Tombstone Tuesday: Jack Garber

Here lies

Yakov son of Avraham Aba

Died 9 Sivan 5723

May his soul be bound in the bonds of eternal life

JACOB 
GARBER

DIED JUNE 1, 1963

AGE 68 YEARS

 ________________________

My grandfather, Jacob or (Jack) Garber was the fifth child and third son of Avraham Aba Garber and Chana Mazewitsky Garber and the third child to emigrate to the United States.[1] He was born in Labun, Russian Empire (today, Yurovshchina, Ukraine) on 15 December 1894.[2] 

Jack left Libau [3] on the Birma on on 20 August 1912 and arrived in New York Harbor on 3 September 1912.[4] He accompanied his brother Nathan's wife Itte (Yetta) and their two daughters on the voyage.[5] Interestingly, both Jankel and Itte and children are listed on separate pages of the manifest with the surname "Arber." This is likely a function of transliterating the name Garber from Yiddish.

On 12 August 1916, Jack married Dora Morris (nee Mazewitsky) his first cousin.[6] He had learned to be a glazier from his uncle/father-in-law, Isidore Morris. 

Jack and Dora has three children: Leah Eisenberg (1917-2006), my father Bernard Garber (1919-2002) and Leonard Garber (1923 -  ). After my grandmother Dora passed away in 1954, Jack married Alice.[7]

Jack's grave is located in one of the First Lubiner Progressive Benevolent Association plots at Montefiore Cemetery, Queens, New York: Block 89, Gate 156, Line 12R, Grave 5.
 

Notes:
1. Two older sisters, Perl and Sarah, did not emigrate. Perl Zabarsky perished in the Holocaust in Labun along with her daughter, Chana, and Sarah Giller and her family were evacuated to Chelyabinsk and survived. 

2. Jack Garber, Social Security number 116-05-7487, 28 May 1937, Application for Account Number (Form SS-5), Social Security Administration.

Jacob Garber Petition for Naturalization number 84430 (4 November 1923), Kings County Supreme Court, C-File 2029448, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

3. Libau was the Polish name for the town now known as Liepaja and located in western Latvia on the Baltic Sea.

4. "New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957," digital images, Ancestry.com
 (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 7 February 2009), manifest, Birma, Libau to New York, arriving 3 September 1912, p. 26 (handwritten), line 8, Jankel Arber; citing National Archives Microfilm Serial T715, Roll 1926.

5. "New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1957," digital images, Ancestry.com
 (http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 7 February 2009), manifest, Birma, Libau to New York, arriving 3 September 1912, p. 4, line 17, Itte Arber; citing National Archives Microfilm Serial T715, Roll 1926.

6. New York County, New York, Certificate and Record of Marriage number 19923 (12 August 1916), Jacob Garber and Dora Morris, New York City Municipal Archives, New York.

7. I am still researching Alice. I do not have a last name for her. She had been married before and had children from that previous marriage. I believe I have located her in the Social Security Death Index and the online index for Montefiore Cemetery. Current Social Security Administration rules for releasing old SS-5s (the application for a Social Security card) are that unless the applicant is more than 100 years old (or one can prove the person is deceased), his or her parents' names will be redacted. The Alice on the record of interest was born in 1893, so I should be able to get her parents' names. I will probably order the record sooner rather than later because access to the Social Security Death Master File (the index of SS-5s) is being threatened by mis-guided notions regarding identity theft. And how long the SS-5s, which are so useful for family history research, will continue to be available is an open question.