That's mostly European Migration of Jews.
Below is a wider view...
Will discuss the Silk Road in another post!
The old joke that we are really the Wandering Jews is honestly more true than we want to admit. Due to Anti-semitism and being caught in the middle of other political problems aka Wars ... Jews often hit the road and moved on to what they hoped would be greener pastures. Sometimes Jews were kicked out of the town outright and when a regime changed they were allowed back in and often they went while others kept moving on somewhere else.
Add in that every family is told that their grandfather was from "Russia" and yet it might really be Lithuania, Poland or even Latvia but "Russia" is written down on the Ancestry Family Tree. Basically what it means is "not Romanian" or "not Sephardic" as the pollitcal borders of that part of Europe changed so frequently that one sibling is listed as being born in one country and the older brother is listed in a different country and yet the farm never moved, only the borders.
When I was young my Grandpa Herman, obviously a wise man, showed me a map of Europe and where his village was and he told me NOT TO LOOK AT BORDERS but to look at the rivers as borders changed but rivers were the better marker to find his home town. He was born in Bodalo that's also spelled Bodalovo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badalovo as seen on Wikipedia. He was born in Hungary, his younger sister was born in Czechoslovakia and if you want to travel there today... it's in the Ukraine! Grandpa was right, follow the rivers and where they almost meet is where he was born. An old map below shows the rivers and where they almost quite meet in what's really the Sub Carpathian region.
It makes everything complicated.
His wife my grandma Esther was born in Plunge Lithuania, but many knew it as Plumgeyan a part of Kovno and it was Lithuania but it had many other influences.
My grandmother said her mother was born in Mala Russia which was only called that for a short time and the borders varied greatly. Makes tracking down the exact small shtetl that much harder. I once asked where Malarussia was in an online Facebook group and all the experts told me she meant Belarus and it was not a place. Annoying, as my degree in International Relations-Russian Studies said otherwise and it's quite easy to find information on. A warning here it's a political powder keg as leaders of modern day Russia wanted to bring back the term to prove it was part of Russia though currently it's Ukraine. Jews may wander a lot but the borders of that part of Europe as always slip sliding away somewhere else.
More confusing was the term "White Russia" which covered a large area, a huge area and a shrinking area depending on which decade the person lived in that region.
https://yannayspitzer.net/2012/07/22/a-new-map-of-jewish-communities-in-the-russian-empire/ The map below comes from this incredible site.
Pretty much a good part of Eastern European Russia.
Add in a bit of the Baltic Region on any given day.
Years ago my Grandma Mary and my Grandma Esther were talking and they said they came from the same place, that place was White Russia and they smiled like they went to the same highschool! This was difficult to me, I remember following my mother around asking her what "White Russia" meant and she tried to make up something because basically my Grandma Mary's side of the family is so old time Florida that the old country before Key West was literally Philadelphia and England way before that. Grandma Mary was a Jewish Southern Belle who dressed very modern, fashionable and spoke with a heavy Southern accent that was specifically a Florida Southern Accent. You know that swath of Florida from Tampa to Tallahassee that's way more Southern than Miami Beach. Grandma Esther was a sweet lady who didn't dress in the most current styles and her apartment in Miami Beach where she spent a few months every year smelled of moth balls and the aroma of food from some place other than how I was raised with Chicken and Yellow Rice Tampa style and grits and fish meant Yellowtail not anything that swam in a bathtub to be made into Gefilte Fish; people from Up North who had Grandmother's from the old country would understand that bathtub carp refrence. In my world Carp was smoked fish served on a platter of various smoked fish such as lox or whitefish at a Bris.
So the thought of these two women coming from "the same place" was almost impossible to wrap your head around. My Grandma Mary once complained to me that when she spoke Yiddish to Grandma Esther and her sister Aunt Ida they looked at her like they weren't speaking the same language, adding in her heavily Southern Accent "I'm speaking a perfectly good Yiddish" and yes she was but most Yankees or New Yorkers (same thing) would have problems understanding it.
Turns out when I was doing research on Grandma Esther's family records from Plunge on JewishGen I found records on Grandma Mary's father's family in the same records. Didn't I feel silly. I thought she meant "Northern Russia" vs Hungary like my father's father but no they meant vaguely the "same place" even if they looked different, sounded different ... okay they were both short... the lesson here is never assume.
So as time goes by I try and piece together the map of where my family was from originally.
Grandma Esther was from Plunge/Kovno near the Baltic in Lithuania/Russia. Grandma Mary's father was from Suwalki or close to their a town near Plunge and also very close to the German/Poland in different times in history! Grandma would often say Lomza that trust me sounds even harder to understand with a Southern Accent.
It does line up there...
...some of her grandparents came from Minsk.
I thought that meant they were in vaudeville!
(honest... we were a musical family, made sense)
And her husband Ben Dov Ber aka Beryl was from Chernigov.
This is basically the Pale of Settlement.
This is an area rich in Chabad history.
Chabad Lubavitch.
As Chassidim traveled.
Everyone it seems traveled.
And you know why?
Napolean's Invasion brought famine and disease and people picked up and ran to wherever they could find a place less touched by the Napoleanic War. The Russian Revolution created havoc in that region and people moved once again to save their lives and find food and another place to live. When Poland was divided by 3 Queens (do you really want women to run the world I wonder) many of the Polish Jews running from Anti-Semitism ran deeper into Russia... and the Ukraine which was basically at that point in time the "borderlands" much like the Wild West where settlers traveled to ...to start over. Then the Cossacks began to attack the Jews who they saw as strangers, more Polish and the old antisemitism and after the Pogroms began more Jews left and made their way to America. Those who did not leave had to deal with the horrors of World War 1 and shuffled about to other places that looked safter.
If you are of Irish or English or French roots and your Ancestry DNA shows you are small parts Eastern European Jewish, it's probably because your ancestor left for the new countty of America to escape the French Revolution. You may not be Jewish by religion but you have parts of the DNA and are partlya member of the tribe.
It's such a mish mash of history, geography and demography. It's such a mish mash of names as your ancestor may know the Polish name of the village or the German name or the Yiddish name or the Russian name. Lots of luck.
No, I haven't written in a while. I'm bored. The tropics are quiet and winter refuses to visit my neck of the woods with any real snow. My maple tree is budding, soon the dogwood will began to open up it's beautiful white little leaves. I may leave for a bit and go somewhere... possibly Florida to see the kids. Somewhere to write, to wander and get lost in the beauty of life in the South; usually that means Savannah where some distant ancestors were part of the original earliest settlers of Savannah...a place I have lots of very distant cousins.
Football Season is over.
I'm planning on using this blog more as a place to keep my thoughts like a verbal and photographic filing case that Google will help me fast find what I want and if nothing else I'm writing.
I'm not proofreading today.
Goal is to find out who Yonah's father was really.... He lived in Chernigov and died there. But his wife and much of the family was from Nezhin, as I've said in this blog earlier. It's a bit of a block... a genealogical wall that's hard to get past though it seems way back the family was from places to the North... somewhere between Latvia and Lubavitch, but someone here is of Mizrachi Persian genes and that probably goes back to Baku but who knows.
What's your goal for the month?
I'm no longer stalking snow probabilities in the models and just relaxing and enjoying the cooler weather.
Ben/Yona known as Yena had cousins in Chernobyl (my mother said that) that is proved by Ancestry results ....
It's a puzzle.
I'm making dinner.
I just needed to write.
Stay focused.
If you are here... hopefully I'll blog more as I have ideas for how to properly organize my notes and seeing as I love to write ....................going to do it here.
Much love.
Besos Bobbi
My Grandma Mary loved to play this song on the piano. I can see her now moving her fingers across the keys as if they were dancing.
He has blue eyes like her father Wolfe!
