Finding Mollie Bogolub

In the 1990s, I came across this photograph in a pile of family photographs at my great-aunt Bernice Kaplan Barr's home. Aunt Bernice and her slightly younger niece, Phyllis Mendelsohn Solub, identified the women going clockwise from the top of the photograph as Mollie Bogolub, my great-aunt Sadye Kaplan Mendelsohn, Aunt Bernice herself as a child, and my own grandmother, Babe Kaplan Schwartzberg. The photo was probably taken about 1919 or 1920 judging by Aunt Bernice's apparent age of three or four. I asked them who Mollie Bogolub was. She was a cousin of some sort and her family lived in St. Paul, Minnesota and she had a brother who was Dr. Feinberg.

This of course intrigued me. How was she related?! I kept asking people questions for years and following up on any hint of a Bogolub family. In 2004, we found a photo album of my great-grandparents, Morris and Lottie Kaplan's 50th wedding anniversary party which took place on 29 May 1948. Pasted in was the invitation list which included who was to sit at what table. Among the family members listed with addresses and contacts were Mrs. Mollie Bogolub and her son Marshall Bogolub who were to be seated at a family table. There was a note that they could be contacted c/o the Feinbergs. The only Feinbergs on my tree at that point were the descendants of my great-great-great-uncle Mochtrayossel Kamenetzky's daughter, Rose Kamenetzky Feinberg. Suzi Fields Scher, Rose's granddaughter, who lived in Phoenix, Arizona, didn't know anything about the Bogolubs. I even emailed my 80-year-old cousin, Hy Wolinetz, who had been seated at the table with the Bogolubs but he didn't know how they were related. Still this pointed strongly to the Bogolubs being part of my Kamenetzky family from Antopol, Kobrin uyezd, Grodno gubernia, Russia, now in Belarus. Aunt Bernice and Cousin Phyllis thought that was the case as well.

Due to the release of the 1940 census in 2010, I was able to find Mollie Bogolub on that census, living in Chicago.

I now had her husband's name, Herman, and her children, Geraldine, Marshall and Betty, and living with them was Mollie's father, Harris Finiberg (Feinberg). Herman Bogolub was a lawyer in private practice and Harris Feinberg was the proprietor of a retail clothing store. This family was doing very well for themselves. Working backwards in time, I also found them on the 1930 census.

According to the census the Bogolubs had gotten married about 1925. Now I needed to look for Mollie Feinberg with a father Harris or Harry. Using a wildcard search: Mol* F*n*berg, father's first name Har*, I found the family in the 1920 census.

Here were Harris Fineberg, his wife, Dora, children, Alfred, Joseph, Mollie and Maurice as well as a lodger. But was it Harris or Dora that was the Kamenetzky connection? More digging remained to be done. Indeed until writing this blog post, I had never been able to locate the family on the 1910 census. In frustration, I tried the search Mol* F*berg living in Minnesota on Ancestry.com and got the indexed result of Mollie Fredberg living with parents Harry and Dora. That had to be her. For whatever reason, the census taker wrote down Fiedberg instead of Fineberg or similar spelling.

This census gave me the original names of Harry and Dora's children, who were listed as Arron (Aaron), Joseph, Mollie and Morris. Minnesota unlike many states did a state census in between the US censuses, and the family showed up in 1905.

Here we have Harry and Dora Fineberg with their children Aaron, Joseph, Mollie and Morris, plus a Tony and Joseph Fineberg, who I suspect were brothers or cousins of Harris Fineberg's. However with all this knowledge, I couldn't find living cousins to ask how we were related (if anyone remembered). Checking newspaper databases gave me some mentions of Marshall Bogolub, including one with a picture from the Chicago Tribune of 17 September 1948.

Checking Geraldine Bogolub led me to an 1966 article on Dr. Melvin Glimcher of Brookline, MA, which identified his wife as Geraldine Bogolub of Chicago and named their children. Googling Geraldine Glimcher led me to a genealogist's dream of a 2010 obituary which listed her descendants, her siblings and her parents. It listed Marshall as under the name of Marshall Bogard. No wonder I had not been able to find him past the 1940s! Now I could find Mollie Bogard's 1980 obituary.

Through some more googling I found contacts for Marshall Bogard's daughter Robbie and found that while still alive, he did not remember the party or how we were related. Unfortunately I made the mistake of not asking him for information on his uncles' and cousins' families. Both Robbie and her cousin Susan were happy to have a photograph of their grandmother but were not able to help answer the question of how we were related. In frustration I set this puzzle aside and continued to work on other branches of my very large family tree. In 2016 I was informed by Robbie that Marshall had died. Rather guiltily I looked again at the tree one day when I was sick at home. This time it occurred to me to check to see if I could order a Minnesota death certificate for Dora Fineberg to see what it said about her parents' names. Harris Fineberg's Illinois death certificate had not provided his parents' names. Even their joint tombstone does not list his father's Hebrew name although it lists her Hebrew name as Dvorah bat r' Tzvi. When the certificate finally arrived it made me scratch my head in puzzlement. It listed her father's name as Harris Cominovsky. Okay, Tzvi Hirsch often becomes Harris in English but Cominovsky? Wait a minute that sounded phonetically very close to Kamenetzky! I looked at an old research report from Belarus that traced my Kamenetzky and Kaplan families in Antopol. There was a Ghersh Kamenetzky born in Antopol in 1840, who was the son of Gershon Kamenetzky, my great-great-great-great-grandfather. Ghersh was my 3x great-uncle, and his daughter Dora (b. 1870) would be first cousin to my great-great-grandmother Pessel Kamenetzky Kaplan (b. 1856), as well as to Pessel's siblings, Mochtrayossel Kamenetzky, Kreshe Kamenetzky Winetzky and Gittel Kamenetzky Plotnitzky. Mochtrayossel, Kreshe and Gittel all lived in Chicago with their families, as did Pessel's son Morris Kaplan and his family. When Dora and Mollie came to Chicago to visit, they were visiting the cousins Dora had grown up with in Antopol. They undoubtedly came to family weddings and other celebrations. Mollie would have been second cousin to my great-grandfather Morris Kaplan but a lot closer in age to Morris's daughters. No wonder people couldn't explain the relationship, as complex as it was! This brief and incomplete tree outline may help explain the relationships of all the cousins mentioned in this blog post.

Thus Mollie's children were my grandma Babe's third cousins and their children my Dad's fourth cousins, and I am fourth cousin once removed to my new cousins Robbie and Susan and fifth cousin to their children. Complicated indeed. Another time, I will share pictures and details of how I found Mollie's siblings' families.