Doctors

April 2, 2012

World War II Marine

Compiled from notes by Judy Lanskey

Judy is a niece by marriage and was raised by Robert George Stagg, née Hans Georg Hirschland (1921-1970), a son of Dr. Fritz Hirschland. Judy has shared these recollections with us:

My uncle was in the Marines, I believe, until he was 29 and although I was quite young when he told us these stories, I know that he wanted to be a career soldier. Because he was German, the military sent him to Japan instead of Germany and he had his back broken there. He knew some of the guys that are in the statute of Iwo Jima. He was given a silver star and a purple heart and an honorable discharge. It was after his discharge that he attended NYU. (Note that Hans is the only Hirschland we found a record of who served in the US Military during WWII. Charles Hannam, née Karl Hirschland, served in the Britsh military, but was also kept out of the European theater.) Continue Reading

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March 7, 2012

Scandal: Dr. Hirschland

by Victoria Hess — Dec. 2010

Fritz H. Hirschland, found on Ancestry.com


Dr. Fritz Hirschland (born 1880) received his medical degree in Germany and moved to the US around 1913. (An Ellis Island document suggests it might have been the year before.) Of course, he took up his vocation in Flushings after he got settled. The authorities did not like that very much.

In March 2011, one of Fritz’s grandsons, Alex Ivsky, got in touch with us, having found our family tree on-line. He was surprised to have found us, since, as he said of his grandfather, “Fritz really never talked about his family.  How they came to live in Flushing?  I don’t know.  Did they know your grandparents??? (who lived on the upper west side at the time)  Unknown.”

Alex added that this news article makes sense in the context of little family history he knows, since it explains why “my grandmother took her three children BACK to Germany for a year in 1922.  Both my mother and her sister talked about that trip although, they never said why (they might not have known?)  My maternal grandmother (Lehnert) was one of eight so, there are plenty of relatives on that side, as well.”

Alex added that the only other Hirschland he had known was “was an actor who lived in Kontanz (Constance on the Lake of Constance) and who was on summer vacation while I lived there during the summer of 1978  (so I never met him).”

What Alex found even more amazing was that he lived only blocks from Roger Hirschland in Washington DC, who I first found when I lived across the street from him in Washington. Roger (my second cousin) had been the first Hirschland outside of my immediate family that I met as a adult, and it appears it will be the same for Alex (our fifth cousin)!

February 20, 2012

The Harveys

updated Feb. 27, 2011, with thanks to Peter Levitt, Richard’s cousin

The tree: Salomon Herz Hirschland (one of the three original brothers) >> Moses Hirschland >> Richard Hirschland >> Sydney Harvey (born Hirschland) >>Anthony Harvey >>Richard Harvey

I have found another renamed UK Hirschland family, the Harveys. The Harveys were actually known to several living Hirschland family members through their banking connections, though they were not listed on any of the family trees that I had in my possession. One evening while scrolling through many pages of Google search results for Hirschland, I found the following listing and opened the 50 page e-book that it referred to:

But I’m Jewish!
headmaster at his school told him, “Hirschland, in the future you will be known as Harvey.” The story goes that my grandfather recognised that a name like …
jewsforjesus.org/resources/ebooks/archive/harvey/harvey.pdf Continue Reading