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.

Sali Handler's Birth Record

As I noted in a previous post about Regina Handler, I have several images of records from Erdevik, Serbia, and Ilok, Croatia. These communities were both part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the 19th and early 20th centuries and part of Yugoslavia for a good part of the 20th century - see Mappy Monday for details.

The following record is a collection of Jewish births from the Ilok, Croatia, Office of the Registrar (according to the Hungarian Databases at JewishGen).

There are five Handler births listed on this birth register and they "belong" to two different, yet related, families. This record is not an original source since the births are recorded in order by family; they must have been copied from other records. The births range in date from March 1849 to November 1854, but this is likely the closest I'm going to get to determining birth information for these relatives of my husband.

Mappy Monday ~ Where the Handlers Were From

Because I am sharing images of vital records for my husband's Handler family, I thought I should refresh my memory (and that of my readers) as to the area that the family lived in.

Surname Saturday ~ Handler Family of Yugoslavia is where I shared the following series of maps showing the border changes.

Macrohistory: Worldhistory is where I found a changing map of Europe from WWI to 2000. I took screen shots and showed where Ilok is situated: at the point of the arrow in each map.

1914: Ilok was in Hungary (Austro-Hungarian Empire)

1919-1938: Ilok was in Yugoslavia

1956: Ilok was still in Yugoslavia

2000: Ilok is now in Croatia, just north of the Serbian border.

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Resi Handler's Birth Record

Acquiring records and images is fun. Crafting an accurate citation, entering the information into Family Tree Maker, and analyzing the evidence sometimes gets put off way too long.

I have several images of records from the border area of Ilok, Croatia, and Ljuba, Serbia, where the Handlers lived for a good part of the 19th century and early 20th century and I have only shared a few:

Josef Handler's 1884 birth record is at Use JewishGen Family Finder.
Adolf (Aron) Handler's 1900 death record is at Adolf Handler's Death Record.
Adolf's and Sali's 1882 marriage record is at Wedding Wednesday ~ Adolf Handler and Sali Handler, 1882.

I will be sharing additional record images that I received from the researcher in Serbia who is indexing these records for JewishGen's Hungary Database. This database is growing! There are now records from the office of the registrar in Ilok, Croatia, in addition to those from Erdevik, Serbia.

Two and a half years ago, when I shared the transcriptions or index of birth records for my husband's grandfather, Josef Handler, I only saw transcriptions for Rose (Rosi, born 1883), Joseph (Josef, born 1884), and Sam (Salomon, born 1887). I wondered why their younger sister, Regina, born in 1891, didn't appear. The suggestions in the comments were great, but it turned out that her birth was recorded in Ilok, not in Erdevik, and it doesn't appear in the JewishGen Hungarian Database, but I found it in one of the digital images that was sent to me.

Happy 7th Blogiversary to A Jewish Genealogy Journey

I started this blog seven (!) years ago to share stories of my husband's family and to share the research strategies I have used to discover these ancestors, cousins, and their stories.

I took a brief hiatus from blogging last summer when I spent 15 weeks obtaining my certificate in Genealogical Research from Boston University. And this week, I officially begin my participation in the next session of the ProGen Study Group. I'm excited for this new educational opportunity but will keep blogging, as ProGen is not quite as time consuming as the B.U. course.

Some favorite blog posts of mine from this past year include a series of posts about connecting with a genetic relative:

Analyzing a DNA Match
Analyzing a DNA Match - Who is the Common Ancestor
Wordless Wednesday ~ Half-Sisters and Half-Cousins

I keep hoping to connect with more DNA cousins, but it's a challenge when the shared DNA is a small amount. I recently created a DNA Toolbox on this blog, which is as much for my reference as it is for my readers!

Thank you for continuing to read my blog even though the posts are infrequent.