Rapoport family
Louis (Ios-Leib) Rapoport was born in Dubova in 1885. According to his notebook, his father Meyer and mother Etya died in 1897, and according to one of his daughters, he then went to live with another family (name unknown). In late 1910 he and his wife Bayla (née Troyanker, from nearby Kocherzhintsy) emigrated via Bremen to New York and then to Canada. They ended up in Brantford, Ontario in 1911, where he became a dealer in in scrap metal, a common occupation in southern Ontario for Jewish immigrants of that time.
Brantford then had a population of 26,617. His six children were born there, between 1911 and 1928. Five of them stayed and had families in southern Ontario, eventually moving out of Brantford; one moved to the USA and had a family in Cleveland, Ohio. Bayla, born in 1887, died in 1957, Louis in 1968. They are buried in Brantford, where, sixty years later, the Jewish population is much reduced.
One of his grandchildren recalls having tried to speak to Louis in Russian. He refused, saying that that was “the language of the oppressor.” He had grown up speaking Yiddish and Russian, learning English after his arrival in North America.
Rapoport family
Louis and Bayla Rapoport, probably in Brantford Ontario, shown with their first three children, left to right: Maxwell (1911–99), Samuel (1912–82), and Carl (1914–97). The photograph is probably from early 1917.
The first page here is Louis Rapoport’s birth certificate—so noted at the bottom in English many years later by his first child. Dubova is indicated as being in the Uman district, and Louis is sometimes indicated to be from Uman.
The date of birth is given as July 10, 1885, under the calendar heading Christian. (In the Gregorian calendar that was July 22.) Notably, the equivalent date of the 10th of Ab is given under the calendar heading Hebrew.
The second page here is from Louis Rapoport’s passport. The first part reads: “The bearer of this [passport], the Uman displaced person Ios-Leib Meerovich Rapoport, aged 25, his sister Etlya, aged 20, and his brother Khuna, aged 17, are going abroad.”
Even if sister and brother do not necessarily mean those blood relations, they may here. Yet no records have been found of either person. Oddly, Louis noted in his notebook the death of his sister Etlya in 1909, the year before this passport was issued. In 1917 in Canada his first daughter, Ethel, was presumably named after her. In 1914 his third son, Carl, was possibly named after Khuna.)