◊ In 1947 the Canadian Jewish Congress published the first of two parts of the book Canadian Jews in World War II. The books were edited by David Rome. The first part deals with Decorations and the second part, which appeared in 1948, memorializes the Casualties. The books were dedicated to the millions of Jews everywhere…
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Born as Tsvi Hirsh Glicenstein in Konin Poland about 1872, my great-grandfather came to London as a youth, married, then brought his family to New York in 1909, and to Toronto in 1913. His tombstone (1955) memorializes Harris Glickstein, the anglicized name he used most of his life. My late grandfather Ralph Gladstone further altered…
Hard to believe, but there were Jews in Toronto and probably Montreal as well who were drawing monthly pensions from the U.S. government as late as 1925 for their participation as soldiers in the American Civil War. An index of Civil War pension recipients indicates that some 4,966 veterans of America’s most sanguinary conflict filed…
The following pages are from the souvenir booklet published by the Hebrew Sick Benefit Society of Toronto in 1935 upon the commemoration of its 35th anniversary. It contains many greetings, advertisements and other items from individual members, often listing family names and other details about family history. Most of the pages are in Yiddish. Each…
From Canadian Jewish News, 2003 He was a British soldier and she was a Jewish nurse in British-mandate Palestine: they met in Egypt about 1940. She was killed in an accident and he vowed to let her family know. But how to find them? He — the British soldier — knew that she had been…
From the Toronto Star Weekly, September 1913 ◊ Note: This article describes the very diligent efforts that went into producing Toronto’s city directories of a century ago. This is good news for genealogists because it assures us of the reliability of the directory information. However, individuals of Chinese, Macedonian and other “foreign” ancestry were not always…
My uncles, aunts and cousins on the Glicenstein [Gladstone] side always perk up when I mention the huge unclaimed fortune that is supposedly hidden somewhere in our extended family tree. Their eyes grow big when they hear that an alleged distant cousin of ours, a wealthy brewery owner, supposedly died intestate (without an heir) in…
The Rothschilds had one. The Disraelis had one. The Montefiore, Mocatta and Sassoon families each had one. And so, according to some interpretations, did each of the twelve tribes of Israel. Popular with the Jewish aristocracy in Europe since medieval times, Jewish coats of arms once seemed a sort of harmless conceit for the rich.…
Problem: you know your Jewish ancestors or relatives lived in Toronto in 1911 — you even know their street address — yet you can’t find them in the 1911 census. No matter how many times you search, they do not show up in Ancestry.com’s database of the 1911 census. Frequently the problem occurs because a family…
