The Arelisky Family – (also sometimes known as the Smiths)

Introduction

Welcome

This website was built to store all of my family’s historical media and make it available to a wider audience. We’re the Smiths, but the original family name is Arelisky. On our maternal side, the family name was Portney.

We hope that you like it.

Who is Arelisky?

The name Arelisky is the original name of our family before coming to America. When I was younger I’d ask my father what our family name really was before it was changed. After all, not many Russian peasants during the time of the czar were named “Smith”. Surely, we became Smiths after coming to America, but who were we before then?

My father knew very little of our family’s history, and I unfortunately didn’t have grandparents who could fill in the missing blanks. Fearing that we’d lose our family’s identity forever, I spent many hours bumping into dead ends and following small pieces of information until one day I got lucky and stumbled on the missing pieces.

We’re descendants of the Arelisky family of Pumpenai, Lithuania.

Here’s the birth record of my grandfather, Aharon Shabsei Arelisky (who eventually becomes Samuel Smith) from the Pumpenai archives.

The Portneys

The Portney family comes from Horochow in the Ukraine (sometimes spelled Gorokhov or Horchiv).

Views of the village of Horochow as well as the main synagogue.

It’s believed that the Portneys immigrated to Baltimore around 1912.

About the Site

Most of the media on this site is password protected.

If you’d like to get access to it, please send me a note.

Video

The videos here were captured during the period of 1959 until 1977 using a consumer-grade 8 mm Kodak film camera. They contain family gatherings as well as significant events in our family’s history.

As an example, here’s some video of Passover 1968:

To download a list of the scenes contained in the entire video, click here

Download Now!

To download the entire video (large, ~2.5 GB) click here:

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Note: The first 25 seconds of the video are without sound. Downloading the file will generally cause the video to begin playing (depending on your browser). You can also download the entire file for playing offline later.

Audio

The audio that’s available here was captured from 1966 until 1970 on an Awai reel-to-reel tape recorder. It consists mostly of songs that we sang, holiday and otherwise.

As examples, here’s a version of Had Gadya from Passover, 1968.

This is lighting the Hanukkah menora, 1968.

To download the entire library of our family’s audio recordings, click here:

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Portney Family Archive

The Portney Family Circle

The Nathan and Mary Portney Family Circle existed from 1947 until 1954 and was created to:

… form a circle of happiness and goodwill, letting no troubles or evils enter or break our circle.

Through the years they not only organized social events, but also collected money and goods to send to the extended family in Europe and Israel.

Minutes from the Family Circle meeting have been preserved at the Jewish Museum of Maryland and have been copied and made available here (it’s really quite a remarkable read).

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Contact Us

You may contact us by sending an email here.

We’d love to hear what you think about the website and what we can include to make it better. If you have any digital information that would be beneficial to include about the Areliskys and/or Portneys, we’d love to have it.

Open Questions

We’ve put an awful lot of effort into researching the history of our family, yet there are still many basic questions that we don’t know the answers to. If you have any insights (or would like your own little research project), we’d be thrilled if you could help.

When did the Arelisky family formally emigrate to America? We know that it was sometime in the late 1890s, but there is conflicting information on several census forms of the time.
How did the Areliskys get to America? We’ve been unable to track down any ship or landing records. It’s believed that they entered through Baltimore but may have gone through Ellis Island/Castle Garden. Each possibility has been checked unsuccessfully.
Why did the Areliskys choose to settle in Baltimore?
When was the family name changed from Arelisky to Smith?
When did the Portneys emigrate to America? Census forms suggest 1912, but we’ve been unable to find immigration records to confirm this.
Did the Portneys come straight to Baltimore? We do know that Baltimore was a popular destination for people from Horochow and that there was a small community of people there.