People, personalities & stories

Guest Blog by Hannah Renier, Hannah has ghost-written several family histories, edited others and edited some nineteenth-century journals, besides ghost-writing books for a well-known historian. History and genealogy have become her passion and she’s writing a book about Leicester Square. See Hannah’s editorial-advice blog Last year I was working on a book about London’s...
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What happens when you are looking for both names for 1 person? A couple of years ago we received an email from Belgium asking for more information on an entry we had under Lauriston Cemetery. The enquirer was interested to know whether Solomon JONES was his ancestor. Now to be honest, my initial reaction...
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What are the chances of two sisters – Abigail and Sarah – both marrying someone  with the same, very distinctive name,  within one year of each other?  Pretty slim, you would think.  I certainly doubted it,  although both marriages appeared  on the Synagogue Scribes database, albeit the grooms’ Hebrew patronymics were different.  My immediate...
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Like many Jewish families, my ancestors were great mythologisers.  They polished and shined our family story until it gleamed, leaving no trace of past crimes and misdemeanours.  Thus, one of my great uncles could write, in all sincerity, a couple of years before he died aged 102: “King Charles banished all Jews when he...
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Two and a half years have passed since we wrote about the Brady Street memorial to Miriam Levy. Her much vaunted connection to the founding of the Jewish Soup Kitchen still eludes us but, thanks to Dr. Phillip Kirby, we have now at least been able to identify her descendants. Some of  these were...
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Benjamin Jacobs, Isaac Lev Lyons and William Shannon.   On 6th November 1810 Benjamin Jacobs made out his will leaving all his “goods, chattels, money and wearing apparel” to his “good friend” and sole executor Ann Taylor. The witnesses to the will were Isaac Lev Lyons and William Shannon and the address given was...
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Our focus at  www,cemeteryscribes.com  is Jewish Cemeteries in the UK. But genealogy knows no borders and a  recent exchange of emails, relating to Anglo-Jewish burials in Australian cemeteries, led to some interesting discoveries and the addition of a note to a marriage record featured in our sister site www.synagoguescribes.com The following burials appear on...
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When it comes to requests for help with family trees, we at www.SynagogeSribes.com are a pretty hard-hearted bunch.   We have to be: if we weren’t, we’d finish up spending all our time on other people’s genealogies,  leaving none for our core work of finding, transcribing and publishing Jewish community records and, with our other...
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We thought our readers may be interested in a recent ‘find’ we came across while transcribing and transliterating burial records for SynagogueScribes.com – our sister site that deals mainly with pre civil registration, Synagogue records such as births, marriages and burials. See SynagogueScribes Sources for more information. There are already a large number of...
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The German born Hildesheimer brothers along with the Tuck family were at the forefront of the fast expanding trade in Greetings Cards in Victorian England. Siegmund Hildesheimer was born in 1832 in Hallberstadt Germany and settled in Manchester in the mid 1870’s.  The 1881 census lists his occupation as Picture Importer, although, according...
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