Surname Saturday ~ Handler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Surname Saturday is a daily blogging prompt from GeneaBloggers TRIBE, the genealogy community’s resource for blogging. I have used this prompt in the past to review the ancestral lines for my husband's family.

I wrote a Surname Saturday ~ Handler of Yugoslavia and Ohio three years ago and have discovered some more information so I thought I would update the post.

The earliest Handler whose name I know is Leopold Handler. He resided in Bonyhad, Tolna, Hungary, in the 1820s, when his sons were born. He had at least two sons with wife Juli Singer: Herman, born in 1820 and Aron, born later in the 1820s. (There are no records available that go back that far to confirm that those births; this information is inferred from later records and Aron's records don't agree on a birth year.) Leopold's name appears on the 1882 marriage record of Aron Handler and Sali Handler.

In 1849, both Herman and Aron named their oldest sons Leopold, which is a tradition in Ashkenazi Jewish families: to name a child for a recently deceased relative. This strongly suggests that Leopold died in 1848 or very early 1849. The image below, from the Srem, Serbia Historical Archive, shows the birth of Leopold Handler on March 15, 1849, and his cousin, Leopold Handler, born September 14, 1849.

Herman named a daughter Juli in February 1861 and Aron named a daughter Juli in October 1860, suggesting that their mother had died before October 1860.

Generation 2: Herman Handler, who was born in Bonyhad, Tolna, Hungary in 1820. He married Hani Stern by 1848 (first child born in March 1849) and fathered at least seven children with her: Leopold (born 1849), Fani (born 1851), Sali (born 1854), Joseph (born 1856), Anton (born 1858), Juli (born 1861), and Moritz (born 1863).

Herman died on 9 July 1863 (though the gravestone photo I have previously shared doesn't agree with the death record). His youngest child was about six months old.

His wife, Hani, survived him by almost thirty years, dying in 1892.

Generation 3: Sali Handler, born 26 November 1854, married her father's brother, Adolf / Aron, on 7 May 1882, in Ilok.

Adolf / Aron and Sali had four children: Rose, Joseph, Sam, and Regina. Aaron died in 1900 and eleven years later, Sali, as Rozalia, immigrated to America with her daughter Regina, daughter-in-law, Lena Hollander Handler, and grandson, Arpad (named after her late husband). She was following her two sons who had already immigrated.

The earliest generation with an immigrant ancestor to be Rozalia Handler, though it looks like she was following three of her children. (Rose remained in Europe and is believed to have died in the Holocaust.) She arrived in New York City on May 25, 1911, on the Pannonia, with her daughter, Regina, and daughter-in-law, Lena (Hollander) Handler, and grandson, Arthur. See that passenger list here. She died in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 25, 1932, as Rosie Goodman, due to a second marriage to Samuel Goodman soon after she arrived. (See her death certificate here.)

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Generation 2: Aron Handler, also known as Adolf Handler (and in one record as Adam Handler) was born in Bonyhad, Tolna, Hungary, sometime in the 1820s.

He married Katy / Katarina Fuchs by late 1848 (first child, Leopold, born in September 1849) and fathered at least seven more children with her: Filip (born 1852), Jakob (born 1856), Juli (born 1860), Sali (born 1865), (another) Jakob (born 1867), (another) Leopold (born 1869), and Herman (born 1874). Katy died 22 December 1880.

On 7 May 1882, in Ilok, Adolf married his brother Herman's daughter, Sali Handler. According to various U.S. records and local vital records that I have found, they lived in or near Ilok, in a part of eastern Europe that is currently on the border of Croatia and Serbia, but has previously been considered part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later, Yugoslavia. It is believed that Aaron was a large landowning farmer.

See above for continuation of the line.

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Generation 4: Joseph Handler, born on August 24, 1884, in Ilok, married Lena Hollander on March 10, 1909, in Bonyhád, Tolna, Hungary. Their first child, Arthur, was born in Ilok.

Joseph immigrated to the U.S. in 1910 and his wife, Lena, arrived in 1911, with their young son. They went on to have five additional children, all born in Akron: Margaret, Belle, Alfred, Louis, and Harry.

Generation 5: My father-in-law, Harry Handler, who died in 2016 at age 93. See his obituary.

Generation 6: My husband.