Sore Cohen

#792 Sore Cohen ( Basche Gute "Bessie" Basewitz◊ • Henry Basewitz◊ )

Sore was born Abt 1902/1903 in Pinsk, Russia. She died.

She is indexed by Ancestry.com as Ivee Cohen but this is clearly a mis-transcription. My best reading is Sore Cohen, Sore being a not-uncommon name on passenger lists from that region.

Sore is problematic because the last record we have of her is her detention record at immigration in 1907. She does not appear with the family on the 1910 Census three years later. She's too young to have married away. One possibility is that she died during those three years. This is the explanation I've used. However, it should be noted that, on the 1910 Census, Bessie lists that she has 10 of 10 children living. Nine of them are listed and Mildred has married and moved away at this point.

To explain this, it is possible that Sore is actually Sadie/Sallie; we do have the first letter match. The difficulty with this is in the ages. Sore was born 1902/3 according to the immigration record, making her 7-8 by the time of the census. However, Sadie/Sallie is listed as 16, which is just too far to stretch.

Alternatively, we could shift the birth years of all three of the sixth, seventh and eighth children to try to make them line up: Rassel to Sadie, Sonie to Rose and Sore to Sophie. However, this involves not only the assumption of quite a few date errors in immigration but also ignoring the name similarities of those other children. Also, Bessie had children every two or three years until the long gap between Sophie and the twins. Adding another child there makes some sense. It's simpler to assume that Bessie misunderstood the question of how many children she had ever had to mean, "How many living?" and answered ten instead of eleven.

Of course, another possibility is that Sore is not a daughter at all, but was smuggled in under that relationship and delivered to her real family right after landing.

New York, Passenger Lists, 1820-1957, Ancestry.com. New York, Passenger Lists, 1820-1957 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010. Year: 1907; Arrival: New York, New York; Microfilm Serial: T715; Microfilm Roll: 858; Line: 10; Page Number: 34

Line Generation: 3

Relationship: Great-Grand-Aunt