I am beginning to regret opening the Pandora’s box marked Kulakofsky/Helford. And it all started so simply… or at least simply enough. If Isaac Levin and Joseph Helford were brothers-in-law (as Isaac claimed on his arrival at Boston), there had to be a single woman who linked the two of them: wife to one, sister to the other. It’s right there on Wikipedia. And who among us dares question Wikipedia? “A brother-in-law (is) the brother of one’s spouse or the husband of one’s sibling”. It was just a question of cherchez la femme.
But where? I thought I would start with Isaac’s sister for the simple reason that I knew she would be named Kievitsky. Per her own death certificate, Joseph’s second wife had been a Pley.
So what was the maiden name of his first wife? Geez, what was his first wife’s first name. No one seemed able to agree even on that.
Louis was Joseph’s first-born son. On his Social Security application he put that his mother’s name was Fannie.
He also put that his birth date was May 16, 1876. His brother Henry – in a stunning example of family bonding, or else bad arithmetic — wrote on his Naturalization Petition that his birth date was October 3, 1876 only four and a half months later.
And yet, in the Boston marriage registry, Ida was put down for his mother’s name.
Normally I would be dubious about this since his second sister – from the same mother – was also named Ida and Jews didn’t do that. Except that Little Ida’s name on arrival was actually Taube and I knew from my own great-grandmother that Idas were usually Chayas (whereas Taubes became Doras). When it came time to pick an “American name” maybe little Taube opted for one that evoked her lost mother. Or it was more likely her father or stepmother who did this, since she was only 4 or 6 when she arrived.1
But then third-born Jennie put on her marriage registration that her mother’s name was Fanny.
Ida/Taube, the fourth-born, punted the question entirely and put on her marriage registration that her mother was her father’s second wife: Rose. Which made a certain amount of sense; Ida was probably only 3 when her father remarried. Rose was really the only mother she ever knew.
So it was one vote for Ida but two votes for Fannie. Michael and Harlan, in a wonderful exhibition of pragmatism, refer to this mystery woman as Ida Fanny.2 But they also theorize she was Isaac Levin’s sister. And I don’t believe a woman named Ida could be that. Why? For the simple reason that Isaac’s sister Ida/Chaya was already taken. She had married David-Solomon Melnik and delivered my grandmother Lena to the world..
But Fannie? I could get my mind around Fannie. A Fannie could have been a sibling of Isaac and Chaya. The only problem was that Boris/Beryl’s Moscow relatives were quite convinced that he only had one uncle in America: Isaac. Joseph was not considered their mother’s brother-in-law by them.
And maybe the improbably named Rose Pley deserved another gander. In the rampant confusion that surrounds this family, George Helford – Rose’s second-born son, had put down on his Social Security application that his mother’s name was, oh Rose Levin.
But on the birth certificate of her third-born son Aaron, her maiden name is entered as Rose Pailloy.
On Joseph’s death certificate, her maiden name is given as Rose Poley.
On the marriage registration of her first-born daughter Mollie, her name is listed as Rose Paley.
On Celia’s birth certificate her name is Rosa Polaoff.
And again, on her own death certificate, her maiden name is Pley.
One could make the case that Pailloy, Poley, Paley. Polaoff and Pley could all be Anglicizations of Bar-Levy. But on Rose’s gravestone her father’s name is engraved as Tzvi Yehudah Helfand. Since she died 11 years before the observant Joseph, one would think that at least this part would have been done correctly. But really, who the heck knows?
Still, an even stronger argument could made for eliminating Joseph’s second wife from contention If Chaya had a sister living in the same small Jewish community as her brother Isaac, surely her name would have come up in correspondence at some point. But David-Solomon’s letter — about what would have been Rose’s mother as well as Isaac’s — he chose to route solely through Lena. There was no mention of Rose at all.
Still, right after eliminating Ida Fanny from contention — because, really, how many Idas can you have in one family? — Barbara Morgan reminded me that Old Man Levin was great-grandfather to my old neighbor and acknowledged third-cousin Richard Holland. Through FamilySearch, I discovered — per his grandfather Charles Holland’s marriage certificate – that Richard’s grandmother, and Isaac’s daughter,was named , um, Ida Levin.
I truly do not know what to make of this. It is conceivable that, just like Taube Helfand, this Ida Levin chose her name with no regard for the normal Americanization of whatever her Yiddish name was. It is also possible, I suppose, that Isaac-Leib Kievitsky had three different wives: Ida (who had perhaps died in childbirth thus yielding a daughter with the same name despite there already being a Chaya Kievitsky), Rose (mother to Nechame and her brother Shmuel) and then Bessie Brody who produced the last four Levin children. The only problem with this scenario is that on the same marriage certificate that yielded Ida Levin, it states that her father is named Isaac and her mother is named Rose. So was there a Rose Helfond/Helfand/Helford somewhere? Was she Isaac Kievitksy’s first wife?4
I turned to Joseph’s family. On his tombstone, presumably ordered by the same family members who filled out his death certificate, the patronymic carved in granite is Samuel Noah Helfand.
And yet the death certificate itself gives Joseph’s father’s name as Nathan Helfand. A piquant note, and another careening detour on this journey, is the fact that I could find no Samuel Noah Helfands in the Old Country, but found instead Samuel Noah Kulakowsky, buried in 1904 in Slutsk.
Kulakowsky? Yes, that was Harlan’s contribution to the confusion. I first reached out to him when I noticed he had posted on Geni that Joseph Helford’s sister — Harlan’s great-great-grandmother — was named D’vorah Kulakofsky. Okay, fine, I thought, Kulakofsky was her married name. Except it wasn’t. Her husband’s name was Moishe Welitzkin. Harlan moreover had met with his great-grandmother’s relatives in Israel years ago. Kulakofsky was definitely the family name. In addition to his great-greatgrandmother Dvorah and great great uncle Joseph, Harlan was told there had been at least three other Kulakovsky brothers: Velvel, Yonah and Abraham. I could even find fleeting mentions of them on Jewage and in the Jewishgen databases. But alas, Rose Kulakovksy/Helfond/Kievistky/Levin had not left a single trace.3
So the mystery will not be solved, at least not at this juncture. Some day, as even more buried documents get unearthed and planted on the internet, maybe I will finally get a clue. Still, in the middle of the night, when all these tangled connections torment me, I can’t help admitting that – for a non-English speaker – “brother-in-law” would have been quite a mouthful, and that Isaac might have saying something else all along.
1 I suppose it is worth mentioning that until recently neither Harlan nor I even realized Joseph had a son named Louis. There were 10 children listed on the manifests and in the various US or RI censuses; and ten children surely seemed plenty enough. But Barbara and Michael maintained there were two more sons: a baby named Motel who had been buried at the North Burial Ground soon after arrival, And then the eldest boy, named Louis, tall and handsome, she recalled..
Michael and Harlan finally found him, living around the corner from his siblings, married and with children. The problem was that he had changed his name. To Elman. Elman? WTF? We had been prepared for the normal slide from Helfond to Helfand to Helford. But Louis became Elman, in fact became Owen Elman for his wedding and the birth of his first child, then Louis Elman for the birth of two and three; and suddenly swung back to Louis Helfand for the birth of his fourth child. This guy just really liked changing his name.
As was for a long time the case with Old Man Levin’s first born Ida, we still are not exactly sure how and when Louis got here. There is a Nachman Hermann on Joseph’s manifests, right beneath him. On the US one, the two are even bracketed together. I suppose once you are Nachmann Herman, to become Louis Elman is not such a big deal. Especially when there were almost no Helfonds in the Old Country for the simple reason that surnames were only adopted because of Russian mandates and there is no H in Russian at all.
2In fact, to Barbara Morgan’s surprise, it turned out her eldest sister Irene — Jennie’s first born daughter — had been registered at birth as Ida Fannie.
But just as soon as that discovery seemed to resolve the question, Barbara dropped another bombshell. The connection between Isaac and Joseph did not come through Ida Fannie but through Rose, Joseph’s second wife. His first six children and their offspring, which included Barbara and her sister Irene/Ida Fannie, were not in any way related to the Levins. It was only the last six children, the offspring of Rose. So hmmm. Either David-Solomon Melnik wasn’t inclined to drag his sister-in-law Rose into the brouhaha over the “not small” Babushka; or Rose wasn’t Isaac Levin’s sister at all. Rather she could have been the sister of Bessie Leyb Brody, Isaac’s second wife. Married to two sisters, Isaac and Joseph had ipso facto become brothers-in-law. (It was Michael who first proposed this angle) It is also possible, of course, that Rose was a Levin cousin and Isaac was using the term brother-in-law somewhat more loosely than he should. But I am intrigued by the fact that Brody might have been the name of Bessie’s first husband. On her tombstone, it says clearly that her father’s name was Shmuel Layb.
If Bessie Layb and Rose Layb were sisters, then Rose’s maiden name could have been — as George had it — not far from Rose Levin. I am just going to put my fingers in my ears and not think about Paley, Pailloy, Pailoff or even Pley anymore. Except maybe to wonder if, like Bessie’s Mr. Brody, Mr. Paley was Rose’s buried and forgotten first spouse.
3It is possible Joseph Helfond had a different dad from his siblings. It is also possible that, blazing the trail for his name-changing sons, he just decided that Kulakovsky had way too many consonents to be endured. Whatever, unlike Isaac who only changed his name on arrival in Providence, Joseph, his wife and children were all Helfands in Hamburg, before they ever got to the US of A.
4As mentioned above, for a long time Ida Levin did not appear on the familial radar. She didn’t show up on manifests nor census lists; and so it was easy to assume Samuel was Isaac’s first-born child. With the appearance of Charles Holland’s marriage certificate, however, that assumption was shot to smithereens. It was clear that Ida had predated her brother Samuel by three years. The question, then, was how and when had she gotten to the US? Somehow she managed to elude the combined efforts of Harlan-the-manifest-whiz, Michael and myself. It was late in the game before I turned again to trawling the manifest search engines for yet another Kievitsky from Shemezeve… and turned up a Chaie Keiwitzky from Schemerewe and bound for her father Isaac Levin at 11 Inez Court, Providence, RI. 
Imagine my astonishment when I scrolled up to discover she had arrived on the same ship and date as her stepmother and siblings, but appeared on the manifest many pages before. Which of course begs the question: why had she so deliberately separated herself from her family? One could posit that as a young woman of 18, she might have been embarrassed to be seen with a parental unit; but given that Bessie was wrangling 6 kids through the chaos of Ellis Island, including a 2-year old Sol and a 4-year old Millie, one might have expected big sister Ida to be of some help. I can’t help suspecting considerable antipathy between Ida and her stepmother Bessie, possibly exacerbated by ten days crammed in amongst 2000 fellow passengers in the SS Rotterdam’s steerage deck. There is a further piquancy to the fact that while Bessie put down that her husband’s name was Isaac Kievitsky, Ida had stated that her father’s name was Isaac Levin. Although a Kievitsky herself, she had an American dad!