Connect the Dots

This web site I use to do the majority of genealogical research, ancestry.com , has a feature I cannot resist - which they call hints. I've got about 1,200 individuals on my tree and about 185 individuals with hints. When I go to the sight I go straight to the hints, where connections with other family trees, census records, school year books, draft registrations, naturalization records, marriage, divorce, and death records are all waiting to be tapped into. Most of the time it's just plod, plod, plod away. It can be boring to just start from the top of the alphabet and work down, especially when there's 185 people to sort through. So I mix it up, scanning down the list until I find a name I hope will help tap a vein with some juicy information. Most of the time this isn't the case. But tonight I happened upon some good stuff.

A fellow named Jacob Chaiken became a Naturalized Citizen in 1921. There's all sorts of information on these papers, which start with a declaration of intent (to become a citizen) and end (hopefully) with the actual certificate of naturalization. This took anywhere from six to twelve years, depending on all sorts of circumstances. Anyway, everybody has to have two witness/sponsor/people to stand up and say Yay, for the petitioner. On Jacob's (his original name was Jankel) one of the witnesses was Abraham Dortort. As you may know I've written about the Dortorts here before. I don't know about you but a name like Dortort seems unusual to me. It's stuck there in my brain as a name to watch out for. So I see this name and I go into my database there on the site to see if I've got an Abraham Dortort. I do, and I don't. I've got an Abraham Yankel ha Kahane Dortort, born about fifty years before the above Abraham is supposed to be born. So, it's not him. But maybe, hopefully, they're related.

So I start digging around and I find Freda Cherim, wife of Jacob Chaiken, is the sister of Yetta (also known as Ethel) Cherim, and the wife of Abraham Dortort, one of Jacob Chaiken's naturalization witnesses. It took me a couple hours to document these findings...it doesn't sound too complicated, but it felt like a bit of a game of hide and seek.

There are public member family trees on the site and private member trees, and there are private components of public trees. The standard private component are people who are still alive. But not always. If someone wants to keep parts of their public trees private they can do so - it's their family, after all. Anyway, I did a bit of detective work with the information I had on the site, and several family trees that included Dortorts, Chaikens, and Cherims. Insert here a good helping of suspension of disbelief. It's essential when coming across hints for people that do not appear, at first glance to be who you think you want them to be. For example, I searched for records for Yetta (Ethel) Cherim in a number of places but didn't find her until a hint turned up, after several connections with related (no pun intended) family trees, for a family listed as Charron, or something close to that. Just beneath the surface of this poor transliteration were salient details that matched up with bits of information I'd come across elsewhere in the search for documentation of this Yetta person. Once I had Yetta it was only a matter of time before I found Abraham and how he was related to the rest of the Dortorts. What was interesting about finding him, though, was that in several family trees his father, David Eliyu, was not included in the (long) list of siblings. But I was able to find one tree that did include David Eliyu, and that's how I was able to confirm Abraham's connection with the rest of the tree. And not because Abraham was listed as David Eliyu's son on the family tree I looked at directly. I had to look at the record kind of out of the corner of my eye, if you can imagine, so as to understand that I'd found what I was looking for.

Fun fact - Abraham Dortort was listed throughout his adult life as an egg candler (also known as an egg inspector).