SCHUMINSKY

The registry books

The surviving Włodawa Jewish civil registers sit in the State Archive in Lublin (fond 35/1785). The family appears across every surviving decade — deaths 1827–33, births 1844–1908, marriages 1848–93. Sixteen indexed Szumiński records, every one now mapped. The 1837–1883 death books did not survive — a gap that probably swallowed Aizyk's own death act.

What the legend got wrong

Family legend made the Szumińskis timber merchants on the Bug. The documents say otherwise: Manel was a wyrobnik, a day-laborer, and the Włodawa memorial book's wood-trade chapter names not a single Szumiński. The village tie to Szuminka is real; the timber fortune is not. This history keeps the corrections as visibly as the discoveries.

A generation later — 1792, a different kind of lead

An estate-wide inventory of Włodawa (AGAD Warsaw, Archiwum Zamoyskich, unit 2733) names four more Hersz-rooted men active in the town nineteen years after the census: Herszo Felkowicz (a merchant) and Herszko Uszkowicz (a shoemaker), plus a widow, "Herszkowa Lachmanowiczowa." No Ajzyk appears anywhere in the sections read. These three are a different kind of evidence than the four above — not candidates to be Herszko (by 1792 the real one, if born around 1750–60, would already be an old man), just further proof the name ran common in this community. One name in the same document matters differently: Zelman Herszkowicz, whose own patronymic shows a Herszko already established as someone's father a generation earlier — making him a candidate son, a possible brother of Ajzyk, not a candidate to be Herszko himself. He's the leading lead in the whole search; see the open mystery below.

The village behind the name

Szuminka, the timber-staging hamlet that gave the family its surname, turned out to have its own inventory after all: a 1770s Rożaniec estate survey (AP Lublin, zespół 86) devotes several full pages to it by name — its own manor farm buildings, its own boundary description, and a household-by-household census of roughly twenty tenant families, none of them surnamed Szumiński. It's not a standalone volume — it's a village-sized section inside the larger Rożaniec estate book — but it is a real, dedicated accounting of the place, not just a passing mention. A widely repeated claim that the village had a Jewish-run tavern by 1850 was checked against its supposed source this month and isn't actually in it — retracted here rather than left standing.

The family storefront

The family kept a shoe store and a wig store side by side — two narrow storefronts, one family working both. The shoe store was Phillip's trade, taken over from Max; the wig store was the craft Helen carried from her father, the Pułtusk sheitel-maker Sam Gedanke. The business had a name — Hi-Mount Shoe Co. — which Max wrote on his own 1942 draft card, self-employed, retail, at 5717 W. North Avenue, the same address on Phillip's own 1940 card. Family memory also carries an earlier address, "1369 8th Avenue," but no Milwaukee directory checked 1915–1927 shows it; the documented chain instead runs 967 Grant St. (1915) to Muskego Avenue (1918–24) to North Avenue. The arrangement people remembered, two doors and one family, ran under the Hi-Mount sign.

Helen and the "twin"

Helen worked both stores at once, crossing between them all day, so quick that customers were sure there were two of her: "Your twin just helped me next door in the shoe store." One woman, two trades, a block of the city she ran on her feet.

Becoming citizens

Max was naturalized in Milwaukee by 1920 — fixed by his son Jacob's derivative certificate, #1836317, issued 9 November 1920. Within seven years of landing they were Americans on paper as well as in fact.

The two congregations

Beth El Ner Tamid married them — Phillip and Helen in 1942, nephew Norman in 1954, both under Rabbi Louis J. Swichkow. And Agudas Achim in Cudahy — organized 1919, first burial 1923 — became the family ground, where Max, Gertrude, and Jack all lie.

Jacob "Jack" Eldest · 1904–1977

The first across — a ten-year-old on the 1914 crossing. His Milwaukee life is the immigrant climb in three census lines: rubber-factory foreman in 1930, salesman by 1940, his own boss by 1950, settled in Whitefish Bay. Married Brondell Bernstein, born in Odessa, in 1927; son Norman arrived around 1931. The 1940 census catches the household whole: Jack and Brondell at 2803 N. 56th St. with Norman, 9 — and Brondell’s father, Jacob Bernstein, 56, living with them, the Odessa line under a Milwaukee roof. Jack’s line runs on: son Norman — ninety-five and living in Scottsdale, the last person alive who knew the immigrant generation — and through Norman, David Schuminsky and Julie Ellsworth. Jack is buried beside his parents at Agudas Achim.

Phillip — Jay's grandfather 1909–1995

The youngest, and the one who made the rest possible. He didn't inherit Hi-Mount Shoe Co., Max's own shop on North Avenue — he bought it from his parents, the hard way. He enlisted 11 December 1942 in Milwaukee; the Army file (serial 36289454) records him plainly: born 1909, four years of high school, retail manager, married. He held the store for decades and sold late — only when rising interest rates finally made holding on too expensive.

When Mike's own syndicated real estate deals hit a cash squeeze in the late 1970s as interest rates rose, Phillip and Helen helped with a small, warm gesture — selling some furniture and a few other things. Give to your kids while you're alive was the rule he passed down — and one the family kept using: in 1986, at Mike's urging, Phillip and Helen set up an irrevocable trust giving directly to their own great-grandchildren, the same principle extended one generation further while they were still alive to see it matter. Family memory keeps him as a romeo and a worrier — devoted to Helen, never quite at ease, sure enough of that one conviction to bet everything on it. Years later Mike wrote his father's obituary and called him a real estate investor with shopping centers and office buildings — not because Phil built them, but because Mike wanted his father to share in what that belief made possible. A son honoring his father.

Sam — Phillip's brother 1906–1993

Sam Schuminsky (1906–1993) was Phillip's brother — the second of Max and Gertrude's four sons, born between Jack and Phillip. He settled in Hollywood, Florida, near Phillip, and died there at eighty-seven. With his wife Faythe, née Kirsch, he raised two children — Alan David and Donna. Alan carried the family’s real-estate thread to Oklahoma City with Hillcrest Companies, where that cousin line is still active today — the branch most likely to hold the missing photographs. Long carried here as a "probable" brother on arithmetic and geography alone; now placed where he belongs, in the family.

The lost boy Schlioma — or Faiwel

The 1914 manifest carries a fourth little boy who never appears in any record again — most likely a son who died young in Milwaukee, before the surviving cemetery indexes begin in 1923. The Army file that locks Phillip's birth at 1909 tilts the reading: the lost boy is probably Schlioma, born ~1907–08, and three-year-old Faiwel was Phillip himself, under his Yiddish name. A name on a ship's sheet and silence after. Counted here because he was real.

Howard — Mike's brother Phillip's son

Phillip's other son, Howard Schuminsky of Orange County, California. The brothers split the map the way their fathers had — Mike to Oklahoma, Las Vegas, Los Angeles; Howard to Orange County — both carrying the family's retail roots west. Howard (1946–2022) and Patricia's line continues through Lisa Mingoia of Johns Creek, Georgia, and Joshua of Winston-Salem.

The American-born layer Nephews & cousins

Norman (b. ~1931), Jack's son, married Liane Hurwitz at Beth El Ner Tamid in 1954 — the first born on this side of the ocean. Three more names cluster and aren't yet placed: Freda (1889), Sidney (1918), Jean (1922). Each a thread back into the wider family, still being followed.

He wrote the book — literally

In January 1969, around twenty-five and running stores while sitting in law class, Mike self-published The Wig Story — his own account of the industry he was building in real time. It never reached WorldCat or the Library of Congress; surviving copies are almost unheard of. The family holds one.

Still open today, without him Confirmed by Jay, 2026

Hi‑Fashion Wigs, LLC is genuinely still trading — two stores, Oklahoma City and Edmond, a live storefront and staff. The original February 1967 founding date checks out exactly against family memory. Confirmed directly by Jay: Mike stayed a named owner of the entity, but the business itself went on without him — he hadn't personally worked wigs in 45-plus years, and it kept operating under his longtime partner Malcolm Hall (who died March 2025, age 85 — his own obituary independently confirms the wig business: he "sold and franchised 65 High Fashion Wigs shops" after first selling wigs out of the trunk of his car as a favor to a friend, then went on to a career that included admission to Texas A&M's first Black and female students and decades as an Oklahoma real estate attorney) and co-owner A.W. Clay. Mike's name simply never came off the paperwork. Business directories (BBB, Dun & Bradstreet) date the original May Avenue store's opening to February 1957 — a decade before Mike, born 1943, could have founded it at 24. More likely he took over an existing shop and built it into the 65-store chain than started one from nothing.

All Storage — the better box

In 1994, out of a single lot in Mustang, Oklahoma, Mike founded All Storage and refused to build first-generation self-storage. He pioneered larger, amenity-rich facilities — security cameras, big offices, climate control, drive-thru units. People said no one needed storage that nice. He built it anyway, across Texas and Oklahoma — and grew it into one of the country's premier private self-storage operators.

A deli family

Mike was a deli man, the way his parents were before him. Pastrami and corned beef, a good rye, a counter that knew the order before you gave it — the family's table from Milwaukee on down. The businesses changed every generation; the food did not. One of the small permanent things, carried from a near-South-Side storefront all the way to a table in Los Angeles.

The sayings he kept

He had a few lines he came back to, and they fit him. "The great ones never lose it." And "the apple doesn't fall far from the tree." He meant them as a standard and as a wager on his own — and on the evidence, he was right on both counts.

Gedanke Paternal

Sam Gedanke (1899–1978), sheitel-maker of the Pułtusk district; married Anna, Feb 1918, Różan. Four daughters: Helen Chaja (1919–2014), Rosalyn, Beatrice, and Barbara. Sailed to Ellis Island on the S.S. Ausonia, December 1925, Helen age six. Fort Atkinson WI by 1930; Helen to Milwaukee and Phillip by 1942; Sam ran a Los Angeles liquor store and bought the Cloverfield building in 1971. Widowed in 1967, he spent his later years with a companion, Rose Cowan. His own LA Times obituary called him "fond grandfather of 7." Anna's own family, only recently traced, carries the harder half of this history. Born Anna Ruza in Pułtusk on 25 December 1895, she died 6 February 1967 in Los Angeles and is buried at Mission Hills; her father, Mordacai (Mordka) Ruza (1871–1939), died in the town itself, just before the war reached it, and her mother, Rivka Blumstein (1871–1941), died there in 1941 — tagged in the family's own record as forced exile, part of the Holocaust. Anna had at least seven siblings. Two brothers, Abraham (1897–1942) and Sholem (1906–1943), were driven east into Soviet Kazakhstan and died there; a sister, Esther (b. 1908), died before 1939 in Pułtusk, and another, Lea (1903–1920), young and before the war ever came. Two sisters survived and scattered further still — Henia (1905–1963) to Tel Aviv, Dyna Szosza "Sylvia" (1899–1963) to Los Angeles, the same city Anna herself had already reached. The Pułtusk Ruzas were scattered and half-destroyed by the war; what's left of them is now spread across three continents.

Nankin & Handelman Paternal · confirmed 2026

Gertrude "Gitl" Nankin (1879–1971) — Max's wife, née Nankin, per her own headstone (an old, unrelated tree entry once had her as "Finkel" — no relation to Jay's actual Finkel line, his mother's side, below). Parents Aaron Urish Nankin (Aharon HaKohen, 1858–1933) and, per a family descendancy chart received in 2026, his first wife (unnamed) — Aaron's second wife was Gela Gitl Jennie Friedman (1869–1931). The HaKohen priestly line runs through here — a separate, Y-DNA-testable marker. The 1914 manifest's "uncle Nankin" near Chełm is her family, and the same chart places multiple Nankin siblings and cousins as born in Ruda Huta — the same village the family's own 1914 manifest gives as their last address, now doubly confirmed. One cousin, Reizel Nankin (b.~1903, Ruda Huta), stayed and died at Sobibór — a direct, named loss on this side of the family, not only Max's.

Weisbrode Maternal

Edla Dweyra Weisbrode (b. ~1827) married Manel in 1848 and is Moszko Aizyk's mother. Her line runs back through Szmul Leib Weisbrode (1798–1841) and Ester Herszkowna (1761–1836) to Hersz & Ryfka, born around 1735 — the oldest named ancestors in the tree (maternal side).

Finkel & Loeb Maternal · hometown found 2026

Jay's mother Leslie Joan Finkel (b. 1949, Council Bluffs, Iowa) descends from Jacob Finkel (1853–1941), an Omaha grocer ("Finkel & Son," 834 N. 27th St.) and, per his own 1902 arrival papers, a trained cabinet maker; son of Shneur; through Morris Finkel and Jennie Eisen; to Harold Finkel (1917–2002) and Lillian Loeb (1924–2006) of Las Vegas. The European hometown, listed everywhere in the American record as just "Russia," reads in Jacob's own handwriting on his 1902 ship's manifest: Sharhorod — one of Podolia's oldest and largest Jewish communities, a center of early Hasidism founded in the 1580s.

James Carroll Tolan Adopted

Jayme's father, Dr. James Carroll Tolan (1953–2010), was born in Washington, D.C., adopted as an infant, and raised on Philadelphia's Main Line by Henry Levick "Hank" Tolan and Anita Marie Carroll — his middle name, Carroll, is his adoptive mother's. He took a degree at Franklin & Marshall, became a clinical psychologist, married Karyn Harner, and raised Jayme and her brother Rob. Because James was adopted, the Tolan surname comes from his adoptive family — a name carried by family rather than by blood. His biological parentage is sealed, so the children's deeper ancestry on this side runs through their grandmother Karyn Harner's people.

Harner & Bloser — the Pennsylvania line Bloodline

Jayme's biological line on this side runs through her mother, Karyn Harner — an only child of Robert A. Harner (1928–2018) and Janet Bloser (d. 2006). It is Janet's side that reaches deepest: a Pennsylvania-German family — Bloser, Jauss, Negley, Burkholder, Knettle, Davidson — documented back through colonial Pennsylvania to the Swiss-German Mennonite families who settled Penn's Woods (Wanner, Funk, Musser, Kendig, Hershey, Landis) and, deepest of all, to Hans Wanner, born 1656, with Anna Maria Wacker and the Mennonite bishop Heinrich Funk among them — about twelve generations, nearly three centuries before Max ever sailed. Robert's own Harner line, an open thread for a year (a same-name, same-region Robert Harner, 1927–2021 Boyertown/Exeter, was checked and ruled out in 2026, wrong wife and children), resolved in July 2026: his parents were Howard W. Harner and Ruth E. Marley, married 1923 in Marietta, Lancaster County — and his grandparents, Albert Franklin Harner and Barbara Welfley, from the same county. The two families turn out to be the same Lancaster County German-American world on both sides of Robert and Janet's marriage, not two disconnected lines as it first looked.

Jaxon Age 8, turning 9

Jaxon is the sports kid — baseball, football, and basketball all get equal time, and he's just as likely to be found deep in a Lego build or lost in Fortnite as he is on a field. He's the one who takes an idea and runs with it; ask him to build or invent something and he's already three steps ahead. Named Mike, for the grandfather he never met but whose drive he seems to have inherited anyway.

Olive Age 7

Olive lives in motion — gymnastics is where she channels it, cartwheeling and flipping through the house as much as the gym. She's soft-hearted underneath the energy: a room full of stuffies she's named and knows by story, and an animal magnetism that runs toward every dog and every horse she's ever met. Named James, for the grandfather she never got the chance to know.

Finn Age 5

Finn is all roar right now — dinosaurs, monster trucks, anything big and loud and a little bit fearsome gets his full attention, basketball included. The youngest, and still writing his first chapters — the newest branch on a tree that started with a man named Herszko on a river in Poland he'll never have to think about unless he wants to.

1 · Who was Herszko's father? Leading candidate, 2026

The deepest documented man is still Herszko. The death registers that would name his father (1837–83) are lost. Włodawa was not in Crown Poland's Chełm Land — it belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, its kahał under Brześć — so the ladder back runs through the 1764/65 Lithuanian poll-tax and the Zamoyski/Czartoryski estate inventories, not Crown records. The 1773 Włodawa census (see Chapter II½) put four men named Herszko on the page for the first time — none yet linkable, and a targeted search for their patronymics recurring in later registers came back empty. A 1792 AGAD estate inventory adds three more Hersz-rooted names, and one has pulled ahead: Zelman Herszkowicz — explicitly recorded as a named son of a Herszko, and a documented property owner three times over: a masonry corner inn at the market square, his single most valuable holding; an adjoining plot with the foundations already started; and a house he'd sold to the Crown treasury before 1792, later converted into the town's customs house. His own household entry — the line that would carry an occupation and test whether he's a previously unknown brother of Ajzyk — still hasn't turned up, even after the named-household register was read essentially in full, both by eye and by handwriting-recognition software. What that full read did surface: Herszko and Zelman were both common given names in this community — six different men carried "Hersko" or "Herszko" as a first name or patronymic across the register's pages — which is exactly why the name alone keeps producing near-misses instead of a match. The Szuminka folwark inventory arrived and was read in full (46 scans, July 2026): it turned out to hold no list of arendarze or Jewish residents after all, but it did settle something else — Szuminka was a real, populated hamlet with its own manor farm and a named census of about twenty tenant families, none of them surnamed Szumiński or Herszko. What it also surfaced, unexpectedly: the village's liquor concession was administered through an unnamed "Ardarz Szuszeński" — the leaseholder of the neighboring Susno estate — and two of the four 1773-census Herszko candidates already held that exact kind of leaseholder post elsewhere in this same estate. If that unnamed office-holder can be identified and turns out to be Hirszko-rooted, it would be the first document to tie a Herszko-named man to a role over Szuminka itself. Three parallel tracks are live as of July 2026: the paleographer commission (Piotr, PolishOrigins) to verify the readings against the originals and locate Zelman's still-missing household line; a targeted query for the Susno leaseholder's name elsewhere in the same archive fond; and the Grand-Duchy ladder — the 1764/65 Lithuanian poll-tax, Brześć kahał district — on query with the National Historical Archives of Belarus, Minsk. The frontier hasn't moved, but it is now approached from three sides.

2 · The fourth son Narrowed

Narrowed again, 2026. Jack (b. 1904) crossed separately (S.S. Rochambeau, November 1914), so the three boys on the St. Albans sheet — read verbatim from the scan: Izrail 8, Schlioma 6, Faiwel 3 — don’t include him. Izrail is Sam to the day (born 10 March 1906, admitted 11 March 1914). The open fork: either Schlioma (b.~1908) is Phillip and Faiwel is the lost fourth son — or Faiwel is Phillip (Feivel→Phillip is the classic Yiddish–American pairing) and Schlioma is the boy who was lost. The Army’s enlistment file locks Phillip’s birth year at 1909, and border clerks understated children’s ages far more often than they overstated them — which tilts the reading toward Faiwel = Phillip, and Schlioma, b.~1907–08, as the boy the family lost. The family appears in no indexed 1920 census at all — and a 2026 line-by-line read of enumeration districts 277, 289 (the Muskego frontage) and all 39 pages of 290 found the street but never the family — house 1010 falls in a gap between the enumerators’ walking routes, which is why a century of indexes missed them. EDs 277, 289 and 290 have now been read in full — the family is in none of them; the likeliest truth is that the January 1920 enumerator simply missed the household, as happened to non-English-speaking families. The Schlioma question now rests on the Milwaukee death record, 1914–22. No burial index has surfaced the lost boy — Agudas Achim’s first interment came only in 1923, so the search moves to Second Home, Beth Hamedrosh Hagodel, and the Jewish Museum Milwaukee’s Death & Burial Index. One document settles it: the 1920 census sheet, or the boy’s Milwaukee death record, 1914–22.

3 · Where in Russia were the Finkels? Solved

Jacob Finkel's hometown was recorded everywhere in the American record as just "Russia." It broke on his own 1902 Ellis Island manifest — column 10, in the clerk's hand: "Scharogrod," the standard German-clerk spelling of Sharhorod, a major Podolia shtetl (now Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine). The same document adds a fact the family record never had: Jacob's trade was cabinet maker. Still open, lower priority now: his 28 June 1941 Omaha World-Herald obituary, page 14, which may independently corroborate the town.

4 · Ruda Solved

The family's last old-country address wasn't Włodawa town — the 1914 manifest reads Ruda, Chełm gubernia, now identified as gmina Ruda-Huta, about 30 km south of Włodawa. The Szumińskis had moved from town to countryside before they emigrated.

5 · The Chełm Nankins Narrowed 2026

A Nankin survivor family from Chełm reached the records — Izrael (b.1907), Gitla, and their children, plus Chuna (b.1897). Their parents (Fiszel, Hersz, Lejwa) don't match Gertrude's father Aaron Urish — so not her siblings directly. The test set was: did Aaron Urish have a brother named Lejwa or Fiszel? A 2026 family descendancy chart answers half of it — yes, a brother Fishel Nankin (b.~1860, Chełm) is confirmed, with his own line running partly to Mexico City. Whether the Chełm survivor family descends from this specific Fishel, rather than a same-named cousin, is still the open piece.

6 · The shoe store's name Found

Resolved from a primary source: Max's 1942 draft card names his business Hi-Mount Shoe Co. (self-employed, retail), at 5717 W. North Avenue — the same address on Phillip's own 1940 card. The city directories add the earlier chain: shoe repairer at 967 Grant St. by 1915, then Muskego Avenue through the 1920s. "1369 8th Avenue," the address family memory has long carried, doesn't appear in any directory checked 1915–1927 — real to the family, just not yet placed in the record.