What a mystery! Genealogically I’m stuck on Scott’s Great Grandfather. Louis Lazarus was born (we think) near Vilnius in Lithuania on 13 Feb 1890 or 13 Feb 1891. When he was 17 or 18 he immigrated to the United States, so that would peg his arrival between 1908-1910, we have it on good authority that it’s 1909.

He married a woman named Tillie or Trinka and she followed after him and immigrated in 1910-1912.

They show up very nicely in the 1930 Census, so they must have completed their naturalization process by then. The family was Louis, Tillie, Herman, and Alexander. Herman is Scott’s maternal grandfather. They lived in 1930 in 712-718 W. 176th Street in Manhattan, New York.

I scanned all of Ancestry.com and I’ve found numerous Louis Lazarus’s but they don’t have Louis’s profession of Upholsterer. Louis taught his profession to his son Herman, and he taught his son, Steven. There is a Bricklayer and a Tailor Louis, but those families don’t have any members like the one we need.

Of course, everyone who knows anything has died. They’ve taken the names and the locations with them, however we have it on good authority from what information leaked out before they died that it’s Lithuania or popularly declared “Russia”, that they were either Russian or Hebrew, and that Louis and Tillie’s original language was Yiddish.

I’ve searched Ancestry.com with +/- 5 years on birth and arrival with names and family and the only real lead I’ve been able to find is the 1930 Census. Possibly they weren’t citizens in the 1920 Census because they don’t show up. I imagine they would have stayed in the environs of NYC because they were in Manhattan in 1930. After that the entire family migrated to the Capital District in New York, ending up clustered around Glens Falls, New York.

There is a big family who would give anything to break through this information blockage and find real names and real histories in the Old World. If anyone knows anything I know there would be a lot of very thankful people. I’m pretty much running out of options without flying to NYC myself, which I can’t do because I can’t afford it. :/