By contacting two other researchers looking at records from Zborow, I acquired some of their research files and gained the encouragement and enthusiasm to work even harder at finding the family history. I noticed, almost as an afterthought, there was a great deal of formal documentation that included a house number, which I presumed (or really hoped) was a personal house number. In order to better view and analyze the data I had uncovered, I created a simple table. I hoped that in identifying those who lived at the same house numbers or close by that I could identify other family members. Of course at the time, it never occurred to me that the house numbers in the town might not be consecutive! I am still awaiting a cadastral map for Zborow to explain the town layout, which has so far proven to be hard to acquire. What started as a simple table to chart the information gathered by 3 researchers has expanded into a major research project.

The simple table developed into an extensive project of enumerating all the information I could find about the many surnames I thought possibly might have intermarried with my own family. It was an attempt to “reverse engineer” the construction of familial relationships when no one or no other data was available to consult. There is now information about 150 surnames, not all to the same depth. This has been a labor of love and of time, especially over a 2-year period when I was able to work at genealogy projects almost every day.

To make the information as accessible as possible, I created several indexes. There is an index of surnames in alphaetical order and a cross index by house number of the families that were documented as having lived at that house number. There is another index that links the surnames to the information in all the other indexes. The entire file will be donated to Gesher Galicia for posting on the website in the near future. The first section includes the names of the towns people and their parents and children (as much as I could pack into the row) listed by house number and the document source. Another section contains notes about the families who lived at these house numbers, with as much detail as I have accumulated.

This information was gathered mostly from documents in the various archives in Poland and Ukraine that contain records from 19th century Galicia, including the provinces of Tarnopol and Lvov. For the most part, the available records that have been indexed are only for the years 1875-1904 (very recently the 20th century records). Additionally, the Mormons have filmed records from 1815-1844, but these are still to be indexed. The original intent was to chart the information for targeted families that made reference to house numbers in their vital records, but these are not all the families in Zborow, but those that were thought to have intermarried with the HEIMAN/BETTINGER/MARDER families that were the known and identified relatives of ANN HARRIS, the research editor and compiler. This expanded to FEURRING/BRUST/PASTERNAK and many others, as information was revealed. The orignal intent was never quite realized, but this body of reasearch stands to honor the ancestors. A corollary project will be to track the families who made it to the new world, mostly New York (and were thus spared extinction in the Holocaust). Another project by this researcher was the translation of the necrology and memorial sections for the Zborow Yizkor book that is available by contacting Ann Harris. Because I was trained as a translator, I was torn between leaving the names as discovered in the documents and making the names consistently spelled. I am afraid there is a mix of styles on this that will simply have to remain as is. Because many Jewish people married only in Jewish ceremonies and NOT through the state, many children took their mother’s surnames in place of their father’s name because when the birth of the child was registered, the father may not have been mentioned, or was mentioned as not being married to the mother.

Chaim Mordechai Heiman and his second wife Mattel Marder Heiman, 1920s, Zborow, are seated. From left t right are: Shaul, Chane, Natan, Arye Leib, and Sara. Natan and Arye Leib survived the war because they had emigrated to Israel in the 1930s. Chaim Mordecahi was the oldest son and stayed to care for his mother. The rest of the family, who by then had families of their own, died in the early 1940s in and around Zborow. Their precise fates are unknown. The oldest, David Wolf Heiman (later David Herman), son of first wife, Chana Marder, older sister of Mattel, who died in childbirth in 1900, went to NY in 1921, sponsored by uncle Hersch Heiman (Herman).
To the right is Chana (Bettinger-Marder) Heiman Gleich, circa 1904. Chaim-Mordechai was her older brother and Mattel Marder was their first cousin, the daughter of their mother's (Perel Leah Marder) brother (Abraham Marder).
The map of 19th century Galicia, showing the location of Zborow, is also at right.