(The URL for this document is
http://www.hep.uiuc.edu/home/g-gollin/about_me.html;
)
Welcome! There appear to be four different families with surname "Gollin" in the United States. There is another Gollin family with members in Great Britain and Australia, as well as one (or more) in Germany and another (or others) in Italy. It is quite possible that some of the Gollin families which I describe as unrelated actually share common origins, and that there are more Gollin families "out there." I have been collecting information about the families for a half-dozen years and occasionally posting new information here.
Three of the four Gollin families in the United States have Russian/Eastern European origins, while the fourth has German Huguenot ancestry, with origins near Berlin. There is some indication that the Russian Gollin family which is descended from the couples Simon and Rachel or Morris and Libby moved from the town of Gollin in Germany (also near Berlin) to Minsk in the late 18th century.
My ancestry can be traced back to Simon (Shimon) Gollin and Rachel (Risha) Fidelman, who left Russia around 1888 for New York. There isn't any indication that their name in Russia was different from "Gollin," but nobody seems to have evidence that it really WAS "Gollin" back then. Simon was a tailor in the Russian army, and probably deserted, then emigrated to keep his sons out of the army. He may have been born near Minsk, and probably left Russia from Dvinsk (now Daugavpils, Latvia). He traveled with the army, spending time in England and, perhaps, Argentina before settling in New York.
A second Gollin family is descended from Huguenots, 16th century French Protestants. The original family name was "Collin," not "Gollin," but the spelling changed in the mid-18th century. This family emigrated from Germany to Bay City, Michgan around 1866; many members of the family are still in Michigan. James P. Gollin (runs "Gollin Block and Supply;" see below), Patricia Gollin (a grad student at Wash. Univ.; also see below), and Norman Gollin (also see below) are members of this family. They pronounce their last name so that it rhymes with "Colleen," accented on the second syllable. The family is Lutheran.
A third Gollin family contains the brothers Richard and Albert, mentioned below as authors of a number of works. Like us, they are Russian-Jewish in origin. Richard is married to Rita K. Gollin (see below); the original family name was Galinsky. Their father was Morris, born around 1885, possibly in Vladimir, Russia (somewhat east of Moscow). Like Simon, he was drafted into (and then deserted) the Czar's army. He settled in Utica, in upstate New York, but later moved to Chicago. Morris owned department stores in the Chicago area, and also in Milwaukee. After his business was trashed by the Depression, he moved east, settling in Queens. I am curious about the possiblity that Morris is a first cousin of Alter, named for a common (deceased) grandfather who would have been Simon's father.
A fourth family consists of Susanne M. Gollin (see below) and her relatives. She reports that her father's parents emigrated from Russia ("somewhere between Minsk and Pinsk") and settled in Milwaukee around 1903. The original family name was Igolnikov. Perhaps some sort of Polish vs. Russian linguistic transformation could map "Igolnikov" into "Galinsky," though that seems a bit much. The possibility of a Milwaukee connection with Richard's and Albert's ancestors is interesting to consider.
A fifth family has its roots in Manchester, England, with a number of members residing in Australia and New Zealand.
I will try to assemble partial family trees for each of the families below. Not surprisingly, what's in this web page is slanted towards my branch of the family.
The information is a bit disorganized in presentation, and suggestions on how
to improve its clarity and accuracy are welcome. Since I
update these pages infrequently,
some of the information may be out-of-date! Send me corrections, please.
Contents, of sorts |
Information about descendants of the brothers
Simon (married to Rachel) and Morris (married to Libby).
(Original name was "Gollin" in Dvinsk, perhaps spelled "Gulyan" sometimes.)
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Information about the Gollin family descended from
"Galinsky" (or "Galinski" or...)
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Information about the Milwaukee Gollin family
(originally "Igolnikov" or "Eugulnikoff" or "Egolnicove" or "Golnikov")
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Information about the Michigan Gollin family
(originally "Collin.")
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Information about the English/New Zealand Gollin family
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Other stuff
Dear Dr Gollin Here's email from Alan Golin Gass, of Denver Colorado. Perhaps there's a connection somewhere to some of us? Dear George: Here's email from Richard Gollin, from The Netherlands. Dear mister missis Gollin,Back to the top |
Descendants of the
brothers Simon and Morris Gollin,
originally from Dvinsk.
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Some of Simon's and Rachel's family historyI'm named for my grandfather George, who emigrated from Russia to New York City with his parents Simon and Rachel around 1888 when he was 3 years old. The family believes that Simon was very tall (6'4"), but that Rachel was tiny (4'9", though this is perhaps an exaggeration); they met in Dvinsk, where Simon was garrisoned as a tailor in the Russian army. (Dvinsk is now called Daugavpils, and is southeast of Riga, in Latvia.) The family had ten children, five of whom died at birth or in the first year of life. Apparently, the unlucky offspring included two girls and a set of twins. For a while, Simon was stationed in Buenos Aires, Sy reports. Simon deserted and the family emigrated from Russia with their surviving children. He had good reason to flee: drunken officers would beat him, and he could expect that his older sons would soon be drafted into the army to share a similar fate. Simon and his oldest son, Alter (Morris), arrived in New York in advance of the rest of the family. Rachel brought Louis, Harry, George, and Max across the Russian frontier through Germany to Hamburg where they took steerage passage to New York. (Eugene, Max's son, still has a samovar and tray they brought along.) George was three at the time; Max was only six months old. (George's mother is listed as Rachel Fidelman on his marriage license, but as "Rita" on his death certificate.) The family story is that Rachel disguised Louis and Harry as girls to fool the Russian border guards into letting them leave. They settled in New York, living in a fifth floor walkup with toilets in the backyard on Delancey and the Bowery. There were three rooms in the cold-water flat: a kitchen, a bedroom for the adults, and a third room where the boys slept. According to Eugene, Simon was a strict disciplinarian and the family observed the Sabbath. Their diet consisted mainly of potatoes and herring, with virtually no green vegetables. Max suffered from rickets as a child. Their neighborhhod was a rough one: near the waterfront, it was full of bars, gamblers, and prostitutes catering to the many sailors on shore leave. Max claims to have earned money from time to time by running errands for the local gamblers and prostitutes while he was growing up. He was only 8 or 9 years old at the time; undoubtedly, running innocent errands would not seem terrible to a child Apparently, he could earn more than his father through this sordid line of work. When Simon discovered Max's money (and the source of his income), he beat the boy. After that, Max hid his cash in the stairwell, but it was often gone by morning. Max left school after the fifth grade to go to work. Eugene does not know if any of the brothers had much formal education; all the boys were self-educated. The household moved uptown, somewhere on Second Avenue in the "30's" while Max was still a teenager. According to Sylvan (Sy), Louis worked for Metropolitan Life and moved to St. Louis in the 1920's to the Met Life office there. He and his wife Rebecca had two children, Joshua and Goldie. Josh became president of a large lquor company in New York (Seagram's?). Alter moved to Newark. I don't have much information about his side of the family. Harry was a successful garment manufacturer in New York, but suffered badly during the Depression. His older children went to work to help support the family after high school, never attending college. The oldest child, Bernard, died (in an automobile accident?) in 1936. Sylvan, the youngest (who strongly prefers to be called "Sy") became an engineer, settling in California. George became a U.S. citizen in 1906. According to a 1949 driver's license, he was born September 2, 1885 and was 5'7", 152 lbs. with brown eyes. George married Belle Marion Lewinthan (who had been born in the United States) on June 13, 1920. According to Belle's birth certificate, she was born as Bella Loewenthal at 317 Stanton Street in New York City on January 13, 1889. Their marriage license names her as Bella Lewentahl. Her parents were Louis Loewenthal, a carpenter born in Germany (near Berlin?) in 1849, and Sarah (Zadikoph) Loewenthal, born in Poland in 1851. (On Belle's marriage license, Sarah's maiden name is listed as Zadiker.) She was their 11th child, but four of her siblings had died before she was born. One of her brothers was probably Max Loewinthan, an M.D. in Manhattan, who refers to her as "Bella" in a brief 1951 note concerning burial plots. The spelling of the family's name seems to have differed from sibling to sibling. George was a manager for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, and lost some money when the stock market crashed in 1929. (Naturally, there is all sorts of mythology concerning the amount.) Belle was vicious, and unbelievably selfish. Her self-centered side, and George's gentle, compliant nature, are confirmed by some letters exchanged while she was vacationing in Atlantic City (in 1924) after Sidney (my father) was born in 1922. Apparently, Belle's sharp tongue cost George his high position at Met Life's Bedford Avenue office. The salesmen had organized, and Belle took it upon herself to give them a tongue lashing. The union used that as a point of grievance and the company demoted George. Belle was at Max's and Sue's when George came home with the news-- she screeched and pretended to faint, but her histrionics were too much for Max's and Sue's bed, which broke under her weight. George, Belle, and Sidney fled to a small apartment in the Bronx in (over)reaction to George's reduced income in his lower-level position. He retired in 1947, then died of a heart attack in January, 1951. Belle lived until 1984. Sidney went to Boys High School in Brooklyn, graduating in 1939. He began college, then enlisted in the Army Signal Corps when World War II began. He served in safety in Omar Bradley's headquarters, far from the clutches of his destructive mother. He stayed in the service for about a year after the war ended, spending time in Warsaw, where he learned to speak Polish. After the war he went back to Brooklyn College, starting as a physics major, switching to chemistry, and then flunking out at the end of his senior year. He never returned to school. He married my mother, Dolores Joseph, around 1950, and worked as a children's photographer, and then as the owner of a "route" of vending machines, selling gum, baseball cards, and so forth. He was a terrific portrait photographer, but never managed to earn enough money at anything he did to pay his share of the household expenses. Dolores and Sid lived on 72nd Rd in Queens, where I was born in 1953. My sister Olivia was born in 1957. In 1960 we moved to Freeport, a suburb of New York on the south shore of Long Island. Around 1964, Dolores began teaching English fulltime at Freeport High School, slogging through years of evening classes at Queens College to get a masters degree and certification as a school administrator. Eventually, she became an assistant principal in the Herricks school system. Dolores and Sidney divorced in 1975; Dolores now lives in Jamesburg, New Jersey. Sidney died of a heart attack in June, 1986. (Yeah, I know. I spend time on an elliptical trainer most mornings.) I went to Harvard from 1971-75 as a physics major, then to Princeton for graduate school. I married Melanie Loots in 1978; Melanie also went to Harvard, then Princeton, as a chemist. We met as Presidential Scholars in Washington around the time we graduated from high school. (This sounds rather like government-sponsored eugenics!) We both worked as postdocs at the University of Chicago after graduate school, then moved back east. I was an assistant professor at Princeton from 1983-1989 while Melanie was a staff chemist at Squibb. Our daughter Cordelia was born in 1988. She is an extraordinary person, exceptionally bright, with a well-developed sense of justice and fairness. We moved to Champaign, Illinois in 1989. I am a professor here, teaching undergraduates and working on elementary particle physics experiments at Fermilab and Cornell, while Melanie is an Associate Vice Chancellor for Research. She had been an associate director at NCSA, the folks who brought you Mosaic (remember Mosaic?). Some of my interests, besides the obvious ones involving family and work: reading (mostly fiction), cooking (northern Italian and Asian), folk guitar, and travel. Olivia went to Cornell, then got a masters degree from Boston College. She married William Hoepfl; they lived north of Dallas for several years before moving to a suburb of Dayton, Ohio. They have a son, Lucas Joseph, who was born in 1992. Olivia teaches in the Beaver Creek, Ohio school system. I got some email late in 1995 from a mysterious "tgollin" who wanted to know if we're related. (This turned out to be Tim Gollin, a second cousin once-removed, though a flakey internet server kept bouncing replies to his email message.) "Gollin" is an uncommon name, and a net search turned up a number of people who might, or might not, be relatives. I pronounce it accented on the first syllable, with a short "o", so that it sounds like "Collins." The Gollin family is dispersed, but I have been having luck finding relatives via internet searches, and then communicating by email. I'll add more details as time permits. Much of the information is from Jeff, Jim, Eugene, Alfred, and Sy. (Thank you!) |
Information about a possible link to more Gollins of German/Russian originIn searching the internet I found you website. My maiden name is Gollin and as you stated it is not a very common name. The history that I have is similar to your. My grandfather, Jacob Gollin came from Minsk at the beginning of the last century. He was a tailor and his family were tailors for the Russian army. He came to Bayonne, New Jersey, were he opened a tailor shop and army & navy store (Gollin's Men Shop). His father's name was Zev (hebrew for Wolf) Gollin and I know of two other sons of Zev - Keva & Max, all came to Bayonne. My father's name was Louis and now after reading your website I realize that it is a common name in the Gollin Family. Some of the names sound familar as my father had an Uncle Harry and cousins in Bayonne, like Sam and Bessie. My father's sister was Winnie but there were three Winnie Gollins in Bayonne. Here are Jeff Gollin's thoughts about this: All - I found Loree Cohen's e-mail to George Gollin of particular interest, because - roughly 2 decades ago (before George contacted most of us) - shopping in a Woodbridge, NJ department store, this guy in the clothing section looks at my credit card and asks me if I'm related to a Louis Gollin who owned a clothing store in Bayonne. (It made quite a bit of sense to some of us at that time that there were probably 2Louis Gollins who were cousins, named for the same deceased relative). Here are Sy Gollin's comments too: The message from Loree Cohen is interesting. From what she says I am fairly sure her branch of the Gollins is related to ours. First there is the link to Minsk. I know we originated there. For years my father paid monthly 'premiums' to a funeral society called something like the Independent Minsker Brothers. In fact they provided his gravesite. Then there is her saying her ancestors were tailors. As I understand it my paternal grandfather was also a tailor (in the Russian army for some time). The New Jersey link is another clue. My oldest Gollin uncle, Alter, settled in New Jersey and had family ties that my father never quite understood. Those ties may have been in Bayonne. The Rogows are descendents of Alter. |
Family trees for descendants of Simon Gollin & Rachel (Risha) Fidelman, also Morris Gollin & Libby GollinWhen I have them, I've linked names in the family tree to email addresses. There are links to additional information about family members at the end of each "branch" which begins with one of Simon's and Rachel's sons.
Descendants of Simon Gollin and Rachel (Risha) FidelmanSimon Gollin married Rachel (Risha or Rishe) Fidelman (1847 - 1923). Simon died in 1920, perhaps from complications following prostate surgery. Rachel died in 1923 after living with Max and Sue for a time. Alter and Simon arrived on the Circassia from Glasgow, approximately March 8, 1888. Their name upon arrival was entered into the arrival logs as "Gollin" (See information here.) Rachel arrived August 14, 1889 on the State of Nebraska from Glasgow with Leib [Louis] age 15, Herschel [Harry] age 11, Gershon [George] age 8, Mordke [Max] age 1. Their name upon arrival was entered into the arrival logs as "Golin" (Information from Gary Mokotoff. See information here concerning the ship.) They had five sons:
Descendants of Morris Gollin and Libby GollinMuch of this information comes from Eugene Gollin, Helen Gollin Schenkman, and Mark D. Gollin (thank you!). Morris Gollin (Simon's brother) married Libby Gollin (she was his niece, her maiden name was also Gollin). Morris was one of eight (living) brothers when he emigrated. According to transit records, Leibe [Libby] Golin age 27 and Chaim [Henry] Golin age 7 arrived April 27, 1891 on Augusta Victoria from Hamburg. Note the single-l spelling of their last name. They had three sons, two daughters:
According to Eugene, Rose moved to California and started a sewing machine business after Henry died at a fairly young age. Norman's younger brother may have taken over the business. Rose was friendly with Max and Sue, who were Eugene's, Rita's, and Alfred's parents.
This is interesting: my mother (Dolores) thinks that Alter, Harry, et al. had a cousin "through marriage" named Bessie Gollin, who lived in Bayonne. (I think she means that Bessie married a male cousin of the five brothers.) Dolores thinks Bessie had a son living with her, who would be in his sixties now. Eugene thinks the cousin was also named Max, who lived in Bayonne, and that Bessie was his daughter; she used her maiden name, and had a son Edward. Rita Gollin Courtney thinks that Bessie Gollin is the first cousin to Max (Simon's son) and that she lived in Bayonne; her father's name was Sam Gollin. Winnie Gollin was one of Bessie's cousins; Winnie's father's name was Meshka. __ Gollin, Simon's brother, married __. An undetermined number of children:
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Information about the Milwaukee Gollin family, originally "Igolnikov" or "Egolnicove" or "Eugulnikoff" or "Golnikov"Susan Brooks (contact me for her email information if you're interested) drew a family tree for several generations of the family during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It is formatted as a pdf file. Susan writes: I have an extensive amount of information on our part of the Gollin family. I know of 4 brothers (Jacob, Kalman, Morris, and Solomon). My grandparents were second cousins, so Jacob was my great grandfather from my maternal grandmother and Morris was my great greatgrandfather from my maternal grandfather. Jacob came to the US and had 8 kids who primarily lived in the Wisconsin area. Solomon had six children that all settled in Chicago originally and I'm still missing information on some of them. He died in Russia, but his wife came here after that. Blanche Gollin was one of his children who married Isadore Geneles and had two kids. She later married Barry Sandler and they lived in California later in life. Kalman had eight children who all settled in the Baltimore area except that one daughter went back to Russia and her kids live in Israel now. The fourth brother Morris also died in Russia as did my great grandfather. Two of his kids came to the states - one to Baltimore, one to Milwaukee and two of his grandchildren (one of which was my grandfather) from a third child that was killed in Russia came to the states. There may have been at least one other child, but it's really sketchy since they never came to the states. Here are some fragments of a family tree I worked up a few years ago: |
Jacob Igolnikov married Mary Gorelick. 8 children:
The following is synthesized from information provided by John Gollin, Naomi Moderick, Mike Randall, and Linda Lieberman. Solomon Gollin (Solomon is Jacobs younger brother; originally named Igolnikov) married Rachel (or perhaps Rose), in Kiev probably.
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