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Magaziners of Humenne |
Updated 29 May 2024 |
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The Magaziner Family Circa 1898.
Back: Hugo, Jeanette
(Jennie), William,
Anthony (Tony, Antal), Sadie
Middle: Fannie, Henry,
Louis, Cecelia,
Lena
Front: Nellie, Anna
Not Pictured: Resi (Rahel),
Jakob, Israel Lob (Lajos)
Hover over a face to see the name
Click a face for more information about the person.
This site is a collection of genealogical information related to the Magaziner family of Humenne. It focuses on the descendants of Henry Magaziner who immigrated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA in the 1880s with his wife Cecelia Rosenbluth and ten of his children, all pictured above. I have also researched collateral branches, descendants of Henry's grandfather, Lowi Magaziner. To date, I have documented over 1700 members of this extended family. I have also found other Magaziners in Central Europe and their descendants that I cannot yet connect to this tree but are probably related. Three "other" branches that were previously unattached have been attached since December 2017! There are now 130 Magaziners and their spouses and descendants whose relationship cannot be proved or disproved, but 80 of them are on two branches that begin in Humenne and are almost certainly related.
Humenne is the Slovak name of a town the Zemplen megye in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The town was known as Homonna in Hungarian. It is now part of Slovakia, at the eastern edge of the country. The Jewish genealogical website JewishGen has a page about Humenne, and pages for some of the other towns that family members lived in, like Kassa and Debrecen.
According to Henry Jonas Magaziner, who heard the story from his father Louis Magaziner, the family acquired the surname "Magaziner" because a distant ancestor took on a government job as manager of the site of an exploded powder magazine. The family lived at that site until the late 1880s. In the mid-1880s, three of Henry and Cecelia's teenaged daughters (Fannie in 1884, Lena in 1885, and probably Jennie) set sail for America. They set up shop as dressmakers in Philadelphia and were successful enough to bring over the rest of the family in 1887. Many of the descendants of this clan still live in Philadelphia and its suburbs.
Many members of the family still live in the Philadelphia area.
Above are descendants of
Anthony,
Lena,
Jeanette,
Anna and
Louis
at Philadelphia's Rodeph Shalom January 13, 2019
for a lecture about Louis's lifelong friendship
with African-American architect Julian Abele.
See it HERE
Henry had 12 children, ten of whom survived to adulthood and are pictured above. His oldest two children (Anthony, pictured above, and Jakob, who died in childhood) were sons of Henry's first wife, Resi or Rahel Friedman, who died when the sons were very young. Henry's second wife, Cecelia Rosenbluth (pictured above) raised his first two sons and was the mother of his remaining ten children. The ten children who survived to adulthood (Anthony and nine of Cecelia's children) all immigrated to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where this photograph was taken, and nine had one or more children. Their descendants include:
Total descendants of Henry: 419! And that's just the ones I know about!
Almost all of the Austro-Hungarian Magaziners I have found can be traced back to Henry's father Anchell or his uncle Samuel. Those who cannot be connected directly to the family can usually be traced back to Humenne or at least to the Zemplen megye, and are probably related to our Magaziners. Most of the Magaziners in Budapest can be connected directly to Samuel's sons Jozsef, Adolf and David. Most of the Magaziners in Vienna can be connected to Samuel's son Adolf. The farthest east I have found definite relatives is Beregszasz (Berehove), now in the western Ukraine but formerly part of Hungary. Samuel's son Jozsef lived in Beregszasz for a while and had several children there before settling in Budapest.
Most of the Magaziners in the United States, (including former presidential advisor Ira C. Magaziner) trace their origins to Poland or the Russian Empire. In 2011, I did some rather exhaustive cataloguing of all the Magaziners I could find, from Russia, Poland, Ukraine and England, and some other places, and found no evidence of any connection between them and my Austro-Hungarian Magaziners. The word "magaziner" is an occupational name in German, and is apparently a military title (it seems to refer to the chief supply clerk), so it's not really surprising that there could be multiple unrelated families with the same name. The surprising thing is how many of the Central European ones have proved to be related to each other.
Yes, Henry Magaziner's wife, Cecelia Rosenbluth, is related to the travel agency Rosenbluths (the travel agency was a family business until 2003). I have been in touch with a person researching the Rosenbluth family, and her family includes a "Tante Magaziner" (Auntie Magaziner), undoubtedly our Cecelia. We have discovered that Cecelia was not their father's sister, but may be an older cousin who was simply referred to as "Aunt" for convenience.
Out of respect for the privacy (and identity security!) of their descendants, I have provided little or no detail about living descendants. The Alphabetical List provides names and dates of birth for living persons, but it does not show how they are connected to the tree. The descendant tree and collateral tree show the connections but do not give names or dates for living persons. Because of the longevity of our Magaziners (at least five lived past 100), I have assumed that anyone born after 1920 is still living unless I have solid proof of a date of death.
Family trip to the beach in the summer of 1916, with children of The last of Henry's grandchildren passed at the end of 2011: William Ward Magaziner passed just before Thanksgiving, approaching his 88th birthday, and Henry Jonas Magaziner passed on Christmas day, at the age of 100. You can see more about these men on their pages, but I'd like to say a few words about their contributions to this family tree and this website, which were significant.
In 2003, before this site began, Henry provided me with some pages from his memoire that talked about his father Louis and the Magaziner family backstory. Although some of the details proved to be factually inaccurate, they inspired the deeper digging that has expanded this tree as far as it has become.
In 2005, shortly after this site began, Bill was the source of the family photo at the top of the page, that really brought this site alive. Before the picture, this site was just dry text, and I rarely received any email. The picture attracted interest to the site, and inspired other members of the family to email me and fill in their branches of the tree.
The generation that has passed, Henry's grandchildren, had 25 members. Most of Henry's grandchildren lived very long and active lives: 18 lived past 80, 13 lived past 90 and two reached the century mark. Three of them were described at one time or another as the oldest member of their profession in Philadelphia: Arthur was described in his obituary as "one of Philadelphia's oldest active lawyers"; Alex's obituary described him as "the oldest practicing accountant in Pennsylvania for many years"; Henry was described in an Athenaeum newsletter as "the oldest living architect in Philadelphia" at a time when he was still writing books.
Twenty-three of Henry's grandchildren had children of their own, giving Henry 56 great-grandchildren.
New 5/29/2024:
My father passed on April 25. He was my connection to the Magaziner family. I remember about 40 years ago, he took me through the Adath Jeshurun and Mount Sinai Cemeteries, where many Magaziners are buried, and told me that my great-grandmother Anna was one of 10 children, but I didn't know who any of them were. When I first started learning about genealogy, I wanted to fill in that missing information. I probably should have just asked my father: he did a family tree for a Hebrew school project in the early 1950s that had a lot of information!
When I added his death the the family tree, it occurred to me that I have recently been spending a lot of time working on distant Hungarian cousins but I've been a little slack about closer American cousins. I wanted to rectify that. I have added dates of death for several of Henry's descendants and a spouse, though two of Henry's great-grandchildren are still going at more than 100 years old! I also found dates of death for some more distant cousins here in America and in Hungary. I've also added a number of other bits and pieces: name cleanup, birth dates, marriages and other interesting facts. And I added a lovely picture of my ancestors, Anna, Maurice and Elsie, that I saw at my father's house toward the end. I also added a newspaper photo of Anthony Jacoby's wife June.
New 3/3/2024:
I really need to update this more frequently. Much like last time, I felt like all the pieces I found were too small to justify an update, and one of them was just too soon! Shortly after I did the last update, I was contacted by a member of Moritz Weinberger's family, which clarified an enormous amount of information about his children and added a son I didn't even know existed!
But the thing that finally got me to do this update was the discovery of a new Magaziner branch in Humenne, Rachel Magaziner, born in the early 1800s! I can't connect her to the tree yet because available records don't go back that far, but she is certainly related, and one of her descendants married a definite member of the family!
Some other big pieces this time (in addition to lots of little dates and places):
As you can see, lots of new information!
New 6/2/2022:
No, I haven't stopped researching this family tree, but I guess the pandemic world made it harder for me to get excited about anything so it seemed like there wasn't anything worth updating for. A date here and there... But when I pulled it all together, there was actually more excitement than I thought!
I was asked to start posting biographies of an additional generation of Magaziners, but so many of them are still living that I hesitated to do that. So as a sort of compromise, I added a list of names of the children of the last generation, with their dates of birth and death. If any of those children are still living, I replaced their information with the word LIVING, and you'll see a lot of that because those Magaziners are remarkably long-lived!
There have been some births in the family I've learned of since my last update: Desi Nima Magaziner born in May 2020, a descendant of Henry Jonas Magaziner; George Magaziner born in August 2020, a descendant of Richard Herman Magaziner; and Sadie Geneva Renfro born in October 2021, a descendant of Robert Henry Magaziner.
And sadly there have been many losses in this horrible time: Robert Henry Magaziner, Jr. died on February 6, 2021 at the age of 68; Brenda Flock Magaziner died on May 27, 2021 at the age of 63; Frances Lipman Rosenthal, widow of Henry Bernard Rosenthal, died on August 7, 2021; Lynne Moskowitz Berman, daughter of Morton Moskowitz, died on August 31, 2021; and Edith Braunstein Magaziner, long since divorced from David Arthur Magaziner, Jr., died on October 25, 2021.
New 12/27/2020:
The most exciting new material this time is some pictures from Lajos's side, including pictures of Pal, his wife and their daughter and Elemer's wife and son. I have also added a picture of Louis Wechter's first wife, Marie Schwartz.
Other than that, it's just lots of bits an pieces, name and date cleanups and such, but there is at least one bit or piece on just about every page!
New 6/28/2020:
Not much new again, but one of our cousins wanted me to fix her surname, which was changed by her father before she was born, so I wanted to turn it around promptly. And there are a few other interesting discoveries!
Most significant, I found the first Magaziner in America! Or at least the earliest one I have found yet. Fanny Magaziner Shatz came to America in 1865 with four children! Unfortunately, most of those children turned out to be step-children and didn't have any children of their own, but I wrote up a page for her and her family. Interestingly, they settled in Ohio, the fourth branch of Magaziners to settle there, though I still don't know if any of them were in contact with each other!
I also found a third husband for Elsie Magaziner, and a possible new family member Elemer Magaziner, probably related because we have another Elemer in the family, but definitely not the same one. And of course, lots of bits and pieces, names and dates added and changed on the full Alphabetical List.
New 4/5/2020:
There are not many new things, but a few of them were significant enough that I felt the need to update.
First is the passing of Theresa Ray, the widow of William Ward Magaziner. Theresa and William were married for almost 65 years when he passed in 2011. But from a family tree perspective, I remember her as the person who first made me curious about my family tree. I met her in passing around 1975 when my grandmother took me to lunch at a deli in the Baederwood Shopping Center in Jenkintown. On our way out the door, my grandmother stopped to speak to a woman I had never met, as she often did. When we got to the car, my grandmother said, "Oh! I should have introduced you. That was my cousin Theresa!" I had no idea who Theresa was or how she was related, but I was curious. When I first started working on my family tree in the 1990s, one of the things I wanted to know was how that mysterious Theresa fit in. I quickly found that my grandmother had no cousins on her father's side who were living in the 1970s, so Theresa had to be on the Magaziner side. And I found no Theresas among her many Magaziner cousins so I realized it was probably a spouse. When I first traded emails with Theresa around the time I started this site, she confirmed that she had met me at Baederwood in the 1970s!
The other significant passing I found recently was the death registration for Seindel Weiszberg, the remarried name of Schondel (Sari) Ganzfried who was the widow of Anchell Magaziner. I have never been certain whether she was Henry's mother or stepmother, because Henry's death certificate gives his mother's name as Sara Cooper, obviously not a Hungarian surname but who knows what the real one was. An interesting hint that she may have been his mother: my great-grandmother, Anna was born two months after she died, and the name that Anna was born with was Seindel! Do people name a child after their stepmother? Well, maybe when you are running out of names on your fourth daughter.
The most interesting other detail I found is when and why Lajos Magainer was knighted. Yes, he was really a Knight of the Order of Franz Joseph, and yes, he earned that knighthood from a feat of architecture, designing and placing the blinds for a building at a Budapest Technical College in 1910. Other than that, there are a number of bits and pieces but not enough to update the site without the things above.
New 11/20/2019:
Lots of new pictures! A picture from a 1929 trip to Europe, on display at Philadelphia's Athenaeum, shows Louis, Sadie and their children. I have added these pictures to Lena Louise Magaziner, Helene Markovitz and Cecelia Markovitz, who previously only had pictures as little children! I have also received pictures of Henrietta Rosenthal and her brother Willard from one of Henrietta's descendants.
I have also identified and hooked up a dozen new descendants of Helen Jacoby Knable, though these people are mostly living and appear only in the alphabetical list.
New 5/19/2019:
I am very excited to report that I have discovered another branch in America -- and they've added more than 50 people to the family! I've known about Jolan Frisch since 2010, but the only information I found about her was her Hungarian birth record. I recently discovered a marriage record for her -- in Cleveland!!! She went by Yolan in America, but there is no question it's her: her date of birth is an exact match, her mother's maiden name is a match and her father's name is close enough to be a simple Americanization. She married a man from Humenne (apparently not related to the Magaziners) and they had two children. And six grandchildren. And 12 great-grandchildren. And 11 great-great-grandchildren. Including all the spouses, this discovery has added 52 people to the family tree, pushing the number of confirmed descendants (including spouses) over 1600!
New 1/27/2019:
I updated today mostly because our Magaziner cousin, Amy Cohen, great-granddaughter of Lena Magaziner Herbach, recently gave an excellent presentation at Congregation Rodeph Shalom about Louis Magaziner's lifelong friendship with African-American architect Julian Abele. A picture of the 19 Magaziner descendants in attendance (!!!) is posted above. (There were also a lot of non-Magaziners present!) A recording of the presentation is also available online if you'd like to see it HERE.
Other than that, the most exciting new development for me is two more branches that found their way to America! I just learned in the last few months that George Herman (aka Gyorgy Herman), son of Ilona Rivka Fischer, came to America in 1949 with his Holocaust-widowed wife and stepdaughter, and Maria Aliz Arvai, ex-wife of Istvan Ternay, came to America in 1961 with their daughter. Both branches have descendants living in the United States today.
There were also a few passings, but let's keep things cheery by focusing on the new births and marriages!
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