LET'S DISCUSS ESTHER SCHNEIDER — Sharon Mark Cohen

It’s no wonder Santa checks his lists twice to see who’s been naughty or nice…you can certainly mess up lists.

To be clear, we have Grandaunt Esther’s obituary, not just my mother-in-law’s recollection of the approximate date of her aunt’s demise. That’s why finding the incorrect person with the same name posted by an indirect relative on a genealogy website had me scrambling to find the person who made the entries so that we could pool our information and get it all correct.

Fast forward to the most recent changes to the family tree of Esther Schneider posted by Henry Krostich, a relative of Esther’s late son-in-law, and updated by C. Svedi, on May 17, 2017, showing a common type error.

The information as posted:

“PARENTS AND SIBLINGS

Hershel Blum
Male Deceased •GK13-FPB
Mrs Fannie Blum
Female Deceased •GK1S-1PY
No Marriage Events

Children (1)

Esther Blum
Female1878–1943 •LTMJ-TQH
23 September 1943 Brooklyn, Kings, New York, United States”

No, no no. Close, but no cigar. Esther Schneider nee Blum/Bloom was not born in 1878, as Krostich and Svedi suggested. Grandaunt Esther, the daughter of Chaim Zvi and Goldie, was born about 1881 in Slonim, Belarus. She died on April 2, 1960, in Plainfield, New Jersey. I’ve tried reaching out to the posters of the faulty information, to no avail.

Alert! New information at the bottom of this blog post reveals a simple clarification and much appreciation for that public family tree posted on the family of Lena Schneider Krostich. That posting about the ancestry of Cousin Lena and her siblings allowed for a joint compilation of facts to reach a common goal of depicting an accurate family tree for Cousin Lena.

While I may be the only one to check such a sight, I was determined to see it with the correct information. It also made me realize that I need to step up my game and get the latest version of the family tree out to our relatives.

Uncannily, but not surprisingly, throughout the years before the advent of computers and spellcheck, the spelling of Grandaunt Esther’s name showed up in varying ways on census records. That’s why it’s so important to know more details to get to the correct person and exactly why at the outset of genealogy television shows, I watched once or twice out of curiosity and turned them off.

After researching our family history for so long, I felt that some of the “finds” they broadcasted were more than likely incorrect. My husband says it’s like wrestling; what they show on television is not real.

A prime example is a similar scenario with the case of Esther Schneider being discussed here. Esther was my mother-in-law Hilda’s maternal aunt. She knew her well.

Over the years, Hilda and I enjoyed many deep discussions about family members. Based on those remembrances, I devoted a chapter of my book, Kitchen Talk, to Grandaunt Esther and her family.

Hilda also knew her cousins, Esther’s four children. Along with two older daughters, Esther and Abraham Schneider had two sons, David and Frank. I had never seen any images of them before but, I did have a picture, which Leon, Frank’s son, and Esther’s only grandchild, sent me of himself as an adult. It was a thrill to find Leon’s high school graduation picture in his Plainfield High yearbook and add it to the family tree.

When my in-laws closed on the house they bought in the 1940s, family helping family was commonplace, and as such, one of Esther’s sons acted as the attorney. Finally, after 35 years of research, I have long sought visuals of Esther’s handsome sons David and Frank.

Leon’s uncle, David Schneider, in his high school yearbook
February 1, 1905 - April 28, 1972
The writing printed under David Schneider’s high school picture gave me another clue. It says that he was in Plainfield High School only for his senior year; before that, he attended school in Westfield. Therefore, if his elder sisters Eleanor “Lena” or Sarah “Shirley” graduated high school, it was before they moved from Westfield to Plainfield. Westfield yearbooks, unfortunately, are not yet available online. There is still hope of someday finding photographs of those two cousins (Don’t forget to look at the photos at the bottom of this blog post).

Leon’s father Frank Schneider in his high school yearbook
March 1, 1908 - February 1973

Now that Leon, Esther’s last living descendant, is gone (see article in The Jewish Link, Who Will Say Kaddish for Leon? by Sharon Mark Cohen, dated April 11, 2019), I feel an obligation to correct the information for Grandaunt Esther’s lasting legacy.

“Who Will Say Kaddish for Leon?

Throughout the decades of my genealogy research, there have been a few cousins with exceptionally common names (think Cohen, Friedman…), making them more of a challenge to find. With the family name Schneider, Leon was one of them. What turned out to be both fortunate and fruitful was finding Leon when I did. By the time I located Leon, he was the one living descendant from the brood of my mother-in-law’s aunt, Esther Schneider from Plainfield.

The best clue my mother-in-law left was that her Aunt Esther’s son Frank married a woman named Ada, and when Frank died, his widow moved back to Allentown, Pennsylvania, with their only child. I took it from there.

Being a consummate researcher is part and parcel of the job of a genealogist. Public records online mistakenly revealed a Leonard (not Leon) Schneider living in Allentown and listed his close relative as Ada. With the help of a friend in Allentown, I got the number of Leon’s maternal grandaunt. Speaking with this jovial nonagenarian was rewarding in more ways than one.

As we talked on and on she announced that she felt as though she had always known me, like I were part of her family. She offered the history of the first store in Vegas, which she and her husband owned, called the Bull Shed. There, they sold the first line of faded denim jeans at $2.95 a pair. Allowing her to banter on, after that claim to fame, she fed my genealogy hunger with the background of her grandnephew whose name she assured me was actually Leon.

She touted Leon as a well-educated gutte neshuma, with a Wharton MBA, who boarded in a rundown part of Allentown with his elderly aunts and willingly came by to do her banking and other errands. Filling me with any and all family-tree facts, Leon’s grandaunt revealed that she was at a hotel with Leon’s mother when Grandaunt Esther made the shidduch for her son. She went on to tell me that Leon was tall and nice-looking like his father, who was a quiet man who would sit by himself and do his legal work.

Excitingly, soon after that conversation, a letter based on my findings, which I had sent to “Leonard,” garnered a reply from Leon. Although he responded, he stopped short of agreeing to meet. That was until he heard me on the radio. Legitimizing my stance and standing in the family enticed Leon to agree to a get-together when we were back in town.

The conversation at our one opportune dinner meeting was congenial and meaningful. It led to many “aha” moments. One was the fact that he never knew when he was growing up in Plainfield that his dentist was a cousin. Another was hearing that a man who lived with Leon’s grandparents and worked in their dry goods store, while not directly related to them, was actually my husband’s uncle Duvid.

There was more. We learned that after his grandparents were gone his parents regularly had the Yiddish-speaking Duvid over for dinner. Leon smirked upon learning that his father, my mother-in-law’s cousin, was the attorney on the closing of the house in which my husband grew up. A relative in the business unquestioningly helping family was the way things were done in the 1940s when they purchased their house in Elizabeth.

A generous gentleman, Leon, a retired, self-described couch potato, insisted on picking up the meal tab, after willingly answering any questions I gingerly posed about his family. He was surprised at the things I already knew about them. His father was one of four children, all gone by then. The eldest of the four was a young woman who died in childbirth. Next in line was another female, who married, but was afraid to have children due to her sister’s fate.

While Grandaunt Esther’s two sons each married, the first had no children and the youngest, Leon’s father Frank, had been married before, but the union was annulled, and then he married Ada. According to Leon, his grandmother put her two sons through law school.

I drank up the additional details, which Leon was game to provide. Leon never married, although he told us that he came close a couple of times.

Leon was a freshman at Rutgers in New Brunswick when my husband was a senior. Did they ever pass each other on the quad not knowing that they were blood relatives? My years of family research have had many pay-offs and one was having my children arrange to officially meet some of their cousins, from even further degrees of separation, at their college campuses.

We have the pictures for posterity, as well as the ones my husband and I took with Leon. As he sat across the table, Leon acceptingly watched as I entered notes into my smartphone. I made sure to confirm that he never fathered any children so if the day ever came that Leon left this world, I would be sure there were no unknown survivors of the Schneider line.

Six years have passed since my husband and I met Leon in Allentown, but I kept sending yearly greetings until the last photocard with a message written on the back was returned as “undeliverable” and stamped “deceased.” While Leon had been hard to find, now it is a mystery about his death and burial.

I’ve already tried to uncover the mystery surrounding Leon’s untimely passing through my friend in Allentown but to no avail this round. The old aunts living at his address are listed in obituaries. The state archives no longer divulge a cause of death.

While continuing to search for more details on the mysterious ending of one family branch, I ponder who will say kaddish for Leon. When I say the Yizkor prayers, I will think about Leon and how the story of Grandaunt Esther’s family ended with a final stamp. “Deceased.”

Sharon Mark Cohen, MPA, is a seasoned genealogist and journalist. A contributing writer at The Jewish Link, Sharon is a people person and born storyteller who feels that everyone is entitled to a legacy. Visit sharonmarkcohen.com. “

After the publication of that article, I continued my search and contacted the funeral home to find Leon’s cause of death. The clerk said that “he died in his home in Allentown and that he is presumed to have died of natural causes, which usually means he hadn't seen a doctor. He is listed as having diabetes and tobacco abuse.”

Backtracking, Esther Bloom came to the United States in 1897 as Ester Genachowski. The family name Genachowski, found listed in multiple spellings, was from Slonim, Belarus. At age 17, Esther traveled on the Veendam Ship from Rotterdam to Ellis Island with her brother Nathan (a future blog post will feature Granduncle Nathan Bloom and his family). In the United States, the name was changed by some family members to “Blum,” while others used “Bloom.” I have traced back to about 1810 for ancestors of Esther in Slonim.

Esther married Abraham Schneider in 1901 and they lived in New York. They had four children, Lena, Sarah, David, and Frank, all born in New York. They are all deceased and the only living offspring was Frank's son Leon, also now deceased.

Leon never married and had no children. Frank’s siblings, Leon’s Aunt Sarah/Shirley and Uncle David each were married but had no children. The elder sister, Leon’s Aunt Lena, born “Eleanor” in 1901 in Manhattan, died in childbirth, along with the baby, on June 2, 1922. Presumably, Leon was named for her.

Esther and Abraham owned a hardware store in Plainfield and Duvid/David Pollack worked for them. Duvid was my mother-in-law Hilda’s brother from her father’s marriage before his marriage to Hilda’s mother Jennie. Duvid, not to be confused with Esther’s son David, was not a direct relative of Esther’s; he was her sister’s stepson. Duvid never married and is interred at the Hebrew Cemetery in South Plainfield.

At some point, the Schneider family moved from New York City to Westfield, New Jersey, then Plainfield. At the time of the 1920 census, they were living in Westfield. By the time of the 1930 census the family had moved to nearby Plainfield. The census records show that in 1920 they lived at 401 W. Broad St., Westfield, New Jersey, whereas in 1930 they lived at 1206 Park Ave., in Plainfield, New Jersey.

My notes reveal that on April 7, 1998, when I spoke with a cousin, Helen Schonwald, she claimed that she had a fuzzy photo of her mother’s aunt Esther from when Helen’s twin brothers were young.

Twenty-two years after she told me about that photo, in April 2020, Helen’s son George sent me the fuzzy photograph showing Grandaunt Esther, with her niece Rosie, and Rosie’s twins Sheldon and Jerry.

The only other pictures of Grandaunt Esther that I have are the one on the title page, which I found with Esther’s obituary online, and another photograph of Esther, that time with Abraham, at the wedding celebration of her brother David’s granddaughter, Anita “Nita.” See my blog post at sharonmarkcohen.com, Who Is That Couple At The 1948 Family Wedding?, dated December 4, 2018.

We visited with Nita and her daughter in their four generation household in Florida this February. There we sat for four hours discussing all the members of the very large Bloom family. My listing of all the relatives informatively sparked remembrances from our vibrant, endearing Cousin Nita in her 94th year.

Esther Schneider is seated second from right, and Abraham Schneider stands behind Esther, second from right.
December 25, 1948, at the wedding of Nita and Jerry Koppele, in New York, New York

That details the complete life of Esther Bloom Schneider and her descendants. Gone but not forgotten.

Wait! There’s more!

My patient perseverance paid off and on February 5, 2024, I received this reply to my January 3, 2024 message posted on Facebook Messenger, “Hi there, sort of cousin!

“Sorry I did not see your message earlier. Yes, I am the one who posted that information, but it was just preliminary information, and I never got to vet any of it.

“My generation of Krostich’s never knew of Eleanor’s existence till my brother did a search on our last name (about 20 years ago), and her gravesite came up. What we know now, came from a published death notice, and some long lost family lore. We think she was my father’s father’s first wife, and died while a patient in a maternity hospital. We have a photo of her headstone, which contains a “photo” of her. That’s about it. But we would love to learn more.

“While my brothers still live on Long Island, and my sister in Colorado, my wife and I, along with our kids and grandkids are in South Florida.

“Reach out thru FB Messenger or email: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”

Our stories jived and reach out, I did. A short two weeks later, on a trip to Florida, we squeezed in a wonderful four-hour visit with our new friends/family Sherry and Henry Krostich. We cannot thank them enough for the much sought-after photographs of Lena and Sam showing a loving couple for us to immortalize.

By now you know my motto is that everyone deserves a legacy. Lena Schneider is no longer just the sad story of a young cousin who died in childbirth. She is, instead, seen as a loving wife whose husband went on to find happiness and establish a wonderful loving family we now get to call part of ours.