For several years, I have been puzzling over the likely maiden name of my mother’s mother, whose married name was Yetta Epstein (c.1894 or 1897-1959) and her sister “Bessie” (March 1885-17 December 1970). whose initial married name was “Masse Lebed,” was later known as “Bessie Labb, ” married to Abraham (Abe) Lebed Labb. The maiden name of Yetta and Bessie would also be the likely maiden name of Bessie and Yetta’s father’s sister, Tillie (Tibel or Taub), who married Yankel (Jacob) Vogin in Motovilovka, Ukraine around 1888. Tillie’s married surname was thus Vogin or Vogina. The Vogin couple and their children emigrated to the United States on 23 February 1923, and settled in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The Vogin and Epstein family retained some connections in Philadelphia from the 1940s onwards.
The unmarried Yetta in the 1920 census in Baltimore gives her surname as “Anderson”, on name which my mother Ruth Epstein Auslander always insisted that was not Yetta’s actual maiden name. Bessie Labb in turn, told her family that her maiden name was “Antinson.” Neither surname appears in relevant immigration or naturalization records, so it seems likely that both women were approximating the Yiddish or Russian pronunciation of their natal surname.
In a previous post,https://markauslander.com/2020/10/30/families-of-yetta-anderson-epstein-and-bessie-labb/
I considered the possibilities that the sisters’ maiden name was in fact Aronson or Nathanson, names which appear frequently in my DNA matches on my maternal side. (I should note that a cousin on her Ancestry tree speculatively listed the maiden name of Tillie Vogin, Yetta Epstein and Bessie Labb as “Andreyev“: unfortunately, that this erroneous name was been reproduced by many Vogin and Epstein descendants in their Ancestry trees.)
I am now convinced that a more likely candidate for the maiden name is in fact “Entenson” or “Yentenzon.” The evidence is as follows:
The Ukraine Revision Lists, Group 2 for 1897 (uploaded and transcribed on JewishGen) contains is a notation for 3 year old Chana-Ita (Hannah Yetta?) daughter of Mordko-El (Mordecai?) Entenson and his wife Inda‑Beyla of Pavoloch, Ukraine. Pavoloch, it should be noted, is the birthplace listed by Yetta’s sister Masse Bessie Labb in her naturalization petition.
Also listed in this entry is a Bryna Entenson, 9 years old, so born about 1886, listed as daughter of Morsko‑El (That may be a transcription mistake’ I can’t make out the Cyrillic clearly)
Perhaps this is Yetta’s sister Masse or Bessie. who was we believe born about 1885.
In any event, the Departure List for the ship Abraham Lincoln in March 1934 from Hamburg lists Chaje Itte Entenson, age 20, as a dressmaker form Pawelec, which is presumably a variant of Pavoloch. She is I believe my maternal grandmother Yetta.
Then the arrival record for 4 April 1914, on the President Lincoln lists Chaje Jette Entenson, 20, dressmaker, who affirms she is heading to Baltimore, Maryland.
She last lived with her father Mordeche Entenson in Pawelec (Pavoloch), and intends to live with her brother in law.
His name is difficult read but appears to be “Levin Abram”, that is to say “Abram Levin”, on 1223 Lexington St, Baltimore, in the heart of what was then Baltimore’s Jewish working class neighborhood.
Abram Levin likely was the half brother of Isadore Epstein, whom Yetta married (probably only in a common law sense) around 1922. The couple apparently lost an infant or stillborn child in 1923. Their first surviving son was Morris Epstein, born in Reading, Berks County, Pennsylvania. The 1914 shipping manifest, listing Chaje-Jetta’s father as Mordeche (Mordecai) would suggest that Yetta named Morris, her first born son, for her father.
When 21 year old Itzchok Epstein (Isadore), my mother’s father, arrived in New York on the Kaiserin Auguste Victorian. from Hamburg, on 22 May 1911, he and his 19 year old half brother Eli Levin indicated that they most recently been residing with their father Reuben Levin and their mother Hannah Epstein back in Bobroisk, Belarus.
(Perhaps Hannah had remarried Reuben after the death of Isadore’s father, Elijah Epstein. Isadore (line 24) planned to stay with his cousin Joe Epstein, 272 Cherry Street, on New York’s Lower East Side. His half brother Eli Epstein (line 23) planned to stay with his brother Abraham Levin, at 58 Montgomery Street in Brooklyn.
(I should note that my father’s mother’s mother, Chava Weinstein Zeltzer, came from Bobruisk; it seems likely she was somehow related to Isadore Epstein and that for this reason many of my DNA matches seem to be both through my maternal and paternal lines.)
I had assumed that Isadore and Yetta, who were from different regions of the Russian Empire, only met in the United States after Yetta emigrated from Ukraine. But the fact that Yetta listed in 1914 Abram Levin as her ‘brother in law suggests that she must at least have considered herself engaged to Isadore Epstein, even though she gave the name “Anderson,”—a variant of her maiden name, which I now believe to have really been Entenson— to the census enumerator in Baltimore in 1920. Bobruisk in Belarus, where Isadore was from, is over 400 miles from Pavoloch, Ukraine, Yetta’s hometown, so it is not clear how the two young people met one another in the Old Country.
As of this writing, I have not succeeded in tracing Abram Levin, Yetta’s brother in law. Abram or Abraham Levin was a common Jewish name in Baltimore and New York City. The Baltimore city directory for 1914, the year Yetta arrived, lists 13 men named Abraham Levin, none of them residing on Lexington St the street which Yetta claimed her brother in law was residing on.
In any event, it is clear that Massie/Bessie and her family never approved of Isadore, whose alcoholism and violent temper were a source of great concern. Yetta appears to have left Baltimore with Isadore in the early 1920s for Reading, Pennsylvania in the face of opposition from her sister and brother in law. Yetta remained estranged from the Labb family for the rest of her life, except for a brief attempted reconciliation around 1942. when the Labbs visited the Epsteins in Philadlephia for one night.
Did Isadore have more than one family?
In his 1917 draft registration card, an Isadore Epstein, tailor, in Reading, Pennsylvania indicates that his wife is “Annie Epstein.” The 1920 census records an Isadore Epstein, tailor, residing at 625 Wales Avenue in the Bronx with his wife Annie and their children Dora, Minnie, and Hannah.
Does this mean that Isadore in fact had two families, one in the Bronx and then one in Reading, where he and Yetta had seven children (Morris, Charles,Louis, Harry, Ruth, Ann, Norman) from 1924 onward, before moving to Philadelphia around 1942? (The move, the family recalls, was catalyzed by Isadore’s desire to escape his extensive debts in Reading. In 1934 Isadore seems to have served a prison sentence due to failure to pay rent.) Might Isadore’s double familial entanglements account for the fact that he and Yetta appear never to have been legally married, and most likely lived as a common law couple?
It should be noted that Yetta’s alienation from her natal kin due to her alliance with Isadore was in a sense mirrored by Isadore’s estrangement from his own natal kin. He appears to have drifted away from his sister Dora Epstein, b. 1880 in Bobroisk, and her husband Sam, also from Bobroisk, who adopted her surname Epstein. (It was not uncommon for Russian Jews negotiating the dangers of conscription and emigration controls by the Czarist system, to alter their surnames.) It does not appear that Dora and Sam, and their son Harry “Hank” Epstein, had extended relations with Isadore and Yetta. (Tensions may also have been exacerbated by financial demands that Isadore, perpetually in financial distress, made upon his relatives.)
Note: While it follows logically that the maternal aunt of Yetta and Bessie, Tillie Vogin also was born with the maiden name of Entenson, I have not yet a reference to a Tillie or Taub Entenson in any Ukrainian records.
It seems clear that Yetta, Bessie, and their Entenson relatives were related to the Bilous, Aronson, and Nathanson families of Pavoloch, but I am not yet sure of all the precise connections.
Nor am I precisely sure how Yetta and Bessie were related
I would be grateful to family members and helpful genealogists for corrections on this preliminary discussion and suggestions for moving forward.
Mark Auslander 