Genealogy research takes a lot of persistence and patience. We would all like to hope that our ancestors’ stories can be easily pieced together by filling in a few names and dates at ancestry.com. Sometimes, particularly with an unusual name, we get lucky. More often, it takes going down many paths, picking up a few pieces to the puzzle, and then sitting down and assembling it all into a story. What follows is one of my most rewarding and difficult searches. I had a photo and a story. It is a picture of my father returning to New Jersey on the Japanese ship, Kamakura Maru in June 1941. He is standing with a young woman. The story was that he met a woman and her mother- Polish Jews- who were on their way to Canton, Ohio. The young woman’s father had supposedly arranged for them to obtain American passports. Here’s how I found the identity of the woman in the photo and her living grandson, a search which took many years:
- The list of passports issued in April 1941, which I obtained from the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, had the names of two women: Cipa and Bluma Lewin. Could one of these be the woman in the photo?
- A year later, I obtained the passenger list for the voyage on the Kamakura Maru, and on that list, were two women, Cipa and Bluma Lewin. They were from Poland and headed to Canton, Ohio. Cipa was the younger- only 25- so I was feeling more confident that she could be the woman in the photo with Dad.
- I viewed a video in which my father told the story about meeting the women on the Kamakura Maru. He mentioned having the address. I recalled that I had found an address book alongside the diary in my father’s dresser. I flipped through the pages of the address book and found and entry, “K. Levine, Canton, Ohio.” BINGO! This was similar enough, particularly knowing that the letters “W” and “V” are often interchanged.
- I returned to ancestry.com, and found several hits. The one which was the most helpful was in the City Directories for Bluma and Kalman Levine in Canton, Ohio. Aha!
- I hopefully now had the name of the parents of the woman in the photo. Ancestry.com gave me the dates of their death, so I wrote to the county library and asked for copies of their obituaries, which I received by email later that day. Quick turnaround, Stark County Public Library!
- The obituary mentioned one daughter, and although the first name was different (Sally instead of Cipa), I knew names were often Americanized. Sally (Cipa?) was married, so I had a completely different name to locate.
- Ancestry also provided me with Sally’s date of death. I couldn’t find her obituary on that site, so I tried another search site which has been very successful to me in the past: “Newsbank- America’s News”, which I am able to access via my local town library remotely. When I read “She was born in Poland, came to the U.S. in 1941, settling in Canton “, I knew this was a match. I was confident I had found the woman in the photograph, but I needed to be 100% positive. Her obituary provided me with the names of her children.
- I googled the names of one of the children + white pages. I learned from that search that there was only one person in the US with that name. Sometimes we are lucky. That name was connected with a business email address. I took a chance and sent an email with a brief explanation of why I was writing, attaching a photo of the ship and my father with the mystery woman. I asked if the woman in the photo was his mother. Attaching the photo was the difference to getting a response and having my email deleted.
The response I got that same day was “That is a picture of my mother……..wow…………” (By the way, her grandson had the same photo of the ship shown below.) So now the mystery of the woman in the photo is solved. My advice is to be patient and take one step at a time. Using ancestry.com, ship records, city directories, local libraries, Newsbank, and Google searches are all useful tools in our searches. Sometimes, all must be used together in finding the answers to our genealogy mysteries.