your advice solicited...

[Spider Jerusalem]

6. I've had a similar issue in tracing some of my ancestry...

my great-great-grandfather came to America as a child from Ireland; he left during the Famine, as far as I know, and ended up in Louisville, Kentucky. I found him in the census, so I have his mother's name...but not his father's; he, his mother, and brother don't appear on any lists of Irish immigrants to New York, Baltimore, or Philadelphia I've been able to find, nor are there any naturalisation records; I have no idea if they came through New Orleans, or possibly even through Canada. He died sometime before 1900 (when his wife appears in the census as a widow), and Kentucky didn't keep a centralised record of deaths then. I know the county he came from in Ireland, but he has a common surname (Dillon); he was a Catholic, and records were only kept, officially, of people baptised in the Anglican Church of Ireland...and the Irish Records Office in Dublin burned during the Irish Civil War in 1921. So I've pretty much given up on finding anything further.

I'd expect that for a Jewish emigrant from Europe in the mid-19th century the situation is probably not dissimilar, with the war destroying a lot of records and in many cases records being kept by the local Jewish community but not officially (especially in Tsarist Russia where Jews were confined to the Pale of Settlement).