The virtual genealogist strikes again...
A friend asked me to find out about her family who immigrated from Mexico to the US in the 1920s. It required a bit of history, as well as some plain old genealogy.
My correspondent’s mother was born in Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico, daughter of an immigrant family from Russia. The timing was important. After WWI a wave of Ashkenazi Jews fled Eastern Europe for Mexico, intending it to be a stopover on the way to the US. In 1921 there were an estimated 12,000 Jews in Mexico. [i] They must have received word of a tightening US immigration policy, because in 1924 immigration to the US was to be severely restricted. [ii
So, in 1923, five of the family members crossed the border at Nogales, Arizona, a 280 km trip from from Hermosillo. According to the manifest, they crossed on foot, headed for an address in Hartford, Connecticut.
The Union Pacific was running from a spur at Nogales through El Paso to Topeka and Kansas City to St. Louis, where they likely switched lines, continuing on to Connecticut. It would have taken at least 3 days for this part of the trip.
But that’s not the mystery. The questions is, why Hartford? California looks a lot closer.
The manifest at the border showed them going to what looks like Yacob Palatine of 38 Cabot St., Hartford Conn.
Who was this? I looked in census and street directories for Connecticut but unfortunately I couldn’t find anyone with a similar name. This is where Steve Morse’s One Step Web Pages came in useful.
If you’ve done any genealogy, you’ve probably seen his extensive passenger lists, as well as the “one step” census finding tools. What I wanted was a way to convert the address into an election district so that I could find out who lived at 38 Cabot St. For this I started with the “Unified 1930 Census ED Finder”
https://stevemorse.org
After entering the information, the form came up with the ED of 2-69, and it had a link to take me directly to that page in the 1930 census.
I landed right on Cabot Street. The odd numbers on Cabot St. Page 1/53.
Here’s how census takers work. They visit houses by block, not street. Usually. To find my number I had to:
Walk down Cabot, R on Homestead, R on Sterling, R on Albany, R on Edgewood, R again on Homestead (odd numbers), and back to Cabot for the even numbers.
And there at number 38 is Jacob Palatnick, 51, a junk dealer who speaks Yiddish, his wife Bessie, and daughter Pauline. No sign of the immigrants from Mexico, who by this time have moved on.
I went through the same process for 1920. I could try a search on Ancestry, but the transcription of the name has changed again, so it wouldn’t work. Back to One-Step.
In 1920 the ED is Hartford-76. The same people are there, plus a lodger.
We still haven’t answered the question of why they came to this family. A little more research shows that Bessie’s maiden name was Friedman, and there were two Friedmans who came in the group from Hermosillo. It’s likely that there is a connection. The assumption is that they came to join family already in the US. So there’s more work to be done.
Stephen Morse is best known as the architect of the Intel 8086 (the granddaddy of today’s pentium processor), which sparked the PC revolution 25 years ago. He is also an amateur genealogist who has been researching his Russian-Jewish origins. He has taught at CCNY, Pratt Institute, UC Berkeley, SUNY Albany, Stanford University, and San Francisco State. He has authored numerous technical papers, written four textbooks, and holds four patents.
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