Dvinsk, Daugavpils
If Kupiškis was the classic small shtetl, Dvinsk (the name has changed a few times along with the borders, but it currently Daugavpils) was the booming metropolis. In the 1897 census, it had a population of 72,231 of which 32,369 of them were Jews. One can imagine a number of reasons why Yankel Shabsel and Khaya Basia would migrate to the big city in the late 1800’s…greater access to just about everything. As mentioned in the previous blog, Yankel Shabsel’s wealthy uncle Girsha had already moved by 1858, so there was family in Daugavpils. It is also true that in the 1880’s, the textile industry, which had previously been mostly a Jewish trade, was largely taken over by the Christian community, so the Jewish tailors, such as Yankel Shabsel, would have had a tougher time making a living in a small town like Kupiskis.
The border between Lithania and Latvia: There isn’t much marking the border besides a small sign and, where we crossed, there happened to be a small tributary to a lake.
The road descending down into the Daugava River Valley. We noticed that throughout the whole region, the environment looked very much like Minnesota. There is a lot of water and the trees are very similar in species and type. Instead of Bald Eagles, there are huge storks of some sort with nests on tall objects all over the place. We even had a near miss with a deer jumping across the road.
Stork on a nest in the Latvian countryside
It was like someone had paid this woman to be on the road a mile into Latvia so we could imagine our ancestors.
A reminder of who are talking about. All the Locketz’s in Minnesota descende from Yankel Shabsel and Khaya Basia.
Family legend is that my Great-Grandfather Louis, and his siblings Joseph, Jessie, Morris and Helen, were orphaned when Louis was still a very small child. Khaya Basia died in child birth with the fifth child, Helen, according to a 1959 essay called, “An Analytical Occupational History” in which Geula Grinberg interviewed Louis. He recalled that his newborn younger sister was adopted by a local family. I have wondered if Helen’s Yiddish name was Khaya like her mother. Helen would be an obvious English choice upon her immigration to the United States. Khaya in Yiddish means, “life” and is sometimes given to a girl whose mother has died.
We do not yet have death records for ether Yankel Shabsel or Khaya Basia. But we do know from Geula’s interview of Louis that “when his parents died,” one brother was already married and had moved to the outskirts of town. The other brother moved to Creslovka (?) to be a pig bristle brush maker which is an industry that is associated with Dvinsk. The older sister Jessie was already married and moved out of town. The essay goes on to say that Louis stayed in an orphanage for one year and then “when he turned eight he fled” because it was a “terrible place” and he went to live on his own in the shipyard because he didn’t know where the rest of the family was. He earned money as a porter.
There is a gap between what Louis remembered and the timeline supported by documents, but clearly he and Helen who were just babies when their mother died had disrupted childhoods. The others were older and perhaps already independent more independent and less impacted.
Daugavpils is not a port city so it is more likely that if Louis was a porter, it was here at the train station, not at a port. The building here is newer, but the tracks below are in the same spot they have been since the 1800s. One can imagine a young Louis running luggage for people arriving to town.
The part of the story that is harder to comprehend is what I alluded to in my previous post. I did find one surprise.
It is common knowledge in the genealogy community that if you dig into your past, more than likely you will find surprises that challenge your own family narrative. Nothing here is earth shattering and all of it is from more than 100 years ago. But the “surprises” do leave questions. Like, “why didn’t we know about it?” Yankel Shebsel married again after Khaya Basia died and he had another child. The woman he married was Rokha and they had a son name Nekeme. All we have is the birth record. I have not been able to find out any more information about them.
This is the birth record for Nekeme. He was born on Wednesday February 2, 1892, 3 Adar 5652. The underlined word is Locketz. It says his the parents are Shabsel, son of Yosel and Rokha daughter of Nekhel. It must have been her first child and they named him for her father.
Here is Louis’s birth record. It also has the Yiddish. May 20th, 1887, the 9th of Sivan.
Helen (nee Locketz) Sherman reported on census records in the United States that she was born on October 20, 1888, though we have not found her birth record.
These documents create a more nuanced story with unanswerable questions. When Nekeme was born, Louis would have been about five years old and Helen about four years old. I imagine Yankel Shabsel would have taken them with him when he remarried, but as far as I know, no one who descends from the five siblings of the first marriage, were aware of the second marriage and the half-brother. With the other siblings and descendants remaining close for generations, this leaves as question mark. It is possible that Yankel Shabsel died soon after the second marriage and Nekeme’s birth and reality changed for the family, but we don’t have Yankel Shabsel’s death record. We do know that at least by 1897, when he was 10 or 11, Louis was already living in the Talmud Torah, the Jewish school and orphanage, of which he had terrible memories. It was from there that he likely ran away.
This is the page from the 1897 Census records which lists the school and address, Ogorodnaya Street in Dvisnk, Apt 2.
Louis is entry #6. You can see in the fourth column from the left that he was marked as 11 years old. Likely by then, Yankel Shabsel had died.
There are many remaining synagogue buildings in Daugavpils today, though they are crumbling and are no longer owned or in use by the Jewish community. The community has fewer than 100 members. When I asked a local if there was a moyel in town, he told me the community is old, most people from Russia and Belarus who, over the decades, have moved west and that there is never a new baby. They maintain one building, the Kadish Synagogue, as a house of study, house of prayer and as a museum and learning center. Outside the building they have photographs of what the Jewish city looked like 100 years ago. You can see most of the exhibit on their website, as well as here, but I included the map so you can see that there were dozens of synagogues at one time (the blue stars).
The Kadish Synagogue today in Daugavpils, Latvia.
The neighborhood of that the Talmud Torah was in was destroyed and is now a mix of old and new. The exact spot of the school/orphanage is somewhere in this strip mall. But just across the street, as you can see in photo series below, there is a remnant of the city that is very old and would likely be recognizable by our ancestors.
Coming from the Train Station down the street on which the Talmud Torah was during Louis’ time.
The old Jewish cemetery where like Yankel Shabsel and Khaya Basia are buried was destroyed. Its earliest graves were from the 17th century. Today there is a memorial marker and just a few headstones. It is a pleasant setting with walking paths down to the lake. As in other destroyed cemeteries we have visited, it is the headstones that were destroyed. What is left of the remains, all these years later, is still below. With that in mind, I recited Kaddish for our ancestors whose graves certainly nearby and have not been visited in likely more than 125 years.
“This place was the site of the Jewish Cemetery, established in the 17th Century and destroyed in the ‘70s of the XX Century.”
All throughout the park, you can see broken pieces of granite…one imagines they are pieces of headstones. The community has recovered 80 of thousands upon thousands of lost and destroyed headstones and plans to create a monument with them.
According to the essay written by Geulah, Louis lived on the street for a time after he left the Talmud Torah, while he was portering, then lived in a camp for workers in a factory, and finally went to find his brother. He lived with the married brother for a few months, but had broken his leg and was a burden…not sure where he went from there. But in the process, it seems that he learned the trade of brush making from the other brother who had moved to Creslovka.
Part of our family legend is that Louis was imprisoned for a period of time before leaving Latvia. There was in fact a thwarted revolution in 1905 called the “Russian Revolution of 1905” or, “The First Russian Revolution.” It was put down by the throne on June 16, 1907. It might well have been then that he was detained. Or, always an organizer, perhaps he had organized a worker’s uprising or rebellion in the factory associated the camp in which he lived. The prison in which he would have been detained is still there and in use.
From “An Analytical Occupational History” by Geula Grinberg, 1959.
The Prison
We know Louis lived for awhile in Leipsig and worked as a brush maker and then emigrated to Minneapolis to reunite with the brothers before venturing to Chicago where he would ultimately meet Elizabeth.
Louis in Leipsig, Germany.
In the interview, Louis reported that in 1910, living in Germany, his brothers living in Minneapolis requested that he come join them. He also reported that since he had used a false passport to enter Germany from Latvia, he had no means by which to become a citizen in Germany. So he made his way to the United States on the SS Corinthian sailing from London on April 23, 1910 and arriving at the Port of Montreal on May 9, 1910.
He continued on to Minneapolis where his brothers, Morris and Joseph were living. One was working as a tailor and the other as a sewing machine operator. Louis found work as a brush maker, but according to the interview with Geula, he had to quit after six weeks because he was producing too quickly, making the other brush makers look bad and there was in conflict with them. At first he was warned by other workers to slow down so he hid completed brushes under his table so it would appear he was working slower. But he ultimately resigned as was a skill that gave him pride and mobility (being an excellent brush maker) in Germany, and it caused him shame in Minneapolis.
One of Louis’ brothers helped him get a job as a sewing machine operator in a small cloth shop. While working there, Louis got involved in union activities and in 1911, the workers went on strike. Louis had to leave the shop and went to Chicago to find work. This information in the interview aligns with the family legend that Louis was blacklisted as a communist in Minneapolis and therefore could not find work. He found work as an operator in a cloth manufacturing shop in Chicago and remained in that company from 1911 to 1914.
Until more documents are found which provide details of Yankel Shabsel’s and Khaya Basia’s death, we’ll never know exactly how the last decade of the family in Daugavpils truly played out. Finding those documents is still possible and I am in touch with a researcher in the archives in Riga which is where they might be. We do know, however, that already by WWI, Helen was in New York, Jessie was in Buenos Aires, and the three brothers, Joseph, Morris and Louis were all in Minneapolis. According to Sidney’s charts from the 1980’s, Jessie was married several times and potentially had children who were already adults and remained when she emigrated. If any descendants remained there, they likely would descend from Jessie.
For many more resources on Daugapils, see the Kehilah Link on JewishGen.
