Thompson Family Overview

(NOTE: This text was written about ten years ago - I have since found a lot of updates for the people listed here and will write about them in a later post) .

The origins of the Thompson family are shrouded in mystery, all written European records before 1900 having been lost, misplaced, destroyed, or never having existed in the first place. But we can assume an ancestor and his wife who lived sometime between 1820 and 1860, and who had two sons that we know of: Mendel (1840-1880) and Lazur (1846-1900). Even their last name is not certain: some have it as Tomshinsk, others as Tomshinski. And when the family adopted that name is also unknown, as well as the reasons for its adoption.
Mendel and Lazur lived in or near Vitebsk, in White Russia, in a town (shtetl?) called Shebezh. Present-day Vitebsk is in Belarus, a former Soviet republic. Belarus means “White Russia”. Shebsh was north of the so-called Pale of Settlement, an area to which Russian Jews were confined by laws of 1795 and 1835. By 1885, there were over 4 million Jews living in the Pale.



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In The Course of Modern Jewish History (1958) Howard Morley Sachar describes the Pale as a “tightly quarantined territory”, and writes that
[i]t is doubtful if any decree in history, even the
Spanish expulsion edict of 1492 or the establishment
of the Western ghetto in the sixteenth century,
imposed a more burdensome political, economic,
or intellectual strait jacket on an entire people. (82)
It is within the political and economic context that Mendel and his wife Rivka and his brother Lazur and his wife Sarah (1848-1882) lived. One can only imagine the difficulties of their daily lives. Mendel and perhaps Lazur as well made a living by trading; how their wives conducted their daily lives, their myriad chores in winters which rivaled Winnipeg for their cold and summers which were most likely hot and stifling, cannot have been easy. These women probably witnessed their own mothers, aunts and friends experiencing childbirth on an annual basis, under superstitious and primitive medical conditions.
We know that Mendel and Rivka had at least one child, a son Meyer (1862-1925). It is perhaps likely that other children were born, or that Rivka died shortly after the birth of this child, or that the other children died, or were girls and took their husbands’ names upon marriage; in any case, no family members have yet been located who are the siblings of Meyer. Further research will be necessary to locate them, if they do indeed exist.
Meyer married twice. His first wife and entire family died in 1885 in a typhoid fever epidemic. Meyer was 23 at the time. Sometime before 1889 he married his second wife was Chaske (Rachel), the daughter of his uncle Lazur. She was one of four children (of which we have information) of Lazur and Sarah Tomshinsk. There was a brother Wolfe (1882-1976), Feitel (Moshe?) (dates unknown), and a sister Anna (1870-1965). The many branches of the Thompson family are descended from these four children of Lazur and Sarah.
Chaske and Meyer had a large family: Phil (Feitel) (1889-1964), Sarah (1890-1975) and David Isaac (1896-1961) were born in White Russia. After the birth of David, around 1897, the family moved to London, England, and it was there that the name was anglicized to Thompson. Other children followed: Millie, Solly, Tillie, Edith, Joe, Sophie, Benny and Dora. A daughter, Ethel, died at the age of three years (1904-1907). In London, Meyer was a glazer by trade.
Wolfe, meanwhile, also moved to London, where his children Sarah (1901-1980) and Samuel (1902-1961) were born. Then Wolfe and his wife Rachel Adelberg moved -- or more correctly voyaged-- to South Africa. Rachel was probably pregnant at the time, her daughter Edith having being born in South Africa in 1903. Two other daughters followed: Elizabeth (1909-1974) and Ida (1912-).
The third child of Lazur and Sarah, Anna (1870-1965) married a Mr. Cutler and lived in Philadelphia. More details are to follow about her life. Her daughter, Deborah Cutler Freeman is still living in Florida. She 93 years old (in 1999) and in good health. (2009: I am sorry to report that Debbie has since passed away)
Anna Cutler had a daughter Hazel, of which there are photographs taken on a visit to Winnipeg in 1936. (Update - Hazel was not a daughter of Anna - more on this another time) Her mother also appears in these photos, taken in the backyard of Wolfe Thompson’s home at 686 Flora Avenue. A son, David, has a daughter Maxine Lapin, who is living in Houston, Texas. I hope to gather more information about the Anna Cutler family from her.
The youngest (I assume) brother was Feitel (Moshe?) whose two children, David (1918-1990) and Luba (1916-1998) Tomshinski, moved to Israel in the 1930’s. David’s two daughters are married and have children. Luba had one daughter, Hanita, who died prematurely. Hanita had three sons, two of which are married with children. Hanita’s son Alon married his distant cousin Marcie, a granddaughter of Joe Thompson (son of Chaske and Meyer).