Ancestors

Joseph Cohen

Joseph Cohen was born in Poland about January 1863, the son of Solomon Cohen and Tillie Solomon, and was a tailor. Yiddish was his first language and his parents were born where he was. He married Eva Selzer about 1885.

He brought his family over in 1890, a year he and Eva both gave the census taker of 1900 and which his own death certificate confirms from the other end, forty years in the United States. Two of their children had already been born abroad: Lena in January 1886 and Jacob in November 1889, so the crossing was made with a girl of four and a baby of a few months, two years before Ellis Island opened.

They settled at 452 West 38th Street, on the far west side of Manhattan, and stayed fifteen years or more. Jennie was born there in 1893, Philip in 1899 and Isidore in 1901, and the census of 1900 finds all six of them in the house with a seventh child born and already lost. Between 1910 and February 1915 they crossed the river to Williamsburg, to 363 South 4th Street. That house is on his daughter's marriage certificate in 1915, on his son Jacob's in 1917, on Philip's draft card in 1918, on Philip's marriage certificate in 1919, at the head of his own census family in 1920, and in the end it is where he died. He never took citizenship; forty years after landing the enumerator still wrote Alien beside his name.

He died there at three in the morning on 22 January 1930, of a heart condition he had had for three years, four days after his sixty seventh birthday. The house was a tenement. Eva reported the death herself and gave his parents' names. He was buried the next day at Mount Judah Cemetery in Ridgewood, in grave R12-039 of the ground held by a burial society the cemetery calls A A RACIONS, and she was laid in the same plot four years later.

That society is the only record of this family that names a place rather than a country. It is Sheveth Achim Anshei Ratchonz, of Raciaz in the Plock country of Congress Poland, founded on 3 September 1892 and incorporated in Manhattan that year, while the Cohens were still living on the west side. So the society was his neighbourhood before it was his neighbours' burial ground.

What that does not do is prove where he was born. Raciaz is where his society came from. Whether it is where he came from is a separate question, and the Polish registers make it harder rather than easier: the town's own books hold 261 surnames and not one of them is Cohen.

If Joseph Cohen is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Joseph Cohen (1863-1930)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/joseph-cohen-1863-1930-4e60b0.