Tag: Ron Geesin

Meet My Father – Teodoro Rossiter, The Truth Uncovered, 24 April 2022

Most people who know me and knew my parents thought that Peter Harris was my father. People who knew him better might have known that he was Peter Isidore Harris and/or that his first given name was Isidore – Peter came later. A handful of family members would be aware that the family on arrival in England were named Russinov, that my grandfather was known as Harris Russinov and that dad’s name on his 1919 birth certificate was Isidore Russinov.

Isidore, Anne & Michael Russinov, c1925

But it turns out that my father was actually some bloke named Teodoro Rossiter.

Here’s the thing:

Following the extraordinary and fascinating revelations just the other week about my mother’s cousin Sid Marcus, his saw playing and the Lithuanian origins of my mother’s family, uncovered with the help of cousin Adam and Ron Geesin…

Turn It Up To Max & Spit: The Baltic Origins Of My Mother’s (Marcus) Family Revealed

…I thought I should learn from Ron’s superb research into my mother’s family and do a similar dig into my father’s family. After all, research is a significant part of what I do for a living and Ron’s example had been very instructive as well as informative.

The central learning point from Ron’s research is that the recent on-line publication of the 1921 census opens up a new trove of information – probably the last such “big reveal” trove that will occur in my lifetime.

I thought it would be easy for me to find a family named Russinov in London in the 1921 census search engine…

…but absolutely nothing came up. I tried all the tricks I know to vary the spelling, allow the machine to approximate the spelling, look beyond London just in case they were away from London at the time…

…nothing.

I even tried Harris. Lots of other Harris families but definitely not mine.

Peter Harris in 2005. Were there secrets behind that smile?

I knew the family was in Fitzrovia (the south-eastern quarter of Marylebone) at that time and I even had a relic from the 1920s – a business certificate allowing the family to trade under the name Harris – which had at one time adorned the certificate wall of the Z/Yen office but was latterly in storage. I was pretty sure that 1920s certificate had an address on it.

Unfortunately, the certificate – which is for sure somewhere in Z/Yen’s secure storage dungeon – is being stored very securely indeed. It wasn’t where we thought it would be and 30 minutes of further searching in the dungeon convinced us that it must have been filed quite deeply – no doubt to be found when searching for something completely different.

I all but gave up on the idea of finding my paternal family in the 1921 census.

But I’m a tenacious sort of chap and was pondering the matter quite a bit. Then at the weekend a thought dawned on me. The granting of business certificates, at that time – indeed deep into the 20th century- often needed to be announced in a gazette. Such announcements naturally included the address.

So rather than search genealogy sites in vain, I searched my Newspapers.com subscription with my grandfather’s name instead. Instant pay dirt:

The Marylebone Mercury and West London Gazette on 3 Jan 1925

Interesting law, Section 7 of the Aliens Restriction (Amendment) Act 1919, requiring migrants to seek permission (at significant expense) to use an English-sounding rather than their natural-born alien name for their business.

Interesting street, Upper Marylebone Street. It subsequently became the eastern end of New Cavendish Street and was confusingly renumbered. Before my family’s time, Thomas Paine wrote The Rights Of Man at No 7. No 7 Upper Marylebone Street was a well-known hang out for radicals, writers and radical writers.

Thomas Paine

But I digress…except that the extremely helpful article about Thomas Paine in Upper Marylebone Street…

Thomas Paine lived and wrote the Rights of Man at 148 New Cavendish Street

…locates Paine’s (now defunct) building, No 7 Upper Marylebone Street, on the site of 148 New Cavendish Street and No 4 – my Grandfather’s place – in a still-existing Georgian terraced house – now numbered 154 New Cavendish Street:

Thank you, Google Maps for this July 2021 image capture

I’d found the family house from 1925 but had I found my family there in 1921? The transcription at first glance did not look promising:

But on reflection, this was unmistakably my family. Grandpa Harris, already 39 years old. Grandma Anne (Annie) much younger, 30. Uncle Alec, 13 at census time. Uncle Manny, just 10. Uncle Michael, a new born babe. Indeed, had it not been for the industrial action that delayed the 1921 census by several months, Uncle Michael might have missed it by a few days.

And there was dad, under the name Teodoro Rossiter.

No-one had even mentioned to me the use of the name Rossiter as an early anglicisation of the family name. As for Teodoro, it is a charming name, but hardly an anglicisation or simplification of the name Isidore.

This made no sense.

I decided to invest in a scan of the original document. It set me back the princely sum of £1.75 (a half-price special offer that weekend – who could resist such a good value deal? Dad would have approved and possibly even would have bought two copies to celebrate his bargain.)

Now I’m not qualified to opine upon or judge handwriting – Ogblog readers who are crazy enough to examine my hand-written diary entries can attest – but I think the hand-writing on the original census document is mighty fine and I think my dad’s entry very clearly says Isodore (admittedly not Isidore) Russinov and all of the “Rossiter family” (as transcribed) are written extremely clearly as “Russinov”.

I award myself 9 out of 10 for detective work and I award the transcriber 1 out of 10 for the transcription of my dad’s name…awarding 1 only because I don’t do 0 out of 10.

When I talked this through with Janie, she wondered whether this might mean that I could be related to Leonard Rossiter, the wonderful (deceased) comedy actor.

Used under fair use rationale to depict Leonard Rossiter in this article. To be clear, the transcription error of the family name “Russinov” to “Rossiter” does not in any way indicate that I, or any other member of the Harris/Russinov family, is related to Leonard, or indeed any other, Rossiter. In short, I didn’t get where I am today by being related to Leonard Rossiter.

I explained to Janie that transcription errors, much like noms de plume, don’t tend to have relatives.

My dad has had an unfortunate record of transcription errors with his records. In the late 1980s, when dad was around or approaching 70, he received a letter from the NHS addressed to Isadora Harris inviting “him” to have a cervical smear test. There must have been SO much wrong with the NHS record that led to that mistake.

Indeed, dad seems so prone to nominative transcription errors, I considered titling this piece “My Trans Dad”, but decided against on balance.

More seriously, I did of course find out some interesting facts about my family history.

I had always suspected that Grandpa Harris probably hailed from Vilnius, as I was aware that he had journeyed into the Belorussian part of the Pale of Settlement where he met and initially settled with my then very young Grandma Anne. But I was also aware that Uncle Manny had been born in Vilnius and had guessed that the family had probably returned to Grandpa Harris’s home place before migrating.

Vilnius in 1915

Grandma Anne stated in the census that she (and Uncle Alec) were born in Igumen, which is a Belarussian town now known as Chervyen. Trigger warning – it was the scene of multiple atrocities during the 1940s – don’t click the preceding link if you’d rather not know the details. It is about 70 km south-east of Minsk – about an hour’s drive today.

The family came a long way in a short space of time, from shtetl life in Igumen and Vilnius, to London life in Marylebone…

…but then the name Teodoro Rossiter is a long way from Isodore Russinov or Peter Harris.

“Call me whatever you blooming well like”.

Turn It Up To Max & Spit: The Baltic Origins Of My Mother’s (Marcus) Family Revealed

My Grandpa: Lew (or Lou) Marcus, with his older brother Max

Meet my Great Uncle Max Marcus (1878-1952). He was the oldest of the multitude of Marcus siblings to venture from the old country to Blighty. My Grandpa Lew (1892-1959) was the youngest of the siblings.

But where exactly did the Marcus family venture from?

The family legend has been vague to say the least. Before the term “self-identify” had been invented, the Marcus family self-identified as “Litvak musicians”.

The word Litvak is a Yiddish term for Jews of Lithuanian (or more generically places we would now call The Baltics) origin. For families like ours, who came to Britain in the late 19th century, that meant that they would have been Russian subjects in The Pale Of Settlement before coming to Britain.

Great Uncle Max as a young man – c1900

The other matter of clarity from the family legend was that Great Uncle Max came to England with his wife, Leah, as an advance party, establishing themselves, at least to some extent, before the rest of the family followed towards the very end of the 19th century.

I did a little bit of on-line genealogy around 2011, liaising with my cousins Ted & Sue, which yielded very little about the family origins. It did encourage me at that time to interview my mother, plus cousins Jacquie Briegal and Sidney Pizan (the latter being Max’s grandson) – I have quite a few notes and yarns for future pieces, but almost nothing on the Baltic origins.

1901 census shows 9 year old Grandpa Lew with parents and some siblings in Whitechapel

I couldn’t find Max and his nascent family in the 1901 census when I looked in 2011. But I did find them in the 1911 census. In April 1911, Max and family were in Great Yarmouth. Once established as a musician in England, for much of his working life, Max split his time between London and Yarmouth. The picture below is probably Yarmouth.

Max playing double-bass with a small band, which I refer to (in PDQ Bach terms) as a schleptet.

When in London, Max played with De Groot at The Piccadilly & Regents Palace Hotels

In the 1911 census, Max claims that he and Leah come from Austria. This claim is a stretch, almost worthy of the UK Government 110 years later, in its extremely loose association with the truth.

In reality, Viennese waltz music was all the rage in those days; it was probably “professionally convenient” for Max to hold himself out as an Austrian exponent of waltz music. It is almost unthinkable that Max (or anyone else from the Marcus family) had ever so much as set foot in Austria (or any part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) before 1911.

Max, Leah & emerging brood circa 1907. Far right is my Great-Grandma Annie.

Max and Leah’s offspring and descendants turned out to be a pretty musical lot. On the far left of the above picture is my mother’s cousin Sid, who ended up as a first violin in and sometime leader of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. Harry, the younger boy in the above picture was, by all accounts, an even more talented violinist but suffered from stage fright, so made his career teaching.

To the right of Harry (Harry’s left) in the above picture is Becky, who became Becky Pizan:

  • mother of Sidney Pizan (who, along with my mother, provided the family pictures you are enjoying);
  • reportedly a very gifted pianist in her own right (as was, according to my mother, my own Grandpa Lew);
  • grandmother of the artist Adam Green, whose extraordinary, almost accidental research a few weeks ago has led to a swathe of discoveries.

I thoroughly recommend that you click through to Adam’s piece about my mother’s musical cousin (Adam’s Great Uncle) Sidney Marcus and the discoveries that flowed from that- click here or the link below.

BBC RADIO 3, RON GEESIN, UNCLE SID, AND CHOPPED LIVER IN KOVNO…

For those who just want to skim the topic, Adam has helped to identify Sid Marcus as The Saw Player on several 1930s recordings, such as the following:

My mum always referred to Sid as “a multi-instrumentalist” without going into too much detail. I hadn’t previously twigged that Sid’s “fifteen minutes of fame” second instrument was the hand saw.

Adam, via Radio 3 and Ron Geesin (composer, writer and self-confirmed absurdist), established that Max and his family, in the 1921 census, stated that they came from Kovno – now known as Kaunas, the second-largest city in Lithuania.

Adam says in his piece that he was a bit surprised, as he thought that branch of his family hailed from Riga.

My take on the matter, having been bitten by Max’s 1911 claims, was that Max on census day was not a 100% reliable witness to his own origins, but that Kaunas was unlikely to be a complete lie (unlike Austria) as it was unlikely that anyone in England would give a fig about which Baltic town Max and family might hail from.

I decided to redouble my efforts and try a bit harder to find Max and his branch in the 1901 census. I had drawn a blank when I looked back in 2011 but I hadn’t looked that hard.

As it turns out, I should indeed have looked harder back in 2011, although the search engines might not have been so good back then.

The 1901 census page for Max, Leah & Simon [sic] Markus [sic]

The trick was to look for Leah and to ask the search engine to be non-exact in the matter of surname (as well as first name) spelling. Thus we find Marks (latterly known as “Max” – we have since learnt that he was previously known as “Mendel”), Leah and baby Simon (latterly known as “Sidney” or “Sid”) in Back Church Lane Whitechapel, very close to the rest of the family and very close to Tobacco Dock, from whence it seems the family was scraping a living in the tobacco business in those early days.

Let’s drill.

Where are they saying they come from?

Let’s drill some more and zoom:

Max comes from Nidy and Leah comes from Yugger?

OK, so in 1901, before they had mastered the English language and how to spin with it, Max and Leah admitted to having been born in different places. I am pretty confident that “Yugger” is the way the census dude wrote down Leah’s attempt to tell him that she was born in Riga.

What about Nidy? I’m pretty sure Max was telling the census dude about Nida, Lithuania.

created by dji camera – LinasD, CC BY-SA 4.0

Now I’m going to be honest here and admit that, until I did this research, I had never heard of Nida, nor had I even heard of the Curonian Spit, the 60+ mile long sand dune depicted below.

H Padleckas, CC BY-SA 3.0

In the late 19th century, Nida was an art colony. Confusingly, the northern part of the Curonian Spit now shown as Lithuania was, at that time, part of Greater Russia, whereas the southern part that today is part of Russia, including Kaliningrad was, at that time, Königsberg, part of Prussia. As my mum would have said, “don’t start”.

For a family of musicians, I suspect that Nida, with its relatively wealthy Prussian visitors, was a suitable place to spend the summer season and earn a decent crust, even if you retreated to Kaunas for the winter and urban gigs…

…and then it dawned on me. Great Yarmouth is also a summer season town, built on a spit, albeit a smaller spit than that massive Curonian one.

Great Yarmouth on a Spit between the River Yare and the North Sea
OpenStreetMap, CC BY-SA 3.0

When Great Uncle Max chose to divide his musical time between London and Great Yarmouth, I’ll guess he was simply continuing the family tradition from the old country, having found a coastal place that reminded him just a little of his youthful summers on the Baltic Coast.

Of course there is a fair amount of supposition in this, but it is hard to imagine why Max would invent an answer to “where were you born” by falsely giving the name of a holiday town on the Baltic Coast.

Perhaps we can find some corroborating evidence on this. I note that Max, Leah and Sid had two boarders sharing their Back Church Lane home in 1901, Michael Freedland and Marks Freedland, both of whom also claimed to have been born in Nidy (Nida). So here is a shout out to possible descendants of the Freedland Brothers – has your family history handed down stories about where your family came from and how they came to England? Because it seems likely that those young men’s fortunes were, at least to some extent, conjoined with that of the Marcus family, from the old country and for a while in Blighty.

To close, my favourite picture of Max is the one below, from 1936, with young Sidney Pizan, dressed up and out for a stroll in Westcliff-on-Sea. It seems he really loved his coastal resorts, did Great Uncle Max.

Afterword: Extracts From E-Mail Conversations With Ron Geesin Casting Doubt On My Nida Theory But Not Necessarily On My Litvak Waterside Theory

Ron to Ian 4 April 2022:

“…On your latest research, hold on a minute! On the next page of the 1901 Census, there’s a ‘Caroline Davis’ ‘Needle Worker’. This gives the enumerator’s written forming of N and W, quite different to each other. So the Marcus entry has to be ‘Widy’…”

“…and there’s a village just outside Kaunas called Vijûkai. Could this half mumbled and ‘interpreted’ by an ill-informed enumerator come out as ‘Widy’? It’s not uncommon in Censuses for people to sometimes state their real original village and then later state the nearest town.”

Ian to Ron 5 April 2022

“…I don’t find the “Vijûkai” for “Wida” idea convincing, although it is just as convincing as my own wild theories! There would have been many long-since destroyed shtetls near Kaunas of which one named Wida or similar is quite possible…”

Ian to Ron 13 April 2022

“…Apropos your thoughts on Vijûkai, which feels to me a long way from anything that might be pronounced or written as “Widy”, there is a neighbourhood near that place which feels more “Widy” to me, named Vaišvydava

Both of those neighbourhoods are on the outskirts of Kaunas and the general area had a significant Jewish population back then, so it is plausible that we have found our Widy. Not on the lagoon coast but it is on the riverside coast! The general area is named Panemune…

There is a charming book about shtetl life in that neighbourhood, My First Eighty Years by Bernard Horwich. It’s been digitised and is available on the Wayback Machine – the first 50 pages or so is an utterly charming skim or read…”

See contemporary pictures of my latest Widy proposal – Vaisydava – here.