Young Blume and Chone

My grandparents Flora (Blume) Burak and Chone Gniazdowicz (later Harry Ness) immigrated to the United States separately, presumably unaware of each other. Chone arrived on December 31, 1906, and Blume sometime in 1907. Blume was born in Jedwabne, Poland. She was one of four children born to Aaron Burak (a blacksmith) and Sheine Gitel Drejarska. Her family was well-to-do, unlike Aaron's.

Blume spent some time in Detroit, Michigan upon her arrival to the States, presumably with a relative or landsman, then she came to New York, to the Lower East Side, where she resided for a time in a building adjacent to where Chone, her future husband, lived. Flora and Chone were residing in adjacent buildings on Rutgers Place on the Lower East Side for a time. They eventually met and wed in January of 1914.

Flora's brother Max, her Uncle Chatzkel, as well as her cousin Edith Burak, had already immigrated to the United States. Chone's cousins Jake Cohen (nee Skura) and Chone (Chona Jankiel) Ness (who eventually too took on the name of Harry Ness), were already in the United States too. Hopefully, all of them were able to attend Flora and Chone's marriage ceremony in lower Manhattan.

After they wed, Chone and Flora lived for a time in a building that stood on Monroe Street on the Lower East Side. They resided there for a couple of years. The building, which was located at 105 Monroe Street, stood adjacent to an onramp that led onto the Manhattan Bridge. In 1917 their first child, Archie, was born. By the time their second child, Pearl, was born (the first-born, Archie, was born in 1915 on the Lower East Side), they had already moved to a tenement located in the East New York section of Brooklyn, where they lived in a four-story apartment building for nearly fifty years.