For a long time Jews didn’t have surnames. We were patronymic. If your name was Ruben, and your father’s name had been David, you’d be Ruben ben David. (ben meaning son of, or bat daughter of). Ashkenazi Jews got surnames at the end of the Eighteenth Century, when countries passed laws making the Jews get surnames.
So…at the end of the nineteenth century, in Radomsk and Lodz in Poland, into the 1940s, it was spelled Heiman. The Heimans on this Holocaust memorial, in Miami, were my family. By the end of the War, they were all murdered.
My great-grandfather, and his family, left Poland and moved to Antwerp in about 1911.
Here’s the Antwerp Police records on the family from around 1913. It was being spelled Geiman, then. (It was a throaty “Ch” sort of an H, the kind you’ll find in the scottish Loch or in Chaim, a first name meaning life, which is, I am assured, where the surname comes from, and the Ch became a G.)
Leib Geiman was a courier on the Antwerp Diamond Bourse.
(Why is my great-grandmother, Eva, not listed? Why were all the children there with my great-grandfather but without her? I have no idea.)
Somewhere around 1914, Leib Geiman came to London. There are different stories in the family about why he left Antwerp, most of them involving a missing diamond.
My great-grandfather Leib (or Leon) spelled his name Geiman for the rest of his life, and that was the name he was buried under in 1951.
My grandmother, Mary, didn’t like the spelling Geiman. She kept fiddling with it. My grandfather was Gaeman on the engagement announcement, then Gaiman on the wedding invitations. I think she went back and forth a bit – Gaeman was the spelling on my Aunt Helene and Uncle Ronnie’s birth listings. And then, before my father was born in 1933, my grandmother changed it again, to Gaiman, and that was the name he was born under, and that was how they left it.
My Uncle Monty became a British Citizen in 1948. His naturalisation information says,
(I don’t know why they weren’t dotting their eyes…).
