USISKINS

Jewish children in the United States are normally given both civil English names and Hebrew names for use in religious services. I was named Zalman Philip (Zalman Feivel) Usiskin after my father’s father and my mother’s aunt Fanny (neé Jacobson) Janow. The founder of the Lubavicher (Habad) Hasid sect of Judaism was Rabbi Shnaer Zalman of Lyady, and any child born in that part of the world with the name Shnaer Zalman would have to be from a Hasid family. My grandfather clearly left that sect because my father did not know of his father’s birth name nor any idea that the family was Hasid.

Story: Growing up, I knew no other person with the name “Zalman” and my family knew no othennr Usiskins. A man with the name “I. Usiskin” was in the Chicago telephone directory with an indication he was on the grain exchange of the Board of Trade, but he did not live in Chicago and we did not know him. My father would travel for business and look in phone books but he never found anyone else with our surname…until the spring of 1963 when my parents traveled for the first time to Europe and in London there were many Usiskins in the London telephone directory. He made telephone contact and, knowing of my interest in finding other Usiskins, let the London Usiskins know that I would be in London three months later (traveling with the University of Illinois Concert Choir).

I met a number of the London Usiskins at the home of Sidney Usiskin (whose Hebrew name was “Zalman”, and it was by this name that his family called him!) and immediately took down information to build a family tree and determine if and how we were related. I learned that the name “Usiskin” comes from the Usiska river, a small waterway in Belarus that flows through the town of Gorodok north of Vitebsk. And the London Usiskins did have parts of their family in North America. I. Usiskin turned out to be Isadore Usiskin with children in New Jersey. Other Usiskins had homesteaded in Saskatchewan and their descendants were in Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, and Toronto. I would make efforts to meet these families when I gave talks near them.

Over the years I created a tree of this family, so much so that in 1988, stopping overnight in London on my way back to the United States from another international meeting, the London Usiskins threw a party by the London airport in my honor to celebrate my work. Over the years I have met a number of the London Usiskin families, and one family stayed at our home in Winnetka on a visit to the United States, but we have never found a genetic link. DNA shows some links to this family too distant to be able to ascertain the way we might be related and no less distant than tens of thousands of other Jews who have placed their DNA in ancestry.com’s database.

While doing research on the London Usiskin family, I found other Usiskins, and the Ussishkin descendants of the Zionist Menachem Mendel Ussishkin. When I had five distinct families including my own, I put the material into a small spiral binder and distributed it. And then I learned about Usiskins and Usyskins in Russia. I continue to keep trees of all the families with my surname and its variants – as many as 18 distinct families but likely all descended from a much smaller number.

In 2018, Konstantin Pimenov, a Russian interested in Jewish genealogy, e-mailed me and directed me to a blog of similarly-interested Russians in which he had posted information (in Russian) about some of the Usiskin/Usyskin families. I sent him my complete file describing 18 Usiskin/Usyskin families and he gave helpful suggestions, in one case connecting two of the families. From his work, he speculates that my great-grandfather Hillel was the son of Abram Usyskin (d. 1857) and Chaya Zalmanovna (b. 1825). Extant records indicate that Abram was the son of Mendel Usyskin (b. 1791, d. 1859) and Basseva Movsheva (b. 1804), and that Mendel was the son of an earlier Hillel Usyskin.

I have no way of verifying Konstantin’s work and I still have never found any definitive connection to any of these families. The ones I think might be closest relatives do not have their DNA in any of the common databases.

Publications (distributed to family):

The Usiskins/Ussishkins: a set of family trees with notes and documents. Spiral, 35 pages, 1986.

Xcscrbys d Hjccbb: Usiskins in Russia. Draft version. Spiral, 41 pages, September 1997.

Usiskin – Ussishkin – Usyskin – Usishkin – Ussyshkin Ascendants and Descendants. Word file. Last edited November 2021.