Question for Jews

[Newfie_Catholic]

For starters this is not in any way a question of faith or theology. I am not quite sure if I should post this under Non-Catholic Religions, but I hope somebody will humor this question of possible Jewish ancestry. In the past three years I have become increasingly interested in my heritage. I almost have it all pieced together however my grandmother is very secretive over hers. The surnames are Deutsch and Bauman, to my knowledge they could possibly be German/Dutch Jewish. Again this may not be the best place to post this, but please reply.

 

[Sam_777]

however my grandmother is very secretive over hers

Why, what could be the reason

 

[LongJohnSilver]

For starters this is not in any way a question of faith or theology. I am not quite sure if I should post this under Non-Catholic Religions, but I hope somebody will humor this question of possible Jewish ancestry. In the past three years I have become increasingly interested in my heritage. I almost have it all pieced together however my grandmother is very secretive over hers. The surnames are Deutsch and Bauman, to my knowledge they could possibly be German/Dutch Jewish. Again this may not be the best place to post this, but please reply.

If the surnames are spelled exactly like that, they are very likely to be German and not Dutch. However, I can give you two websites on Jewish genealogy in the Netherlands:

Netherlands Society for Jewish Genealogy
nljewgen.org/eng/index.html

Family Trees of Dutch Jewish Families
maxvandam.info/index_en.html

It is pretty likely that similar sites exist for German Jewish families. Hope this helps, as I’m not really sure I understand what you asking for.

 

[Kaninchen]

Well, ‘Deutsch’ just means ‘German’ and Bauman could have its origins as either the equivalent of ‘Forester’ or ‘Farmer’.

They’re names that could be German-Jewish but could just as well be German.

 

[Joe_Kelley]

For starters this is not in any way a question of faith or theology. I am not quite sure if I should post this under Non-Catholic Religions, but I hope somebody will humor this question of possible Jewish ancestry. In the past three years I have become increasingly interested in my heritage. I almost have it all pieced together however my grandmother is very secretive over hers. The surnames are Deutsch and Bauman, to my knowledge they could possibly be German/Dutch Jewish. Again this may not be the best place to post this, but please reply.

I have heard that names ending in “mann” tend to be German while those ending in “man” tend to be Jewish. I don’t know how universal that is. Also, a lot of names got respelled on immigration papers; so current papers may not have the original spelling.

There was a story of the Chinese gentleman with the name Bernard Schwartz. When asked how that came about he explained that when he entered the U.S. the customs man asked the man in front of him for his name to which he replied, Bernard Schwartz. When asked for his name the Chinese gentleman said Sam Ting; so the agent wrote *Bernard Schwartz *on his papers also.