get some responses, about the towns and names I was interested in. Through the contacts I made, I found out that the Mormons had microfilmed birth, marriage, and death records from towns all over Eastern Europe, and these microfilms were available to the public (they do this as part of their own religious beliefs). I was shocked to find that they actually filmed the records from Polaniec, since it really was a pretty small shtetl. Nearly the entire 19th century’s worth of data was available, however, the records were hand-written, and they were in Russian and Polish. Soon I was learning the Cyrillic alphabet and delving into esoteric how-to guides about the style and format of Napoleonic-era vital records. I wrote down the name “Gottlieb” as I thought it would look in Russian, showed it to some Russian-speaking friends, got their approval, and I was on my way.
I still remember the massive
headache I had after my first session with the microfilms. The format of the
films is: all births, all marriages, and all deaths, written
chronologically, for each year. After each year’s worth of data, an
alphabetical index, by last name, was compiled for the year and written
down. My method was to go through each years’ index, searching for anything
that looked like my hand-printed Cyrillic “Gottlieb”. Each time I found
something that looked promising, I rewound to the actual document and printed
it. Luckily, I have numerous friends who were able to translate the Russian
and Polish for me. My efforts paid off when I found the birth records of both
paternal grandparents. Since all of the records give the names and ages of the
person’s parents, I was able to work backwards through the years. Over the
next several months I found great-grandparents, great-great-grandparents,
great-great-great-grandparents, and even a great-great-great-great-grandmother
who was born in the 1740’s.
By the beginning of 1998 I had collected enough ancestors to the point where I started to wonder what became of the later generations of these people. So I put out some emails on Jewishgen, listing various relatives from previous generations, asking if anyone knew the names. This effort was to bear fruit three years later, so read on!
At a family wedding, My cousin Arlene told me that she had audio-taped an ‘interview’ with her mother, my aunt Pauline, and our aunt Rosie, who were my father’s sisters. The interview was focused on family history, including names and occupations of various Plontch ancestors. My cousin had the tape with her so I borrowed it and made a copy. I was able to corroborate much of the information from my aunts with the information I found on the Mormon microfilms.
Over the next few years I branched out into many other sources of research for my family history. These included:
I also discovered the
Jewishgen Family Finder, which is an online-searchable database of fellow
researchers and the family names and towns they are researching. I was able to
meet more 2nd-generation Plontchers and exchange information with
them. At that time I ventured into publishing the first stuff of my own on the web. In the summer of 1999 I had ‘met’ (via email) a fellow Plontch descendant, Jonathan Gadir, of Australia, and together we translated the article on Plontch (originally written by Dovid Schniffer) that was published in Sefer Stashev. This was published on the Jewishgen website in October, 2000.
I came home from a family outing on a Sunday in March of 2001 to find a cryptic message on my answering machine: “Are you the Michael Gottlieb who left a message on the Internet about Gottlieb relatives? If you are, we’re related”. I returned the call and was introduced to my second cousin (once removed) Beth, who lives in Manhattan. Beth’s great-grandfather Shia (Sam) Gottlieb and my grandfather Morris Gottlieb were brothers. She filled me in on that whole branch of the family and quickly arranged a family get-together. It was a Gottlieb “gathering of the clans” - a day I’ll remember for a long time.
The Jewishgen website experience gave me the idea for my own Plontch website. I taught myself some HTML commands and began sharing the wealth of information I had amassed on Plontch with the rest of the world. I launched The “Memorial to the Jewish Shtetl of Plontch (Polaniec), on June 17, 2001. It has since gone through several upgrades, and I registered a URL for it: www.plontch.net.
The next major milestone in my association with Plontch was to attend a meeting of the Plancher Society in NYC, in June of 2002. The Plancher Society was established in 1919, and, as it approaches its 85th anniversary in 2004, is one of the oldest “Landsmen” societies that is still functioning. As soon as I entered the meeting room in the Workman's Circle Building, I was immediately made to feel like I was among ‘family’. I was able to speak to many people about the town and even hear stories about my own relatives. I really hit ‘genealogical paydirt’ when I found that one of the gentlemen, in a recent visit to the town of Polaniec, obtained a list of all the Jews who lived in the town before the Holocaust. The list was shown to him, and a copy was made, by the mayor of the town, whom he visited at the town hall. Apparently, a Jew who lived in the town copied down the Jewish entries from one or more census lists of the town. This was a wonderful find, because the LDS microfilms only go up to about 1890, and this list (which I called the “Polaniec Census Extract”) helped me to fill in names and dates of relatives for several decades from about the 1880’s to 1930’s.
In February of 2003 I did research at Yad Hashem’s Hall of Names in Jerusalem. Using their Intranet, one can look up names of Holocaust victims, searching by name and/or town. You can even display and print a copy of the “Daf Edah” (Page of Testimony for Victims of the Holocaust) that is filled out on behalf of the victim. These forms also contain the name and address of the person who gave the testimony. Sure enough, I found several relatives from the various European towns where I knew they had lived. I discovered that my grandfather had a sister, Freyda, who was killed in the Holocaust. Her son, Morris Kaufman, had filled out the Daf Edah for her in 1973, and at that time he lived in Baltimore. Imagine my shock when I got home, searched the Yahoo white pages, and found that he still lived there! I spoke to Morris (who is in his mid-80’s), and his wife Esther and daughter Freda, by telephone. I learned that this branch of the family lived in Cuba when they left Europe before and after WWII, and left there when Fidel Castro came to power. We always knew we had relatives in Cuba but we didn’t know who they were. Now the pieces of that puzzle were coming together.
Another recent “success story”. This one concerns the descendants of my great-great-grandfather Yaakov Gottlieb. He had a son, Avraham Moshe, who had 8 children, one of whom was a son named Nuta. Nuta also had 8 children, one of whom was a son named Zvi Hersh. I suspected that Zvi Hersh lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil, based on a memorial notice that I found in Sefer Stashev (published 1965). Zvi Hersh’s parents and most of his brothers and sisters were killed in the Holocaust. And at Yad Vashem I found the Dafei Edah that he had filled out on their behalf. Having corroborated the fact that I had a relative named Zvi Hersh Gottlieb who (at least at one time) had lived in Sao Paulo, I put another notice out on the Jewishgen bulletin board. I received a response within a day(!), from Henry Gotlieb in Sao Paulo, who is Hersh’s grandson. We’ve just started to correspond and are busy learning about each other. Henry has helped me add about 25-30 names to our family tree.
As a followup to the Baltimore Kaufmans: we finally got to meet on August 31, 2003. My whole family had breakfast with Morris Kaufman, Esther, Isaac, Freda, and Freda’s son Jamie. We had a great time swapping stories and getting to know each other.
That pretty much brings me
up to today, September of 2003. I still have lots of open projects and more
avenues to research. It really never ends! Michael Gottlieb Friday, September 19, 2003
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