Creating a New Tree on MyHeritage - Tue, 2 Jul 2024

MyHeritage is the site where I maintain my family tree information. I have one main tree for my family and my wife’s family along with a place-to-place study of the people who left the town of Mezhirichi in the Russian Empire in the early 1900’s to come to Winnipeg and their families. This tree now has 12,111 people in it.

I also have 6 other trees, for my brother-in-law (my wife’s sister’s husband), my niece, my wife’s stepfather, a good friend, a family tree of Mark Cuban from when I worked on him during a WikiTree challenge, and a Bible family tree. These other trees are all relatively small ranging from 190 to 804 people. My niece and friend’s trees could be much larger since they have some lines going back to the 1500s, but I’ve limited those trees to ancestors-only after the first 3 generations to avoid going crazy.

An Opportunity

For my other brother-in-law (my sister’s husband), I have his mother’s side included in my place-to-place study. But his father’s side has been mostly a mystery and there’s no living relatives that he knew of on his father’s side.

He told me his father Joseph Shpiegel (later Spiegel) came from Russia with his father’s uncle Alex Shpiegel. My brother-in-law remembers when he was young visiting his great-uncle at the old folks home in Winnipeg. Alex passed away in 1961 and is buried in a cemetery near Winnipeg.

I knew my brother-in-law’s father had 3 brothers and 2 sisters that went by the surname Kogenman, son of Oiser Kogenman. One older brother left Russia and went to St. Louis and married and had a daughter who died unmarried and childless. So that branch is gone. And we don’t know what happened to the other 4 siblings who stayed in Russia (now Ukraine).

So just for fun, I thought I’d try to find out more about this Alex Shpiegel.

Another Family Researcher

The first place I went was to my brother-in-law’s niece’s Ancestry site to see if she had anything I didn’t.  She had three important facts: 

1. The family was from the town of Pishchanka in Podolia.
2. Oiser Kogenman’s wife was Rifka Prosterman.
3. Joseph’s passenger record in 1924 which stated that he travelled across the ocean alone (at 14 years old!!!) to stay with his uncle Alex Shpiegel in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Researching Alex Shpiegel in Regina

I then looked to see what I could find about Alex’s life in Saskatchewan. I couldn’t find much, but what I found had a big surprise.

The 1916 Canadian Census shows Alex living on Ottawa Street in Regina, age 28, a junk peddler, immigrated from Russia in 1913.

It shows him having a wife, age 28, immigrated from Russia in 1914. Nobody ever knew that Alex was ever married!!

The name is indexed as “Lisa” but is hard to read and is likely something else, since Lisa is not a Jewish name given to Russian girls:

I was able to find her Passenger record:

This lists her name as “Leie”, i.e. Leah, which makes more sense. It also says she was married, so she and Alex must have got married in Russia. Alex came first to find a place and get a job and then sent for Leah to join him the next year.  Either Alex or Leah could be Joseph’s blood relative.

After that, I found the 1926 Canadian Census for Alex Shpiegel:   Item: Alex Spiegel - Library and Archives Canada (bac-lac.gc.ca)
This record lists his wife as Helen, which may be the English name she chose.  I searched around to see if I could find a death record or a headstone for a Leah/Helen Shpiegel/Spiegel, but I was unable to find anything. She just vanished after 1930.

Joseph lived with them from the age of 14 for about 10 years and even took the Shpiegel surname. But he never mentioned to his children that Alex had a wife. Maybe she and Alex split and she remarried and took on a new surname, which might be why I can’t find her.

Prosterman in Regina

While searching information about Alex Shpiegel and Leah/Helen in Regina, I also came across some family trees on MyHeritage of Prosterman in Regina.

Sam Prosterman and his wife Miriam and their 8 children came to Regina in 1904 from Pishchanka. Sam’s sister Faigeh Prosterman and her husband Nusan Finkelstein and their 10 children came to Regina in 1913 from Pishchanka.

Everything is starting to click. Joseph’s mother was Rifka Prosterman. She is not listed as one of the 18 children of Sam and Faigeh. And Leah/Helen and Alex Shpiegel are not in the trees either. Could they somehow be related.

Then I came across this newspaper article from 1928:

This was a 1928 Wedding Anniversary from the Prosterman family where much of the Regina Prosterman and Finkelstein families were invited. And who just happens to be invited to this event? None other than “Mr. and Mrs. Alex Spiegel”.

So how are they related?

Russian Records

After a bit of checking on JewishGen for a Leah Prosterman, I found just one record  and it was a birth record in the correct year in the correct place Podolia. The town of Balta is only 25 km from Pishchanka. I would think this is quite likely her.

Fun, fun, fun!

Unfortunately, it does not give Leah’s father’s name. But since Alex was known to be Joseph’s uncle, it makes sense that Leah Prosterman was Rifka Prosterman’s sister. Their father likely was a brother to Sam Prosterman and Faigeh Finkelstein.

Building the Tree on MyHeritage

With the assumption in hand that Sam, Faigeh and “Unknown male” Prosterman were 3 siblings, I moved on to the task of building their family tree.

I started with Joseph, added his parents Oiser Konegman and Rifka Posterman and Oiser’s siblings. I connected Leah/Helen as a sister to Rifka. Added their unknown father and connected him as a sibling to Sam and Faigeh.

Then I let MyHeritage’s magic do its work, and it came up with 542 record Matches from 33 sources, and 1,132 Smart Matches from 62 family trees. Those trees included 6 that were created by direct descendants of Sam or Faigah.

So now it was time to build a “Quick and Dirty” tree from all that information. I methodically went through all the MyHeritage hints, using newspaper articles and online obituaries of those who died within the past 25 years along with living people records for the USA to add some confirmation that the family trees were mostly correct.

About 4 days and 40 hours of reviewing matches later, I had my own tree assembled with 538 people.

My brother-in-law now has several hundred living relatives on his father’s side, mostly at the 3rd cousin level, that he previously never knew of.