Cast a Wide Net

Our lesson for today is, sometimes you need to cast a wide net and get creative to find new things.  Over the last week, I cast a very wide net and stumbled over a Magaziner descendant in a place I never expected.  I'm still sorting out the details, but I've already added several new people to the tree, and a lot of new information.  The short version: I stumbled over the Wechter family, descendants of Sara Magaziner, in the United States, mostly in Chicago.

I always understood that there were two different sets of Magaziners: the ones from Hungary were related to us, and the ones from Russia were not.  When Ira Magaziner gained national attention during the Clinton administration, one of my grandmother's cousins looked into it, and concluded that we were not related to him.  "He was one of those Russian Magaziners," my grandmother told me with disdain, because her generation of Western European Jews didn't think much of Eastern European Jews. 

But I recently began to think that perhaps we are related to the Russian Magaziners after all.  Perhaps some of our Magaziners moved east, and the Russian Magaziners are their descendants.  I know that one family of Magaziners in the Ukraine originally came from Homonna (our family's point of origin), so perhaps more are related. 

The name Magaziner is rare enough that I decided to catalog every person of that name, regardless of their point of origin, a wide net indeed.  I started with a new search tool on the LDS Church's website, FS Beta, and started to put every single Magaziner I found into a separate family tree database.  It wasn't long before I stumbled across the name Serena Magaziner in a Kentucky marriage record, of all things.  Upon further examination, it was a marriage record for a Louis Wechter.  Serena Magaziner was the mother of the groom, and the father was Marcus Wechter.  I already had a Sara Magaziner on my tree with a husband named Mark Wächter and a son named Lenni Lajos (Lajos = Louis), who would be exactly the same age as the groom Louis, undoutedly a match.

But I had no idea that the Wächters had come to America!  The closest thing I had found up to that point was 1893 ship manifests for a Wachter family traveling from Hamburg to Chicago by way of Montreal, but the manifests raised many questions.  My records indicated that Sara died in 1889, four years before this journey, but there was an adult woman on that manifest (though her name wasn't right).  Five of the children's names and ages more or less matched what I had (but not quite), and there was a sixth child who didn't match at all.  Then I couldn't find the family in Canada or America.

Now that I had the new spelling of the name (Wechter instead of Wächter -- the German "ä" is pronounced "e") and some locations to work with, I was able to find more information easily.  Louis's naturalization documents, WWI and WWII draft registrations said he was born in Homonna on the exact date of birth as the Homonna birth record I have for Sara's son, removing any doubt of his identity.  I found census records for him, two marriage records (the Kentucky one I started with, plus an earlier one in Chicago), a birth record for one of his children (two others appear in censuses) and more.

But where was the rest of the family?  I thought perhaps the woman on the ship manifest was a second wife, and looked back through the Homonna records.  Sure enough, I found a marriage record for Sara's husband less than three months after Sara's death.  Couldn't wait 'til the body got cold, Mark?  But I suppose, with four children in the household under the age of 12, a new wife was necessary.  The wife's name was transcribed as Rozi Taub.  I also found a birth record for a Zoltan Wachter, son of Mark Wachter and Deborah Taub, probably the sixth child on the ship's manifest (the manifest had his name as Saloman, close enough to Zoltan).  I was a bit puzzled how Rozi became Deborah.  The name situation became more clear as I found additional censuses, and Louise's death record: Deborah's name sometimes appears as Bori, a sensible nickname if you consider the accent on the second syllable: Deborah, Bori.  Bori could easily be mistaken for Bertha by a census-taker, and looking at the original marriage record... well, it still looks like Rozi to me, but the "z" looks very much like the "r" in other words, and R isn't very different from B, so that could actually be Bori.

I still had trouble finding the rest of the family in the United States.  There was nothing in the 1900 census that was a great match for the family.  The best match I found was a Bertha Wechter, whose month/year of birth matched the age of the bride in Mark's second marriage, with two children in the household: Louisa, whose month/year of birth matched the birth record of Mark and Sara's daughter Lea, and Charley, whose month/year of birth matched the birth record for Mark and Debora's son Zoltan.  But how do you get Bertha from Deborah or Rozi?  And where are the other children, Jonathan, Louis, Jakob and David?  Interestingly, "Bertha" identifies herself as the mother of six children, all of them living.  When Mark remarried, he had five living children, and fathered a sixth.  The census is supposed to identify only children born to the mother, but perhaps she included her stepchildren as "her" children.  But if the other four children are still living, then where are they?  The first two were over 20 by that time, so they may have been on their own (though I haven't found them in the census yet), but Jakob was 16 and David was 12. 

I finally found David in the 1900 census.  He's in a home for Jewish orphans in Chicago.  No question it's him: name is David Wechter, birthplace is Hungary, and his month/year of birth exactly matches the Homonna birth records.  But why is he in an orphanage when his stepmother, sister and half-brother are in the same town?  The answer may be in the 1910, 1920 and 1930 censuses for him: in all of those censuses, he is a patient in a state hospital, and the 1910 census refers to the facility as "Hospital (Institution for Insane)", though that notation is crossed out.  Perhaps David suffered from mental problems that his stepmother couldn't handle, and she put him in an orphanage, and when he was too old for an orphanage (21 by 1910), he ended up in a mental hospital, where he may well have spent the rest of his life.

Complicating the matter is the presence of another Wechter family in Chicago with some of the same names born at about the same time!  There is a Simon Wechter from Hungary living in Chicago with sons John and Jacob.  This is probably not a coincidence: Simon was born in Homonna and his father's name is Jacob, same as Mark's father, so Simon is probably Mark's brother. It's very common for Jewish cousins born around the same time to have the same name, named after the same recently-deceased relative. Mark's family may have come to Chicago precisely because they had relatives settled there.  But consider the problems this causes: I have seen a Canadian death index for a Jacob Wachter, who died in British Columbia in 1973 at the age of 89, but is this Mark's son or Simon's?  Both were born in 1884!