Our Ancestors

Life is funny and full of coincidences. No sooner than I written my Searching for Friedmans and Newmans, a first draft of our immediate family’s history, then I received e-mail from my cousin Al. He wrote, “A distant cousin of ours, Scott London, would like to get in touch with you…He has a cassette tape of you interviewing Ba (FZN) from the mid 70’s.”

I remembered interviewing my grandfather, Frank Z. Newman, when I was a young man. I had looked for the blue cassette tape many times, most recently to share with my daughters. It was gone, with so much of my memorabilia from the 1970’s. Now a cousin I never knew had the tape.

The history-mystery was soon solved with e-mail from my newly discovered cousin, Scott London. He wrote, “It is delight to make contact with you…When I hit upon the recording of Frank Newman, recorded in 1976, I thought perhaps you were the family genealogist, someone with essential clues to some of the unsolved mysteries in our collective family history.” (No, I am the idiot who made the tape and then proceeded to lose it.)

Scott wrote that his grandfather, Irwin Abrams, was given the tape by my grandfather. They were cousins. Upon his death, Mr. Abrams passed it along to Scott, his grandson. My new-found cousin explained that,  “your great grandfather, Samuel Newman, and my great great grandfather, Philip Newman, were brothers.”

Scott was born in Washington DC and raised in Sweden. He is a professional journalist and photographer. Over the next few months I would discover that Scott had a treasure trove of Newman (Naman) family history, including photos, letters, and wills.  He hadn’t found the family genealogist but I had.

A few days later a CD arrived in the mail from Scott, labeled Frank Z. Newman, Interview by Dave Forrest, 1976. I popped it in the computer to hear the clear and articulate voice of my grandfather then in his early 80’s. He began, “This is going to be a family tree experience, record. And David you’re the only one in the family who has any information at all concerning my parents, my grandparents, the antecedents, Arline, myself… so here goes.” Tears welled up, hearing my Baba from so many years ago.

Samuel Newman

The story he told, much of which I had forgotten, was of his father Samuel, born in the Polish town of Marijampol. Samuel’s father died  two years after his birth, and his mother, unable to provide for her two sons moved to Chicago to live with an aunt. What followed was an incredible tale of grit and determination. Young Samuel was forced to work at 14, traveling as a peddler in towns near Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. By the time he was 20 he struck out on his own, setting up a small shoe store in Indiana. It failed and he joined his brother, Phillip, starting a small department store in Devil’s Lake North Dakota. Their store, along with the whole town, burned to the ground in a prairie fire. And so it went.

Samuel Newman’s odyssey landed him in California, selling insurance in Long Beach. Then he opened a small department store in Hanford, in California’s Central Valley. During the 1890’s Samuel worked in San Francisco and was married to Julia Caro. They had four children, including my grandfather.  Samuel unsuccessfully tried businesses in Stockton and Napa, until he returned to San Francisco.  His San Francisco store also burned to the ground, along with thousands of residences and businesses, in the 1906 Earthquake.

Frank Z. Newman

My grandfather, then a 12 year-old boy, remembered the earthquake in great detail, “I recall being awakened on April the 18th, 1906 at 5:15 a.m. The house shook laterally, and in an up-and-down motion as well, for approximately a minute and thirty seconds—and that's a long, long time with a severe earthquake. I saw my father, who had an adjoining room to the children's room, walk through a hallway staggering, like being drunk, and could hardly navigate to hold his feet on the ground.”

It is worth listening to the tape. In it my grandfather describes the fires that enveloped San Francisco and how his family camped for three days in Golden Gate Park. He also shares his great pride in the city’s resilience in the aftermath of the quake. He says, “It was really an all-out community interest project. All the neighbors and friends tried to be helpful to each other. They had a slogan later in San Francisco: “The city that knows how.”

Several days after the arrival of the CD, Scott attached his  typed transcript of my interview with my grandfather. With the transcription were meticulous footnotes added by Scott, which contained all sorts of information about our family. Samuel Newman’s mother’s maiden name was Rachael Rosenthal. Her married name was Rachael Naman, but when her first husband died she remarried a man named Moses Margolis. Attached with the transcription Scott sent a photo of a middle aged Rachael Margolis. Clearly, my grandfather, her grandson, had her eyes.

Scott’s footnotes indicate that our family name in Poland was Naman. Some Namans, like Samuel and Phillip used the name Newman in the US. My explanation of our name “Newman” was that it meant “newcomer,” or so said the Internet when I first researched our family name for Searching for Friedmans and Newmans. As historians say, the first draft of history is full of errors.

It turns out that the Jewish name Naman means “faithful” in Hebrew. Some of our Namans kept their name when they came to the US, including a cousin Jerome Naman. Writing a letter to his cousin Sadine in the 1960’s he says, “Reb Ezra (1808-1850) and his brothers were called ‘Naman’ which means ‘faithful’ in Hebrew. It also means ‘trustee.’ This was used whenever some Jew had been entrusted with some government (or feudal) responsibility, mainly financial.”

My grandfather’s interview and my cousin’s footnotes had other clues to our family history as well. It turns out that Rachel Rosenthal (Naman, Margolis) had a younger sister named Esther. Scott said in his footnotes, “Rachel’s younger sister, Esther, along with her brother George, arrived in America before her. Esther married Charles Stein and they had three sons. The two sisters remained very close all their lives.” Stein was a name I recognized because it was my Grandmother’s maiden name.

 The Steins

In an email Scott suggested that it might be coincidence or perhaps a family connection between my grandmother’s family, the Steins, and my grandfather’s family the Newmans. Scott wrote, “ If there is a family tie between George Stein (Arline’s father) and Charles Stein (Rachel’s brother-in-law) I suppose Frank would have mentioned it in the interview you did with him. But the fact they shared the same last name and were both Jewish immigrants who had settled in western Pennsylvania in the late 1800s seems like an interesting avenue for further research.” (“Interesting avenue for further research”; uh-oh, family trees were crossing. Were Mimi and Baba cousins?)

I sat on this for a couple of days. I wasn’t ready to have my research end in a family scandal, although I knew it was common for cousins to marry in previous centuries. It is still legal in some states. I tentatively asked my Bay Area Newmans about this. Lisa and Jamie remembered our Mom kidding Mimi that she had married her cousin. Alan weighed in; yep they were cousins. And Jannie wrote, “ Yes, they were related. That’s how they met. Baba was travelling across the US and specifically stopped in McDonald to visit with his cousins – however many times removed.” Apparently everyone knew Mimi and Baba were cousins, except for me. (Scandal averted.)

I sent Scott an email, explaining that the cousins’ consensus was that our Grandmother and Grandfather were cousins. I also enlisted help from Jannie and Al in finding out the exact relationship between Charles Stein and George Stein. I found census data that Charles Stein was born in March of 1845. His birthplace is listed as Russia and his immigration year 1867. His spouse’s name is listed as Esther Stein (Esther Rosenthal), and their marriage year was 1860. Her birthplace is also listed as Russia. We now know that George was Charles Stein's son. 

Once again Scott provided help. He sent a photo of the two Rosenthal sisters, Rachel and Esther from Bialystok, one who married Nathan Naman the other who wed Charles Stein. It was astounding. My grandmother definitely resembled Esther, and my grandfather looked like Rachel. It was a little scary.

The Newmans (The Namans)

Photos continued to flow. My cousin Al, was a great source of our Newman photos including: a photo of newlyweds, Arline and Frank Newman on honeymoon in Santa Barbara, and Arline Newman with her three small daughters Shirley, Frances, and Elaine. Al also had a wonderful photo of Frank and Arline, and their three grown daughters dressed to the hilt. With them are Mimi’s Mom and Dad, Anna and George Stein.

Our family genealogist, Scott, began sending documents, which sketched out the family tree. Perhaps the most interesting were several letters, written the 1940’s between two brothers Abbele and Ezra, descendants of Samuel J. Newman’s father, Nachum Naman (Nathan Newman). In the letters, Ezra is living in the United States and writing his brother Abbele, who is living in Palestine. In the exchange we learn their great-grandfather, “Reb Israel was going from Jaffa to Jerusalem when he fell from a donkey and died right away.” Apparently he died the very first day in the Holy Land and was buried in the Mount of Olives.

It appears that the Naman family has a long history in Palestine and later Israel, something I never learned about growing up.  In addition to Reb Israel Naman, Abbele (Abba) Ne’eman was a member of the Jaffa theatre and orchestra in the 1890’s. According to an article sent to me by Georgie, Abba and his brother, Dr. Nachum Stein, designed the first water pumps placed in the Jewish orange groves at the turn of the 20^th century. Scott, who has contact with several Naman relatives in Israel, also explained that our family tree has been registered in Israel.

Abba Ne’eman’s grandson, Dr. Yuval Ne’eman, is our most famous relative from Israel. He was a candidate for the Nobel Prize in physics. Although he didn’t win, he was awarded the American Albert Einstein Prize. According to Wikipedia, At 15 Ne’eman, joined the Haganah, a Jewish paramilitary organization. He also served in the Israel Defense Forces during the 1948 Arab Israeli War. Ne’eman became a politician in the late 1970’s, founding the right wing Tehiya Party. Apparently, he opposed the Camp David talks and was elected to the Knesset, the Israeli Parliament, in 1981. He died in 2006.

One of  Ezra’s letters also eerily alludes to what happened to the Namans who did not leave for Palestine or America, but remained in Eastern Europe. In a 1946 letter Ezra laments, “The whole time that I’m here I did not correspond with them and now you know yourself that the murderer (Hitler) destroyed them all.” I had often wondered what might have happened to our ancestors, had they not left Poland. Sadly, now we know.

Georgie mailed a packet of genealogical materials passed down from her mom. It included letters between Newman/Naman cousins in the 1960’s and 70’s. Enclosed was a well developed family tree, with branches stretching from Europe to Israel and the US. Apparently our ancestors not only lived in Poland, but Prussia, Russia, Spain, Turkey, Syria, and Egypt, as well. And lest we think that the Newmans restricted themselves to the West Coast, we had relatives from Miami, Denver, Atlanta, Charleston, Waco, Kansas City, Houston, New Orleans, Burlington (Iowa), New York and Chicago.

Among our ranks were rabbis and Talmudic scholars, along with scientists, engineers, doctors, journalists, lawyers, and businessmen. I found several high school teachers. One of our ancestors was the deputy mayor of Tel-Aviv and another was responsible for air conditioning the Houston Astrodome. Scott’s grandfather Irwin Abrams, is described in Wikipedia as “a long-time professor of history at Antioch College, a pioneer in the field of peace research, and a global authority on the Nobel Peace Prize.”

On the branches of our tree were given names in Yiddish and names in Hebrew. I found six different versions of our family surname including: Naman, Naaman, Ne’eman, Neuman, Neumann, and Newman.

 My grandfather, I am sure excited that his grandson was going to interview him about family history, graciously said to me, “And David you’re the only one in the family who has any information at all concerning my parents, my grandparents, the antecedents, Arline, and myself…”As it turns out, long before I interviewed my grandfather, Newmans were working on our family tree. 

In the 1946 letter to his brother Abelle, Ezra says, “ You asked me that I should give you in detail what I know about our family, about our origin. I took the trouble to write it out… I don’t know if this was your idea to know what I wrote about the family’s origin is like a tree with branch…” In the 1960’s, Evelyn Naman, in a letter to her cousin writes,  “ With the help of Ezra Kaplan, Jerome’s spry elderly cousin, we were able to compile the enclosed family chart …”  Scott tells us that in the 1970’s his grandfather, Irwin Abrams, worked with “several family cousins on the Newman side set to work on mapping out the family tree.”

Our generation is adding a few more pieces to the Newman puzzle. We are working together. Al is sending photos, Georgie and Jannie packets of materials from days gone by. Caity found a wedding announcement for Frank and Arline Newman in the McDonald, Pennsylvania Outlook newspaper. And we are so lucky to have the continual flow of accurate, detailed family history from our newly found cousin Scott London.

For my part I am writing things down this time around, so I don’t lose another important piece of our family history.

DF - 2014  and Revision 2019