We summarise below how each of our ancestral branches came to the UK
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The notes written by Nat Tobias outlined how his father Touvye, in seeking an escape route for his family from the frequent pogroms, travelled from Ostroleka in Russian-Poland, through Germany, finally sailing from Hamburg to Leith in Scotland. From there he travelled to Glasgow where it is said "he was fortunate to meet Landslite from his beloved Ostrolenka". (We suspect that this "Landslite" was in fact Touvye's cousin Abraham Tobias (the baker) whom is thought to have arrived in Glasgow around the same time.) Details of Touvye's journey are confirmed by the Indirect Hamburg Shipping Records which show that, at the age of 22, he sailed from Hamburg to Leith on 14 May 1886 on board the "Breslau".
Once settled in Glasgow, Touvye was joined by his wife and young family and established his Blacksmith business in Schipka Pass in Glasgow in 1889. Other members of the Tobias family rapidly followed Touvye to Glasgow. He was soon joined by his bothers, sisters and their families and, at around the turn of the century, by his father Aryeh (Harris). Also, a number of cousins made the journey to Glasgow from Ostroleka and its neighbouring towns. While the majority of the family remained in Glasgow some later settled in London and Manchester while others eventually continued their journeys to New York and Buenos Aires. It is also said that Touvye's brother Morris returned to Russia with his family around the time of the Russian Revolution to fight for the Czar. All contact with him was subsequently lost.
In spite of this mass exodus of Tobias's from Ostroleka and its surrounds in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there is evidence to show that a sizable part of the family remained in and around Ostroleka up until the time of World War II. Family legend had told us that Touvye's grandfather was the Rabbi of Ostroleka and that he had a total of 14 children - to date we have information on only 5 !
Due to Ostroleka's proximity to the Polish-Russian border it was the site of many battles during the 19th century and, as a consequence, very few of the town's vital records have survived. We have pieced together the details given in these web pages with the aid of the fragmentary family details which survived in the vital records of Ostroleka's neighbouring towns of Lomza and Novogrod. Also, we are fortunate that Scottish birth records include the date and place of the parents' marriage as well as the mother's maiden name so it was possible to glean much information from the many family births in Scotland in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Our most prized vital record is the death certificate for our great-great-great-grandfather Szymek Tobiasz who died in Novogrod on 4th February 1848 aged 68. This particular record gave detail of Szymek's parents Tobiasz and Ryvka an of his grandfather Leyzor. When surnames were introduced by Napoleonic decree in the 1820s it would appear that Szymek adopted the name of his (deceased) father as the family surname. We also have two prayer books which belonged to our great-grandfather Harris Tobias and which he had inscribed.
The bulk of what we know comes from the writings of one of our grandmother's surviving sisters, now well into her 90s.
Family tradition suggested that Simon Cowan (Zelden) had come to Glasgow in the late 1800s from Odessa. However, the naturalisation certificate for Simon's brother Philip suggests that that family originated from Bobruisk in Belarus. We now think that they may have travelled to the UK via Odessa. Simon had 2 brothers and a sister. The sister settled in London, one brother in Newcastle and the other in Edinburgh.
In the late 1880s, our great-great-grandmother Kate Banks was left a widow with young children - 2 sons and 3 daughters - on a farm near Taurragen in Kovno Gubernia, Lithuania. The eldest daughter Hilda was already married. The elder son Morris went to Dallas in the USA and in 1890 the younger son Harris, newly married, went to Glasgow in Scotland. Around the same time, our great-grandmother Mary Banks aged 15 also went to Glasgow in Scotland and a few years later was able to pay for her sisters and mother to join her. In 1901, Mary's eldest sister Hilda settled in Glasgow together with her husband and family. Some years later, Rachel Banks left Glasgow to join her brother Morris in Dallas while the other members of the family remained in Scotland.
After they married, Simon and Mary Cowan moved regularly between London and Glasgow before finally settling in Scotland.
The scarcity of records for Belarus and Lithuania has made it difficult to trace these families further back and again it has been necessary to piece together what we can from the information given in the Scottish birth records.
The Cromwell (Crochmall) family first left Lodz in Poland in 1905 to settle in Sheffield, England. After a few months they moved to Manchester, where they remained until 1909 before returning to Poland. The family returned to Manchester in January 1912 where they settled permanently.
Little is known of when and how the Marcus family came to the UK from Lodz in Poland. We recall being told by our grandmother that, like the Cromwell family, they travelled back and forth between Poland and the UK on a number of occasions before finally settling in Liverpool in the early 1900s. It was also suggested that the Marcus and Cromwell families knew each other in Lodz before our grandparents met and married in the UK.
We have not actively pursued our research of the Cromwell (Crochmall) family so far, but have made significant progress on the Marcus (Majerkiewicz) branch due the comprehensive collection of vital records which survive for the town of Checiny from which they originated.
