Beril Weber

1880s

Living at house number 134 in Bolszowce, Galicia, with his wife, Heny Malka Klinger, working as a baker and then a merchant. Sons Hersch (Harry) and Marcus and daughter Sarah were born; Marcus died in 1887.

1890s–1900s

A laborer in Bolszowce, living by 1893 at house number 154. More children were born, among them Ire (1890), Simon (1893), and Simche Dawid (1900).

1910s

His sons Harry and Isaak went to New York, and his daughter Sarah married there in 1915. His son Simon died in Bolszowce in December 1915.

A Baker in Bolszowce

Beril Weber, sometimes recorded as Benjamin, lived in Bolszowce (today Bilshivtsi, Ukraine), a small town in Galicia, then a province of the Austrian Empire. Almost everything known about him comes from the birth and death records of his children, which list him with his wife, Heny Malka Klinger. The children were entered in those records under their mother's surname, Klinger, so Beril's son Harry began life on paper as Hersch Klinger.

The records trace the family's fortunes in outline. When Hersch was born on November 30, 1883, and when his younger brother Marcus died of bronchitis in January 1887, not quite two years old, Beril was a baker at house number 134. When his daughter Sarah was born that November he was listed as a merchant. By January 1893, when his son Simon was born, the family had moved to house number 154 and Beril was a laborer, as he still was in April 1900, when his son Simche Dawid was born. Another son, Ire, was born in 1890, and there were also sons named Isaak and Isadore.

Children in America

Several of the children made their futures in New York. Isaak was already living on Columbia Street on the Lower East Side when Harry arrived in November 1912 to join him, and Sarah married Max Buchalter on Suffolk Street in Manhattan in December 1915. That same month, back in Bolszowce, Beril's son Simon died at twenty-two. Beril is listed as a baker in December 1915, though it is not certain he was still living by then. When and where Beril himself died has not been found.