While researching my maternal grandmother’s family, I’ve been working on the Messer branch. This line begins with Moses Messer and Rachel Stierer, who had three children I’ve identified so far: Jakob, Hersch (Herman), and Berl. The family lived in Lviv, and I found birth/marriage records for all three children. In each one, the children are listed as illegitimate—the “illegal” children of Moses Messer and Rachel Stierer. None of the records mention Moses Messer’s parents.
Over ten years ago, I was contacted by descendants of Herman Messer. They claimed that Moses was the son of Jakob Messer and Schindel Projekt. There is a death record for a Moses Messer listing those parents, but that record makes no mention of Rachel Stierer or any children.
So why were they so confident that the two men were the same?
Fritz, another one of Herman’s descendants, had a copy of that death certificate in his papers. That’s certainly intriguing! But I wasn’t entirely convinced. Did Fritz find the record during his own genealogical research? Could he have made a leap, assuming both references to “Moses Messer” were about the same person? I couldn’t ask him—by the time I learned of Fritz, he had already passed away. And the papers? They had been passed on to another family member and stored in a closed box.
In the 1860s, Hersch moved from Lviv to Vienna. That move required him to provide documents proving his identity to the Vienna magistrate. If the death certificate was used in that process, it would support the claim that this Moses Messer was indeed his father. After all, Hersch would have known who his own father was.
Still, deep down, I wasn’t fully convinced.
Was the certificate an original or just a copy Fritz found? I needed to see what was in that box.
This morning, I reviewed the contents of that box with two of Fritz’s cousins.
It held an original death certificate from 1862, documenting the death of Moses Messer in Lviv.
And with that, I can now say with confidence:
Moses Messer, the husband (כדת משה וישראל) of Rachel Stierer and father of Jakob, Hersch (Herman), and Berl, is the same Moses Messer whose parents were Jakob Messer and Schindel Projekt.
