Not entirely Russian, after all

As many of you are aware, we’ve been tracing our Guins/Gins ancestors since 2008, combing through personal files and family photos, translating original Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish documents, and locating other historical records. But it was always done with the thought that we were going to find the location in Russia where our earliest Gins relatives were born. After years of research, the truth came out—and the result wasn’t what we anticipated.

The new revelations came from the work of a highly regarded Southern California genealogist, Ted Gostin, who we contacted in 2016. We had hit a genealogical ‘brick wall’ after pushing our Gins ancestry back to Ludvig Lipman Gins (born 1771) and wife, Fryderyka Holtz (born 1790), who were the parents of Morits Gins (born 1827). Morits (later known as Morits-Emil Gins) was the youngest of eight children born to the couple. The family lived for a time in Kalisz in west central Poland. Gostin, who specializes in Polish and Eastern European genealogical research, was able to find two extraordinary documents which contained details that took these Gins relatives back two earlier generations and illuminated our family history in unexpected ways.

The first original document that Gostin discovered in the Family History Library (FHL) microfilm collection of Jewish marriage records, 1811-1813, for Kalisz, Poland gave us the birthplaces of Ludvig Lipman Gins and Fryderyka Holtz, their parents’ names, and the wives’ fathers’ names in Lipman and Fryderyka’s 23 September 1811 Polish marriage record. Lipmann Gins (name spellings varied in documents) was a 40-year- old bachelor and a merchant in 1811 from the town of Rawicz in Prussia. Located in the province of Posen, Rawicz was southwest of Kalisz, where the marriage took place. According to Gostin, “It was formerly Polish territory that was taken by Prussia in the Polish partitions of 1772-1795, in which Prussia, Russia and Austria divided up the entire Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth among themselves and wiped Poland off the map for over a century.

Lipmann’s father and mother were also listed on the record: Manasse Lipmann and Ryfka, daughter of Judel. Gostin wrote this about Ryfka’s father’s name: “Judel is a Yiddish given name, a diminutive related to the Hebrew Yehudah, or Judah; her maiden name or father’s surname is not given here.”

The bride, Fryderyka Holtz, was recorded as a 21-year-old from Wrzesnia, another town in the Prussian province of Posen. Wrzesnia was northwest of Kalisz where the couple began married life. Fryderyka’s father was cut off by the margins of the page, but is likely Bar[uch] Holtz, based on information in her children’s birth records. Baruch Holtz’ wife was Hanna, daughter of Beer (more appropriately spelled Ber, another Yiddish name, meaning bear).

This 1811 marriage record also explains why the couple chose German-sounding secular names for their children as recorded on their Kalisz, Poland birth records: Fryderyka, Rozalia, Manas, Julius, Leopold, Alexander, Bernhard, and Moritz. Lipmann Gins and Fryderyka Holtz hailed from Prussia, the premier state that created the German empire, and where German was spoken.

So with this one document, we now have two additional earlier generations of Gins relatives. We can estimate their birth years as 25 years prior to the birth of their child: Manasse Lipmann and Ryfka were born about 1746, making Ryfka’s father, Judel’s, birth about 1721. Baruch Holtz and Hanna were born about 1765, while Hanna’s father may have been born about 1740. The bottom line: This 1811 Polish marriage record extends our Gins family history back more than 300 years. We now have the birthplaces of Lipman Gins and Fryderyka Holtz, Rawicz and Wrzesnia, in what was then eastern Prussia and is now western Poland. The second document that Ted located and translated was also revelatory: The 1842 Warsaw, Poland baptismal record for Moritz Gins. I’ll discuss the exceptionally interesting findings from this original record in the next post.