June’s Origins: New Documents
The origins of Henry Miller’s second wife, June Smerth, have long remained a mystery. In recent years, research by Randy Chase1, James Decker,2 and Karl Orend3 has pointed to the town of Biory or Bori in Bukovina as her home town. Their conclusions rely on the ship manifest from her father Wilhelm’s 1907 voyage to America which is available at the Ellis Island Foundation web site. This handwritten document is difficult to read, but the entry for Wilhelm’s last residence and place of birth has been transcribed into the Ellis Island database as “Biory, Austria.” This is the town cited by Chase and Decker as June’s probable place of origin, while Orend discovers4 in Biory a misspelling of Bori. Biory does appear to be a poor transcription as no such town is known to exist. The town of Bori, in the Bukovina region of Romania, is real enough, but a second manifest from Wilhelm’s trip points us in a different direction.
Database entry from Ellis Island with incorrect transcription of Wilhelm Smerth’s name and residence
The Ellis Island manifest was created in New York upon Wilhelm’s arrival. I found a second manifest, completed in Hamburg at the outset of the trip, while searching the records on Ancestry.com. The handwriting on this document is clearer and, when compared with the New York manifest, reveals Brody, a town in western Ukraine. Brody is the transcription provided by Ancestry.com, though it assigns “Biorz” to the New York document.
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| Brody appears twice in Wilhelm’s entry on the New York manifest | Brody from the Hamburg manifest | |||
Ancestry.com also provides a Hamburg manifest for the trip Wilhelm’s wife and children made to join him in New York in 1908. Chase and Decker have described the New York manifest for this trip in their articles, but the Hamburg document presents a new piece of information. Here, the Smerth family is identified as Galician, from the town of Lemberg. Lemberg is the German name for L’viv, another city in western Ukraine, roughly 90 kilometers (55 miles) southwest of Brody. In 1908, L’viv was the capitol of Galicia.
Hamburg manifest showing Lemberg designation for the Smerth family
Seeming to confuse the issue, the New York manifest declares the Smerth’s last permanent residence as “Russ. Moldawica” (Moldovita in Romanian), which is located in Bukovina. Galicia, which contains both L’viv and Brody, shares a border with Bukovina. Both were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
On a second page of the 1908 New York manifest, which appears to be unavailable through the Ellis Island search, the birthplace of each member of the Smerth family is listed. Here we learn that June’s mother Fanie was born in Podhajce. She bore her two eldest children in Brody and her three youngest in Moldovita.
To tie up all of the information found in these ship manifests, I present the following scenario: June’s parents, Wilhelm and Fanie, were born around 1878 in Galicia. Wilhelm is from the town of Brody and Fanie from Podhajce. By 1897, they are married and living in Brody, where Fanie will bear two sons, Gustawa and Hermann. By the beginning of 1902, the young family has moved to Moldovita in Bukovina where June (Julia) is born, followed by her two younger brothers, Siegmund and Ignatz. In the summer of 1907, Wilhelm departs for America, leaving his wife and children to take up temporary residence in L’viv. There they remain for one year before following him to New York.
The Documents
Copies of the complete ship manifest pages discussed in this article are linked below. Entries describing the Smerth family in the 1908 New York manifest are found on three separate pages.
1907 New York manifest for Wilhelm (line 4)
1907 Hamburg manifest for Wilhelm (line 31)
1908 New York manifest for Smerths pg. 1 (lines 20-25)
1908 New York manifest for Smerths pg. 2 (lines 20-25)
1908 New York manifest for Smerths pg. 3 (line 94)
1908 Hamburg manifest for Smerths (lines 6-11)
Notes
- Randy Chase, “June Comes To America”, Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company: A Henry Miller Blog. November 29, 2005.
http://cosmotc.blogspot.com/2005/11/june-comes-to-america.html. - James M. decker, “June Miller: Remnants of a Life”, Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal. Vol. 3, 2006.
- Karl Orend, “Alfred Perlès and June Mansfield—Some Unforgiving Encounters in the Shadow of Henry Miller”, Nexus: The International Henry Miller Journal. Vol. 3, 2006. [see photo captions]
- The 2003 mailing list discussion in which Orend is advised to regard Biory as Bori has been preserved online:
pg 1: http://www.ehpes.com/czernowitz/czernowitz12/testfile2003/0289.html
pg 2: http://www.ehpes.com/czernowitz/czernowitz12/testfile2003/0290.html
3 comments on "June’s Origins: New Documents"
Wow – great post, Kreg. This is the way this stuff gets figured out – Karl, James, Randy, and now you…each fitting in a piece and continuing the work.
Nice work, Kreg!
Thanks, guys—glad to help push this one down the track a little further.
