52Essays Next Wave #5: Family History

The other day I went to a genealogy workshop at the Municipal Archives, where I learned what birth, death, and marriage information is available for New York City. I had the marriage certificate for one set of grandparents, but I was also able to find the marriage license, which included information about names and birthplaces of my grandparents' parents. My grandfather's parents were both born in the same city he was born, Vitebsk, in what's now Belarus. My grandmother's mother, however, was born in Vilno aka Vilnius, in what was Russia then and now is Lithuania. Since my grandmother and her father were both born in Lodz, then Russia, now Poland, I wish there were some way of finding out how my great-grandmother got from Vilno to Lodz—did her family move from Vilno to Lodz? or did my great-grandfather travel to Vilno and meet her there? I have no idea what he did for a living, but I know he died before my grandmother and her mother came to the United States.

            Also of interest is that a city alderman (the equivalent of a city councilman today) was the person who married them. Does this indicate a certain kind of status for my grandfather or grandmother? Or had they done some sort of service that generated a certain amount of goodwill on the part of the alderman, Herman Bauler? Was he from their part of the world?

            When I looked up my other grandparents’ marriage certificate and license, I found more baffling information. There were actually two sets of licenses and certificates. On March 28, 1917, my grandparents were married at City Hall by a city clerk, with a witness whose name, Thomas Douglas, makes me think he was someone at City Hall, not someone my grandparents knew. But then, on May 25, 1917, there’s another license and certificate stating that Joseph S. Somerstein, a “reverend” (not a rabbi), married my grandparents at 611 East 6th Street, with two witnesses, Abraham Blaustein and Abraham Sternthal, whose names suggest they were friends of either grandfather or grandmother.

            Why two weddings? One of the women working at the archives had this thought: one set of parents didn’t think a marriage at City Hall was a real marriage and they needed to be married in a religious ceremony. But why a “reverend”? Was Somerstein really a Christian minister or did the clerk filling out the certificate not want to write “rabbi”? Or was this a little dig by my grandfather, who I’m pretty sure by this time had become an atheist, so it didn’t matter to him what religion he was married in? (As a union organizer, he once told me, he would sit outside of workplaces and eat a ham sandwich; since God didn’t strike him dead for eating traif, this was supposed to show that the union wasn’t against God.)