Sheva Baila: My Great-Great-Grandmother:
[First, apologies and a request for family: I seem to have left the US without a copy of the picture of Sheva Baila on my phone… if you have one, and can send it to me, I’ll update this posting to include it. Thanks, Mom!]
According to family history, my twice-great grandmother Sheva Baila ran a nobleman’s dairy. We don’t know a lot; Mom says we know he was a minor Russian noble, but after the Czarist invasion, all the local manors would have been given to Russian nobles. The story is that her sons were allowed to study English with the children of the manor, and that eased their emigration to the US. (Extra thanks to our cousin Ronald Polan, for having found preserved this information in his excellent family history distributed at a family reunion many years ago.)
We found two possible manors within a reasonable distance from Linkuva; one is small and currently someone’s residence (luckily, they weren’t home when we discovered this), and one is very large—the grounds, at least, are almost Mirabell Palace large, if not nearly as grand—and has been turned into a “living museum” tourist destination.
Arguements can be made that each is the more likely.
The Small Manor:
The small of the two, Impoliiai Manor (other spellings exist, but this is the one I could also find online in a registry of , is about 5 or 6 kilometers from Linkuva. It’s proximity makes it seem like the likely choice? It’s very small, so the idea that it belonged to a minor nobleman also argues in its favor; the larger manor clearly did not belong at any point to anyone who one would call “minor.” But Andreis, our guide, was skeptical that any of the buildings looked like they were suitable for a dairy, or that an estate of this size would be able to hire someone solely for the task of managing one; rather, they’d have had one or two general farmhands who helped out with what would essentially have been a family-run farm, he said.
The Grand Manor
The other option is Pakruojo dvaras. It’s now a tourist attraction, wedding venue, and “living museum.” There is no doubt that this place could afford to hire widely from the local communities, and did. Not only did they have a dairy, but they had a brewery, a perfumery, a hospital, a mill, and pretty much everything you would find in a medium sized town of the time. They had not one, but two, cowsheds, and a statue of a cow near the entrance, suggesting that the dairy was an important part of manor life.
Our tour guide was pretty certain this must have been where Sheva Bela worked.
But two things make me less sure. First, this doesn’t look to me like the kind of place where the divisions between the hired help and the nobles were particularly porous; if the story that AI, Lake, and their brothers were allowed to study English with the children of the noble family, that seems to me to suggest a closer and more casual relationship than the family that ran a place of this size would have with the workers? And second, this is 15km away… not far when you have a car, but of course Sheva and Joseph did not have a car. It’s possible that she and the children lived at the manor—there was plenty of worker housing—but we know Joseph taught at the school in Linkuva, and so that also seems unlikely? Finally, there is a restored wooden synagogue MUCH closer to this manor than the one in Linkuva, so if she had worked here, why would they not simply have lived and worshipped in that nearby community?
But I’ll also admit Mom and I both just want it to be the first, which looks like it would have been less work, and which also doesn’t set off our “allergic to fancy” response that is maybe the most Appalachian thing about us.
What do you think, family and readers? Which one do you think is more likely, or even more desirable/a better story. Since we will likely never know, there can be plenty of fun in speculating and considering possibilities.
Ooooo, this is fun speculation. I'm coming to this right after I've spent a little time considering my grandmother's fictionalization of her family history, so I'm wondering how certain you are that the family account sought for accuracy. Do you have multiple sources that confirm the kids could speak English when they arrived, for example? Or did they have a few phrases and a facility? I would see how in some families the responsibility of milking a couple cows as part of regular day labor could become "ran the dairy." Or could there be more intrigue—an illicit relationship that complicates the children's paternity and gives them special privilege on the big estate? How common was the study of English then?
Digging into local records might help. Since you don’t read the language, that might require hiring a genealogist or historian to help. But there wouldn’t be many men who match the “minor nobleman” description. There may be records on him. Deeds and wills etc can be surprisingly detailed, especially when a lot of property was involved. Or maybe someone can trace his descendants, to see if they know anything? What a fascinating puzzle.