Zvi Buchmann was the son of Yitzhak and Chopa Esther. He married Rivka Stein. Their eight children — Noah, Mendel Leibel, Hanna-Rocha, Brina, Meyer, Aaron, Fruma and Dov Bereh — appear to have been born in Klykoliai, a small town in north-western Lithuania near the Latvian border. The records are inconsistent on this point: some say Klykoliai, some say Riga, some say Mitau. The country itself was inconsistent. In the span of one childhood, the same village was Russian, Lithuanian, Latvian, German-occupied, and Russian again.
A century and a half on, only four of the eight branches have been documented in any depth. Half the lines remain to be found.
The eight
Of Zvi and Rivka's eight, four lines have been the most documented, by accident more than design — they were the families with someone keeping notes. Noah's descendants reached the United States; Meyer's went to Manchester and to Memphis, where they became Bookmans; Aaron's stayed largely in the eastern United States; Dov Bereh's branch, the largest of the eight, scattered across Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, France, Israel, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States.
The other four — Mendel Leibel, Hanna-Rocha, Brina, Fruma — are mostly absent from the record. Some left no descendants. Some left descendants whose links to the family have not yet been traced. Filling those gaps is one of the active projects of this site.
Various branches of the family left Lithuania and settled across Norway, Denmark, Britain, the United States, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. Their activities in their new countries were notable — from participation in the original Montana Land Rush to a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth.
The leaving
The departures happen mostly in two waves. The first is the late nineteenth century: Trondheim around 1888, Copenhagen in the 1890s, then London, Manchester, New York, Boston, all before the Great War. The second is the post-war wave: Rotterdam in the late forties, Tel Aviv in the early fifties, Provence in the sixties, Auckland later still. Every wave was its own answer to its own question.
What surprises, looking back, is how thinly the cause is named. There is no single "we left because." The family left, separately, over four generations. The result is the present geography: a Norwegian Buchmann in Trondheim manages a transportation firm, an Israeli Buchman in Kfar Saba runs a household with three grown children, a Buchman in Massachusetts is a lawyer, a Bookman in Manchester runs a textiles business, a Levin in Rotterdam has just retired from medicine. They share great-great-grandparents.
The reunions
The first modern reunion was in 1999 in Denmark. They've kept happening, roughly every five years, in a different country each time: 2004 in Auckland; 2009 in Boston; 2014 in Trondheim; 2019 in Jerusalem; and 2024 in Rotterdam, the sixth.
What this site is, in part, is a way to keep the gap between reunions shorter. Photographs, write-ups, a tree that updates as it learns. A small editorial frame around what has always been an oral tradition.
What this site will and won't do
We are starting small, on purpose. The first version is the story you are reading, the eight branches, and a way to write to us. The family tree, the photo archive, the calendar, the per-person profile pages — those are the next two phases, and they only work if curators keep them alive.
We are not trying to be exhaustive on day one. We are trying to be honest about what is known, careful about what is private, and patient about the rest.