Sunday, June 23, 2019

Paris, 1904 & 2019: The Last Resting Place of Beryl Grabois


My father's father's father's father was named Beryl Grabois (Bernard, in French and English; last name in Cyrillic was ГРАБОИС, which would have been pronounced GRAH-BOYCE). He came from a town about 50 miles northwest of what is now Kishinev, Moldova, called Faleshti (in various languages or transliterations Фэлешть/Făleşti [Romanian], פֿאַלעשט/Faleshti [Yiddish], Фолешты/Foleshty [Russian], Falesht', Feleshti, Faleshty [English]) but back then was part of greater Bessarabia, and he and his family decided that with the pogroms in Kishinev and in greater Russia against the Jews, it was time to leave. This would have been circa 1900 but maybe even as late as 1903, which was the first Kishinev pogrom. So he left with his two brothers, Morris and Abraham (aka Avram or Avroum) - but not a sister, whose name we don't know - and made their way west. They stopped in Paris for a few years.

How to find someone in the 1940 Census

I posted this on Facebook in April 2012, not long after the 1940 Census was released. I rediscovered this post in November 2020 and figured ...