Marriages and Mazurkas

As promised, the woman from the civil registry office emailed me this morning to let me know that she found the marriage certificate from Nachman Birnberg's (Papa Joe's father) first marriage. When I arrived at the office to pick up the copy, I learned that Nachman Birnberg's first wife was named Dvora Tropp. For those of you that have been reading for a while, you may recall that Nachman's second wife was Ernestyna Tropp! But they weren't sisters: Dvora's parents names were Eidi Tropp and Gerschon Rath (another person who went by her mother's last name) and Ernestyna's were Baruch Tropp and Ryfka Krauthammer. Still, it's likely they were related, as Tropp wasn't a common name and both families lived in Kolomyja. Anyway, the marriage certificate was from 1915, but the woman at the office couldn't find Solomon Birnberg's birth record, which we had thought would have been from 1912 or 1913. She did, however, find a David Salamon born to Nachman and Dvora in 1904 (don't worry--they were married in Jewish tradition before then, were registered civilly only in 1915). Either this was another child born to them, or this was the Solomon we knew of, just born 8 years earlier. More on that soon.

Anyway, I thanked the woman and left the office, but when I was a few blocks away I realized: If Nachman and Dvora were legally married in 1915, and Nachman and Ernestyna were married in 1918 (as listed on Papa Joe's birth record), then Dvora must have died somewhere in that narrow range of years. I walked back to the office to see if they could find Dvora's death record. However, after about a half-an-hour of looking, the women there couldn't find anything. But it's still interesting to note that, either way, Nachman was remarried pretty quickly after the death of his first wife--and during World War I no less. And--on the subject of marriage, as I left the civil registry office, I walked through a wedding party taking pictures in front of the building. Either they had just registered their marriage, or they thought it was a nice looking building. Probably the first.

With Dvora's parents names and a record of David Salamon born in 1904 in hand, I checked the Kolomyja records index online to see if there would be anything to look up in the central archives...and I found a lot! Not only was Dvora's birth record listed, but I also found listings of other children born to Nachman's parents. The interesting thing is that Nachman's father, also David Salamon (Nachman's son was clearly named after him), went by David Salamon in one record, but just Salamon in another and Schlomo (the Hebrew version of Salamon) in another--meaning, that if his grandfather went by just Salamon (or Solomon), then perhaps the David Salamon born in 1904 also went by just Solomon--and this would be the Solomon we are looking for. I requested all of these records to see tomorrow, so hopefully I'll have some sort of confirmation on that.

I ended the day by visiting the Chopin Museum, which was very recently renovated, so it was as much a display of Chopin's life and music as it was of the latest technology...not to say that I didn't enjoy it. I guess it's a common thing that in Polish museums, there's no signs telling you where to go next, but this museum was definitely more understandable and educational than the museums I visited yesterday. Some of the coolest parts of the museum were the interactive technology aspects themselves: for example, instead of a paper ticket to enter the museum, you receive a card, that, when you wave it in front of a screen or image inside the museum, it activates the section of the exhibit you're standing in front of. But probably the best section of the museum was one called "Chopin the Composer." It was a room with different desks labeled with different categories of pieces Chopin wrote: Sonatas, Nocturnes, Waltzes, etc. At each desk there's a "book" whose pages are made out of some sort of cloth, which also act as touchscreens. At each station, you can listen to the pieces that Chopin wrote that correspond to each category. When you turn the pages of the book, images of the original handwritten compositions appear. It was like an iPad and a real book put together! I could have sat there for hours listening to pieces at each station. I'll have to learn to play some Chopin when I get back home!