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Citation: Klein, Michele. 2023.
Picturing Jewish Genealogy: Using
Nineteenth-Century Portrait Albums
as a Genealogical Source. Genealogy 7:
87. https://doi.org/10.3390/
genealogy7040087
Received: 8 October 2023
Revised: 30 October 2023
Accepted: 6 November 2023
Published: 15 November 2023
Copyright: © 2023 by the author.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
genealogy
Article
Picturing Jewish Genealogy: Using Nineteenth-Century Portrait
Albums as a Genealogical Source
Michele Klein
Independent Researcher, 1 Ruppin Street, Rehovot 7634501, Israel; michele2kl@gmail.com
Abstract:
This essay argues that the earliest genre of Jewish family photograph albums, the nineteenth-
century portrait-card albums created by the bourgeoisie, may become a starting point for genealogical
discoveries. Some display the visual genealogies of extended families, and many reveal the genealog-
ical memories of family migration. The case studies presented here showcase the process through
which an album became a starting point for the construction or expansion of a family’s genealogy.
They draw on the radial sources commonly employed by family genealogists, including birth and
burial records, censuses, and other archival materials. The discussion looks at the role of family
albums in the passing down of family history to future generations.
Keywords:
family album; photograph album; family history; nineteenth-century Jews; visual
genealogy; kin keeping; visual culture; bourgeoisie; memory
[The thick photograph album’s] favoured location was
. . .
on pier or pedestal tables
in the drawing-room. Leatherbound, embossed with metal mounts, it sported upon its
gold-rimmed, fingerthick pages absurdly draped or laced figures—Uncle Alex and Aunt
Riekchen, Trudchen when she was little . . .. (Benjamin[1931] 2011, p. 18)
As Walter Benjamin informed us, the heavy album on display in his family’s elegant
drawing room in nineteenth-century Berlin contained photographic portraits of family
members. Unfortunately, its fate is unknown. This album, and those of many other
bourgeois Jews of the same era, contained collections of stylized studio photographs taken
during the craze for photographic self-portraits that began among the bourgeoisie in the
1850s and continued, worldwide, well after the invention of Kodak’s portable box cameras
in 1888. The collection of portraits between the album’s covers, a visual archive, was a
product of the photo-sharing visual culture of the period.
Relatively few of these Jewish family heirlooms survived the twentieth century, com-
pared with those that belonged to non-Jews. Well-off Jews in the Russian Empire lost
their possessions during the Russian Revolution, including their family albums. During
World War II (WWII), the Nazis looted or destroyed albums that belonged to Jews whom
they deported and/or murdered. Nevertheless, some one hundred nineteenth-century
Jewish portrait albums are now preserved in at least 24 different museums, archives, and
libraries worldwide. It is not known how many remain in private hands. Made by Jews
in the British, German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman Empires, as well as in
France, Italy, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia’s cities, these heritage objects invite us to
discover and reconstruct the memories of long-forgotten ancestors.
This article argues that the earliest genre of the family photograph album may catalyze
the construction or expansion of a family’s genealogy, embody a visual genealogy of
extended families, and/or reveal genealogical memories of family migration or dispersion.
Jews left photographs and portrait albums, just as they left headstones in graveyards, for
us to visit, study, and discuss when they were gone. After outlining the methodology used,
this essay presents case studies in which genealogical discoveries, visual genealogies, and
memories of family dispersion are extracted from such albums. Finally, the discussion looks
at the role of family albums in the passing down of family history to future generations.
Genealogy 2023,7, 87. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy7040087 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 2 of 29
1. Introduction
The portrait-card albums created by bourgeois Jews in the nineteenth century contain
mini-archives that may be of interest to genealogists. As Susan Sontag famously noted,
“Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A
family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family—and, often, is all that
remains of it.” (Sontag[1973] 1977, pp. 8–9). Such albums embody “genealogical memory”,
which the anthropologist Gaynor Macdonald defined as “the memory of real people in real
time.” (Macdonald 2003, p. 232).
Nineteenth-century Jews and non-Jews used their portrait albums as mnemonics.
Stories told about relatives who featured in an album transmitted both genealogy and family
history. As Anna Dahlgren noted, such books “were conversation pieces that functioned
better without text, as the images could prompt social contact in the form of inquiries
and discussion” (Dahlgren 2010, p. 175). For this reason, album makers did not write the
names of the subjects on the album’s pages. The “show and tell” function of these books
disappeared when albums were given away to institutions. Martha Langford observed that
the deposition of an album in a museum “suspends its sustaining conversation, stripping
the album of its social function and meaning” (Langford 2008, p. 5). For many families
that owned albums, the destruction of the Holocaust cut off the communication of family
history prematurely. The oral communication of family memories around historical albums
that were not impacted by war eventually ceased with time; Jan Assmann found that
the transmission of family memories lasts, at best, only three generations (Assmann 1995,
p. 127). Most of the private owners of a nineteenth-century family album today no longer
know the names of unlabeled portraits. Such memory loss challenges the genealogical use
of historic albums today. Luckily, sometimes, a person who inherited an album, aware that
its genealogical information was rapidly fading, noted on its cardboard pages the names
of the people whom they could recognize therein and, occasionally, dates as well. These
inscriptions are vital for genealogists.
The collection of photographic portraits began in France in the 1850s among the elites
and the middle classes and quickly spread across the globe. In 1854, the Frenchman A. A.
E. Disdéri invented a technology to make multiple prints from a single photographic plate.
He stuck his albumen prints on small cards the size of a visiting card, a carte de visite (ca.
11.4 cm
×
6.3 cm). Other photographers soon embraced this technology, and millions of
people, including Jews, flocked to photographers’ studios to acquire such newly affordable
self-portraits (McCauley 1985). If they were satisfied that these showed them at their best,
they gifted and exchanged them with family and friends. Disdéri’s photographic process
significantly cut the cost of portraiture and revolutionized visual culture. It generated a
veritable mania for creating and collecting these small images, which the Parisian journalist
Victor Fournel named, in 1858, “portraituromanie” (cited in Charpy 2007, p. 148), recently
termed “cartomania” by English-speaking researchers (e.g., Cosens 2003, pp. 34–35; Rudd
2016, pp. 196–97).
In 1861, The Photographic News predicted that the family portrait album, “an illustrated
book of genealogy,” would “supersede the first leaf of the family Bible,” which often
contained lists of the births and deaths in the owner’s family (Carte de Visite Portraits 1861,
p. 342). However, most albums do not contain such information and did not serve Jews as
birth and yahrzeit registers. (Yahrzeit is the Yiddish term for the anniversary of a death.) In
the late 1850s and early 1860s, newly designed albums that resembled Christian liturgical
books enabled the exhibition of personal photographic collections of portraits to guests in
the home (see Figure 1). As Benjamin noted, these books were expensively bound and had
thick, gilt-edged cardboard pages with pre-cut apertures the size of the photographic cards.
Each page framed one, two, or more portraits, depending on the number of apertures
provided. Portraits could be removed from their frames on the album’s page, given away,
and replaced. The binding of the album, as well as the rich clothing seen in the portraits,
conveyed class.
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 3 of 29
Genealogy 2023, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 3 of 30
number of apertures provided. Portraits could be removed from their frames on the al-
bum’s page, given away, and replaced. The binding of the album, as well as the rich cloth-
ing seen in the portraits, conveyed class.
Figure 1. Photographic portrait album of Hannah Merton, née Cohen. Leatherbound album with
metal straps in the style of a Christian liturgical book, two cartes de visite per page, with the French
patent printed on every page, early 1860s. Richard Levy Family Archive, Album 5.
Jewish and non-Jewish men and women often collected and displayed photographic
images of friends, casual acquaintances, and famous people they admired, in addition to
portraits of their relatives. Photographic and art historians around the world have studied
these nineteenth-century portrait albums from various perspectives. For example, Eliza-
beth Siegel studied the social uses of portrait albums in the nineteenth-century USA; she
wrote that “the album was seen to be filled as much by the desire to construct a family
tree as by the urge to acquire portraits in great numbers” (Siegel 2010, p. 125). Patrizia di
Bello examined gender issues in four albums created by British women (Di Bello 2007);
Martha Langford (2008) focused on the albums’ orality in her study of such books in the
McCord Museum of Canadian History. Jill Haley’s doctoral thesis surveyed evidence of
colonialism in the albums of nineteenth-century immigrants to Otago, New Zealand (Ha-
ley 2017). Cultural anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards similarly stressed the importance of
“show and tell” when looking for meaning in historical albums (Edwards 1999, p. 230;
2005, p. 35). Earnestine Jenkins (2020) argued that an album assembled by a woman of
mixed race in Memphis fashions a legacy of status and shared identity, which she, her
family, and mixed-race friends could not previously claim in the urban South prior to the
reconstruction. As each album is a unique visual archive that embodies the maker’s social
world, Annie Rudd (2016) and Stephen Burstow (2016) compared the nineteenth-century
photo-sharing visual culture with social media in the digital age. None of these considered
the vintage albums as a primary source for genealogists.
Figure 1.
Photographic portrait album of Hannah Merton, née Cohen. Leatherbound album with
metal straps in the style of a Christian liturgical book, two cartes de visite per page, with the French
patent printed on every page, early 1860s. Richard Levy Family Archive, Album 5.
Jewish and non-Jewish men and women often collected and displayed photographic
images of friends, casual acquaintances, and famous people they admired, in addition
to portraits of their relatives. Photographic and art historians around the world have
studied these nineteenth-century portrait albums from various perspectives. For example,
Elizabeth Siegel studied the social uses of portrait albums in the nineteenth-century USA;
she wrote that “the album was seen to be filled as much by the desire to construct a family
tree as by the urge to acquire portraits in great numbers” (Siegel 2010, p. 125). Patrizia di
Bello examined gender issues in four albums created by British women (Di Bello 2007);
Martha Langford (2008) focused on the albums’ orality in her study of such books in the
McCord Museum of Canadian History. Jill Haley’s doctoral thesis surveyed evidence of
colonialism in the albums of nineteenth-century immigrants to Otago, New Zealand (Haley
2017). Cultural anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards similarly stressed the importance of
“show and tell” when looking for meaning in historical albums (Edwards 1999, p. 230;
2005, p. 35). Earnestine Jenkins (2020) argued that an album assembled by a woman of
mixed race in Memphis fashions a legacy of status and shared identity, which she, her
family, and mixed-race friends could not previously claim in the urban South prior to the
reconstruction. As each album is a unique visual archive that embodies the maker’s social
world, Annie Rudd (2016) and Stephen Burstow (2016) compared the nineteenth-century
photo-sharing visual culture with social media in the digital age. None of these considered
the vintage albums as a primary source for genealogists.
Photographs have nevertheless long served as a focus for discussing collective family
memories. Anthropologists Roslyn Poignant and Gaynor Macdonald (2003,
pp. 235–36
)
have used collections of photographs of native Australian peoples with fractured histories
to facilitate the telling of genealogies, establish family continuities, and revive genealogical
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 4 of 29
memory. Poignant (1992, p. 74) observed that the photographs “established continuities of
self and families and made biographies and genealogies visible”. The albums of fashion-
ably dressed mixed-race women, dating from the decades after the American Civil War,
distanced their owners from the trauma of slavery and rape and became meaningful for the
entire group of women of color forging their new identities (Jenkins 2020, p. 30). Such work
on non-Jewish people who experienced racist violence is relevant for Jewish families, espe-
cially for those whose links to the past were shattered traumatically in the twentieth century.
Marianne Hirsch (1997) recovered memory from old family photographs, including those
of her own Jewish family who experienced the Shoah. Using her imagination, she sought
to convert memories that were buried in the photographs into living memory relevant
to the present. Hirsch’s concept of “postmemorial work” involves an effort to reactivate
distant memory from photographs, within the context of a traumatic family narrative, by a
deeply connected later generation that has no empirical knowledge of the first-generation
subjects portrayed (Hirsch 2008, p. 111). Trauma is inherent in the biographies of some
of the Jewish families whose albums survived the twentieth century, such as the albums
of the Dreyfus and Freiberg-Deutsch families, described below for the first time. Trauma
is not, however, a necessary theme for the reactivation of nineteenth-century albums for
genealogical purposes.
Few scholars have studied nineteenth-century albums created by Jews. Nebahat
Avcıo˘glu (2018) looked at immigrant narratives in the album of Hungarian-born Elisabeth
Leitner, née Saphir (1842?–1908), a cosmopolitan woman who drifted between empires
and nations throughout her life, immersing herself in the local culture and making friends
locally before moving on. Michaela Sidenberg (2020) published an overview of the 23 multi-
generational Jewish family photograph albums that are preserved in the Jewish Museum
of Prague. She noted that most of these albums, and many more whose whereabouts
are no longer known, came into the museum’s collection from the Prague Treuhandstelle
Warehouses, where the Nazi authorities collected the movable property of deported Jews
from Prague and its environs. Lavie Shai (2014) published his study of the family album
of the Valero bankers in Jerusalem, focusing on the album’s revelation of the history of
photography in Jerusalem and the Ottoman Empire. Daniela Götz examined an unlabeled,
early-twentieth-century Austro-Hungarian album. She studied the dedications and annota-
tions on the backs of the photographs as well as the subjects’ dress. A postcard addressed
to Ludwig Beran, dated 1917, showing a young woman and a three-month-old baby led
Götz to identify only Ludwig Israel Beran (1866–1942) and nobody else in the album. As
many Jews named Beran perished in the Holocaust, this album may be all that remains of
his family (Götz 2016).
In her publications in British and French genealogical society journals, Klein argued
that nineteenth-century Jewish albums reveal meaningful narratives about a family’s
cultural identity, migration, international networks, and leisure activities. In one study,
she focused on the albums of Anglo-Jews, particularly those in the Salomons Museum
at Broomhill, near Tunbridge Wells (UK), and others in the author’s own family archive
(Klein 2020). She also extracted genealogical discoveries from the Crémieux (Klein 2021,
p. 15 n. 29), Ettinger (Klein and Ginzberg 2021), and Szulc-Bertillon (Klein and Chenu 2023)
albums discussed below. This article examines the concept that such albums can serve as
sources for genealogists.
Jewish men and women exchanged and collected portraits, which they displayed in
albums. Several studies of non-Jewish albums (for example, Warner 1992, p. 30; Di Bello
2007;Siegel 2010, p. 140) have claimed that the collection and arrangement of portraits
in an album was a predominantly female pastime. In the nineteenth century, Jewish men
were more likely to maintain international contacts with family members for business
and philanthropic purposes, whereas Jewish women more frequently took on the role
of keeping up with their aging parents, married siblings, cousins, in-law relatives, and
all aspects of family news, including the births of children, grandchildren, and great-
grandchildren. Women were indeed more likely to become collectors and makers of family
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 5 of 29
albums, and their albums are more likely to reveal genealogical information. Men, however,
did sometimes become collectors and album makers. In the case studies discussed below,
the Crémieux, Dreyfus, and Freiberg-Deutsch albums reflect women’s work and serve as
primary genealogical sources. In contrast, the portraits in the Melchior album belonged
to a man interested in photography; he maintained his own photographic studio and
also collected photographs of his extended family. He or his wife may have arranged the
album. The Szulc-Bertillon, Ettinger, and De Beer albums display portraits collected by
both husband and wife. The case studies below are a sampling of Jewish family albums
with genealogical narratives.
The albums of bourgeois Jews show the established Jewish elites, in some cases, and
the nouveau riche, in others, in all their finery. Photography historian Julia Hirsch and
dress historian Lou Taylor warned that the photographic studio may present “a chamber of
fictions” (Hirsch 1981, p. 70) and cautioned against “reading” clothes in nineteenth-century
portraits (Taylor 2004, p. 163). For bourgeois Jews, as Marcel Proust revealed, the visit to the
photographer was an occasion to show off one’s latest sartorial acquisitions (Proust[1913]
2013, p. 166). Such Jews had no reason to pose in someone else’s clothing or appurtenances,
except for a fancy-dress ball or a traveler’s souvenir for which a costume could be rented.
What is known about the wealth of the Jewish album makers strongly suggests that they,
their family, and their friends wore their best garments taken from their own wardrobes for
their portraits and that these images convey an accurate testimony of pedigree and class.
“Genealogy” encompasses the study of families and family histories and the tracing
of their lineages. Although the Jews’ albums did not document family history in any
organized or hierarchical fashion, they shaped the manner in which family history could
be remembered. As conversation pieces, they encouraged viewers to ask questions about
ancestors and, in this way, facilitated the handing down of genealogical memory. Who
are these people? How are they related to each other? How, when, and where did they
live? Who is missing from the family album? Vintage albums are fascinating catalysts for
visualizing and discovering family history.
2. Methodology
A series of activities may enable the genealogist to reactivate genealogical narratives,
construct or extend a family tree, and/or trace family migration. John Berger, who studied
how people look at and understand photographs, observed that “To read a photograph,
we need to know the historical context” (Berger and Mohr 1982, p. 109). To read a vintage
portrait album, the first step requires the careful documentation of all the textual and
pictorial information in it, including on the cover, each cardboard page, and both sides
of the photographic cards, to extract names, relationships, dates, and any other clues. In
addition, the family historian studies the signs, gestures, and other non-linguistic forms of
communication, including facial features, hairstyles and head-dresses, costumes, uniforms,
office regalia, and accessories, such as jewelry and medals. Textual information, including
names, locations, and dates, as well as semiotic information gained from the visual clues,
can lead the genealogist to search for contextual material in family, community, and state
archives; military records; cemetery records and gravestones; and newspapers and journals.
Books, other pictorial sources, and interviews with the descendants of the original owners
of the album may contribute further information about the portraits in a particular album.
In addition, facial recognition software may assist with the naming of relatives, as Scott
Genzer’s pioneering work has shown (Genzer 2019).
The genealogist cannot assume that every portrait in an album depicts a family mem-
ber. The social aspect of exchanging portraits nevertheless helps the researcher of family
history when a dedication on the photographic card names the relationship of the donor
to the collector, e.g., “from your sister Henriette” and “to my dear aunt Flora”. Such
inscriptions are usually on the reverse side of the photograph and become visible only
when the card is extracted from the album. Occasionally, albums also contain genealog-
ical information inscribed on the album’s page, added by a descendant sometime in the
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 6 of 29
twentieth century, such as birth and death dates, or the relationship of a subject to the new
owner of the album (grandmother, cousin, etc.). Also, in some instances, portraits have
been labeled on the album page and then removed or replaced with another portrait (as in
the Szulc-Bertillon album described below). The remaining name below the empty frame
may prove helpful to the genealogist.
The name and location of the photographers of an album’s nineteenth-century por-
traits, printed on the base and/or reverse of the portrait card, enables the mapping of
family dispersal. As the album format hides this information, it is necessary to extract the
card from the album to access this, a difficult task that the keepers of such albums do not
always permit. The Toit
¯
u Settlers Museum in Otago, New Zealand (see the De Beer case
below), the Center of Jewish History in New York (viz., the Freiberg-Deutsch album and a
few others in their collection), the Jewish Museums of Belgium, Prague, and Sweden, the
Center for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, the Museum of Jewish Art and
History, Paris, and the Salomons Museum in England have photo-documented or enabled
the photo-documentation of both sides of the portrait cards in their nineteenth-century
albums. The Jewish Museum of Prague, however, has not digitized page views, and there-
fore, any extant written text identifying sitters is not visible to viewers. In contrast, the
National Library of Israel, the Rothschild Archive in London, the Anglo-Jewish Archive at
Southampton University, and the Jewish Museum of Denmark (two Melchior albums and
four Meyer family albums) did not permit this, limiting the reactivation of genealogical
memories of migration, as well as the search for dedications and genealogical information
on the reverse of the cards. Other institutions, including the Göteborg City Museum and
the National Library of Sweden, have not documented their albums. The Jewish Museums
of Berlin and Frankfurt have noted the photographers and their locations on only some of
their Jewish albums and not others.
Facts and information about a particular album do not necessarily generate a genealogy.
Relationships between the portraits in an album are not instantaneously obvious. The
family historian therefore seeks connective threads in the collection of photographs, in
juxtapositions, and in signs on both sides of the photographic cards. Two or more cards
placed together or facing each other, taken by the same photographer at the same time, are
likely related—a man and wife or a couple and their child/ren. Geographic information
on the photographic cards, where visible, may reveal migration and family dispersion or
merely bear witness to a business trip or a holiday at a spa or seaside resort. External
contextual information, such as extant family trees (even if incomplete), biographies of
owners and/or subjects, places of residence, occupations, and political events, helps the
viewer extract, develop, and revive the genealogical stories embedded in an album. To
cite Berger again: “without a story, without an unfolding, there is no meaning” (Berger
and Mohr 1982, p. 89). As both Langford (2008) and Hirsch (2008) stressed, imagination,
interpretation, and discussion of the album and its contents are as necessary now as in the
past for revitalizing these albums, making them relevant to individual spectators today,
and for “reading” genealogy in these memory objects.
Unfortunately, some albums offer no visible evidence of the name of the person whose
collection is displayed or of the identity of any of the portraits. Hand-written names and
dedications are often hard to decipher. In addition, as genealogists well know, the search for
information about a name may involve consideration of a variety of spellings in numerous
languages and alphabets.
This study presents four case studies to show how family albums of nineteenth-century
bourgeois Jews could become catalysts for genealogical discoveries. It also discusses four
other Jewish albums that display visual genealogies, albeit in no organized fashion, and two
other case studies from which genealogical memories of migration are revived. Nineteenth-
century portrait albums owned by Jews that house only celebrity collections are beyond
the scope of this study.
The choice of which albums would serve as case studies was determined by their
potential for genealogical study. An unlabeled album without any personal names is
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 7 of 29
unlikely to reveal genealogical discoveries, analogous to an unmarked or severely corroded
gravestone. Some albums, such as the three Prussian Burchardt family albums in the Jewish
Museum Berlin, two in the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris that belonged
to the sister and sister-in-law of Alfred Dreyfus (the French artillery officer accused of
treason in 1894), and the four made by Ida Samuel, her mother Jane Spiers, and her father-
in-law Salvador Levi in the Jewish Museum of Belgium, portray family genealogies that
have already been well documented. The Melchior and Salomons families, whose albums
show aristocratic genealogies, also have detailed family trees. The Schames album, in the
National Library of Israel (NLI), which offers evidence of family dispersion in the wake
of Nazi racial laws, may have been a good candidate for another genealogical case study.
However, as mentioned above, the NLI, as well as some archives and museums, did not
permit the extraction of photographs from their albums to access all of the data hidden
on the reverse of the portraits and have thereby limited the possibilities for genealogical
research. Full-page scans are missing from the online view of some albums, including the
many in the Jewish Museums of Prague. Other albums, such as those in the Jewish Museum
of Amsterdam, may yet prove useful for genealogical research. Many of these albums
were donated by living descendants, except those in the Jewish Museum of Prague and
those in the Center for the History of the Jewish People in Jerusalem, which were mostly
looted by the Nazis. Institutions, however, have often not kept records of the provenance
of their albums. A brief summary of all of the albums named in this article is provided in
Appendix A.
3. Case Studies
Text and context are needed to give genealogical meaning to the visual archive within
a portrait album. The case studies below are a result of an examination of the content
of each album and each of its portraits, as well as research to provide the backstories of
the named individuals and their families. Only two of the albums mentioned in the case
studies above, the Ettinger and Berthe Dreyfus’s albums, remain today in the hands of
relatives of the album compilers. The Szulc-Bertillon couple has no surviving descendants.
Descendants and relatives of the sitters and makers of the albums in public archives and
museums are no longer connected to these objects, voluntarily or involuntarily.
3.1. Genealogical Discoveries
The albums presented in the case studies below formed the catalyst for original
genealogical research. Unlike some genealogical sources, Jewish albums usually show
matrilinear as well as patrilinear relatives: women and girls, as well as men and boys.
The fully labeled Crémieux album revealed just one unknown female relative, whereas
a few unknown female relatives were discovered via the unannotated Ettinger album. In
contrast, research of the annotated Szulc-Bertillon and Dreyfus albums led to the con-
struction of extensive, hitherto undocumented family trees. The Szulc-Bertillon album,
in particular, added women to the genealogy of a highly musical family in Warsaw. The
Dreyfus album revealed an international cousinhood.
3.1.1. The Crémieux Album: A Genealogical Memorial
Most albums that have been donated to institutions for preservation are either unla-
beled or partially labeled. However, someone had labeled the contents of the “Adolphe
Crémieux family album” before its deposit in the French National Archives, together with
other archival material related to the French politician, who was also a Jewish activist
(French National Archives 369ap/3, dossier 3). The names beneath each portrait facilitated
the search in newspaper archives, scanned books, and genealogical websites for information
about each one.
The lineage of the old French Jewish Crémieux family is well documented. This
album, however, contains a collection of portraits that clearly belonged to Amélie Crémieux
(1800–1880), née Silny, the wife of Adolphe Crémieux, and portrays her two sisters, who
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 8 of 29
were born in Metz. It is unusual in that 85% of friends and family in the portraits had died
by the time the album was assembled in its present form. She therefore created most of
the album as a memorial collection, rather than a work in progress. It is of special interest,
genealogically, for revealing her elder sisters and some of the women who, like her, married
into the Crémieux clan. Her small album does not contain any portraits of herself, her
husband, or her children. Only 9 of its 33 portraits portray men. The album contains a
sampling of her mostly female non-Jewish friends, whom she met at literary and musical
salons, as well as Jews from the financial and social elites of her era.
Although Amélie Crémieux converted to Catholicism in 1846, the sixteen portraits of
Jews within the album defines it as a small repository of Jewish genealogical memories.
Eugénie Beer (1793–1869) and Rose Berncastel (1794–1876) are among the few members
of her own family on display. Eugénie Beer, Amélie’s eldest sister, did not appear in any
published family trees (e.g., Geni.com, geneanet.org, myheritage.com) prior to Klein’s
publication (Klein 2021, pp. 8, 15, n. 29). A book about a Viennese musician led to the
discovery that Eugénie Silny was a talented pianist who married Markus (Meschulam)
Hirsch Beer (1785–1857), one of the leaders of the Jewish community of Vienna prior to
1848 (Kroll 2007, pp. 120, 248, 358, 367, 379). Eugénie must also have sent Amélie the three
portraits of her grandson’s beautiful young wife, Henriette Kann, née Biedermann, who
died aged 27 in 1865 and is memorialized in this album.
Klein’s publication led Jacques Gerstenkorn to identify the portrait of his great-
grandfather Samuel Mayer in this album (private correspondence, 23 September 2021),
whom Klein had mistaken for someone else. Gersternkorn was excited to see the image
of his ancestor. Samuel Mayer (d. 1856) married Ernestine Berncastel, a daughter of
Amélie’s sister, Rose. Ernestine’s sister, Adèle Weil, is well-known as the grandmother of
Marcel Proust.
The album also contains portraits of two women who married into the Crémieux
family: Esther (1800–66), née Lévy-Salvador, whose husband Jacob Vidal Crémieux was a
cousin and childhood friend of Adolphe’s, and two portraits of Esther’s lovely daughter-in-
law Leontine (1837–1869), the daughter of the banker and Strasbourg Jewish community
leader Achille Samuel Ratisbonne. Leontine was only 32 when she died.
3.1.2. The Ettinger Album: Rabbinic Genealogies
Jewish albums were predominantly owned by individuals or families who had inher-
ited wealth or had made their money in finance or business. Hayim Ettinger (
1857–1928
)
was an observant Jew, a successful merchant, and a philanthropist. His maternal grand-
father was wealthy; there is no evidence that his own father was a man of means. Nev-
ertheless, the Ettinger album memorializes an extended and dispersed family, including
the wives of two rabbis, whose given names were omitted in an old book of rabbinic
genealogies (Beilinson 1901, pp. 170–73).
In 1922, 65-year-old Hayim and his wife Esther (c. 1852–1941) left Odessa for Palestine
with their leatherbound family portrait album. Today, the Ettingers’ relatives may not be
able to find the graves of many of their Eastern European cousins, who, the album reveals,
lived in the late nineteenth century in Kiev, Warsaw, Uman, Mezritsh (now Mi˛edzyrzec
Podlaski, Poland), Odessa, Riga, Kishinev, and elsewhere, but they can now visualize them
in the family album and re-create their stories. The published study of Klein and Ginzberg
(2021) related stories about the Ettinger couple and album. It did not focus on genealogy,
although it led to a few genealogical discoveries.
At first glance, Arnon Ginzberg, who now owns the album, could only identify two of
its fifty portraits from copies he had seen in his grandfather’s home: the simply dressed
family matriarch on the first page of the album was Hayim Ettinger’s paternal grandmother,
Mary Sim
h
.
evitz (d. 1865), and on one of the inner pages, a photograph taken in Uman
of the Ettingers’ son-in-law in a fedora hat, Meir David Piness (1872–1936). According to
the book containing rabbinic genealogies, Sim
h
.
evitz was from Minsk (now Belarus), the
unnamed daughter of Rabbi Hayim Sim
h
.
evitz was from Minsk, and the wife of Yakov
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 9 of 29
Hillel Ettinger, Hayim’s grandfather, was also from Minsk. The same book revealed that
Dov Piness of Rozhinoy (now Ruzhany, Belarus) married one of Mary’s daughters. He was
likely a relative of Ettinger’s son-in-law (Beilinson 1901, p. 170).
Arnon’s nephew, Alon Ginzberg, and Klein examined both sides of each photograph,
consulted historical family documents that had lain untouched for decades, contacted a
relative who had immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union in 1990, and scoured
newspaper archives in Hebrew and Yiddish, as well as online family trees, for names and
connective threads. Anna Grudinovker and Shoshana Levit kindly translated nineteenth-
century inscriptions. Klein and Ginzberg ultimately succeeded in identifying 19 people in
the album and expanded the entangled Ettinger–Ginzberg family tree, where the children
of one branch married the children of another branch, as in the Rothschild and so many
other Jewish families.
The Ettingers’ social world began in a well-to-do Orthodox environment, where
women wore a head-dress, a sheitel, and boys attended yeshiva, men engaged in business
as well as Torah study, and family names repeated themselves generation after generation.
Hayim, who features as both a child and an adult in this album, was born in 1856 in Uman
in the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine). He was born a few months after the death of
his father, also named Hayim, whose grandfather was the distinguished Polish Talmudist
Yehiel Michl Ettinger of Rawer (now Rava Mazowiecka, Poland), also known as Michli
Rawer or Michl Ettinger Rawski (Landa 1837, p. 1), who headed a delegation of Jewish
deputies to Csar Alexander I in Paris (cited in Fijałkowski n.d.). Baby Hayim was the third
son of Hayim Ettinger (senior) and Hannah, née Tulchinsky, who also features in the album.
A few years after her husband died, Hannah wed Aryeh Leib Ginzberg, a Torah teacher and
widower from Pinsk (now Belarus). She gave birth to more children in Uman before he also
died in 1866 (HaCarmel, 12 Adar 5626, 134). The album contains two portraits bearing the
names of Uman photographers from the 1880s or 1890s of yet-unidentified young women.
Alon Ginzberg knew that Hayim (junior) and his two brothers Yakov Hillel and
Yona Ettinger had two half-brothers, Berish and Arie Zeev Ginzberg; the album led to the
discovery of a half-sister as well, named Rachil. A passport issued in Riga, now in the Yad
Vashem Archives (in M. 43, Archives in Latvia, file no. 2756) and dated 1922, provides a
portrait of “Rachil Leiba Berlin, née Ginsburg,” born 12 September 1863. This document,
which was uploaded to geni.com, names her parents, Leyba Ginsberg and Chana Ginzberg
(Etinger), as well as her husband, Berka Zalmanovich Berlin. Two portraits in the album,
from Riga, one of a man and one of a woman, show newly married Berka and Rachil,
confirmed by face-matching software.
A portrait of a man with receding dark hair and a waxed mustache taken in Kishinev
led to a search for relatives in that city. Alon Ginzberg discovered that Lova Ginzberg,
a descendant of Berish Ginzberg, who settled in Israel after the dissolution of the Soviet
Union, kept a family tree and some old photographs. One of his photographs enabled the
identification of a woman seen posing with her husband for a snapshot displayed in the
Ettinger album. This was Klara, born in 1882, a daughter of Berish, and her frail-looking
husband, Avram Gendrikh, born in 1881, who lived in Kishinev. Both were murdered in
the Shoah (Yad Vashem Archive Data Base, s.v. Gendrikh). Face-matching software was
not needed to assert that the portrait of the much younger man with the waxed mustache,
photographed in Kishinev, is Avram Gendrikh.
Alon Ginzberg knew that Hayim Ettinger’s wife was named Esther but did not know
her maiden name or her place of birth. With help from Yosef Vidman in B’nei Brak, the 1866
hand-written marriage contract in Arnon Ginzberg’s cupboard provided the answer. Esther
was the daughter of R. Shimon Papirna and lived in Mezritsch, some 800 kms north-west of
Uman. A portrait in the album taken in Mezritsch is evidently her mother. A memoir in an
Israeli newspaper, Yediot Aharonot (1959), by Yehoshua H. Yeivin, the grandson of Esther’s
sister, related that Reb Shime’on was from Paritch (now Parichi, Belarus), a Talmudic
scholar and entrepreneur with broad literary interests who sported a brown top hat, a
fashion favored by the learned Jews of the “Mitnagdim” (“opponents” of Hasidism). This
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 10 of 29
information enabled the identification of his portrait in the Ettinger album. Yeivin also
mentioned that Shimon’s wife was named Feige and she withdrew to her room after her
husband died. The album preserved two portraits of her, one in her prime and one in her
retirement. Yeivin’s memoir provided a few more additions to the fast-growing Ettinger
family tree.
Thirteen portraits taken in Odessa date from the Ettingers’ residence in that city
during the 1890s and early 1900s. They show Hayim and Esther, their son and daughter,
her husband and son, among others. Hayim built a profitable business in the Black Sea
port, became a leader of the Jewish community, and an active Zionist. Burial records in Tel
Aviv provided dates for the births and deaths of Hayim, his daughter, and his grandson.
The aforementioned book with rabbinic genealogies (Beilinson 1901, p. 173) enabled
the identification of a portrait of an elegant, elderly woman photographed in Bobruysk
(now Babruysk, Belarus): she had to be Esther’s pious and affluent aunt, the wife of
Michael Margolioth of Bobruysk, daughter of Shaul Papirna of Paritch and his wife Dvora
Margolioth (Figure 2). She wears a sheitel in her portrait, as well as earrings, a fancy brooch,
and tailored cuffs. Her hat is fashionably decorated with feathers. Like many other women
in the rabbinic genealogies, Mrs. Margolioth’s first name remains unknown. Her portrait
preserves her memory.
Genealogy 2023, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 10 of 30
Alon Ginzberg knew that Hayim Einger’s wife was named Esther but did not know
her maiden name or her place of birth. With help from Yosef Vidman in B’nei Brak, the
1866 hand-wrien marriage contract in Arnon Ginzberg’s cupboard provided the answer.
Esther was the daughter of R. Shimon Papirna and lived in Mezritsch, some 800 kms
north-west of Uman. A portrait in the album taken in Mezritsch is evidently her mother.
A memoir in an Israeli newspaper, Yediot Aharonot (1959), by Yehoshua H. Yeivin, the
grandson of Esther’s sister, related that Reb Shime’on was from Paritch (now Parichi, Bel-
arus), a Talmudic scholar and entrepreneur with broad literary interests who sported a
brown top hat, a fashion favored by the learned Jews of the “Mitnagdim” (“opponents”
of Hasidism). This information enabled the identification of his portrait in the Einger
album. Yeivin also mentioned that Shimon’s wife was named Feige and she withdrew to
her room after her husband died. The album preserved two portraits of her, one in her
prime and one in her retirement. Yeivin’s memoir provided a few more additions to the
fast-growing Einger family tree.
Thirteen portraits taken in Odessa date from the Eingers’ residence in that city dur-
ing the 1890s and early 1900s. They show Hayim and Esther, their son and daughter, her
husband and son, among others. Hayim built a profitable business in the Black Sea port,
became a leader of the Jewish community, and an active Zionist. Burial records in Tel Aviv
provided dates for the births and deaths of Hayim, his daughter, and his grandson.
The aforementioned book with rabbinic genealogies (Beilinson 1901, p. 173) enabled
the identification of a portrait of an elegant, elderly woman photographed in Bobruysk
(now Babruysk, Belarus): she had to be Esther’s pious and affluent aunt, the wife of Mi-
chael Margolioth of Bobruysk, daughter of Shaul Papirna of Paritch and his wife Dvora
Margolioth (Figure 2). She wears a sheitel in her portrait, as well as earrings, a fancy
brooch, and tailored cuffs. Her hat is fashionably decorated with feathers. Like many other
women in the rabbinic genealogies, Mrs. Margolioth’s first name remains unknown. Her
portrait preserves her memory.
Figure 2. Mrs Michael Margolioth, daughter of Shaul Papirna and Dvora Margoliot. Photo: R. Zak-
rojski, Babryusk. Einger album. Arnon Ginzberg archive.
Finally, research of this album led to the discovery of another album held by Yoram
Yeivin in Hod Hasharon, Israel, the grandson of the writer of the above-mentioned mem-
oir published in Yediot Aharonot and the great-great-grandson of Esther’s sister, Tsina
Figure 2.
Mrs Michael Margolioth, daughter of Shaul Papirna and Dvora Margoliot. Photo: R.
Zakrojski, Babryusk. Ettinger album. Arnon Ginzberg archive.
Finally, research of this album led to the discovery of another album held by Yoram
Yeivin in Hod Hasharon, Israel, the grandson of the writer of the above-mentioned memoir
published in Yediot Aharonot and the great-great-grandson of Esther’s sister, Tsina Golda
Papirna. His album was partially annotated by his father and includes a portrait of Esther ’s
sister. Klein and Ginzberg’s findings expanded Yeivin’s family tree. Dedications on the back
of the portraits in the Yeivin album include the names and images of hitherto unknown
Yeivin relatives.
3.1.3. The Szulc-Bertillon Album: A Genealogy of Musicians
Wives and daughters, unnamed in rabbinic genealogies, have often been ignored in the
biographies of Jewish musicians. The Szulc-Bertillon album led to the discovery of hitherto
forgotten members of a large, extended musical family in nineteenth-century Warsaw.
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 11 of 29
Researching the Parisian Bertillon family in 2017, Alain Chenu acquired a thick leather-
bound portrait album in a sale of Bertillon papers. The album had probably been a wedding
present given to Jacques Bertillon (1851–1922), an atheist, and Caroline Szulc/Schultze
(1867–1926), who was born into a Jewish family in Warsaw. They both studied medicine in
Paris, he a few years before her, and married in 1889. The couple began to fill the album
with their own collections of portraits, including some of his family members, some of
hers, and medical and feminist friends. They later added portraits of their two daughters,
which were removed at some point. The Klein and Chenu study, published in French
(Klein and Chenu 2023), discussed the non-genealogical narratives that they found in this
album, which are beyond the scope of this study, and attempted to construct Caroline’s
Polish genealogy, helped by the annotations on some of the album’s pages and dedica-
tions on the back of some of the album’s portraits, skillfully deciphered and translated by
Monica Kluzek.
Polish and French newspapers and other archives, as well as cemetery listings, as-
sisted in the documentation of Caroline’s highly musical family. Leon Tadeusz Błaszczyk’s
(2014, p. 248) book on the Jews in music in Poland in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries proved a useful but not entirely reliable source. The numerous spellings of
Karolina/Caroline’s surname in Polish, Russian, Hebrew, Yiddish, and French—Szulc/
Szultz/Schultz/Shultze—as well as that of her Wakhalter/Waghalter/Wachalter cousins,
burdened the search. Similarly, the first names of her male relatives varied according
to the sources consulted—Adam/Abram/Abraham; Icek/Iccek/Isaak/Itzhak; and Hen-
ryk/Hayim. Following the textual and semiotic clues in the album, Klein and Chenu
sketched the genealogy of Caroline’s Jewish family to highlight its musicality and its role
in the musical activities of late nineteenth-century Warsaw.
The album exhibits three portraits of Caroline, the latest of which was her gift to her
fiancé, dated 22 June 1889, according to the dedication on the reverse. The civil registration
of the couple’s wedding on 11 October 1889 notes that the bride, “Caroline Szultz, dit
[pronounced] Schultze,” was born in Warsaw on 20 May 1867, daughter of Abraham Szultz,
a 59-year-old musician living in Warsaw, and Elka Kaliska, deceased. The album displays
a carte de visite portrait of her father, according to the Polish inscription, “to my dear
daughter, Caroline,” on the reverse. The annotation beneath the portrait noted the date that
Caroline’s father died, 11 March 1906. On 30 March 1906, the Gazeta Kalisk reported that
the 78-year-old double bass player, Adam Szulc, had died in Paris. Records of the Warsaw
Theater of Varieties showed his employment as a double bass player in 1870 and 1871
(Błaszczyk 2014, p. 248). Błaszczyk reported erroneously that this musician was named
Adam Abram Szulc, born in 1827, and was buried in the Okopowa cemetery in Warsaw in
1902. The elaborate headstone in the Warsaw cemetery, engraved with an image of a hand
placing coins in a charity box, marks the grave of the philanthropist Abram Schultz, son
of Saul, a wealthy merchant, who died at the age of 75 on 14 May 1902 (Virtual Cemetery
(jewish.org.pl), sv. Schultz). This error highlights the necessity to check primary sources
and the danger of relying solely on secondary sources.
A portrait on the same page as Caroline’s father is apparently her mother. The
dedication on the reverse, “as a souvenir to the much-loved lady-doctor from her loving
and devoted mother”, is signed Paulina Szultz. This was not the mother ’s name, according
to the marriage certificate. Klein and Chenu were unable to discover whether Paulina was
Caroline’s sister, aunt, or step-mother. We were also unable to find any Polish records of
Elka’s birth, marriage, or death.
Another portrait revealed Caroline’s sister, Henryka, inscribed with “A token of
remembrance! For my dearest sister, Karolina, a sign of affection from loving Henryka
Szultz, Warsaw 2 September 1888.” Two other portraits taken in Warsaw, apparently show
Caroline’s maternal relatives, the young adults Hélène Kaliska and Julien Kaliski. A
penciled annotation in the album notes that Hélène became Mme Neymanowicz, but no
other records of this woman were found.
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 12 of 29
The album provided many more entries for Caroline’s family tree. Two early pho-
tographs in the album, with similar dedications on the reverse, taken at the same studio,
show Caroline’s uncle, Henryk Szulc, who closely resembles Caroline’s father. Henryk
wrote on the back of his portrait: “To my dear niece Karola, Uncle Henryk Szulc.” A photo-
graph of two young women in their late teens and in Polish dress (Figure 3) was inscribed
with the following: “To my dear cousin, Karola Szulc, your loving cousins Emilia and
Felicia Szulc.” These two photographs are dated “Warsaw 25/7/85.” A penciled comment
in the album added decades later notes that the two girls are the sisters of “Joseph Szulc (le
musicien). Félicie est morte [Felicia died, presumably unmarried] et Emilie (Mme Apen-
szlak) mère de [mother of]
. . .
” Emilie evidently had a child, but the writer did not know
its name. The Bertillon couple would have met Felicia’s younger brother, Joseph Szulc
(1875, Warsaw–1956, Paris), a virtuoso pianist who arrived in Paris in 1899 to work with
Jules Massenet. He composed a symphony and violin sonata, wrote light operas, and set
Verlaine’s poems to music. He also conducted orchestras in Brussels and Paris and married
a non-Jewish operetta singer, Suzy Delsart (Letellier 2015, p. 386). Could Emilie’s child
have been Leonora Apenszlak, born in 1904, who lived in Warsaw in 1939 and survived
the war, https://new.getto.pl/en/People/A/Apenszlak-Leonora-Unknown (accessed on
5 November 2023)? Felicia was about the same age as Caroline.
Genealogy 2023, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 13 of 30
Figure 3. Felicia and Emilie Schule. Photo: Karoli and Pusch, Warsaw. Szulc-Bertillon album.
Błaszczyk (2014, p. 249) provided a brief biography of Henryk Szulc and his five mu-
sical sons, one of whom was the virtuoso pianist and composer Joseph in Paris. This biog-
raphy says nothing about his daughters, although the album reveals that he had at least
two. Błaszczyk mentions the cellist Leon (1857–1935), clarinetist Maurycy (c. 1865–d.
1936), violinist Michał (d. c. 1930), and Bronislaw (1881–1955), a horn player and composer
who arrived in Palestine in 1938. Błaszczyk noted that Henryk Szulc (1836–1903), a com-
poser and conductor, worked as a violinist in the Grand Theatre and Opera Orchestra of
Warsaw and taught the double bass at the Warsaw Conservatory.
Leon Szulc visited the same photographer as his sisters and father just before Caro-
line left for Paris. On the reverse of his portrait, he wrote, “A ma chère cousine Caroline,
souvenir, Léon Schul. Varsovie, le 27 juillet 1885.” Leon played his cello in the Grand
Theatre and Opera Orchestra in Warsaw. His brother Maurycy, on the same album page
as Henryka and Felicia, studied clarinet and for many years played this instrument as well
as a base clarinet in the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra (Błaszczyk 2014, pp. 250–51).
Henryk’s brilliant career was reported in the press on several occasions (e.g., Echo
Muzyczne, 2 March 1895, 103; Kurjer Warszawski ier 21 March 1900, 2, which also stated that
his great-grandfather was a musician). Henryk’s lengthy obituary in the Echo Muzyczne
(20 February 1903, 178) reported that he had six musical sons and a prodigal grandson.
Henryk’s sixth son, Hermann, omied by Błaszczyk, posed with his father and is named
in the Szulc-Bertillon album. The dedication in French on the portrait of Henryk and his
son says, “à Mlle Caroline Schul, docteur en médecine, souvenir sympathique de son
oncle et cousin.” It must date from 1889, before her marriage. The boy appears to be about
17 years old and was therefore born ca. 1872. Four years later, in 1893, the same young
man sent Caroline his portrait, with a dedication in English: “To my dearest cousin, as a
Figure 3. Felicia and Emilie Schultze. Photo: Karoli and Pusch, Warsaw. Szulc-Bertillon album.
Błaszczyk (2014, p. 249) provided a brief biography of Henryk Szulc and his five
musical sons, one of whom was the virtuoso pianist and composer Joseph in Paris. This
biography says nothing about his daughters, although the album reveals that he had at least
two. Błaszczyk mentions the cellist Leon (1857–1935), clarinetist Maurycy (c. 1865–d. 1936),
violinist Michał (d. c. 1930), and Bronislaw (1881–1955), a horn player and composer who
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 13 of 29
arrived in Palestine in 1938. Błaszczyk noted that Henryk Szulc (1836–1903), a composer
and conductor, worked as a violinist in the Grand Theatre and Opera Orchestra of Warsaw
and taught the double bass at the Warsaw Conservatory.
Leon Szulc visited the same photographer as his sisters and father just before Caroline
left for Paris. On the reverse of his portrait, he wrote, “A ma chère cousine Caroline,
souvenir, Léon Schultz. Varsovie, le 27 juillet 1885.” Leon played his cello in the Grand
Theatre and Opera Orchestra in Warsaw. His brother Maurycy, on the same album page as
Henryka and Felicia, studied clarinet and for many years played this instrument as well as
a base clarinet in the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra (Błaszczyk 2014, pp. 250–51).
Henryk’s brilliant career was reported in the press on several occasions (e.g., Echo
Muzyczne, 2 March 1895, 103; Kurjer Warszawski ier 21 March 1900, 2, which also stated that
his great-grandfather was a musician). Henryk’s lengthy obituary in the Echo Muzyczne
(20 February 1903, 178) reported that he had six musical sons and a prodigal grandson.
Henryk’s sixth son, Hermann, omitted by Błaszczyk, posed with his father and is named
in the Szulc-Bertillon album. The dedication in French on the portrait of Henryk and his
son says, “àMlle Caroline Schultz, docteur en médecine, souvenir sympathique de son
oncle et cousin.” It must date from 1889, before her marriage. The boy appears to be about
17 years old and was therefore born ca. 1872. Four years later, in 1893, the same young
man sent Caroline his portrait, with a dedication in English: “To my dearest cousin, as a
slightest token of regard and admiration, Hermann, Berlin, 11/12/93.” Another obituary
of Henryk’s in the Kurjer Codzienny (12 February 1903, 2) says that the talented grandson
performed at the age of ten at Warsaw’s Music Society. This has to be Leon Szulc’s son,
Jozef/Joseph, born in 1893, who had proved his great talent as a pianist at a concert in 1903
(Kurjer Codzienny, 12 February 1903, 2) and later became a professor of piano in Strasbourg.
He survived WWII in Cairo, where he founded a conservatory (Błaszczyk 2014, p. 250).
Leon’s second son, Roman, also escaped the Nazis and worked as a timpanist in the Boston
Symphony Orchestra (Błaszczyk 2014, p. 251).
The album displays another of Caroline’s cousins, a teenager in school uniform,
whose dedication says, “To my cousin Caroline, a token of affection and respect. Henryk.
8/6/[18]85.” The penciled annotation says that this was Henryk Waghalter or Wakhalter.
This led to the discovery of another branch of Caroline’s genealogy. The population
registers on JRI Poland, https://www.jri-poland.org/ (accessed on 5 November 2023),
revealed that the Waghalters and Szulc families were related through several marriages.
Adam’s parents were likely Jakub/Jakob/Yakov Szultz (d. 14 April 1876), a cellist, and
Fajga/Fayge Waghalter. Adam had an aunt or a sister who married a Waghalter/Wakhalter,
who had a son named Henryk. Błaszczyk (2014, pp. 265–67) listed ten musicians in the
Waghalter family, who were born in Warsaw, including Henryk (1869–1961), who became a
renowned cellist. Henryk and his younger brother Jozef (1880–1942) played in the Jewish
Symphony Orchestra in the Warsaw Ghetto, but only Henryk survived the war. A website,
www.waghalter.com (accessed on 5 November 2023), devoted to the compositions of his
talented younger brother Ignaz (1881–1949) reported that Henryk, Jozef, and Ignatz had
another 18 siblings, including Wladyslaw (1885–1940), who played in Berlin’s German
Opera orchestra. Both their parents were musicians, and their great-grandfather, Lejbu´s
Waghalter (1790–1868), was known as the “Paganini of the East” (Błaszczyk 2014, p. 267).
Ignatz left Europe in 1937 and died in New York. Warsaw newspapers mentioned two
other noteworthy young cellists from this family, Aloiza Waghalter and Hipolyt (b. 1897),
who became a soloist in Warsaw’s Music Society Orchestra (e.g., Kurjer Warszawski, 13 June
1891, 1 and 15 February 1905, 3).
Caroline was related to most of the 23 Szulc musicians and 10 Waghalter musicians
listed in Błaszczyk, as well as others not listed there. She had no grandchildren. Thanks
to the dedications on the reverse of the photographic cards and the annotations on the
album’s pages, Klein and Chenu’s (2023, pp. 32, 36) study discovered some of the musicians’
mothers, wives, and sisters who had not interested music historians.
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 14 of 29
3.1.4. The Dreyfus Album: An International Cousinhood
Louise Dessaivre inherited an album created by her great-grandmother, Berthe Drey-
fus, who was born in Antwerp in 1879. This album, too, became a catalyst for searching
genealogical websites and public archives in order to construct Berthe’s nineteenth-century
family tree, the family’s dispersion, and their genealogical memories. In 1901, she and
her husband, Ferdinand Lazard, moved to Amiens, France. In 1944, they were deported
to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered, https://hal.science/hal-03425716/ (accessed on
5 November 2023), and all their belongings were pillaged. However, Berthe had already
given her album and autograph book to her daughter Simonne Audelet, who survived
the German occupation in hiding with her non-Jewish in-laws, and these heirlooms re-
mained intact.
The 91 photographic portraits that Berthe collected in her album spanned from the
1860s to the early years of the twentieth century. She penciled in the names of many
portraits on the cardboard pages. A few cards have dedications on the back. Dessaivre
could identify Berthe’s parents, Hélène Michel (1845–1936) and Arnold Lucien Dreyfus
(1847–1913), Berthe’s sister Anna, her husband Alfred Dreyfus, and their daughter Hélène,
whom Berthe had not named. Dessaivre recalled that Berthe and Anna had a sister, Céline,
who died aged 16 in 1891 and who appears to be missing from the album. “The other
branches of the family—the Philips, Krijns, Francks and Blochs are almost unknown to
me,” wrote Dessaivre, “but my grandmother talked often of these cousins of her mother”
(private correspondence, 24 September 2021). The album’s photographs have enabled
the construction of Berthe’s nineteenth-century family tree, showing her maternal and
paternal relatives.
The photographers’ details on the base or reverse of the portraits revealed the cities in
which Berthe’s extended family resided and enabled localized searches of online databases.
One maternal branch lived in Amsterdam, and another maternal branch remained in
Antwerp. The paternal branches lived in Paris, although Berthe’s paternal grandmother
came from the Moselle region of Lorraine.
The Dutch connection: Ten photographs from Amsterdam show the Van Messel and
De Vries families. Dessaivre discovered that Berthe’s maternal aunts, Josephine and Marie
Agatha Michel, both married Jewish Dutchmen, Juda van Messel of Leeuwarden and
André(Asser Hijman) de Vries of Amsterdam, and their children, Marianne Van Messel
and Marianna De Vries, were named after Berthe’s maternal grandmother, Maria Anna
Krijn/Kryn (1828–1892).
The Krijn/Kryn family in Antwerp: Maria Anna Krijn/Kryn had at least seven sib-
lings who survived into adulthood and married, discovered by searching for names that
appeared in the album in several genealogical databases. While the name Krijn/Kryn
was very popular in the Netherlands, especially among non-Jews, it was less common in
Antwerp. Dessaivre was able to locate Maria Anna’s parents and siblings via Geneanet.com.
Maria Anna’s youngest sister, Fijtje, married into the Philip family, as discussed below. Krijn
relatives in the album include Maria Anna’s sister Marie, who married Maurice Grevel,
and their brother, “Uncle Rick” (Henricus), who worked in the diamond business, his wife
Catherine, and some of their children, who all lived in Antwerp. Two portraits showed a
young woman named Anaïs Franck (1882–1927); a Google search revealed her husband,
Frans Franck, a decorator and furniture maker, art patron, and initiator of Antwerp’s De
Kapel group of progressive intellectuals. Berthe’s autograph book provided the clue to
where Anaïs fit in the family tree. She had signed her entry “Cousine Anaïs Franck”. Anaïs’
maiden name, we discovered, was Anna Krijn, a grand-daughter of Henricus Krijn, Uncle
Rick, and thus Berthe’s second cousin.
One of the larger portraits in the album showed a man with a mustache and a dark
stripe down his pale trouser leg. He posed smugly, with a white dog perched on the table
(Figure 4). The penciled note beneath this portrait said, cryptically, “father of Bouneque?”
The text on the back revealed that this was a passport photograph of “Michel Joseph Kryn,”
Berthe’s grandfather, Joseph Michel, the husband of Maria Anna Krijn/Kryn, who adopted
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 15 of 29
her name to mark their association. It was dated 25 October 1870 (or 1871, unclear) and
countersigned by the Burgermeister of Antwerp, who attested to its authenticity. The
online Directory of Belgian Photographers, https://fomu.atomis.be/index.php/michel-
kryn-j;isaar (accessed on 5 November 2023), lists Berthe’s grandfather, Michel Joseph Kryn,
born in Maastricht in 1819. The directory notes that he had worked as a money exchanger
before becoming an optician who created magnifying lenses for photography and sold
stereoscopes. Berthe’s father, Arnold Lucien Dreyfus, who also initially worked as a money
changer, took over his business, according to the directory.
Genealogy 2023, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 16 of 30
Figure 4. Joseph Michel, grandfather of Berthe Dreyfus, Antwerp, 1871, recto and verso. Photo: Pho-
tographie Artistique. Dreyfus album, private collection.
The Paris jewelers: Berthe’s father had a sister, Sara Céline, who married a jeweler,
Arthur Moise Philip, and they and their two children, Emile and Georges Arnold Philip,
feature in the album. Emile and Georges both served in the French army, and Berthe dis-
played photographs of them in military uniform. Arthur’s brother, also a jeweler, Edouard
Moise Philip, married Maria Anna Krijn’s youngest sister, Fijtje, whom Berthe called Car-
oline, and their daughter, named Berthe Helene Philip, married her first cousin, Georges
Arnold Philip. Edouard, his wife, and their two children are seen and named in the album.
The Philip family is therefore related to Berthe Dreyfus, the album owner, via both her
parents.
Berthe labeled two of the album’s portraits “Grand mère Philip” and “Grand père
Philip,” although they were not actually her own grandparents (Figures 5 and 6). The
photograph of “grandmother”, adorned with an elaborate lace head covering and Bieder-
meier style of dress (identified by Lou Taylor, personal correspondence, 20 September
2023), reproduces an amateur watercolor painting. She was not the grandmother of Berthe
Dreyfus, the album owner; her title is honorific. Breslau-born Annee Jacob (1802/1803–
1886) was the mother of the jewelers Arthur and Edouard Philip and the wife of
Jacques/Jacob Moyse Philip (1801–1886, see Figure 6), also a Parisian jeweler. As described
below, an aristocratic-looking ancestor in one’s album implied an aristocratic pedigree.
Figure 4.
Joseph Michel, grandfather of Berthe Dreyfus, Antwerp, 1871, recto and verso. Photo:
Photographie Artistique. Dreyfus album, private collection.
The Paris jewelers: Berthe’s father had a sister, Sara Céline, who married a jeweler,
Arthur Moise Philip, and they and their two children, Emile and Georges Arnold Philip,
feature in the album. Emile and Georges both served in the French army, and Berthe
displayed photographs of them in military uniform. Arthur’s brother, also a jeweler,
Edouard Moise Philip, married Maria Anna Krijn’s youngest sister, Fijtje, whom Berthe
called Caroline, and their daughter, named Berthe Helene Philip, married her first cousin,
Georges Arnold Philip. Edouard, his wife, and their two children are seen and named in
the album. The Philip family is therefore related to Berthe Dreyfus, the album owner, via
both her parents.
Berthe labeled two of the album’s portraits “Grand mère Philip” and “Grand père Philip,”
although they were not actually her own grandparents (Figures 5and 6). The photograph
of “grandmother”, adorned with an elaborate lace head covering and Biedermeier style of
dress (identified by Lou Taylor, personal correspondence, 20 September 2023), reproduces
an amateur watercolor painting. She was not the grandmother of Berthe Dreyfus, the album
owner; her title is honorific. Breslau-born Annette Jacob (1802/1803–1886) was the mother
of the jewelers Arthur and Edouard Philip and the wife of Jacques/Jacob Moyse Philip
(1801–1886, see Figure 6), also a Parisian jeweler. As described below, an aristocratic-looking
ancestor in one’s album implied an aristocratic pedigree.
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 16 of 29
Genealogy 2023, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 17 of 30
Figure 5. «Grand’ mère Philip» Annee Jacob, 1830s. Photo: A. Zagel, 76 rue de Rivoli, Paris. Berthe
Dreyfus album. Private collection.
Figure 6. «Grand’ père Philip» Jacob Moyse Philip. Photo: Photographie Tufferau, 48 rue Vivienne,
Paris. Dreyfus album, private collection.
The Lorraine relatives: There is no doubt about the bourgeois status of Berthe’s
portly, double-chinned Parisian paternal grandfather, Isidore Dreyfus (1814–1883), clearly
a successful businessman, and his tightly corseted wife, Philippine Aron (1812–1869) (see
Figure 7). The album revealed descendants of Philippine Aron, who came from Phals-
bourg, a small town in the Moselle region, just east of Strasbourg, where Jews had lived
from the time of Louis XIV. Mme Edinger, the Bloch family, and Commander Leopold
Steheimer/Stetemer, we discovered, were all connected to the Aron family. Mme Edinger
was Philippine’s sister Caroline, and an unlabeled photograph on the same album page,
Figure 5.
«Grand’ mère Philip» Annette Jacob, 1830s. Photo: A. Zagel, 76 rue de Rivoli, Paris. Berthe
Dreyfus album. Private collection.
Genealogy 2023, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 17 of 30
Figure 5. «Grand’ mère Philip» Annee Jacob, 1830s. Photo: A. Zagel, 76 rue de Rivoli, Paris. Berthe
Dreyfus album. Private collection.
Figure 6. «Grand’ père Philip» Jacob Moyse Philip. Photo: Photographie Tufferau, 48 rue Vivienne,
Paris. Dreyfus album, private collection.
The Lorraine relatives: There is no doubt about the bourgeois status of Berthe’s
portly, double-chinned Parisian paternal grandfather, Isidore Dreyfus (1814–1883), clearly
a successful businessman, and his tightly corseted wife, Philippine Aron (1812–1869) (see
Figure 7). The album revealed descendants of Philippine Aron, who came from Phals-
bourg, a small town in the Moselle region, just east of Strasbourg, where Jews had lived
from the time of Louis XIV. Mme Edinger, the Bloch family, and Commander Leopold
Steheimer/Stetemer, we discovered, were all connected to the Aron family. Mme Edinger
was Philippine’s sister Caroline, and an unlabeled photograph on the same album page,
Figure 6.
«Grand’ père Philip» Jacob Moyse Philip. Photo: Photographie Tufferau, 48 rue Vivienne,
Paris. Dreyfus album, private collection.
The Lorraine relatives: There is no doubt about the bourgeois status of Berthe’s
portly, double-chinned Parisian paternal grandfather, Isidore Dreyfus (1814–1883), clearly
a successful businessman, and his tightly corseted wife, Philippine Aron (1812–1869)
(see Figure 7). The album revealed descendants of Philippine Aron, who came from
Phalsbourg, a small town in the Moselle region, just east of Strasbourg, where Jews had
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 17 of 29
lived from the time of Louis XIV. Mme Edinger, the Bloch family, and Commander Leopold
Stettheimer/Stetemer, we discovered, were all connected to the Aron family. Mme Edinger
was Philippine’s sister Caroline, and an unlabeled photograph on the same album page,
taken by the same Parisian photographer, must be Caroline’s daughter, Clara Coblentz.
Clara’s daughter Berthe married Sam Bloch, and their two girls, another Berthe (the fourth
in the family!) and Andrée, all appear on page 15 of the album. Commander Stetemer
was not in uniform, but he had a fine, waxed mustache and a pin in his lapel. His mother,
Esther Estelle Aron of Phalsbourg, was apparently a cousin of Philippine and Caroline.
Genealogy 2023, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 18 of 30
taken by the same Parisian photographer, must be Caroline’s daughter, Clara Coblen.
Clara’s daughter Berthe married Sam Bloch, and their two girls, another Berthe (the fourth
in the family!) and Andrée, all appear on page 15 of the album. Commander Stetemer was
not in uniform, but he had a fine, waxed mustache and a pin in his lapel. His mother,
Esther Estelle Aron of Phalsbourg, was apparently a cousin of Philippine and Caroline.
Figure 7. Isidore Dreyfus and his wife Philippine Aron. Photos: A. Zagel, 76 rue de Rivoli, Paris.
Dreyfus album, private collection.
Our research enabled the construction of extensive and intertwined family trees. We
were unable to discover the identity of “Tante Merek, mother of Elise.” Merek may be a
diminutive of Maria Josepha Ravays, the wife of Maria Anna Krijn’s brother Moses Krijn,
or Margareta, a sister of Maria Anna, Moses, and Henricus, or the “tante” may signify an
honorific aunt who is not actually related. We were unable to identify ten of the people in
the album, most of whom are likely also relatives of Berthe, although she also displayed
the family’s servants and portraits of friends, some of whom had signed her autograph
book.
These case studies, and the other albums discussed below, maintained family net-
works and enabled descendants to visualize and learn about their ancestors.
3.2. Aristocratic Lineage
The collection of photographic family portraits enabled Jews to create a visual gene-
alogy, intentionally or unintentionally, which portrayed their bourgeois heritage. Nine-
teenth-century Jews did not initially collect portraits to memorialize their family histories,
although their collections of richly aired ancestors and descendants, preserved as family
heirlooms and displayed in albums, came to serve this function. In the early nineteenth
century, opulent Jews commissioned painted portraits of themselves and their wives and,
on occasion, also their parents, imitating the non-Jewish aristocracy. The early-nineteenth-
century portraitist could, of course, embellish the painting of a wealthy Jewish patron. In
contrast, a photograph of a live model provided a more accurate likeness, although the
photographic artist could touch up a print to make it more flaering. Descendants some-
times displayed photographic reproductions of their family’s painted portraits in their
albums to convey an aristocratic pedigree, as in the Dreyfus album described above and
the four examples below.
Figure 7.
Isidore Dreyfus and his wife Philippine Aron. Photos: A. Zagel, 76 rue de Rivoli, Paris.
Dreyfus album, private collection.
Our research enabled the construction of extensive and intertwined family trees. We
were unable to discover the identity of “Tante Merek, mother of Elise.” Merek may be a
diminutive of Maria Josepha Ravays, the wife of Maria Anna Krijn’s brother Moses Krijn,
or Margareta, a sister of Maria Anna, Moses, and Henricus, or the “tante” may signify an
honorific aunt who is not actually related. We were unable to identify ten of the people in
the album, most of whom are likely also relatives of Berthe, although she also displayed the
family’s servants and portraits of friends, some of whom had signed her autograph book.
These case studies, and the other albums discussed below, maintained family networks
and enabled descendants to visualize and learn about their ancestors.
3.2. Aristocratic Lineage
The collection of photographic family portraits enabled Jews to create a visual geneal-
ogy, intentionally or unintentionally, which portrayed their bourgeois heritage. Nineteenth-
century Jews did not initially collect portraits to memorialize their family histories, although
their collections of richly attired ancestors and descendants, preserved as family heirlooms
and displayed in albums, came to serve this function. In the early nineteenth century,
opulent Jews commissioned painted portraits of themselves and their wives and, on occa-
sion, also their parents, imitating the non-Jewish aristocracy. The early-nineteenth-century
portraitist could, of course, embellish the painting of a wealthy Jewish patron. In contrast, a
photograph of a live model provided a more accurate likeness, although the photographic
artist could touch up a print to make it more flattering. Descendants sometimes displayed
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 18 of 29
photographic reproductions of their family’s painted portraits in their albums to convey an
aristocratic pedigree, as in the Dreyfus album described above and the four examples below.
Gustav Przibram’s family album in the Jewish Museum Vienna (Inv. No. 4515) shows
that he and his wife were proud of their aristocratic heritage. Gustav was the grandson of
Aron Beer Przibram (1781–1857) of Prague and Therese Esther Jerusalem (1783–1866), who
was Aron’s wife and niece. Descended from the eminent Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel,
the Maharal of Prague, Aron built an immense fortune in the textile business. He and
his wife were richly dressed for their portraits in the Przibram family album. Most of the
other 23 portraits in this album portray the families of Gustav’s parents, Salomon and
Marie Dormitzer, whose mother was Therese Esther Jerusalem’s sister. This album also
exhibits Gustav’s wife, Charlotte von Schey, and her ennobled Austro-Hungarian parents,
the Jewish banker Baron Freidrich Schey von Koromla and his wife Hermine, née Landauer.
The luxurious dress of the women, including the rich fabrics, jewelry, and lace, shows the
family’s aristocracy, as well as three generations of its intertwined genealogy.
A much larger album—the largest in this study—belonged to the family of Israel
Barendt Melchior (1827–1893) and spans four generations of an extensive family at the
pinnacle of Danish Jewish society (Danish Jewish Museum, JDK0148x2). This collection of
some 370 photographic cards portrays a highly interconnected Ashkenazic family, where
marriages took place between uncles and nieces as well as with other members of the
Danish Jewish elite, including the Henriques and Meyer families. The first page displays
photographs of ancestors, including reproductions of painted portraits of Israel Barendt
Melchior’s maternal grandparents, Lea/Galathea (1755–1814) and Lion Israel (1758–1834),
dressed in the fashion of Napoleon’s empire (Figure 8), and images of his parents, Gerson
Moses Melchior (1771–1845) and Birgitte Melchior, née Israel (1792–1855). Yet another
photographic card on the album’s first page reproduced a painting of Israel Barendt’s sister
Henriette Melchior (1813–1892) sumptuously dressed in the late 1830s. These portraits
attest to the family’s wealth in the early nineteenth century. Israel Barendt Melchior had
seventeen siblings. Unusually, some of the pages in this album are organized genealogically,
with photographs of Israel’s siblings’ nuclear families arranged together. For example,
portraits of Israel’s sister Sophie (1809–1883), her ten children, and their spouses and
children are followed by his sister Galathea (1818–1906), her German husband, Dr. Nathan
Levi Marcus, and their children, displayed one next to another. Some portraits reveal the
Melchior family’s participation in the pastimes of the leisured class, including masquerades,
tableaux vivants, fancy-dress parties, and play acting in the salon.
Other Jewish album makers similarly exhibited photographic reproductions of long-
dead ancestors in their albums, portraits of Jews who had acquired wealth in the eighteenth
or early nineteenth century and formed part of the old bourgeoisie, as opposed to the
nouveau riche Victorians. For example, Sir David Lionel Salomons (1851–1925), a photogra-
pher and an avid collector of photographic portraits, inserted a photographic reproduction
(Figure 9) of a youthful painting of his Dutch-born paternal grandmother, Mrs. Levi Sa-
lomons, née Matilda de Metz (1775–1838) (Salomons Museum, UK, Album 510), among
the many portraits of his extended family and his friends. The original likely came from
inside a locket or pendant. Her short curly hair (“coiffure àla Titus”) followed the French
Revolutionary fashion (1790s), as did the choker around her neck. The ruffle on her bodice
and the small shawl suggest a date up to about 1804 (Lou Taylor, private correspondence,
21 September 2023).
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 19 of 29
Genealogy 2023, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 19 of 30
Gustav Przibram’s family album in the Jewish Museum Vienna (Inv. No. 4515) shows
that he and his wife were proud of their aristocratic heritage. Gustav was the grandson of
Aron Beer Przibram (1781–1857) of Prague and Therese Esther Jerusalem (1783–1866),
who was Aron’s wife and niece. Descended from the eminent Rabbi Judah Loew ben
Bezalel, the Maharal of Prague, Aron built an immense fortune in the textile business. He
and his wife were richly dressed for their portraits in the Przibram family album. Most of
the other 23 portraits in this album portray the families of Gustav’s parents, Salomon and
Marie Dormier, whose mother was Therese Esther Jerusalem’s sister. This album also
exhibits Gustav’s wife, Charloe von Schey, and her ennobled Austro-Hungarian parents,
the Jewish banker Baron Freidrich Schey von Koromla and his wife Hermine, née Lan-
dauer. The luxurious dress of the women, including the rich fabrics, jewelry, and lace,
shows the family’s aristocracy, as well as three generations of its intertwined genealogy.
A much larger album—the largest in this study—belonged to the family of Israel Bar-
endt Melchior (1827–1893) and spans four generations of an extensive family at the pin-
nacle of Danish Jewish society (Danish Jewish Museum, JDK0148x2). This collection of
some 370 photographic cards portrays a highly interconnected Ashkenazic family, where
marriages took place between uncles and nieces as well as with other members of the
Danish Jewish elite, including the Henriques and Meyer families. The first page displays
photographs of ancestors, including reproductions of painted portraits of Israel Barendt
Melchior’s maternal grandparents, Lea/Galathea (1755–1814) and Lion Israel (1758–1834),
dressed in the fashion of Napoleon’s empire (Figure 8), and images of his parents, Gerson
Moses Melchior (1771–1845) and Birgie Melchior, née Israel (1792–1855). Yet another
photographic card on the album’s first page reproduced a painting of Israel Barendt’s sis-
ter Henriee Melchior (1813–1892) sumptuously dressed in the late 1830s. These portraits
aest to the family’s wealth in the early nineteenth century. Israel Barendt Melchior had
seventeen siblings. Unusually, some of the pages in this album are organized genealogi-
cally, with photographs of Israel’s siblings’ nuclear families arranged together. For exam-
ple, portraits of Israel’s sister Sophie (1809–1883), her ten children, and their spouses and
children are followed by his sister Galathea (1818–1906), her German husband, Dr. Nathan
Levi Marcus, and their children, displayed one next to another. Some portraits reveal the
Melchior family’s participation in the pastimes of the leisured class, including masquer-
ades, tableaux vivants, fancy-dress parties, and play acting in the salon.
Figure 8. Lea and Lion Israel, grandparents of Israel Barendt Melchior. Melchior album. The Danish
Jewish Museum, JDK0148x2, p. 1.
Other Jewish album makers similarly exhibited photographic reproductions of long-
dead ancestors in their albums, portraits of Jews who had acquired wealth in the
Figure 8.
Lea and Lion Israel, grandparents of Israel Barendt Melchior. Melchior album. The Danish
Jewish Museum, JDK0148x2, p. 1.
Genealogy 2023, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 20 of 30
eighteenth or early nineteenth century and formed part of the old bourgeoisie, as opposed
to the nouveau riche Victorians. For example, Sir David Lionel Salomons (1851–1925), a
photographer and an avid collector of photographic portraits, inserted a photographic
reproduction (Figure 9) of a youthful painting of his Dutch-born paternal grandmother,
Mrs. Levi Salomons, née Matilda de Me (1775–1838) (Salomons Museum, UK, Album
510), among the many portraits of his extended family and his friends. The original likely
came from inside a locket or pendant. Her short curly hair (“coiffure à la Titus”) followed
the French Revolutionary fashion (1790s), as did the choker around her neck. The ruffle
on her bodice and the small shawl suggest a date up to about 1804 (Lou Taylor, private
correspondence, 21 September 2023).
Figure 9. Mrs. Levi Salomons, née Matilda de Me (1775–1838). Salomons Album 510, Salomons
Museum, UK.
The reproduction of a painted portrait of Salomon Josephson (1784–1834), the first
generation of the talented Josephson family born in Sweden, features in an album (Figure
10) that belonged to the family of his son, the Swedish composer Jacob Axel Josephson
and his second wife, Loe Piscator (Jewish Museum of Sweden, album 1259). Jacob Axel
converted to Christianity in 1841, yet his family album preserved a visual genealogy of 29
members of the Jewish Josephson family—Jacob Axel’s siblings and their families. Salo-
mon Josephson was clearly already very wealthy when he posed, shaved and balding, for
his painted portrait in a starched white stand-up collar, white dress shirt, and tie. His
plump widow, Beate Levin (1791–1859), who was born in Copenhagen, sat for her photo-
graphic portrait in Stockholm in the 1850s in an embroidered black satin dress with white
lace cuffs and collar, as well as an elaborate indoor bonnet (Figure 11).
Figure 9.
Mrs. Levi Salomons, née Matilda de Metz (1775–1838). Salomons Album 510, Salomons
Museum, UK.
The reproduction of a painted portrait of Salomon Josephson (1784–1834), the first
generation of the talented Josephson family born in Sweden, features in an album (Figure 10)
that belonged to the family of his son, the Swedish composer Jacob Axel Josephson and his
second wife, Lotte Piscator (Jewish Museum of Sweden, album 1259). Jacob Axel converted
to Christianity in 1841, yet his family album preserved a visual genealogy of 29 members of
the Jewish Josephson family—Jacob Axel’s siblings and their families. Salomon Josephson
was clearly already very wealthy when he posed, shaved and balding, for his painted
portrait in a starched white stand-up collar, white dress shirt, and tie. His plump widow,
Beate Levin (1791–1859), who was born in Copenhagen, sat for her photographic portrait
in Stockholm in the 1850s in an embroidered black satin dress with white lace cuffs and
collar, as well as an elaborate indoor bonnet (Figure 11).
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 20 of 29
Genealogy 2023, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 21 of 30
Figure 10. Solomon Josephson. Photos: Martin Josephson, Stockholm. Josephson album JUD01259,
Jewish Museum of Sweden.
Figure 11. Solomon Josephson’s wife, Beate Levin. Photos: Martin Josephson, Stockholm. Josephson
album JUD01259, Jewish Museum of Sweden.
The Przibram family migrated to Vienna from Prague, and Baroness Schey moved
from Trieste to Vienna after her wedding. Israel Barendt Melchior’s grandmother moved
from Copenhagen to Stockholm, where she raised her family, and Matilda Salomons
moved from Leiden to London. Salomon Josephson’s father left Prenzlau in Brandenburg
to engage in business and sele in Stockholm. His wife was born in Copenhagen. Most
nineteenth-century Jews had genealogical memories of migration.
3.3. Genealogical Memories of Migration and Dispersal
Many more Jewish albums, compared to non-Jewish albums, bring together dis-
persed relatives. In the nineteenth century and especially in the last two decades, millions
of Jews migrated, either voluntarily or due to the force of circumstances, and their large
Figure 10.
Solomon Josephson. Photos: Martin Josephson, Stockholm. Josephson album JUD01259,
Jewish Museum of Sweden.
Genealogy 2023, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 21 of 30
Figure 10. Solomon Josephson. Photos: Martin Josephson, Stockholm. Josephson album JUD01259,
Jewish Museum of Sweden.
Figure 11. Solomon Josephson’s wife, Beate Levin. Photos: Martin Josephson, Stockholm. Josephson
album JUD01259, Jewish Museum of Sweden.
The Przibram family migrated to Vienna from Prague, and Baroness Schey moved
from Trieste to Vienna after her wedding. Israel Barendt Melchior’s grandmother moved
from Copenhagen to Stockholm, where she raised her family, and Matilda Salomons
moved from Leiden to London. Salomon Josephson’s father left Prenzlau in Brandenburg
to engage in business and sele in Stockholm. His wife was born in Copenhagen. Most
nineteenth-century Jews had genealogical memories of migration.
3.3. Genealogical Memories of Migration and Dispersal
Many more Jewish albums, compared to non-Jewish albums, bring together dis-
persed relatives. In the nineteenth century and especially in the last two decades, millions
of Jews migrated, either voluntarily or due to the force of circumstances, and their large
Figure 11.
Solomon Josephson’s wife, Beate Levin. Photos: Martin Josephson, Stockholm. Josephson
album JUD01259, Jewish Museum of Sweden.
The Przibram family migrated to Vienna from Prague, and Baroness Schey moved
from Trieste to Vienna after her wedding. Israel Barendt Melchior’s grandmother moved
from Copenhagen to Stockholm, where she raised her family, and Matilda Salomons moved
from Leiden to London. Salomon Josephson’s father left Prenzlau in Brandenburg to
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 21 of 29
engage in business and settle in Stockholm. His wife was born in Copenhagen. Most
nineteenth-century Jews had genealogical memories of migration.
3.3. Genealogical Memories of Migration and Dispersal
Many more Jewish albums, compared to non-Jewish albums, bring together dispersed
relatives. In the nineteenth century and especially in the last two decades, millions of Jews
migrated, either voluntarily or due to the force of circumstances, and their large families
increasingly dissolved into nuclear family units. They moved away from their birthplace
in order to seek new business opportunities, wed, or escape war and anti-Semitic decrees
and violence. Many sent each other their latest portraits from their new residence, which
collectors arranged in their albums.
The in-gathering of far-flung relatives between the covers of Jewish albums maintained
the connectedness of a scattered family, sometimes over many decades. Although Amélie
Crémieux lived in Paris, her album brought together members of her family in Vienna,
Metz, and Strasbourg. The Ettinger album, as noted, gathered portraits from relatives
spread out between Uman, Mezritch, Kiev, Bobruysk, Odessa, Kishinev, Riga, and Warsaw,
within and beyond the Russian Empire. The Szulc family dispersed from Warsaw to Paris
and Berlin; the Dreyfus couple had cousins in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Paris. Albums
of continental Jews show far more cross-border mobility than British and Scandinavian
Jewish albums, which reflect the stability and dominance of the established moneyed class.
Some albums show migrations from small towns to large urban centers, as in the case of
the Ettingers.
The contents of Jewish portrait albums frequently embody genealogical memories of
family migration. Even when most of their portraits are unnamed, albums bring together
and visualize a multi-generational, physically dispersed, yet emotionally connected family,
as presented in the following two examples of dispersed German Jews. The De Beer family
from northern Germany emigrated in the nineteenth century, whereas the Freiberg and
Deutsch families from the Rhineland fled the Nazis, and this album (and others, such as the
Schames family album in the National Library of Israel, TMA 4833/1) became a valuable
repository of family history following the trauma of the Shoah.
3.3.1. The De Beer Albums: Toward a Colonial Genealogy
When, in 1936, Augustus De Beer of Roslyn, Dunedin, deposited the two albums
containing his family’s collection of photographic cards in the Toit
¯
u Settlers Museum, Otago,
New Zealand (1936/118/2, 1936/118/3), he likely believed that these would contribute to
the history of Jewish settlement in the region. The museum’s inventory records the albums
as having belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Louis De Beer, the parents of Augustus. These two
unannotated albums offer only a few names yet preserve the genealogical memories of
Jewish families who emigrated from Emden and Hamburg. The portraits of family, friends,
and celebrities convey the strong ties of the Antipodean immigrants with their Heimat,
the German homeland. Of the 356 portraits in these albums, 61 were printed in German
lands; 33 were printed in Australia, the first destination of these German Jews in the 1860s;
and 111 were taken in the coastal town of Dunedin, New Zealand, where some members
of the De Beer family settled. Whereas these albums bear witness to the maintenance of
family bonds among first-generation colonialists in the Antipodes with their relatives back
in Germany, the donation by Augustus to the local museum may also reflect the desire
of the second generation to disengage from the family’s German past after the rise of the
racist Nazi party in Germany.
The family’s genealogical narratives have lain dormant for almost a century. These
albums have never been thoroughly researched or exhibited. The current research catalyzed
the construction of the family’s genealogy. The probate of Mrs. Rosette De Beer, née Frank
(b. Hamburg 1851–1927), widow of Louis De Beer, confirms that Augustus was one of
the couple’s three surviving sons. The probate, state, cemetery, and newspaper archives
provided further information that aided the construction of the forgotten genealogy of
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 22 of 29
this colonial family. Louis De Beer ’s obituary (Lake Wakatip Mail, 21 January 1887, p. 5)
noted that he, Louis Solomon De Beer, was born in Emden. The Bendigo Advertiser, an
Australian newspaper, reported his arrival on a ship from Rotterdam, together with his
cousin, Joseph Van der Walde, on 13 December 1866, after four months at sea. Just over
one year later, according to another Australian newspaper, The Age (21 February 1868,
p. 4), he arrived in Adelaide, from where he was due to sail to Callao, a Peruvian port.
However, Louis De Beer and his cousin settled in Queensland, New Zealand, where Louis
worked as a draper and gained British citizenship in 1870. The following year, he married
Rosette in Queensland, where their four sons and daughter were born: Solon, known as
“Louis” (b. 1872–1934), Isidore Louis (1874–1920), Augustus Louis (1876–1954), Samuel
Louis (1882–1957), and daughter Chanella/Schanette, known as “Nettie” (1879–1922). In
1902, Rosette and her daughter moved to Dunedin, where her sons were in business. The
Southern Cemetery preserves the gravestones of Rosette and four of her children, inscribed
in Hebrew and English.
The photographs from Emden and Hamburg show family, and possibly also friends,
whom the De Beer couple left behind. The portraits appear in no obvious order in the two
albums, although, occasionally, a few by the same photographer appear to be members
of one family, taken on the same day. Two photographs sent from Hartford, Connecticut,
show Martha Frank and her little brother Julius, a niece and nephew of Rosette’s. At
least one from Emden shows Joseph van der Walde’s sister-in-law Emilie with her two
eldest children. Most of the portraits date from the 1860s to the 1880s. Others, marked and
unmarked, likely show the De Beer couple’s parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and cousins
who stayed behind.
Louis’s brothers, Isaac/Isidore De Beer (1839–1910) and Salomon De Beer (1849–1917),
also left Emden for the Antipodes. Isidore settled in Melbourne, and he and his family likely
feature among the unnamed Melbourne portraits. In 1874, Salomon married Sophia Jacobs,
the daughter of a Polish immigrant, in Christchurch, New Zealand. This couple settled
in Dunedin, where Salomon was an active member of the Jewish community. They and
their five children likely also feature among the many portraits taken in Dunedin. By 1888,
they had moved to Melbourne and may appear in some of the Australian photographs.
Obituaries in the local newspapers reveal that Louis and Joseph were active members of
the Jewish community, and they and Salomon De Beer were elected Freemasons, where
they contributed to the well-being of others in their town (Figure 12).
The portraits from Australia show one evidently wealthy woman, with her hair
covered in a net and an elaborate lace headdress on top. Others show Louis’s uncle, Samuel
De Beer, and his family. Samuel was Louis’s youngest uncle, born in Emden in 1818, who
emigrated to Australia in 1852, drawn by reports of the gold fields and new business
opportunities. In Melbourne, where Samuel earned a living as a shipping agent, he married
London-born Louisa Hart, who appears in one of the De Beer family albums, as do other
members of her family. Samuel was likely instrumental in persuading at least four of his
nephews to try their luck in Australia.
As Louis De Beer never lived in Dunedin, where the majority of the portraits were
taken, and the albums contain only three portraits from Queenstown, it appears that the
albums were arranged by Rosette, after she was widowed. She would have gathered
together the family collections of loose photos, some brought over from Germany by the
emigrants and others received in the mail over the years. This was her way of preserving
and keeping together her vastly dispersed family. Her children apparently no longer felt
the need to hold on to family memories when Augustus gave the albums to the Toit
¯
u
Settlers Museum, set up in Dunedin in 1908, to document the lives of the early settlers and
subsequent waves of migrants.
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 23 of 29
Genealogy 2023, 7, x FOR PEER REVIEW 23 of 30
worked as a draper and gained British citizenship in 1870. The following year, he married
Rosee in Queensland, where their four sons and daughter were born: Solon, known as
“Louis” (b. 1872–1934), Isidore Louis (1874–1920), Augustus Louis (1876–1954), Samuel
Louis (1882–1957), and daughter Chanella/Schanee, known as “Neie” (1879–1922). In
1902, Rosee and her daughter moved to Dunedin, where her sons were in business. The
Southern Cemetery preserves the gravestones of Rosee and four of her children, in-
scribed in Hebrew and English.
The photographs from Emden and Hamburg show family, and possibly also friends,
whom the De Beer couple left behind. The portraits appear in no obvious order in the two
albums, although, occasionally, a few by the same photographer appear to be members of
one family, taken on the same day. Two photographs sent from Hartford, Connecticut,
show Martha Frank and her lile brother Julius, a niece and nephew of Rosee’s. At least
one from Emden shows Joseph van der Walde’s sister-in-law Emilie with her two eldest
children. Most of the portraits date from the 1860s to the 1880s. Others, marked and un-
marked, likely show the De Beer couple’s parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and cousins who
stayed behind.
Louis’s brothers, Isaac/Isidore De Beer (1839–1910) and Salomon De Beer (1849–
1917), also left Emden for the Antipodes. Isidore seled in Melbourne, and he and his
family likely feature among the unnamed Melbourne portraits. In 1874, Salomon married
Sophia Jacobs, the daughter of a Polish immigrant, in Christchurch, New Zealand. This
couple seled in Dunedin, where Salomon was an active member of the Jewish commu-
nity. They and their five children likely also feature among the many portraits taken in
Dunedin. By 1888, they had moved to Melbourne and may appear in some of the Austral-
ian photographs. Obituaries in the local newspapers reveal that Louis and Joseph were
active members of the Jewish community, and they and Salomon De Beer were elected
Freemasons, where they contributed to the well-being of others in their town (Figure 12).
Figure 12. Unnamed Freemason. 1870s. Photograph: R. J. Nicholas, Invercargill, New Zealand. De
Beer album, 1936/118/3, recto and verso. Collection of Toitū Otago Selers Museum, Dunedin, New
Zealand.
Figure 12.
Unnamed Freemason. 1870s. Photograph: R. J. Nicholas, Invercargill, New Zealand. De
Beer album, 1936/118/3, recto and verso. Collection of Toit
¯
u Otago Settlers Museum, Dunedin,
New Zealand.
3.3.2. Rosa Freiberg’s Album: Dispersal before and after the Nazi Era
The album of Rosa Freiberg, née Deutsch (1860–1957), who was born in the small
town of Ingenheim in the Rhine Palatinate, not far from Karlsruhe, reveals her family’s
dispersal. Preserved in the Center for Jewish History in New York (AR 25181, ALB 187),
this album contains portraits of six of Rosa’s siblings and many of her nephews and nieces,
alongside some of her friends. Most of its 43 studio portraits were made in towns in the
Rhine Palatinate in the 1880s and 1890s. However, three of her sisters left home in the
late nineteenth century when they married: two sisters raised their families in Mainz
(10 portraits from Mainz), and another did likewise in Alsace (6 portraits from Strasbourg),
whereas her other siblings remained in the region of Ingenheim (14 portraits from nearby
Landau). Ingenheim’s Jewish community dwindled from a maximum of 619 in 1856 to
under 200 in 1900, when Rosa, her children, her mother, and three of her other siblings still
lived there.
The album also displays 15 portraits in postcard format from the 1890s and early
decades of the twentieth century, as well as 30 snapshots, including some taken in the USA
after WW2. These are stuck over the pre-cut apertures on the album’s thick pages. A color
snapshot dated 1963 was added to the album after Rosa had died. Rosa and three of her
children, as well as one of her sisters and some of her nephews and nieces, escaped to the
USA following the Nazi rise to power. One niece emigrated to Palestine.
The album, annotated by one of her grandchildren, gained genealogical significance
following the Shoah, as it shows images of many members of Rosa’s family in the Rhineland
prior to the Nazis’ arrival and preserves portraits of some whose lives were cut off by the
Nazis, including her daughter Ida, born in Ingenheim in 1895; her brother Abraham/Albert,
who died at the internment camp at Gurs, France; her niece Fanny Bader, née May, who
perished at Auschwitz in 1944; and her cousin Hedwig Mayer, born in Steinbach, near
Frankfurt, in 1883, who was murdered at Sobibor. It also displays Rosa’s nephew who died
in infancy in Mainz in 1897 and another nephew, Alfred Blum, who was killed in Flanders
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 24 of 29
in the first year of the First World War. A note on a snapshot taken in [Bad] Ragaz, 1912,
picturing one of Rosa’s nieces, indicates that she found refuge in Argentina, presumably
during the Nazi era. Other notes indicate a family that emigrated to Milwaukee.
Whereas the archive deposited in the Center of Jewish History by Rosa’s grandson,
Werner Marx, includes genealogical material regarding the Marx and Freiberg families
(Marx 2003), he apparently did little research on the Deutsch family from Ingenheim.
This album is more than just a collection of photographs; it contains valuable clues for
investigation, including family names, relationships, and places of residence, starting points
for radial research.
The albums discussed here, and many other Jewish albums, hold together dispersed
families. They are living memorials to the departed. Unlike tombstones, these photographs
bring genealogy to life.
4. Discussion
When Augustus De Beer and others donated their historical family albums to an
institution, they had a sense of the importance of their heirlooms—a public importance that
stretched beyond the family, even though most did not supply any genealogical or explana-
tory information. Similarly, when the Nazi authorities salvaged family photograph albums
from deported Jews in Prague and elsewhere, they considered these would eventually have
historical interest. This study set out to show that an active effort to research, discuss, and
publish the albums’ historical narratives has given them genealogical meaning.
This study found that relatives who are alive today discovered hitherto unknown
genealogical information via the research of their albums; they were able to visualize their
ancestors within their nineteenth-century social networks and expand their knowledge
about their extended family and its dispersal.
The studies of nineteenth-century albums mentioned in the introduction have placed
album narratives in bigger, more universal narratives, including gender narratives, colo-
nialism, and aspired identities. The Ettinger and Szulc-Bertillon albums have gender
narratives, the De Beer albums have a colonial narrative, and the Crémieux album has
an identity narrative. The genealogical study of named and unnamed albums pioneered
here can be viewed in the framework of “connected histories,” a concept developed by
Sanjay Subrahmanyam and applied to early modern Jewish history by David B. Ruderman
(Subrahmanyam 1999;Ruderman 2010). Genealogy maps connectedness. The albums’
contents link nuclear families, conversations, spaces, and temporalities of the nineteenth-
and early-twentieth-century Jewish bourgeoisie.
Commemoration provides another broad framework for unrelated spectators of such
albums. Each album may serve as a potential “site of memory,” a site with a symbolic
aura with a transmittable memorial function that bridges the past, present, and future,
as envisaged by Pierre Nora and Jay Winter (Nora 1989, p. 12; Winter 2008, p. 62). Each
spectator’s search for meaning in an album is crucial to its preservation as a site of com-
memoration. Descendants who donated their ancestral albums to institutions likely hoped
that these visual archives would somehow become sites of memory, beyond family memory
and genealogy—sites of Jewish memory or, in the case of De Beer, colonial memory. The
albums discussed here contain images capable of engaging the public in questioning the
backstories of their contents and imagining the lives of the people portrayed. How do they
differ from one’s own ancestors and their backstories? In what ways, if any, are their stories
Jewish stories? What happened to these families in the mid-twentieth century?
Although trauma and loss are not a central theme in this study, for Ettinger’s relatives
in Israel today and for the descendants of Berthe Dreyfus, the Burchardt and Schames
families, and Rosa Freiberg, the trauma and murders during the Second World War (WW2)
shattered and scarred their family history. The study of albums for genealogical insights
gave rise to “postmemorial work,” to use Marianne Hirsch’s concept. The reactivated
memory of distant family history reconnected the extended Ginzberg family, as well as
Louise Dessaivre, to the lives of their ancestors before these were shattered during WW2 in
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 25 of 29
Eastern Europe and in France, respectively. Both of these families had kept their albums
within the family. In the case of institutionalized albums, the descendants, if any are still
alive, forwent engaging in postmemorial work on their own families.
The case studies presented here, some in more detail than others, show that it is
possible to construct or discover additions to a family tree and/or reactivate the micro-
histories and collective memories of Jewish families from some nineteenth-century portrait
albums. These sources have advantages and disadvantages for researchers of family history.
4.1. Advantages: Context
Just as the cemetery provides context for a gravestone, so too does the album provide
context for a portrait. The album houses relationships between the portrait collector and the
subject of every portrait. It creates a virtual salon, where dispersed relatives of all ages meet.
The Ettinger, Szulc-Bertillon, Berthe Dreyfus, De Beer, Freiberg, and Schames albums, and
many others, hold together dispersed families, evidenced by the locations of the portraits’
photographers. This virtual salon preserves family networks across continents and oceans
and, in the case of Amélie Crémieux, after conversion to Christianity. Some family members
left their birthplace in the nineteenth century in order to marry, study, or seek business
opportunities; others fled abroad in the twentieth century following the imposition of the
Nazi racial laws.
The nineteenth-century photo-sharing culture, which, in many ways, resembles that of
social media today, laid the groundwork for discovering visual genealogies and revealing
forgotten, hitherto unknown relatives of the album makers in the case of Mrs. Crémieux,
Hayim and Esther Ettinger, Caroline Bertillon, Berthe Dreyfus, and the De Beer couple.
As women as well as men, the elderly, the very young, and ancestors face each other
on an album’s pages, the spectator develops a sense of extended family, a community of
people, even after memory is lost. The albums bring women out of the shadows and give
them an honorable place in Jewish history. These albums also show their acculturation
into the middle class in the towns where they settled, for example, via the portrait of
the Freemason.
Historically, these albums had a role in passing on family history from generation
to generation in families that were comfortably off. Loose, isolated nineteenth-century
photographs, although useful for family historians, nevertheless provide less information
than an album, which, as shown here, embraces numerous and dispersed relatives. The
research of albums that remain in the hands of family descendants, such as the Ettinger
and Berthe Dreyfus albums, has led to both a revival of the album’s mnemonic function—a
revival of conversation about the family’s ancestors—and the discovery, via the album,
of distant cousins, strengthening kinship bonds and enabling the reconstruction of the
extended family. The revitalization of the album of the Bertillon couple, whose descendants
are no longer living, revealed an exceptional Jewish woman from Warsaw, a medical
pioneer in her day, and some of the women in her musical family.
4.2. Disadvantages: Missing Materials
Researching their backstories, it becomes obvious that these visual genealogies are
incomplete; not every family member appears. Some relatives may have refused to be
photographed, were unable to be photographed, or were displeased with their portrait
and refused to share it. These exclusions would have been obvious a century or more ago,
when family discussions of an album could fill in the gaps. Now, the genealogist has to use
the album’s clues and any available contextual material to discover who is missing.
Accessibility is paramount for researchers. Unfortunately, some institutions that have
been entrusted with nineteenth-century albums have entombed these visual remnants
of past lives, guarded by property and/or access rights. The data embedded in these
books may not be visible. In the Crémieux, Melchior, Przibram, and Schames albums
mentioned above, as well as many others stored in institutions, the textual material printed
on the portraits, at the base or on the reverse, is mostly inaccessible. Admittedly, it is
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 26 of 29
sometimes difficult to access the reverse of a portrait without damaging the album’s page,
and therefore, some institutions forbid researchers from extracting the portraits themselves.
In other cases, where the portraits have been professionally removed from the album
and both sides have been digitized, as has been carried out for the albums in the Jewish
Museum of Prague, full-page views are missing from the digital database. Therefore, any
written material on the album pages is lost from public view. In order to make photograph
albums accessible, this essay has argued that the documentation of all aspects of the album
is essential. Digitization, including full-page scans and scans of both sides of each portrait,
will reduce the damage caused by the further handling of the album and enable access to
countless viewers, within the family or within the institution, and beyond—if there are no
limitations on rights. Digital materials require updating, however, when software storage
technology changes from decade to decade.
Digitization limits the psychological experience of looking, not merely seeing or
viewing. The spectator loses the special relationship with the album when examining
it on a screen. Viewing a family album has always been a social, performative event.
When an album became a memory object, a grandparent could “read” it with younger
family members, pausing to talk about a specific portrait, to recall an anecdote, or to
explain how the subject of the photograph is related, before turning the page and focusing
on another portrait. When studying such albums, the researcher takes over the role of
that grandparent and searches beyond the portrait for missing information in order to
reconstruct family narratives.
5. Conclusions
What can the descendants of the people pictured in these albums learn from these
visual archives, especially after a long period of dormancy? The two albums in this study
that have remained in the possession of a descendant or a relative showed that descendants
were able to construct a family tree in one case and considerably broaden an extant family
tree in the other. They discovered lost family connections and forged new bonds between
formerly unknown cousins. Moreover, the narration of the visual genealogies and the
reconstruction of genealogical memories of dispersal extends these albums’ kin-keeping
significance into the future, as their makers and at least some of their descendants may
have hoped.
What genealogical meaning is there to an album whose portraits lack narration about
them from someone who knew them? The revitalization of nineteenth-century albums
may enable people who have no acquaintance with those who feature within them to
discover Jewish connectedness, particularly the strength of kinship links across borders
and across generations.
Why is it important to connect spectators/readers to broader interpersonal narratives,
such as the connected histories mentioned above, and/or the social history of the Jewish
bourgeoisie, Jewish mobility and migrations, and collective memory? The nineteenth-
century albums described in the case studies above embody connectedness: connectedness
through kinship and marriage, connectedness in the face of migration and dispersion,
and connectedness in their adoption and portrayal of the values and behaviors of the
leisured class. Although each album displays male and female family members of all
ages within their social world, often in disparate locations and across national borders,
these people are connected between each album’s bindings. Tuning in to the albums’
connectivities is especially important in the face of the catastrophic rupture that WW2
imposed on Jewish genealogies and the cessation of the process of passing on the names
and memories of family histories. The reactivation of the albums’ genealogical narratives
strives to re-establish lost connections.
In conclusion, this study set out to show that well-documented family albums can
form an important source for storing and transmitting family history and genealogy. Some
individuals have used Facebook, genealogy websites, and/or DNA findings to connect with
dispersed family and distantly related cousins, some of whom are discovering Jewish roots
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 27 of 29
that had been abandoned or hidden by their parents or grandparents. Visual materials,
including family albums, as shown here, may also enable individuals to connect with
dispersed family and their Jewish roots. This genealogical study of vintage albums led to
the reconstruction of a sense of family for some descendants of the albums’ sitters, as well
as the identification of unknown relatives. By mapping the connectedness of the people
portrayed in these visual archives, questioning the relationships between the album makers
and the sitters, and revitalizing the conversation about these objects decades after the death
of their owners, this study has revitalized the albums’ function as a site of memory where
Jews and non-Jews can bridge the past, present, and future. Genealogists may know who
counted as family in the past. It is more challenging to define who counts as family now;
who will be considered family in the future? We should also note how we maintain kinship
links with far-flung relatives and consider whether such links will be preserved in the
coming generations. Finally, how do we, in the digital age, transmit family history to our
children, if at all?
Funding: This research received no external funding.
Informed Consent Statement: Not applicable.
Data Availability Statement: Data are contained within the article.
Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
Appendix A. Summary of Albums Mentioned
•
Burchardt, Rosa (1821–1893). Prussian, partially labeled album with 238 portraits,
spanning 1851–1900; Jewish Museum Berlin, Inv. No. 2000/500/46. https://objekte.
jmberlin.de/object/jmb-obj-102787 (accessed on 5 November 2023). Also two fully
labeled albums that belonged to her husband Hermann (Hirsh) Burchardt (1820–
1904); Jewish Museum Berlin, Inv. No. 200/500/47 with 26 portraits, mainly from
Berlin, spanning the 1860s–1870s. https://objekte.jmberlin.de/object/jmb-obj-103380
(accessed 12 November 2023). And Inv. No. 200/500/48 with 9 portraits from Berlin
and Budapest, spanning 1861–ca. 1940. https://objekte.jmberlin.de/object/jmb-obj-
1033802 (accessed 12 November 2023).
•
Crémieux, Amélie (1800–1880). French, fully labeled album with 33 portraits, spanning
the 1850s–1870s, locations not visible; French National Archives, 369ap/3, dossier 3.
•
De Beer, Louis (d. 1887) family. German immigrants to Australia and New Zealand,
two unlabeled albums in Toit
¯
u Settlers Museum, Otago, New Zealand, spanning
the 1860s–1880s; one with 199 portraits, Inv. No. 1936/118/2, and the other with
157 portraits, Inv. No. 1936/118/3.
•
Dreyfus, Berthe (1879–1944). Antwerp and Paris, mostly labeled album with 91 por-
traits, spanning the 1860s–1902; private ownership (Louise Dessaivre, Amiens, France).
•
Dreyfus, Alice, née May (1864–1945). French, partially labeled album with 61 por-
traits, spanning the 1860s–ca. 1920; Museum of Jewish Art and History, Paris, Inv.
No. 99.52.023.
•
Ettinger, Hayim (1857–1928) family. Russian Empire, unlabeled album with 50 por-
traits, spanning 1865–1920s; private ownership (Arnon Ginzberg, Petah Tikva, Israel).
•
Freiberg, Rosa, née Deutsch (1860–1957). German (Rhineland Palatinate), partially
labeled album with 88 portraits, spanning 1880–1963; Center for Jewish History, New
York, AR25181, alb. 187. https://digipres.cjh.org/delivery/DeliveryManagerServlet?
dps_pid=IE3031616 (accessed 12 November 2023).
•
Lévi, Salvador (1850–1930). Metz, Paris, Brussels, partially labeled album with 50 por-
traits, spanning 1860–1910; Jewish Museum Belgium, BE/MJB/FondsLévi Box 14a,
Y 156.
•
Josephson, Jacob Axel (1818–1880) family. Stockholm, Göteborg, mostly labeled album
with 69 portraits; Jewish Museum Sweden, JUD01259. https://digitaltmuseum.org/
0210211126016/album (accessed 12 November 2023).
Genealogy 2023,7, 87 28 of 29
•
Melchior, Israel Barendt (1827–1893) family. Copenhagen, partially labeled album with
377 portraits; Danish Jewish Museum, JDK0148x2.
•
Przibram, Gustav (1844–1904) family. Vienna, mostly labeled album with 25 portraits,
spanning the 1860s–1870s, locations not visible; Jewish Museum Vienna, Inv. No. 4515.
•
Salomons, David Lionel (1851–1925). England, fully labeled album with 244 portraits,
spanning the 1850s–1880s; Salomons Museum, Broomfield, England, album 510.
•
Samuel, Ida (1881–1965). Belgian, partially labeled album with 68 portraits from the
1870s, 1890s–1910. Jewish Museum Belgium, BE/MJB/FondsLévi Box 13, Y155.
•
Schames, Ludwig (1852–1922) family. Frankfurt and elsewhere, unlabeled, par-
tially annotated album with 120 portraits, spanning 1880–1950, locations not vis-
ible; National Library of Israel, TMA 4833/1. https://rosetta.nli.org.il/delivery/
DeliveryManagerServlet?dps_pid=IE23602770 (accessed on 5 November 2023).
•
Schil, Rachel, née Dreyfus (1856–1942). French, partially labeled album with 60 por-
traits, spanning the late 1860s–1937, mostly the 1880s–1890s; Museum of Jewish of Jew-
ish Art and History, Paris, Inv. No. 99.52.022. https://www.mahj.org/fr/decouvrir-
collections-betsalel/album-de-photographies-25981 (accessed on 5 November 2023).
•
Samuel, Jane/Jeannette, née Spiers (1842–?). Belfast, Brussels, Paris, Rotterdam, two
albums in the Jewish Museum Belgium; one partially labeled, with 141 portraits,
spanning the 1860s–1890s, Inv. No. BE/MJB/FondsLévi Box 15, Y 157, and one mostly
unlabeled, with 38 portraits, mostly 1860s, with a few from the 1890s–1910, Inv. No.
BE/MJB/FondsLévi Box 15, Y 156.
•
Szulc/Schultze, Karolina/Caroline (1867–1926) and her husband Jacques Bertillon.
Warsaw and Paris, mostly labeled album with 72 portraits, spanning 1877–1905; private
collection (Alain Chenu, Paris).
•
Yeivin, Israel (d. 1895) and his wife Rachel. Mostly Russian Empire and Warsaw,
mostly unlabeled album with 42 portraits, spanning the 1880s–early 1900s; private
collection (Yoram Yeivin, Hod Hasharon, Israel).
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