Hi all Lipcons and other former Lipkunskis,

As you all know, your patriarch, Jacob, came from the town of Eishishok. This shtetl was and is in Lithuania. I say was and is because the shtetl was in the original Kingdom of Lithuania and it is now in Lithuania. It has been in other countries as well, as you will see. On the internet, at an address called www.jewishgen.org ,there is a bulletin board called Litvaksig. The Moderator of this site, Judy Baston, is a friend of the Lipkunskis, and also has roots in Eisishok. If any of you are doing independent family research you will know that there is a site called the Ellis Island Data Base at which one can find immigrant arrival information for Ellis Island for the dates between 1892 and 1924.

In any case, Judy downloaded from that site the names of all the immigrants from Eishishok. I was interested in seeing how many different ways the town of Eishishok was spelled on that list. I made this list into a Excel spreadsheet. The list included about 245 immigrants. There were 107 different variations in the spelling of the shtetl name. I am attaching this list of different spellings. Note that every U.S. vowels is used at the beginning of the name.

Most of the data listed on the Arrival Manifest was taken from the travel documents of the immigrants. The immigrants were not questioned as to their names which the Immigration officials already knew from their records. The spelling variations therefore were probably caused by incorrect spelling on the documents, incorrect rewriting by the Registrars and/or incorrect transcribing by the Mormon volunteers who did the data entry from the original records for the EIDB.

Note that some people wrote that they were from Russia and others, Poland. Before WW II this area was in Russia, but years before it was in Poland. Be sure they knew they were Litvaks. Again,note that the attachment is in Excel.

I hope at least a couple of you find this of interest as I did.

Joe Fibel