By the numbers

At a glance

Lifespans

Of the people whose birth and death years are both known (404), those who survived childhood lived on average to 70. Women outlived men slightly (71 against 70). 27 of them died before the age of five, a reminder that in the nineteenth century a family could expect to bury some of its children. The 80 Shoah victims with known birth years were murdered at an average age of 38; 19 of them were children. They are left out of the averages below, which describe natural lifespans.

Average age at death, for those who reached 15, by when they were born

Each bar averages everyone born in that quarter-century whose death year is known. The most recent eras are left out because people born then who are still alive would pull the numbers down.

Children per family

The tree records 247 couples with at least one child. Many of these list only the one child who leads to us, so the true families were larger than the records show. Counting only couples with two or more recorded children, the average was highest for children born in the late nineteenth century and fell sharply in America.

The largest families

• Milan Goldberger & Sulamith “Sue” Lebovics13 children
• Mendel (Israel Menachem) Fried & Malka Schönberger13 children
• Kalman Potok & Jentla (Jenta) Potok née Zuchter13 children
• Moses (Mojžiš) Moskovic & Mariam (Maria) Moskovic née Schlesinger12 children
• Yakov Chaim (Jakab) Deutsch & Juli (Zseni) Deutsch née Grünfeld11 children
• Moszek (Mosze) Potok & Rywka (Braindla) Potok née Paluch11 children
• Nathan Wachtel & Rosa (Reisel) Wachtel née Mensch11 children
• Rabbi Yaakov (Jakab) Lebovics & Töbe (Toba) Lebovics née Welber10 children

14 couples are recorded with ten or more children.

Marriage and parenthood

In 166 couples where both birth years are known, the husband was older in 122 (73%), by 3.7 years on average; 16 were born the same year, and in the rest the wife was the elder. Fathers were on average 34 when a child was born and mothers 30. Remarriage was common when a spouse died young; 15 people in the tree are recorded with more than one husband or wife.

Names

Ashkenazi children were named for relatives who had died, so the same few names come back in every generation, written differently in each country: the Hebrew Moshe appears in the records as Moses, Mózes, Mojżesz, Moszek and Morris. The counts below group those spellings together.

Places

Almost every line begins in the old Habsburg and Russian borderlands: Galicia, the Hungarian kingdom (today's Slovakia, Hungary and Subcarpathian Ukraine) and Russian Poland. The first of our people born in the United States was Ophelia Nadel née Jacobs (1861). Even at the peak, in the 1920s, only 29% of the births the archive records were outside Europe: most of the people the archive follows were born in the old country.

Towns with the most births

• Działoszyce42
• Galicia35
• Austria34
• Habura32
• Podhajce31
• Lemberg26
• Sosnowiec22
• New York City20

The work they did

The records name the trade of 265 of our people: in birth and marriage registers, censuses, ship manifests, naturalisation papers and obituaries. In the old country they were merchants, innkeepers, butchers and tailors, and a remarkable number served the community as rabbis, cantors and ritual slaughterers (26 in all). In America and Israel the commonest recorded work was soldier, housewife, tailor, poultry dealer and student. See every job, what it involved, and who did it →

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