The First Find

In reality this happened a month (or more) ago, but as I am so bad about updating let's all pretend that I've just discovered this now.

When I began this quest to find out more about the Lander family, I was prepared for a difficult and arduous process.  After all, my family has always assumed that the name Lander was given to us at Ellis Island.  Lander is a really non-descript name, not easily identifiable to any culture, but certainly not Jewish.  Lander does however, sound close to plenty of fairly common Jewish names; there's Friedlander and Lender, Langer and Lanman.  So, I was sure, one of these more common Jewish names had belonged to my ancestors.

My first stop was to visit ellisisland.org, which is free and allows you to access records easily.  I thought that they might have records of both the names that passengers came with as well as what they were changed to.  Though I felt it to be a long shot, I used what little knowledge I had about my father's grandfather.  That, like my father, his name had been George and that someone on that side of the family had come from Austria. 

I hit the search function and entered "George" where I was asked for a first name and "Lander" where I was asked for the surname.  I set the gender to male, clicked the search button and prayed.  The results came back with a few George Lander's, but they had all come from England and their ages and years of arrival would've made it impossible to be my grandfather's father. I was disappointed and was about to close the page when a thought came to me, "why not simply put the letter 'G' in the first name field," and so, I did.

This time I got a slightly broader list of names and right on the top of the list I noticed a name, "Gedalje (pro: geh-dahl-ya) Lander."  My father's hebrew name is Gedalje, could this be my great-granfather.  I clicked on the records and they confirmed that Gedalje Lander was from the Austro-Hungarian empire and that he was 15 when he arrived in 1903, which would have made him the right age in 1913 when my grandfather was born.

It made perfect sense.  He must've come with the first name Gedalje and anglicized it to George at some point.  In Jewish culture a baby is always given the Hebrew name of a deceased relative so in this case my father, unbeknownst to him, had been given his grandfather's given name, which is Hebrew, as his Hebrew name and the name he went by in America, George, as his English first name.  I felt my whole body tingle with excitement at the find!

Then I noticed a button off to the side labeled, "view original ship manifest."  The original, handwritten passenger lists had been scanned in and was available for viewing.  Now I was doubly excited, if this manifest originated at the ships departure it would have my great grandfather's last name before it was changed.  I was brimming over with excitement as I clicked the button.  The handwritten document popped up and here's what it said, "Gedaljah Lander."  It seems that all of our speculation had been wrong, though it may have been changed at some point in Europe, my great grandfather had come to America with the surname Lander!

My great grandfather's name is on the eighth line down