The Only Post On This Blog
December 7, 2018 update: I got this information to familysearch.org (where anyone can post an update), and findagrave.com and geni.com (which allowed me to suggest an update to a manager, but it has not been accepted). Wikipedia still has not caught on.
December 23, 2018 update: findagrave.com has updated Mel's birthplace to Poland. geni.com still has the incorrect information.
Feburary 1, 2020 update: After more than a year, I figured I'd try editing Wikipedia to correct the Belarus claim. Unsurprisingly, someone reverted it within one day. They said that a blog is not a "Reliable Source" per Wikipedia standards.
The official records of the U.S. Department of State seem pretty reliable to me, but I understand where they're coming from. Wikipedia isn't a real encyclopedia; it doesn't have an editorial staff that can verify anything. But one has to ask, if Wikipedia isn't a real encyclopedia, then what is it? I suppose it's a one-stop-shop for the conventional wisdom. If Wikipedia had existed in 1500, the sun would still be orbiting the earth.
I have another Wikipedia story, this one concerning the article on Slim Gaillard, the mid-20th-century jazz songwriter. I don't remember why it caught my eye, but Wikipedia repeated Gaillard's story that he had been born in Cuba to an Afro-Cuban mother and a German father named Theophilus Rothchild, then gone on a worldwide voyage with his father only to be stranded in Crete at the age of 12.
I can almost see the old guy winking to his buddies as he spun that yarn to a credulous interviewer. A few minutes' look at the census showed that this claim was very unlikely to be true. I easily found him in 1920 in Pensacola, born in Alabama, with his never-married mother, who was also born in Alabama. In 1930, 12-year-old "Wilson" Gillard is still in Pensacola with his mother and Theophilus Rothchild is living next door to them, 71 years old and seemingly not up to a world voyage in that very year when Slim Gaillard would have turned 12. Then in 1935, a state census turns up Wilson B. Gillard in high school, not stranded in Crete. In 1940, he is a mess waiter at the Cadet Station at Pensacola Naval Airfield. He had already started his musical career by then.
I managed to get the 1920 census information into the Slim Gaillard article, but Wikipedia insists on retaining Gaillard's tall tales about his youth as if they were fact. Some stories are too good to check.
Now, the original blog...
This blog has only one purpose: to document the fact that Richard Feynman's father was born in Poland, not Belarus. I won't take up space explaining who Feynman was; if you don't already know, you won't care where his father was born. Why a blog? I'll explain later after I provide the facts.
All online sources I can find state that Feynman's father, Mel, was born in Minsk, Belarus in 1890. Examples:
Richard Feynman Wikipedia page (as of 23 November 2018)
Feynman's Minsk
findagrave entry for Mel Feynman (corrected as of 4 Feb 2019)
The Kaleo Foundation
Royal Society Biographical Memoir
and so on. In addition, James Gleick's definitive biography states, "Melville Feynman...came from Minsk, Byelorussia." Byelorussia is what English speakers called Belarus before about 1995.
I surmise that all of these sources trace back to Feynman's fascinating American Institute of Physics interview by Charles Weiner from 1966:
WEINER: Where was he born, do you recall?
FEYNMAN: Probably in Patchogue [New York]. No --- he was born in Minsk. At five he came over to the United States with his father and mother.
This is true, but incomplete. It leaves the reader assuming that the Minsk being referred to is the Belarusian capital. There is another Minsk, in Poland, which is where Mel was really born. I do not want to speculate on whether Feynman himself may have believed Mel was from Minsk, Belarus. But now we come to the hard evidence. "Mella" Feynman can be found in the 1900 Census living in the household of his father, Lewis Jacob Feynman, in Brookhaven Township, Long Island, New York. In that census, he gives his and Mel's birthplace as Russia. That does not narrow it down much, because both Poland and Belarus, along with various other now-independent nations, were part of the Russian Empire at the time of Lewis's birth. But at least this documents that Mel's father was Lewis Feynman.
Lewis Jacob Feynman was something of an adventurer and left a trail of evidence, the most interesting of which is a 1906 passport application. On it, he states that he was born in "Maswick [or Maswish], Minsk, Russia-Poland." What is this Maswick? Well, there's a small city of about 40,000 called Mińsk Mazowiecki, in present-day Poland. It's not the big, famous Minsk in Belarus at all.
Richard Feynman was indifferent to the details of his family history. But he had a well-known interest in geographical obscurities, so one imagines he would have been pleased to know his family hailed from the little Minsk in Poland that nobody knows about instead of the big, famous Minsk in Belarus.
OK, so Feynman's father was from Poland. Why did I make a blog to document this sole fact? Well, when I ran across the 1906 passport application, the first thing I tried to do was edit Feynman's Wikipedia page. But apparently Wikipedia has a policy that you aren't supposed to use "original research." I take "original" to mean a direct appeal to primary documents. I guess that means it's OK to reference someone else's original research, but you can't cite the original document itself in a Wikipedia page. The idea seems to be that Wikipedia must rely on other organizations to do peer review, but they cite news articles all the time and news articles have no peer review. Anyway...
I needed to publish my original research somewhere else first so I could cite it in Wikipedia. I felt it was important to get the information into Wikipedia somehow, because that's the first place everyone looks. My next step was to approach the editor of Royal Society Biographical Memoirs with a very short monograph containing the information I have given above. The editor, a nice lady named Helen Eaton, received my note gratefully but informed me that the correction of a single minor fact did not warrant publishing a correction or erratum. FAIL.
I really didn't want to go on shopping this around to every obscure journal of scientific biography, so that left me only one option: to publish the information myself, on my own blog as a simple fact, unbound by a silly rule about whether research is original or not. So here it is. Maybe someone can now correct the Wikipedia page and link to this blog as a secondary reference, but that someone will not be me.
I want to thank FamilySearch for making these documents and many, many others freely available to genealogy researchers.
December 23, 2018 update: findagrave.com has updated Mel's birthplace to Poland. geni.com still has the incorrect information.
Feburary 1, 2020 update: After more than a year, I figured I'd try editing Wikipedia to correct the Belarus claim. Unsurprisingly, someone reverted it within one day. They said that a blog is not a "Reliable Source" per Wikipedia standards.
The official records of the U.S. Department of State seem pretty reliable to me, but I understand where they're coming from. Wikipedia isn't a real encyclopedia; it doesn't have an editorial staff that can verify anything. But one has to ask, if Wikipedia isn't a real encyclopedia, then what is it? I suppose it's a one-stop-shop for the conventional wisdom. If Wikipedia had existed in 1500, the sun would still be orbiting the earth.
I have another Wikipedia story, this one concerning the article on Slim Gaillard, the mid-20th-century jazz songwriter. I don't remember why it caught my eye, but Wikipedia repeated Gaillard's story that he had been born in Cuba to an Afro-Cuban mother and a German father named Theophilus Rothchild, then gone on a worldwide voyage with his father only to be stranded in Crete at the age of 12.
I can almost see the old guy winking to his buddies as he spun that yarn to a credulous interviewer. A few minutes' look at the census showed that this claim was very unlikely to be true. I easily found him in 1920 in Pensacola, born in Alabama, with his never-married mother, who was also born in Alabama. In 1930, 12-year-old "Wilson" Gillard is still in Pensacola with his mother and Theophilus Rothchild is living next door to them, 71 years old and seemingly not up to a world voyage in that very year when Slim Gaillard would have turned 12. Then in 1935, a state census turns up Wilson B. Gillard in high school, not stranded in Crete. In 1940, he is a mess waiter at the Cadet Station at Pensacola Naval Airfield. He had already started his musical career by then.
I managed to get the 1920 census information into the Slim Gaillard article, but Wikipedia insists on retaining Gaillard's tall tales about his youth as if they were fact. Some stories are too good to check.
Now, the original blog...
This blog has only one purpose: to document the fact that Richard Feynman's father was born in Poland, not Belarus. I won't take up space explaining who Feynman was; if you don't already know, you won't care where his father was born. Why a blog? I'll explain later after I provide the facts.
All online sources I can find state that Feynman's father, Mel, was born in Minsk, Belarus in 1890. Examples:
Richard Feynman Wikipedia page (as of 23 November 2018)
Feynman's Minsk
findagrave entry for Mel Feynman (corrected as of 4 Feb 2019)
The Kaleo Foundation
Royal Society Biographical Memoir
and so on. In addition, James Gleick's definitive biography states, "Melville Feynman...came from Minsk, Byelorussia." Byelorussia is what English speakers called Belarus before about 1995.
I surmise that all of these sources trace back to Feynman's fascinating American Institute of Physics interview by Charles Weiner from 1966:
WEINER: Where was he born, do you recall?
FEYNMAN: Probably in Patchogue [New York]. No --- he was born in Minsk. At five he came over to the United States with his father and mother.
This is true, but incomplete. It leaves the reader assuming that the Minsk being referred to is the Belarusian capital. There is another Minsk, in Poland, which is where Mel was really born. I do not want to speculate on whether Feynman himself may have believed Mel was from Minsk, Belarus. But now we come to the hard evidence. "Mella" Feynman can be found in the 1900 Census living in the household of his father, Lewis Jacob Feynman, in Brookhaven Township, Long Island, New York. In that census, he gives his and Mel's birthplace as Russia. That does not narrow it down much, because both Poland and Belarus, along with various other now-independent nations, were part of the Russian Empire at the time of Lewis's birth. But at least this documents that Mel's father was Lewis Feynman.
 |
| 1900 Census entry for the household of Lewis Feynman |
Lewis Jacob Feynman was something of an adventurer and left a trail of evidence, the most interesting of which is a 1906 passport application. On it, he states that he was born in "Maswick [or Maswish], Minsk, Russia-Poland." What is this Maswick? Well, there's a small city of about 40,000 called Mińsk Mazowiecki, in present-day Poland. It's not the big, famous Minsk in Belarus at all.
 |
| Lewis Feynman's 1906 passport application |
Richard Feynman was indifferent to the details of his family history. But he had a well-known interest in geographical obscurities, so one imagines he would have been pleased to know his family hailed from the little Minsk in Poland that nobody knows about instead of the big, famous Minsk in Belarus.
OK, so Feynman's father was from Poland. Why did I make a blog to document this sole fact? Well, when I ran across the 1906 passport application, the first thing I tried to do was edit Feynman's Wikipedia page. But apparently Wikipedia has a policy that you aren't supposed to use "original research." I take "original" to mean a direct appeal to primary documents. I guess that means it's OK to reference someone else's original research, but you can't cite the original document itself in a Wikipedia page. The idea seems to be that Wikipedia must rely on other organizations to do peer review, but they cite news articles all the time and news articles have no peer review. Anyway...
I needed to publish my original research somewhere else first so I could cite it in Wikipedia. I felt it was important to get the information into Wikipedia somehow, because that's the first place everyone looks. My next step was to approach the editor of Royal Society Biographical Memoirs with a very short monograph containing the information I have given above. The editor, a nice lady named Helen Eaton, received my note gratefully but informed me that the correction of a single minor fact did not warrant publishing a correction or erratum. FAIL.
I really didn't want to go on shopping this around to every obscure journal of scientific biography, so that left me only one option: to publish the information myself, on my own blog as a simple fact, unbound by a silly rule about whether research is original or not. So here it is. Maybe someone can now correct the Wikipedia page and link to this blog as a secondary reference, but that someone will not be me.
I want to thank FamilySearch for making these documents and many, many others freely available to genealogy researchers.
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