My Father's Manuel 's Grandparents

This is probably the earliest photo I have: Meyer Thomshinski, Manuel’s grandfather, and his wife, Chashka (Rachel) Thomshinski, who was a cousin. It may have been a passport photo, or a photo for some other travel document. It was probably taken around the turn of the century, or in the first decade of the twentieth century. Meyer was the son of Mendel (1840s? – 1880s?) and Rivka, who lived in Shebezh, near Vitebsk, in White Russia, north of the Pale. Chashka was the daughter of Mendel’s brother Lazur (Eliezer)(1846?-1900?) and Sarah (1848?-1882?). Mendel, Lazur, and a brother David, were the sons of Lusik (1820?-1880?) and Essie. They may have had other siblings, but I have no information about them as of yet.
Manuel’s grandfather Meyer was married twice. His first wife and their entire family perished in Russia in a typhoid fever epidemic. Chashka, his first cousin, became his second wife. Their children were Phil, Sarah (m. Goldstein), David, Tillie (m. Levant), Millie/Minnie (m. Silver), Solly, Ethel (1904-1907), Edith (m. Schwartz), Joe, Sophie (m.Chudnow), Ben, and Dora (m. Seligman).
In Russia, Meyer made his living by trading. Between 1897 and 1900, he and his entire family moved to London, England, where he was a glazer by trade. I have a photograph of Manuel’s father David in a London school group which reads “Lower Chapman Street, 1906.” He would have been about ten years old.
In 1906 or 1907, Meyer and the family moved to Winnipeg. In 1912, they moved to Pine Ridge, Manitoba, where the family made a living by delivering wood, farming, buying cattle and dealing in horses. Manuel used to tell a story about his father’s family’s immigration to Canada. It seems that, as a young boy, Zaida Thompson (David) sustained an eye injury in England while playing with firecrackers on Guy Fawkes Day. At Halifax, while the rest of his family was admitted to Canada, the immigration authorities threatened to send young David back to England alone, because of his eye. A kindly Halifax doctor took David into his home and treated him until he recovered, and then sent him on to his family in Winnipeg. For many years, my grandfather (and my father) contributed to the Jewish Institute for the Blind in Jerusalem.