The Wrong Photograph

For years, a photograph stood in for my great-great-uncle Harry Fox: three young men in front of the palms of the Belle Isle Conservatory in Detroit, around 1917. I had assumed the man standing in the middle was Harry, because on the right of the photo was my great grandfather Albert Fox, and on the left was their brother Ervin Fox.

That was a mistake. When the faces were finally checked, the man seated on the left matched Harry's brother Ervin, but the man standing in the middle was definitely not Harry.

Harry left Minsk in December of 1902. On the Hamburg steamer Pisa's manifest, which arrived in New York on January 2, 1903, he is listed as Hirsch Fuchs, a tailor. The family name Fuks/Fuchs is an ornamental surname that means Fox in Yiddish. In column 18, where the clerk recorded whom each immigrant was going to join, there is a name that made no sense based on what I knew about the family at the time.

An uncle named Lebow was surprising. We have a pretty strong understanding of all Meyer's siblings. The Fox side of the family is documented across generations in Minsk records and validated with extensive DNA evidence. There is no Lebow among them. If this uncle was actually blood related, the likeliest place to look was the other side: Harry's mother, Reva Heft. While we knew a lot about the Heft family history in Minsk going back several generations, we had very little knowledge about what happened to her family going into the 20th century.

There is one more clue in that scrawled address, and it took a second manifest to see it. Three days before Harry landed, on December 30, 1902, the S.S. Belgravia arrived in New York carrying another young man from Minsk: Schmul Libow, who America would come to know as Sam Lewis. The clerk on Sam's manifest wrote his destination plainly: uncle Hyman Lisitsky, 74 Brighton St., Boston. The 1902 Boston city directory lists Hyman Lisitzky at that same address.

Harry's clerk wrote what looks like "[H/L]yman Str 74". I could not turn that scrawl into a street name, and I am not going to pretend I can, so we show it as written. But two different clerks, three days apart, both wrote down the same house number, 74. That number is what let me line the two ships up against each other.

And there was a third. In January 1908, a young woman named Chayke Libow arrived from Minsk, and her manifest sent her to a Boston uncle too, written this time as "uncle Chaim S. Lisitzky," at a new address now that the household had moved. Three young travelers from Minsk across six years, Sam in 1902, Harry in 1903, and Chayke in 1908, were each pointed to a Boston uncle, written down under the names Lisitzky and Lebow both.

Put the three arrivals beside the 1902 directory and the strongest reading, about 90 to 95 percent by the records we hold, is that the Boston uncle was the man the city knew as Hyman Lisitzky, one man under two surnames. The family tree now has it that way. The records point there, and it is very likely, though not locked.° ◕ very likely

The paper trail could not tell me how this Lebow family connected to ours. So I turned to the DNA.

First, were the Lisitzky and Lebow families actually related to each other by blood, or just friends or associates? A tested descendant of the Lisitzky line and a tested descendant of the Lebow line share 103 centimorgans of DNA. A centimorgan is the unit used to measure how much DNA two people share, and 103 is a lot, even for Ashkenazi Jews from the same town, where generations of marrying inside a small community leave almost everyone sharing a little. The two families were definitely closely related.°

Second, how did the Lebows connect to us? Two members of the family had tested: my great uncle Charles Fox and his cousin Alan Newman, descendants of Meyer and Reva through two different children. If a stranger's descendants matched closely to both kits, the connection very likely ran through Meyer or Reva rather than some other branch.

One cluster of shared matches stood out. Mutual DNA matches led back to one woman: Sivia Lebov of Boston.°

Like Harry, Sivia left a paper trail of her own. Her Declaration of Intention carries her photograph, and it names the ship that brought her over.

So I pulled that passenger list. The S.S. Westernland arrived in New York on May 10, 1906. Sivia is on line 16, and Reva is on line 17, the very next line, in the same clerk's hand, with Reva's four children written down the rows beneath her. You can put a finger on Sivia's name and move it down one line to Reva without lifting it off the page. They came from the same city, and they crossed the ocean written into the book back to back. How Sivia connected to Reva is where the records go next.

The Foxes and the Lebows crossed on the same ship, written on the same page. Sivia, then Reva, then four of her children, one of them my great grandfather Albert, the same Albert this story started with.

Sivia's records named her parents: her father Iudel-Leiba Lebov, written as Yehuda Leib on her tombstone and Louis Lebow on her marriage record, and her mother, Sora-Malka. Sora-Malka is where the question finally settled. Her son Sam, Sivia's brother, married in Boston in 1913, and the register asked one question Russian records never answered for us: Maiden name of mother.

The clerk wrote: HEFT.

Whether Reva and Sora-Malka were sisters comes down to a single name, their father's. Two Minsk birth records carry it, written into the register in the clerk's own hand, a generation apart. Here is how we read them.

Sora-Malka's father was Vulf. To see who that Vulf was, we go back another thirty-five years, to the 1847 birth of one of his own children, and to the way the Russian clerks wrote the family's name.

Reva's own stone says the same, in two alphabets. The English face reads Rebecca Fox. The Hebrew above it names her father, the same Vulf the Minsk registers gave Sora-Malka.

The stone is sure about her father. It is less sure about her age. It reads aged 68, which would put her birth around 1858, close to the 1859 we publish, but the records never fully agreed on the year.

Reva's niece Sivia lies under a Massachusetts stone too, and it carries the other half of the picture. Where Reva's stone names her father Zeev Tzvi, the Heft side, Sivia's names her father, Yehuda Leib, the Lebov who married Reva's sister Sora-Malka. Two stones in two cemeteries, each naming a different father in Hebrew, the two branches of one Minsk family that settled in America. She died in 1966 under yet another surname, Landy, possibly from a later marriage, but the stone still carries the old names.

Once I knew who the Lebows were, I started seeing them everywhere in the family's first American decade. In 1911, when Harry's sister Bessie was married at 274 Cherry Street in Manhattan, one of the two witnesses who signed the certificate was Samuel Lebow: Sivia's brother, by our best identification.°

Laid side by side, the documents show a pattern that no single record does. In 1903, Harry lands and is sent not to his father but to a Lebow in Boston. In 1906, Reva crosses the ocean one line above Sivia, her niece. Sivia married in Malden in 1907 and Sam married in Boston in 1913, and the same rabbi, Jacob G. Shain, married them both. In 1911, a Samuel Lebow, probably Sivia's brother Sam, signed as a witness at a Fox family wedding in Manhattan.

No one of these is a big event on its own. But you do not get pointed to a man's house, cross an ocean beside him, share a rabbi, and sign each other's wedding papers unless you are still in each other's lives, and they kept it up for at least a decade in the records that survive. The memory lasted longer than the paperwork. A century later, a note in a cousin's family tree still kept the story that her grandmother "came over with Reva Heft Fuks."

The records that should tell the Hefts' story are mostly gone, or were never made. The register pages that would carry Reva's and Sora-Malka's births do not survive; what remains are books like this one, from the same shelf, the neighboring years.

I grew up knowing almost nothing about this side of the family, one maiden name on a couple of certificates. The research eventually mapped the Hefts of Minsk back several generations. It was the family Reva left behind around the turn of the century that seemed to vanish, and it took one wrong photograph to find where part of it went. They had been here the whole time, in Boston and in New York, one line over from Reva's family in record after record.

The photograph of Reva and Meyer that survives is cracked across the middle and torn at the edges, and I used to read it as one family. I now know it holds two. The Lebows are on the next line of the manifest, at Bessie's wedding in Manhattan, and at the Boston address the clerks kept writing down.

I keep going back to the Belle Isle photograph this story started with. I still cannot tell you who the man standing in the middle is, and that stays open. But I can tell you who is around him now. The wrong name on one face is what sent me looking for the right one, and the right one led to a whole branch of the family that had been out of reach for years. I went in trying to name one man. I came out having found a family instead.