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?
I feel pretty sure there is no scandal. When her oldest son, AI, sent back more money from the US than she thought reasonable, she paid for a rabbi to travel from Lithuania to be sure he wasn't up to no good.
Or so the story goes.
I think this may be a difference between researching fairly recent family history and older stories? Nobody alive knew Sheva, who died almost exactly 100 years ago. And my family intentionally never talked about life before emigration or even generations before my grandfather. I'm not sure how I'd even discover truth from family myth.
Luckily, I can just write into that ambiguity. So much of what I'm discovering is the cost of not knowing--and not really being able to discover--much about my family history.
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.
Unfortunately, the records we’d need didn’t survive either WWII or the Soviet occupation (we’re not sure which), because both manors could qualify (and who knows how accurate that “minor” is in the family story, or what it means… perhaps just “noble but not royal,” or perhaps “some random Baron who was really just a titled farmer (says the Baroness Heinrici von der Linden, who knows of what she speaks). So we’d need Sheva’s records, and anything that recorded her work information, but those would have been destroyed when all the Jewish community records were destroyed.
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?
I feel pretty sure there is no scandal. When her oldest son, AI, sent back more money from the US than she thought reasonable, she paid for a rabbi to travel from Lithuania to be sure he wasn't up to no good.
Or so the story goes.
I think this may be a difference between researching fairly recent family history and older stories? Nobody alive knew Sheva, who died almost exactly 100 years ago. And my family intentionally never talked about life before emigration or even generations before my grandfather. I'm not sure how I'd even discover truth from family myth.
Luckily, I can just write into that ambiguity. So much of what I'm discovering is the cost of not knowing--and not really being able to discover--much about my family history.
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.
Unfortunately, the records we’d need didn’t survive either WWII or the Soviet occupation (we’re not sure which), because both manors could qualify (and who knows how accurate that “minor” is in the family story, or what it means… perhaps just “noble but not royal,” or perhaps “some random Baron who was really just a titled farmer (says the Baroness Heinrici von der Linden, who knows of what she speaks). So we’d need Sheva’s records, and anything that recorded her work information, but those would have been destroyed when all the Jewish community records were destroyed.