| Probably born 1869 or l870 Brody in Lemberg province then Austrian Galicia later in Poland, Russia and now Ukraine.She was friendly with the Meisselman and Witkower families of Hartford, also believed to originate from Brody. Her youngest daughter Rebekah Geetter stated her mother traveled though Hamburg Germany. She was married to Daivd Meranski in Hartford August 8, l890. A younger brother Jacob had some sort of speech or hearing problem - was unmarried - worked as tailor.Many neighbors whose mothers had died lived with the Meranski family including Julius Aronson and his brother. Both parents spoke many languages including German, Yiddish, and Polish, and Pa Meranski spoke Russian. At home Sophie often used an Austrian German dialect with her mother and took German at Hartford Public High School and three years of college German at Mount Holyoke reading Goethe and Schiller with Professor Grace Bacon after World War I, when enrollment in German-l;anguage courses was low. Babe recounted that when three sons got Army draft notices in l9l8, her mother was so nervous she used salt instead of sugar by mistake in jelly she was making.Her gallstones became cancerous when improperly diatgnosed. He had an operation in l925 - was well enough to attend Sophie's Mount Holyoke grandaution May l923 but died September 8, l925 aged about 55 years. Her sonBen furnished "Abel and Bertha Goldfeld" as names of her parents. A family named Goldfield were neighbors of the Meranskis on Portalnd St. Hartford l909 - possibly relatives? [draft 01A:]#01A- Date: Mon, 18 May 1998 17:16:31 PDT #01A Thalia Goldfeld Meranski- To the best of my knowledge my mother Tahlia Meranski came to Hartford Connecticut from Vienna Austria with her younger brother Jacob, when she was a girl.I understood that she and my father were married in Germania Hall at the corner of Main and Morgan Street in HartfordAugust 8, l890. My first memory of my mother finds her standing in the living room, holding my infant sister Babe in her arms on Pleasant Street when I was five years old, iin l906. Babe was her eighth and last child - all healthy.I was her sixth born in a family of four boys and four girls. My mother was of average height, slender, black=haired and black-eyed.She was a good cook, but I never saw her sew or mend even though my father was an excellent tailor who enjoyed his work until his eyesight was strained by the use of fineneedles and dark thread on dark blue overcoats and black velvet collars. Apparently around l909-l9l0 as he got into his mid-forties, it became difficult to adjust to the close work.In l906 owing to a financial Panic my father found it very difficult to support his large family of ten in Hartford, where very few customers if any could afford a custom made overcoat. Through a friend Samuel Schlimbaum he found work as a tailor in New York for a time in l907. He located a cheap tenement at Twenty=-Seventh Street near Third Avenue and wrote my mother to bring the family.Less than a year old my sister Babe was an infant in arms suffering from the measles when my mother gathered her brood in a horse=drawn carriage and took us to the railroad station. My sister Esther remembers my mother keeping Babe's face covered with a blanket asd we rode in the coach train to New York city.My three older brothers slept on the floor at 27th Street, and one night Ben stepped on Al's hand, which was sore for weeks afterward.I was too young togo to school, though my sister Bertha did attend New York schools forsome time. I spent most of my time looking out the window, as mymother had two very young children to care for. Although I was lessthan six years old, my mother would give me ten or twenty cents everynoon, and I would go to the store to buy the baloney.We had no bathroom of our own and had to share the toilet out in the front hallwith the other tenants on that second floor.To supplement our diet, wehad a corn popper and popped corn on the coal stove nearly every night.My brothers would take a coal hod down to the railroad tracksand spend long hours trying to fill their hods with coal that mighthave fallen from the coal trains. Wood was difficult to get, but mybrothers searched endlessly for kindling wood. One evening my father'sfriends the Schlimbaums had the ten of us for supper. We went to their flat by streetcar, and I can remember my disbelief at the number of courses and quantity of food on the table. At Halloween, looking out the window I saw some mean tricks as teenage boys would hit passersby with long socks with a heavy brick inside. One morning I was standing in the front room when myt father unexppectedly came home. My mother without a word followed him from the entrance down in the kitchen to the front room and watched the poor man put his scissors and his tape measure on the table. When she questioned him with her expressive eyes, he told her that there was not enough work, and as the last man hired, he had been fired.We returned to Hardford and lived on Portland Street.There are Portland Street neighbors named Goldfield listed nearby in directories, but we have not been able to find out if they were relatives of my mother. In Boston in the l970's we spoke with a widow Celia Goldfield of Milton, whose husband had come from Rovno in eastern Poland, on the same railroad line as Brody, where my mother came from.The name probably dates back to an Austrian taxation plan of the later eighteenth century.My mother had a family photo album. We believe her parents named Abel and Bertha were deceased in Austria before 1890.Ellis Island opened in l892, and immigration records from New York from the 1880's are said to have burned. e her parents named Abel and Bertha were deceased in Austria before 1890.Ellis Island opened in l892, and immigration records from New York from the 1880's are said to have burned |
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