As a teenager I presumed that my surname “Bookman” was passed down to me through the generations.  Then I asked my grandparents for their surnames and place of birth.  This information (Table 1) sat forgotten in a drawer for the next fifty-plus years.  Some members of my family believed that the family surname had once been “Narovlevsky” (or some variation thereof) but no one in my family really knew if or why our surname had been changed to “Bookman.”

Table 1: My Grandparent’s Surnames and Place of Birth (from my notes in the 1960’s)

Grandparent	Surname	Place of Birth
Paternal Grandfather	Bookman (Narovlevsky)	Russia – Kiev
Paternal Grandmother	Kalfus	Austria – Lvuv
Maternal Grandfather	Blumenthal	Never asked – he died before my birth
Maternal Grandmother	Gruber	Poland

Five years ago I received an email from a relative with a subject of, “Family Zoom to honor the Narivlansky’s.”  It read:

In 2021, it will be 110 years since Benjamin and Faigie Bookman (Narivlansky or Narovlansky) arrived in Canada.

Thanks to their courage leaving Kiev, Ukraine in 1911 with 9 children, we avoided the destruction of our family during the Holocaust. The youngest, Shayndle died on the ship. The other children were, Nathan, Harry, Abie, Isaac (Zeke), Kitty, Rosie, Lily and Eva.

We have a huge family. Most of our children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren do not know the Narivlansky story.

Nathan (Nissen) mentioned above was my grandfather.  In the Zoom meeting I found out not only did no one know anything about the family in Europe but they didn’t know the exact year the family had arrived in Canada.

I was discussing this story with my friend Rabbi Chaim Meir Israel.  He recommended I contact one of his former students, Dovid Darnowsky, the owner of Mispacha Maven, a company that specializes in finding a person’s yichus.  I contacted Dovid by phone, and after emailing the little information I knew about my family history, he went to work.

The job of a genealogist is not a simple one as I quickly discovered.  Was my great grandfather’s surname spelled “Narovlevsky” as I had thought or, “Narivlansky” or “Narovlansky” as others had thought?  There is a web site (the “Search Jewish Surnames” link on avotaynu.com) that contains the possible spellings of a Jewish surname based upon the way it sounds (Figure 1).  It listed fifteen spelling of “Narovlansky.”  Luckily, most ancestry search sites allow you to search phonetically for a name rather than based on its actual spelling.

Figure 1: Possible Spellings of Surname “Narovlansky”

Dovid explained that incorrect translation is only one reason for conflicting data when researching various source documents.  There are often misspellings of names, and conflicting dates.  He found family members whose records showed three different birth dates, including different years of birth which is quite common.  During a yichus search, one can easily be misled or fail to find data.

So how would Dovid proceed?  He first sent me a picture of my great grandfather’s tombstone (Figure 2) and said that a tombstone is usually an easy reliable way to find out someone’s father’s name.  The picture came from arguably the best internet site to search for Jewish ancestry, JewishGen.org, which is a free site to use but requests donations.

Figure 2: Tombstone of Benjamin Bookman

Having learned the name of my great great grandfather Shmuel, Dovid continued searching through various web sites and databases that contained records from Europe, Canada and the United States.  Popular websites other than JewishGen.org to use for these searches include Ancestry.com, MyHeritage.com and FamilySearch.org.

In several short weeks, he had already created most of my family tree (part shown in Figure 3) including about fifty people that I never knew existed.  I knew that my name Chaskel was from my great grandfather who was a rabbi in Europe but this is the first time I saw his full name, “Chaskel Kalbfus,” and the name of his wife.

Figure 3: Part of Bookman Family Tree

As you can see in the family tree, Dovid used the spelling “Narovlyanskiy” as my family surname since that spelling was the most common in the European documents he found.  It is not how my Canadian family had spelled it, nor in the way I, as a teenager, thought it was spelled.  Neither did I have the correct spelling of “Guber” that I thought was “Gruber” nor “Kalbfus” that I thought was “Kalfus.”

But where had the “Narovlyanskiy” name originated?  It was quite common in Europe for a surname to come from the place that a person lived.  When “sky” or “ski” is used at the end of a word it means “from the town of” so I felt if I can find either a web site showing the derivation of the name “Narovlyanskiy” or a town or city with a similar name to “Narovlyan” I would probably know where the name came from.  I searched on Google but found nothing of consequence.  Then I used the Russian search engine Yandex.  I’ve always found it much better than Google at finding images and quite good at normal searches.  Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia and almost as popular as Bing in Europe.  Although many search results are in Russian, Chrome allows you to easily translate a lot of the results to English.  I found the Narovlyansky district and the town of Narovlya in Belarus.  This must have been the area where the name originated.

So where is this area in Belarus?  It is north and just over 100 miles by air from Kiev which is the closest big city.  Had my grandfather ever lived there it is highly likely he would have said he was from Kiev.

It was still not known when the Bookmans arrived in Montreal, Canada.  Dovid did a search of the Canadian ship manifests of the early 1900s for “Bookman” and “Narovlansky” (he was still usually using this spelling of the name for searches at the time) but did not find a match.  It seemed he had done about all he could do so he completed my family tree with the data he had.

I still wondered about the exact date and ship that the Bookmans arrived on.  From time to time for several months I read through ship manifests from 1905 and 1906, the most likely years the family probably arrived; this was something that I didn’t need to hire Dovid to do.  These lists can be found on sites like Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org.  I was able to narrow down which years to search by knowing that some family members were born in Europe in the very early 1900s and others in the United States several years later.  I went through thousands of names hoping to find a misspelling of “Bookman” or “Narovlansky” that did not show up in an online search.  You can see that the passenger list (Figure 4) is difficult and tedious to read, and is a strain on the eyes.  I knew the Narovlansky family was large and all names would have been listed together so I concentrated on listings for large family groups.

Figure 4: Sample Canadian Ship Manifest from 1906

No success.  I therefore decided to look through available documents of known family members and hoped that perhaps I would find a document that would lead me to the information.  I used Ancestry.com to locate two Examination Records of my great grandmother Fannie (Faige) required for Canadian citizens to enter the United States (Figure 5 and Figure 6).  Both records state that she landed in Quebec in September 1906.

Figure 5: First Fannie (Feige) Bookman Examination Record

Figure 6: Second Fanny (Feige) Bookman Examination Record

I still didn’t know the sailing ship my family arrived on as the “S.S.” entry was blank on both records.  I found another examination record for my grandfather’s sister Lily (Figure 7).  It shows that she arrived in Quebec in what looks like 1905; if it does say 1905 rather than 1906 it most probably was a mistake because both of her mother Fannie’s examination cards stated 1906 and for another reason I will soon explain.  The examination record shows the ship name of “Sardinia” or “Sardinin.”

Figure 7: Lily Bookman Examination Record

From the Canadian Archives (library-archives.canada.ca/eng) I found that there was no ship by either of those names but there was a ship with a similar name, the “Sardinian” (Figure 8).    There were no sailings of the Sardinian in September 1905 but there was a sailing in September 1906.

Figure 8: Sailings of Sardinian Ship in late 1906

Using the date on both of my great grandmother Fannie’s records and the ship on her daughter Lily’s record, the Canadian archives showed that the Bookmans had to have sailed on the voyage which landed in Montreal on September 24, 1906 (Figure 9).

Figure 9: Sardinian Sailing That Arrived in Canada in September 1906

I now had a family tree and the sailing on which my family arrived in Canada and was quite satisfied.  The only major open issue was how the Narovlansky name was changed to Bookman in Canada.  Some in my family speculated that the family liked to read books and changed the name to Bookman but most accepted the family lore that when they family arrived from Europe and told immigration in Canada that their surname was Narovlansky, the customs agent decided to change the difficult sounding name to Bookman.

I contacted Richard Bercuvitz, a Canadian who has been a genealogist for over fifty years.  He is considered one of the top Jewish genealogists in the world, and is part of the Narovlansky family.  He said that it is a myth that people changed their surnames when they entered Canada.

I didn’t find out where the Bookman name came from but was quite content from the information Dovid had found out about my family from his extensive research.  Within several months, I had come from knowing nearly nothing about my family history to having a family tree going back to at least all my great grandparents because of Dovid.  While I had found out the ship and date that the Bookman family had arrived in Canada, and from where the Narovlyanskiy name had originated, Dovid had found out everything else.  I would have liked to have known more but was quite content as I believe strongly in the line from Pirkei Avot, “Who is rich? He who rejoices in his portion.”

But then, in early 2024, I was contacted by Dovid Darnowsky, informing me that JewishGen had been updating its Ukrainian database and that he had found new information.

Dovid loves doing genealogy and feels like a detective as he searches for data.  It bothered him that the source of the Bookman name was still unknown.  While I had not hired him to continue, he decided to continue the search.  And what he found were the missing links to the Bookman name.

His new research first found a page on JewishGen.org (Figure 10) that listed Ukrainian births of the NAROVLYANSKIY family.  While each line lists the family surname, the last line that lists the birth of my great grandfather’s nephew shows the surname as “NAROVLYANSKIY BOKMAN.”  This is obviously where the Bookman name comes from and shows it was used in Europe.

Figure 11 is the actual document showing this information.  It lists births and is written in Russian on the left and Yiddish on the right.  In addition to the information translated from Figure 10, it also contains the name of the Mohel and, only in Russian for the “BOKMAN” entry, it states that the family is in the social middle class.  While the middle class was a social and not a monetary designation, money and social status often go together so it is most likely that the family was not poor.

Figure 10: Ukrainian Birth Records With Narovylanskiy Surname

Figure 11: Birth Record of Shmul Narovlyanskiy Bokman in 1910

“Bokman” (“БЕКМАН” in Russian) is only listed on the Russian side of the page and is not written on the Yiddish side.  The misspelling of “Bookman” seems to be meaningless as the extra “o” can easily occur as the original document had to be translated from Russian to English.  “Bokman” is definitely written as a name, not a profession.  It may have been based on a profession but that is unknown.

Even though Dovid had found the “Bokman” name in Europe, he still was not satisfied.  He wanted to find the birth record of my great grandfather.  Dovid continued searching and found it (Figure 12).  My great grandfather’s name was translated as “Binyamin Bekman” which made it difficult to find.  Upon examining the original page that the translation came from, we found that the name should have been translated as “Bokman.”  It was exactly the same Russian spelling as the entry for his nephew’s birth discussed previously, and the entry also listed the family as being part of the social middle class.  While the entry for my great grandfather doesn’t list the Narovlyanskiy name, we are certain it is him for many reasons, including that the following line on the Russian/Yiddish page lists the family surname in his cousin Itsko’s birth (his birth is shown in Figure 10) who was born two weeks after him.

Dovid found the “Bokman” name in Yiddish on Binyamin Bekman’s birth record (Figure 13) but the letters were not clearly written so he wasn’t certain of the exact spelling.  But then he also found the “Bokman” name on his daughter’s Khava Narovlyanskiy’s birth record (Figure 14) which was more clearly written, so we now know the Yiddish spelling (Figure 15).  It is interesting that Khava’s name is shown in Figure 10 without the surname “Bokman.”  This shows the inconsistency in the translations done on web sites which adds to the difficulty in finding one’s yichus, a difficulty that Dovid overcame.

Figure 12: Birth Record of Binyamin Bekman (properly “Bokman”)

Figure 13: “Bokman” in Binyamin Bekman Birth Record – Yiddish

Figure 14: “Bokman” in Khava Naroyvlanskiy Birth Record – Yiddish

Figure 15: Spelling of Bookman Name in Yiddish

The JewishGen entries for the Narovlyanskiy family in Figure 10 show that they all lived in Chernobyl within Kiyev.  Chernobyl is less than 50 air miles from the Narovlya region mentioned earlier as a source for the name Narovlyanskiy.  This validates that the Bookmans are from Kiev as our family has always thought.

During WWII Germans occupied this part of the Soviet Union.  Many of the archives were destroyed which makes it harder for people to find family histories.  My family was lucky that much of our family archives survived.In the second half of the 18th century, Chernobyl became a major center of Hasidic Judaism where the Chernobyl Hasidic dynasty had been founded by Rabbi Menachem Nachum Twersky.  The Jewish population there suffered greatly from pogroms in October 1905.  It therefore would have made perfect sense for the Bookman family to leave Chernobyl at that time.

I hope this story gave you a good idea on how to proceed if you want to find your own family’s yichus.  If you decide to do so, one choice is to go to the web sites mentioned and search for your family records.  Genealogy sites are among the most visited sites on the internet.  While many of the sites are free, some like Ancestry.com, often considered the best site, charges about $40 per month for worldwide search access.  You can compare this with the average hourly rate of a genealogist being around $60 to $70.

The problem in going alone is that there are many nuances in ancestry searching.  An expert genealogist can search much faster and better than a novice.  If you have the time, and it can take a lot of it, you may want to give it a try.  But be prepared for tedious searches that strain the eyes that may yield little of significant value.

I generally like to do most everything myself.  I have done my own taxes for over fifty years, incorporated my own business, wrote my own contracts, and do most everything in my house including electrical work and plumbing.  But I know my limitations and understand where professionals are worthwhile.

Even though I did a lot of searching myself, most of it yielded no useful results of unknown family members.  I would have found very little about my family without the help of Dovid Darnowsky.  Whether you want to go it alone or hire someone to find your yichus is a personal decision.  If you are interested in using Dovid, he can be reached at Mishpacha Maven (mishpachamaven@gmail.com).

What’s in a name? Would Narovlyanskiy Consulting, Inc. have been as successful as Bookman Consulting, Inc. had been?  Regardless, I now know a lot about my Yichus and wish good luck to all of you that begin a similar journey.