{"id":1414,"date":"2017-10-28T21:16:41","date_gmt":"2017-10-29T04:16:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=1414"},"modified":"2017-11-16T21:37:57","modified_gmt":"2017-11-17T05:37:57","slug":"a-nachod-riddle-solved-at-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/?p=1414","title":{"rendered":"A Nachod Riddle Solved At Last"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Megan Nachod converted twice to Judaism.\u00a0 Growing up in Iowa and Ohio, she first was attracted to Jewish culture through Sidney Taylor\u2019s All-of-a-Kind Family<\/em><\/a> about five sisters growing up in New York City around 1900.\u00a0 In graduate school in Cincinnati, she attended a Passover seder with the family of her friend Stephanie Kaplan.\u00a0 Always a lover of history, Megan felt drawn to a religion that encouraged adherents to discuss events that took place thousands of years earlier.\u00a0 She went through a Reform conversion.\u00a0 Some years later, she went to an Orthodox Beit Din for good measure. Megan has worked for many years in the field of early childhood learning, directing programs for several congregations and the Jewish Federation in Philadelphia.<\/p>\n

Megan first contacted me almost twenty years ago after she found her surname listed by me on JewishGen<\/a>, the Internet hub for Jewish genealogy. My great-grandmother Pauline Nachod<\/a> was born 1848 in Prague to Josef<\/a> and Karoline<\/a> Nachod.\u00a0 Pauline\u2019s family were members of the famed Altneuschul<\/a>, the oldest surviving medieval synagogue in Europe.\u00a0 Her grandfather Gabriel Nachod<\/a> was a cantor and marschalik<\/em>, a type of Jewish wedding-singer.\u00a0 According to Alexandr Putik<\/a> of the Jewish Museum of Prague<\/a>, the Nachod family was closely connected with the rabbinic Horowitz family<\/a>, and the two families are buried together in a section of the old Prague cemetery.\u00a0 Both Nachod and Horowitz are toponyms, meaning the names are derived from the names of towns near Prague.<\/p>\n

Megan was curious to know if we were somehow related.\u00a0 The Nachod surname was very rare and she had not found anyone else with the name.\u00a0 Her father is the fourth in a line of four Julius Nachods.\u00a0 The first Julius<\/a> was born in Hungary in 1846 and came to Philadelphia where he founded the Class and Nachod Brewery<\/a> in 1896 and helped build a church in Glenside. Megan said Julius\u2019 parents were Joseph and Franziska Nachod. \u00a0Although her family was Christian, I guessed that Megan\u2019s ggg-grandfather Joseph and my gg-grandfather Josef might have been cousins, but at the time, we couldn\u2019t find any proof of a connection between our families.<\/p>\n

This week I decided to reach out to Megan and see if we could use any of the newer research available online to help figure out if we were related.\u00a0 Megan had still not been able to get past her ggg-grandparents Joseph and Franziska.\u00a0 I decided to search on Ancestry.com and quickly found lots of records of Megan\u2019s American family.\u00a0 Julius appears already in the 1870 census in Philadelphia.\u00a0 In 1901 he applied for a passport<\/a> and listed his place of birth as Kunszentm\u00e1rton in Hungary. In a Facebook message, Megan confirmed this and said that his father Joseph \u201cwas a medical doctor and worked for a count with a large estate.\u201d\u00a0 I replied, \u201cI wish Josef was named Philipp. Then it would all make sense. My ggg-grandfather Josef had an older brother Philipp, b. 1804, who studied medicine in Vienna and was baptized and disappeared without any trace.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Just then, I decided to try a simple Google search of \u201cKunszentm\u00e1rton Nachod.\u201d\u00a0 The first result was a pdf in Hungarian<\/a> with one single mention of a F\u00fcl\u00f6p J\u00f3zsef Nachod, a doctor who gave the small pox vaccine to 158 children in the town in 1840.\u00a0 Megan\u2019s \u201cJoseph\u201d was actually Philipp Joseph<\/a>, the older brother of my gg-grandfather!\u00a0 (The middle name “Joseph” must have been given to him when he was baptized.) In an instant, two family riddles were solved.<\/p>\n

I had been trying to find Philipp\u2019s family for many years. My great-aunt Ottilie<\/a>, who miraculously survived WWII in Berlin, left behind a tiny handwritten note<\/a> that said \u201cOur grandfather [Josef Nachod] was not allowed to study [at a University], because his older brother went to study and as a result was baptized and stricken out of the family.\u201d\u00a0 In the State Archives in Prague, I found a record <\/a>that said that Josef\u2019s older brother Philipp had been baptized in Vienna in 1831.\u00a0 I even found a publication from 1829 that listed Philipp as a student in the Army Medical School in Vienna<\/a>.\u00a0 But until now I had never figured out what happened to him.<\/p>\n

Having linked our Nachod families, I took another look and realized that Franziska Pivany<\/a>, the wife of Philipp Nachod, also came from a Prague Jewish family. Her father Julius<\/a> born 1790 in Prague, was also a doctor and came with his wife Anna<\/a> to New York in 1854, following their other daughter Mary<\/a>, who had emigrated to the United States in 1850 with her husband Charles Morningstar (Morgenstern)<\/a>. \u00a0Julius Nachod must have come to America at the invitation of his aunt and maternal grandparents.<\/p>\n

Megan says that this week has been one of the most emotional of her life.\u00a0 Having firmly established herself as a Jew, she is thrilled to find that she too has Jewish roots, and a new fourth cousin once removed in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Megan Nachod converted twice to Judaism.\u00a0 Growing up in Iowa and Ohio, she first was attracted to Jewish culture through Sidney Taylor\u2019s All-of-a-Kind Family about five sisters growing up in New York City around 1900.\u00a0 In graduate school in Cincinnati, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1414"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1420,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1414\/revisions\/1420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/schoenblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}