Sources

Yad Vashem, Central Database of Shoah Victims’ Names

searched properly on 17 September 2026, having previously been used for one list only. LEIBHOLZ returns 88 victim records across the List of Murdered Jews from Germany, the List of Deportation from Berlin, eighteen Pages of Testimony and the Theresienstadt inmate list. Jacob’s record (13520936) names the train: “Transport 30 from Berlin to Auschwitz Birkenau on 26/02/1943”, and gives his citizenship as German. Oskar’s (13449776) gives Theresienstadt 17 March 1943, Auschwitz 16 October 1944, and death the same day. It also identifies a source this archive had been quoting at second hand without knowing it: the Gedenkbuch Berlins der jüdischen Opfer des Nationalsozialismus, Freie Universität Berlin, Edition Hentrich, Berlin 1995 — Berlin’s own memorial book, not the national one, and the origin of the transport number.

Arolsen Archives

the international centre on Nazi persecution, some 30 million documents referring to around 17.5 million people. Index read 17 September 2026; the documents were not opened. 213 person entries under LEIBHOLZ. It confirms, from a body of records entirely separate from the Bundesarchiv, JAKOB LEIBHOLZ 08.08.1884 SCHUBIN, OSKAR LEIBHOLZ 13.05.1887 SCHUBIN and SIEGFRIED LEIBHOLZ 05.08.1925; it carries two of the brothers under the compulsory name — LEIBHOLZ, ISRAEL OSKAR and LEIBHOLZ, GEORG ISRAEL; it holds a post-war tracing case for Oskar, T/D 52.971, fourteen documents; and it holds Kurt himself. The documents stop here on purpose: opening one requires ticking a declaration of consent about the use of sensitive personal data, which is a statement a named person makes about their own conduct, and this archive does not tick it on anybody's behalf. Everything cited is from the index, which needs no consent.

The National Archives, Discovery

the catalogue of Kew and of more than two thousand five hundred other British archives. Free, no account, answers JSON. First used on 17 September 2026, after two hundred and nineteen commits that cited Kew references without once opening the catalogue they belong to. Every citation on this site verifies, and two verify more precisely than they were published: WO 392/15 is specifically “Section 5: South Africa (Union Defence Forces)”, which is exactly the claim made here about Leonard Wear; WO 329/1120 adds the page range 312–622. It also gave WO 372/4/50790, the item reference for Frederick James Castle’s medal card, and DP/12/1/14 and DP/12/1/15, the Baldock baptism registers at Hertfordshire Archives. LUWINSKI returns zero across every archive it describes. Wrapped in tools/tna.py, which has a --verify mode. On 17 September that mode was run over the whole site: forty-four distinct archival references, forty-two verified exactly, two resolved after one correction, and none wrong, missing or misattributed. The two were the same mistake twice and it is not really ours — RG 15/7079 and RG 14/7576 carry a leading zero, which is how Findmypast prints a piece number and not how Kew does. The catalogue also confirmed the content: RG 11/574 is 5K St James Bermondsey, HO 107/1560 is Bermondsey (Street Indexed), RG 14/10304 is Colchester South-East, and the three BT 27 pieces are Southampton Feb–Mar 1937, London Apr–Jun 1939 and London Aug–Oct 1939 — Leonard’s sailing, his father’s and his mother’s, in the right ports in the right months.

Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin, Berliner Adressbücher

the Berlin city directories, digitised annually from 1799 to 1970, six to seven thousand pages a volume, listing householders by name, trade and street. Free, full-text, JSON. Read from 17 September 2026; wrapped in tools/zlb.py. 1,047 page hits for LEIBHOLZ and 23 for LUWINSKI. The counts by year, with controls, are in data/berlin-adressbuch.tsv. The OCR is Fraktur and the columns jam — counting is reliable, reading a named line needs the page image.

Findmypast

, full subscription, from 16 September 2026 — the 1851, 1871, 1881, 1891, 1901, 1911 and 1921 censuses of England and Wales; the 1939 Register; the GRO birth, marriage and death indexes; BT 27 outbound passenger lists; Soldiers Died in the Great War; the First World War campaign medal rolls and medal index cards; WO 363 and WO 364 service records; British Armed Forces and Overseas births, marriages and deaths; and Hertfordshire Baptisms. Most of the Wear and Castle work on this site is from it. Its transcripts are not the records: the 1911 barracks return that names Frederick Castle’s regiment has an empty occupation column in the transcript and reads Scottish Rifles on the image. Worked through the Australian site — www.findmypast.com.au and search.findmypast.com.au — which is where David’s subscription lives and what every link in this archive’s data points at, though the records are the same British ones.

FamilySearch full-text search

, signed in, 17 September 2026 — which reads the words on unindexed images rather than a name index. LUWINSKI, LUWINSKY, LUWENSKI and the phrase Piccadilly Hat: thirty-three hits and every one American. The control ran first and the corpus really does hold South Africa — but what it holds is the voters’ rolls of 1925–1931, and every person this archive wants arrived after the last roll was printed.

gendatabase.com

a free mirror of the South African archives index with death and estate databases attached, and it does stem matching where the official index does not. It answered in four seconds a question that had taken a day, and produced three Luwinski court files nobody had seen.

Bundesarchiv, Gedenkbuch — Opfer der Verfolgung der Juden unter der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft in Deutschland 1933–1945

, online edition, read 14 September 2026. Entries en1100957 (Jacob), en909753 (Samuel), en1100894 (Oskar), en1100801 (Georg). Also the surname search returning 50 Leibholz entries, which is what showed the two family clusters.

MyHeritage

, Defranceski family site, family tree 9 — 164 individuals and 648 facts, read 14 September 2026. The spine of this archive and the thing most of the work consists of checking.

MyHeritage DNA

ethnicity estimate and match list for Lynn Derrick Luwinski's kit, read 14 September 2026.

FamilySearch, South Africa, Civil Marriage Records, 1840–1973

Kurt Luwinski and Ivone de Figueiredo de Witt, 19 June 1948, Johannesburg, certificate 858 (1:1:6ZHT-WSJM; page image 3:1:3Q9M-CSJ1-SJQK, digital film 008109682, frame 2047 — read from the film on 15 September 2026, having twice been read only from a photograph in the family tree); Morris Isaac Salkow and Ivone Luwinski, 13 February 1953 (1:1:6ZHR-B6Y3). Hanover, Orange Free State records, for the 1956 marriage — but see the next entry: the citation is the film group's catalogue title, not the contents of the frame.

Marriage register, entry No. 169 of 1956

, form B.M.D. 3 (a) — Kurt Luwinski and Frances Sefton, formerly Berner, born Hostovsky, 29 February 1956, Johannesburg, Transvaal. Held in the MyHeritage tree as photo 9500001, catalogued there as record-image_ and attached to Frances; original scan 3,918 × 5,245 px, read at full resolution 14 September 2026. Every field transcribed in notes/marriage-register-1956.md. The frame is plainly Johannesburg, whatever the film group is called.

Held. A copy is in this project's source library: A scan held in the MyHeritage tree as photo 9500001, attached to Frances; 3,918 × 5,245 px, transcribed in notes/marriage-register-1956.md

MyHeritage Y-DNA

, kit MH-7GGV62, read 14 September 2026 — haplogroup R-S11477, reported as nested within R-Z381, haplogroup family R1b/Z381, parent node R-FGC13328; with the Country Frequency table for 74 testers. MyHeritage labels its own call a low-resolution estimate (microarray, not Big Y), and the Y-DNA pages are powered by FamilyTreeDNA. Phylogeny and frequencies for R-U106/Z381, and Ashkenazi Y-haplogroup frequencies, from the published literature — see notes/ydna-result.md for the working.

Gazettes.Africa

(Laws.Africa / AfricanLII) — a free, full-text searchable archive of African government gazettes; 54,313 South African issues. A search for Luwinski returns eight, giving the Piccadilly Hat Company notices of 1940–52 and two for Pauline in 1972 and 1975. Transcribed in notes/piccadilly-hat-company.md. Its Mozambique run begins only in 1975, so the colonial Boletim Oficial is not there.

FamilyTreeDNA Discover

(public, no account), haplogroup R-S11477 — ancestral path, age estimates, the 42 downstream branches, and the Suggested Projects listing that names the surname projects on the branch. Read 14 September 2026.

MyHeritage DNA Matches

, Derrick's kit, name or ancestral surname search across all 5,464 matches, 14 September 2026. Results in notes/surname-sweep.md. Match holders are living and are described by role, country and shared centimorgans only.

National Archives of South Africa — NAAIRS, now the National Archival Information Search System

, read 14 September 2026 — at an address that has since moved. The search system now answers at www.national.archsrch.gov.za/sm300cv/smws/; the old host stopped resolving on 16 September and this archive briefly published that the service was down, which was wrong. On 17 September it answered 503 — a server saying it exists and cannot reply, which is a different thing again, and nothing has been published from it since. All 43 documents indexed under FIGUEIREDO, saved to data/naairs-figueiredo.tsv — among them WLD 1950/1948, which gives Ivone's birth name in full. Also the seven under LUWINSKI, including the estate file TAB MHG 7584/69, and the single document under the variant spelling LUWINSKY. *** 11 OCTOBER 2026 — THE SERVICE MOVED AGAIN, AND THE OLD ADDRESS IN THIS ROW IS DEAD. *** www.national.archsrch.gov.za answers 503 and naairs.htm is 404. NAAIRS is now https://www.nationalarchives.gov.za/search/, titled the National Archival Information Search System and subtitled with the words NAAIRS stands for: free, no account, an Angular portal with all twenty repositories including RSA for all at once, a four-keyword form, and a JSON API at /search-api/api/search. Its own routes 404 if typed directly, so it must be entered at /search/ and the repository clicked. And NARSSA still publishes the two-database warning — 8.3 million entries migrating, the “fulltext search” admittedly incomplete — and names this portal as the complete one: “To search the complete database please click on: Search NAAIRS Database”, whose link is exactly that URL. Measured here with live controls: SMITH 47,936 and SCHMIDT 3,418. One caveat: a multi-word keyword is not a phrase, so one surname per box.

Stolpersteine Berlin

checked for Leibholz stones; those found (Willmanndamm 6, Danckelmannstraße 44) belong to other Leibholz families.

Geneteka, the Polish Genealogical Society’s volunteer index

put to this family three times and useful every time for the SAME REASON — it says what it does not hold. Warmińsko-mazurskie: its 278 parishes include Olsztyn and Reszel and their civil registries and do not include Bössau, Biesowo, Jeziorany or Zerbuń, which are the two places Kurt’s mother’s family actually came from. Pomorskie, 11 October 2026: of the eleven West Prussian and Pomeranian towns the Gedenkbuch’s fifty Leibholz cluster in, nine are not indexed at all — Człuchów (Schlochau) and Czarne (Hammerstein) among them — and of the two that are, Przechlewo stops before 1800 and Debrzno, which is Preussisch Friedland, stops before 1840. And the province holds essentially no Jewish records: births give Schmidt 1,134 and Kowalski 1,023 against Cohn 1, Levy 0, Levin 0 and Israel 1, so a Jewish surname’s zero in this index is the index speaking and is never recorded here as a negative. Two warnings for anyone using it: the province codes are positional and an invalid one falls back silently to dolnośląskie, which cost this archive a day in September; and the results are an AJAX call, so the HTML page returns an empty table and the rows come from api/getAct.php.

Landesarchiv Berlin — LABSA, the Namensverzeichnisse to Berlin’s civil registers

the public viewer of the name indexes to Berlin’s birth, marriage and death registers — free, no account, no fee — and the instrument behind every Berlin register reading on this site. Worked from 7 October 2026; wrapped in tools/labsa.py. Over 600 volumes have been passed through it and roughly 150 read entire, across Neukölln, Kreuzberg, Reinickendorf, Spandau, Schöneberg and all eleven East Berlin offices. Three limits worth knowing before anyone uses it again. The record-type checkboxes do not union — ask for one kind per request or the answer is silently wrong. It cannot display umlauts: search an office on its stem (‘Neuk’) and pick the mangled entry out of the list. And there are 150-odd registry offices with no index across them, each indexing births, marriages and deaths separately for every year, so an enquiry that cannot name the responsible Standesamt cannot be answered at all. The label “Durchsuchbares PDF durch OCR-Texterkennung” is not a promise about the names. Every volume on this site is scored against six common surnames before its silence is allowed to count, and the blind ones are recorded as unread rather than as negatives.

Genealogia w Archiwach, the Polish state archives’ scan portal

the digitised holdings of the Polish state archives. It serves scans through a Loris IIIF tile server, which means a page can be read at up to twice its native resolution rather than at whatever size the viewer offers — and that is what made the Szubin marriage entry of 1874 legible letter by letter, re-read against the registrar’s own capitals elsewhere on the same page. Free.

Archiwum Państwowe w Bydgoszczy

the Polish state archive holding the Szubin registers, answered by letter on 25 September 2026. The holdings fact it gave is the reason a letter was worth writing: the Jewish registers of Szubin survive for 1820–1847 only. That is the wrong span for Friederike and the right span for Abraham Schmul, born 1846, whose entry would name the same parents if he is her brother. A fourth letter asking for that one year is drafted and unsent.

Trove, National Library of Australia

the digitised Australian newspapers, read through its API for the branch that sailed in 1965. Free; the key is held locally and is not in this repository.

Conservatória do Registo Civil do Porto · Arquivo Histórico de Moçambi

Conservatória do Registo Civil do Porto · Arquivo Histórico de Moçambique, Maputo · Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, Lisbon

Landesarchiv Berlin — Schöneberg registers of birth, marriage, divorce

Landesarchiv Berlin — Schöneberg registers of birth, marriage, divorce and death

Mapping the Lives, built on the 17 May 1939 census — Arolsen and Yad V

Mapping the Lives, built on the 17 May 1939 census — Arolsen and Yad Vashem both come off this list on 17 September 2026; they are now above.

Master of the Supreme Court, Pretoria — estate file 7584/1969

Master of the Supreme Court, Pretoria — estate file 7584/1969

Schubin (Szubin) Jewish registers — Hammerstein (Czarne) is no longer

Schubin (Szubin) Jewish registers — Hammerstein (Czarne) is no longer on this list, because it has been answered. The Archiwum Państwowe w Koszalinie replied on 16 September 2026, reference O-S.6342.406.2026: it holds no civil registers for Standesamt Hammerstein 1874–1899 and no books of the Jewish community at Czarne at all, and no information about where either went. That was the only document that could have named Georg Leibholz's parents. The bounded negative →

Allenstein and Kreis Rössel Catholic parish registers

Allenstein and Kreis Rössel Catholic parish registers

Landesarchiv Berlin — the Digitaler Antrag

not a source to read but the counter at which Berlin copies are bought. Registers that are not digitised — and the Sammelakten that sit alongside the marriage registers, which in 1923 would normally hold the birth certificates of both parties and therefore the parents this archive still cannot confirm on one document — are ordered here for a fee. Every one of these is a purchase and David’s to make. Six are drafted and none is ordered.