Alan Schwartz's Friends

Alan Schwartz's Page

At 2:04pm on July 19, 2009, Michael Leon Kantey said…: amazing! It souds suspiciously like they could be brothers. I know there were something like seven brothers in all, and that some came to Cape Town with Edel (around 1895) and then left again, quite possibly for the United States, where New York would ave been their port of entry. The spelling was never really consistent in those days, by the way, and "Schwartz/Swartz" would have been variants of the same root word: "Schwartz" in Yiddish -- from the German.

Let me have your e-mail to mike.kantey@gmail,com and I'll send you the little that I have.

If Israel and Idel were brothers, then Idel's eldest daughter (my paternal grandmother) would have been Israel's niece. I have a picture of her as a young girl with the word "Minsk" printed at the bottom in Russian (or Cyrillic) script. Their family apparently had a timber farm on the (Volga?) River.

My dad's brother was Leon Kantey, who lived in Teaneck, New Jersey. His children were: Ilana, Donna and David Seth Kantey, who teaches chess in the New York area. You could probably Google them and pick up where they are today. It would be really wild if we shared a common ancestor!

Stay well, and keep searching ...

At 3:11pm on July 18, 2009, Michael Leon Kantey said…: my great-grandfather Edel Schwartz came from Minsk in Belarus. His wife was named Sonia, and his kids were my grandmother Esther, and my great-aunts Bertha, Billie Ruth with one son Victor who apparently died in New York. How near is that place to Minsk? Plus, apparently their birth-name was Abramowitz, but they changed it to "Schwartz" to avoid the draft into the Imperial Russian army.

What countries and other locations are you interested in researching?: Poland, Ukraine, Belarus

What is your level of genealogy knowledge?: Beginning Family History Researcher