Our Earliest Ancestors
Our family tree has six branches, one for each of the five Kudinsky siblings who emigrated with their families to Winnipeg – Herschel, Miriam, Leib, Nesanel and Raful. The sixth branch is from Feiga, the sibling who did not emigrate. The parents of these six ancestral Kudinskys were Y’shia Kudinsky and Pinze Tabachnick whose names we know from some of their children’s death registrations and gravestone inscriptions.
Y’shia was born in Bilylivka in about 1838. He and Pinze raised their family there. Since all of their sons were millers before emigrating, it is likely that Y’shia was also a miller. Sadly, that is all we know of Y’shia and Pinze. There are echoes of their lives in descendants who we believe were named after them: their granddaughter Boble (Pinze) Applebaum, their great granddaughter Bertha (Pinze) Black, their great grandsons Shia Bakalinsky and Sam (Shmuel Shia) Kreger, and their great great grandson Sheldon (Shia) Pereles.
But our known roots do not end with Y’shia and Pinze. We have a Revision List (a kind of census) which lists the Jewish families living in Bilylivka in 1858. One of these is the family of Leib Kudinsky and his second wife, Nekhama. In 1858, two sons of Leib lived with them. The younger son was our forefather Y’shia. The older son was named Yoel. From the birth years of Nekhama, Yoel and Y’shia, we can conclude that Yoel’s mother was Leib’s first wife. From Y’shia’s birth year it’s probable that his mother was Leib’s second wife, Nekhama.
The 1858 Revision List takes us back one more generation to give us the name of Leib Kudinsky’s father. Leib is identified with the patronymic “Shmerkovich” meaning son of Shmerko. Shmerko is a diminutive of the biblical names Shmarya and Shmaryahu. Our forefather, Shmerko would have been born in the 1700s, before Jews in Russia acquired surnames. We don’t know when he died, but if he was alive when Jews received surnames, he would have become our first Kudinsky.
Find your place in the family tree. Click on a name in the box below.
