If there is a theme to this site it must have something to do with the word “Unknown”. From the very start, it described the land I wanted to survey. And yes, initially it referred only to how little I knew about my grandmother; but the more I researched, the more I discovered that most of the tales handed down through families as gospel only had the barest relationship to the truth. Foremost among these has to be the breathless saga of Minnie Rosenberg and Meyer Still.
The first and most enduring version – related to me by Alan’s Aunt Hermine — was that Meyer was in fact the scion of Scottish aristocracy. Forbidden to marry the lowly Minnie, he had adopted her exceedingly Jewish surname to spite his family, and then added the first name Meyer as a special little poke in the eye. I can’t tell you how long I plowed through the highly-born of Scotland in search of him. I did have his rough birth date but I had no idea what his real first name had been. And especially in Aberdeen, Still is a long established and at least semi-royal surname with many many bearers. Finally I discovered that the Scottish government, for a fee, will hand over almost any record in its possession. To my astonishment, I found an entry in the Edinburgh wedding registry for Meyer Still and Minna Rosenberg, on February 28, 1893.
I assumed the Jewish-y names Meyer had put down for his parents were fabrications. I could find no Morris Still anywhere in Scotland at all. The fact that he put down Mina for his mother’s name I attributed to wedding day distractions. But I pursued that woman’s maiden name of Gordon relentlessly; and finally believed I had located a likely candidate when I happened upon a young man with roughly the right birth date who was named Andrew Still, Jr.
His father Andrew Still had married a Margaret Gordon in September, 1868. Andrew Jr. had been born in April of 1869 (one hoped prematurely) . The only problem was that the wedding announcement in an Aberdeen newspaper specified that Andrew Still was a print compositor and his Gordon father-in-law had been a cooper. These hardly seemed the stuff of noble enterprise to me.
Still, I was intrigued by the fact that on their wedding registry, both Meyer (aka Andrew?) and Minna had put down 11 Infirmary Street as their residence. It was possible, of course, that it was only intended as a joint love nest once the ts were all crossed and the is all dotted, But I have to confess to a somewhat salacious curiosity as to whether hankypanky had been going on before that point.
On Ancestry.co.uk, I found the details of the 1891 Scotland census taken almost two years earlier. Minnie had been somewhat difficult to pin down. On familysearch.com and on the Scottish government’s site her name was rendered as Minnie Risenberg,
Ancestry did both better and worse and came up with Mauriel Rosenberg.
But the two sites had the same location for her premarital abode: in St. Cuthbert’s parish, just south of Edinburgh Old Town. I will admit to vague disappointment that Minnie was living as a Boarder with an upright-sounding couple: Philip and Rebecca Brown. They must have been fairly well off. In addition to Minnie, a Scottish servant girl was in residence.
Then I looked for Meyer and found him at 23 West Richmond Street. It was, less than half a mile away. To my surprise, however, he had not yet fled his family. He was living with a man named Joseph Still.
Joseph was listed as Head of the Household. Myer’s role was listed as NK (I assume Not Known). The two men were said to be 15 years apart in age though in fact they were really only 12. I understand the confusion of whoever did the tally. It was just within the realm of the possible that Joseph had sired Myer as a randy adolescent. But given my experience with the Helfond/Helfords or even the slightly less fecund Isaac Kievitsky/Levin who only produced 7 children but who still managed to spread them across a span of 15 years, I thought it more likely that Joseph was Myer’s older brother. Okay, high-falutin’ older brother determined to protect the precious family name.
Except that Joseph Still happened to receive a Certificates of Naturalization from “Herbert Henry Asquith, one of Her Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State”.
The certificate contained not only the names of Joseph’s (and presumably Myer’s) parents, but also the place of his birth: Wekschna, Lithuania. As it happened, Wekschna burned to the ground in 1886 sending its younger inhabitants to greener, or at least less smoky pastures. Myer and Joseph had fled to Scotland. Minnie’s husband was no more Scottish than he was a kangaroo.1
A quick check of the Naturalization files confirmed that Philip Brown (born Brin) was also from Lithuania (though so close to the border that on alternate parking days it was considered a Polish town).2
It’s a pretty safe bet that Minnie came from somewhere in the general vicinity as well. Given what I saw happening in Providence, I didn’t think it unlikely that the Browns were family. Hah, my kids had Litvak relatives after all!
And the Litvak SIG at Jewishgen is extremely active if not well organized. Its vast number of accumulated censuses and tax rolls often lack interpretable dates. Still, I had one ace in the hole: Joseph’s mother’s moniker was not the ubiquitous Rose or Bessie or, heaven help us, Ida. It was Sprintzer! The woman could have been one of Rudolph’s reindeer. And given that the Still males were extremely big on recycling, (Movsha, Yankel and Judel recurring over and over through generation after generation), I was very lucky the women had distinctive names. With Sprintzer as my key, I was able to extract four generations of Stills in what Joseph wrote as Wekschna and what is now known as Viekšniai, Lithuania. The ages are somewhat screwy. The 1858 Revision List had Sprintse’s birthdate as 1822, which worked for Joseph who was born around 1854 per his naturalization certicate. But it meant if she was also Meyer’s mother, she was 44 when she gave birth.
Sadly, Meyer doesn’t appear anywhere in the Revision Lists, which makes sense if in fact he was born after 1858. Strangely, however, neither does Joseph, who would have been 3 or 4 at the time, although other boys of the same age, in the same town, do appear. Among them is a Iosel Gordon which tends to snag the attention. I recalled Meyer had put Gordon as Sprintzer’s maiden name.3
Nonetheless, the specificity of Joseph’s rendition of his parents’ name and his hometown totally persuades me he belongs in this family. And by virtue of Meyer sharing his hearth and home, I believe that Meyer does as well.
In fact, when Alan and I recently contacted Mitchell Rose, another of Minnie’s grandchildren, we heard a different version of the tale: that Meyer had been not a rich Scotsman but a rich Russian gentile; and that he and Minnie had fled from Russia to escape his parents’ wrath.
Okay, there were a couple of problems with this story also. First of all, Meyer’s parents were definitely Jews. Based on a tax roll, his father taught in a Vekshne cheder, among other jobs.
Second, Philp Brown came from Vishtinetyz, over 200 kilometers miles south of Vekshne. His wife Dina Stungo came from Keidan, over 160 kilometers to the south-east. An orphaned young woman alone in a strange country would mostly likely chose to stay with a family from her part of the country. It seemed unlikely she even knew Meyer until they were thrust together in Edinburgh, which in 1891 held almost a thousand Jews. So how did they find each other? In 1891, Joseph Still was listed as a wholesale jeweler and purchaser of old gold and silver. Philip Brown was a jeweler as well.
Also the New Hebrew Congregation had what was referred to as the “Greener Shul” on the very same Richmond Street where Joseph and Meyer were tenant/occupants. Unlike the Graham Street Synagogue or the Park Place chapel which catered to the more established middle-class Jews in Edinburgh, the Greener Shul was devoted to recent immigrant, and both Minnie and Meyer were definitely that.
They met and they married. Brother Joseph was apparently not asked to be a witness, and yet Meyer wasn’t making any effort to conceal his nuptials. He clearly wrote his name down as Still. Two years later, Minnie and Meyer had their first child, Alan’s grandma Hannah. Meyer put her name down as Still.
Two years later, in 1897, they emigrated to America. Hannah had somehow turned into Harry and there was a mysterious Scottish-born infant who seemed to vanish from the record.4
And still – both on leaving Glasgow as a Farmer…
… and arriving at Ellis Island as Draper, — Meyer was still a Still.
They said they were going to Philadelphia. They said they were going to an Uncle. Unfortunately, the Philadelphia City Directories of 1897 through 1900 showed not a single Meyer Still. Still influenced by the family lore, I did turn up a Meyer Rosenberg. But he was a tailor and it seemed unlikely that Alan’s perennially unskilled great-grandfather would ever dare to style himself that.
Then I learned from Mitchell Rose that Meyer and Minnie’s youngest child – his father Lou — had been born in Harrisburg in 1907. Unfortunately, birth records for Harrisburg – he said – had been destroyed. Because he couldn’t prove his age, Lou was forced to serve in World War 2 although he was technically too old to be drafted.5
I decided the uncle had moved from Philadelphia to Harrisburg and the Scottish trio had followed him. I hunted that man as though I were a hound of Hell. Alas, the only Stills in Harrisburg in 1907 were Clare and Susan and J.Parker, machinist. None of them seemed a likely candidate for my man.
But there was a Morris Rosenberg. He had been the only Rosenberg in Harrisburg in 1897.
More to the point, before Harrisburg, he had been living in Philadelphia. His third child, Anna, had been born there in 1896. It would likely have been the most recent address Meyer and Minnie would have had before their departure. Even better, Morris’ naturalization petition told me that his place of birth was the town of Keidan in Kovno District, Kovno Province, which was at least the same district and province Meyer hailed from.
I decided he was my Uncle-in-America. I was perplexed, however, that there was no sign of Meyer. Between his landing at Ellis Island as Meyer Still and his appearance in the 1910 US Census in Newark, New Jersey as Meyer Rosenberg, the man seemed to vanish off the face of the earth.
Stubbornly I pursued Louis Rosenberg’s birth. He later shortened his name to Lou Rose but at the time of his birth he didn’t have much say in the matter. Pennsylvania didn’t start logging births on a state-wide scale until 1906, but Lou providently had been born on June 14, 1907. I pulled up Harrisburg. To my surprise, the state of Pennsylvania denied any records from that city had ever vanished. And yet there were no Louis Rosenbergs born in Harrisburg on that date. I broadened my search to encompass every place in Pennsylvania. No Lou Rosenbergs. And then, frustrated, I decide to plug in Still. And found this:
Lou’s birth had been registered. He just hadn’t had a name yet. He was merely listed as Boy Still. But the birth date was correct as was the name of his mother, Rosenberg. On the actual birth certificate, I found the family’s address in Easton. It was a city equidistant from New York City where his family had landed and Philadelphia where they’d said they were going. And Meyer was still Still!6
Excited, I pulled up the Easton directories. In both 1906 and 1908, Myer/Meyers Still was still in existence.
The directories were only published every other year, and had no online presence between 1900 (no Myer) and 1906 where I first found him. By 1910, he was in Newark with the name of Meyer Rosenberg. (There was a 1909 Newark City directory but he wasn’t in it. )
I had narrowed the window of his transformation down to a measly two years.
I now know that both Meyer’s sons had to flee Newark in the middle of the night, at least in the case of Lou with his entire family. They were both on the run from Jersey’s Jewish mob. Per Mitchell, Lou had grown up with Longy Zwillman and Doc Starcher but was reluctant to stay part of their gang as they escalated from petty theft to more serious matters.7
I have to wonder if Meyer also had a problem that necessitated a sudden name change and and an equally sudden departure in the middle of the night.
The only two events of note in Easton in 1908 were the murder of a 5-year old girl in a religious frenzy (The headline read: “Girl offered as sacrifice by fanatics”) and the threat by the Black Hand to blow up a cement mill. (Meyer was working at Thomas Edison’s cement works at the time.) 8
By then, Meyer and Minnie were at least 15 years removed from the free-floating terror of the shtetls. Nonetheless, it might have seemed time to move on. Or perhaps, on the positive side, friends or relatives lured them to Newark. It is likely I will never know. But I do know that Meyer’s becoming a Rosenberg had nothing to do with his disapproving family, whether they were Russian or Scottish, gentile or Jew.
The other mystery surrounding this couple was their vaunted relationship to the famous Lord and Baron Emmanuel Shinwell, a poor Jewish Glaswegian who ended up founding the British Labor Party. Alan’s Uncle Alec and Aunt Hermine had visited him in London in 1984, when he was 100. Hermine told me how he he talked at length about his favorite cousin, Minnie’s daughter Hannah. At the time, I thoroughly accepted this as fact. Now, with the dates and ages before me, I was baffled because Hannah left Scotland at the age of 2. I decided she must have had an extraordinarily precocious charisma. Or else it was actually Minnie, reputed to have been a knock-out, who Manny remembered with such love.
Alec and Hermine are now gone, but their son Lenny and his wife Allison reported to us that it was Manny’s third wife Sarah Stungo who linked the Rosenbergs and Shinwells. Unfortunately, they didn’t have a clue how she’d pulled it off. With one day left in our Ancestry.co.uk trial, I scrambled to accumulate every Stungo on the planet. It is not a common name but – holy cow — in Edinburgh there were a lot of them. And then I saw they had come to Scotland from Keidan in Kovno District, Kovno Province.
Klaxons sounded. I had to be on the right track. (And note that Morris Stungo was a Waterproof Manufacturer while in the 1891 census Minnie said she was a Waterproof Maker.) But I still lacked the actual, physical proof. Wearily, I browsed through Sarah’s sisters and cousins and aunts. I entered their data into my Legacy software, pausing to regard with sympathy Dina Rebecca Stungo Brown who had died at the age of 35, leaving two young children. And then I paused again, recognizing her married name as the one borne by the family Minnie had lived with in Edinburgh. I pulled out my weedwhacker and thrashed about the ancestry.com bushes until the name of Dina’s husband popped up. Of course, it was Philip. It was Philip Brown and Dina Rebecca Stungo Brown who had been Minnie’s hosts and her probable relatives. Rebecca Stungo Brown was the key.
During World War 2 Alec reportedly traveled to Edinburgh and visited with Old Man Stungo. All Lennie and Allison remembered being told was that the old man had “had the grippe”. This would have been Dina’s nephew, Solomon aka Saul Stungo. Like his father Morris, he had been born in Keidan (the same town as Morris Rosenberg) but in later years visited the US frequently, taking the Queen Mary or the Queen Elizabeth and staying at the Waldorf, traveling in style. His daughter Sarah lived In New York with her first husband and their two New York-born children. They had immigrated in 1917. Clearly the family connection had been maintained across the decades. Hermine recalled Scottish relatives often visiting Hannah. And then when Manny and Sarah married (he was 88 at the time, Sarah 75!) Manny became Alan’s kin.9
Which still doesn’t explain how Manny even knew Minnie Rosenberg Still or her daughter Hannah. By the time of this (third) marriage, both were already dead. But by now I have become comfortable with the curiously reflexive habits of these immigrants, families curving back to meet over and over again.10
By and large, these were all Jewish Scots from Lithuania. I have to assume that somewhere and sometime and somehow, Stungos and Shinwells and Rosenbergs had all met before.
1Actually, I discovered in one of the Revision Lists, that the Stil men had all left Wekschna in 1881. I have no reason what the motive was, nor where most of them ended up.
2 Jill Whitehead, great-grandniece of Philip Brown and Rebecca Dina Stungo Brown, has written an excellent essay on the wayward nature of this wiggly border.
3 While emendations were made to the Lists right up through the empire-wide census of 1897, except for a notation that Meyer’s father Movsha and two sons, Itzhok and Yudel, moved away in 1881, the Stills essentially disappeared after 1858. There were scattered mentions in tax records of Still cousins in other parts of the Kovno district; but in the aftermath of World War 2, only a single Stil, Khaia Zaksiene nee Shtil, appeared in the Lithuanian Shoah database.
4I have come to believe that this unnamed Scottish infant was actually Hannah’s younger and Lou’s older brother Abraham/Al. There is no record of his birth in the US (though of course Pennsylvania was admittedly shoddy about keeping track that early) But claiming he was born in the US when he wasn’t, and in the new century when he wasn’t, seems entirely in keeping for this clan.
5When the U.S. entered World War II, all men from their 18th birthday until the day before their 45th birthday were made subject to military service, so Lou, even if born at the turn of the century, would never have been too old.
6Reading this, Lennie recalled his mother telling him that Hannah had played on the grounds of Lafayette College in Easton as a child. Their address in the 1908 directory was less than a mile away.
7Far be it from me to doubt a cousin, but I have to point out that Mitchell was born in 1933 and by the 1920s Starcher was running much of Zwillman’s gambling operations. In 1931, Starcher helped Meyer Lansky organize a conference of Jewish organized crime leaders at the Franconia Hotel, which later would see the alleged merging of the Jewish and Italian Mafia into a national crime syndicate. By 1935, after the murder of Dutch Schultz, Zwillman took over those of Schultz’s criminal operations that were in New Jersey. The press began calling Zwillman the “Al Capone of New Jersey.” By the time Lou and his family fled in 1939 or so, his old friends were way past petty theft.
81909 was more interesting. An airship built in Easton was damaged on its first trial; and Easton was chopped from the Atlantic Baseball league
9Because Dina was 17 years younger than her brother Morris, she was basically the same age as Meyer while her great-niece Sarah was the same age as Hannah, which undoubtedly facilitated their bonding.
10Manny’s father in fact married two Dutch sisters in quick succession.