adding a snippet to our fund of knowledge…

… on Victor. We’re learning about our great-grandfather even though we can’t find all answers to those perennial questions: why, how, and what were you playing at? For example, why did he add a second n to his family name, Kahnn instead of Kahn? He was the sole generation, perhaps even the sole family member, to add that little flourish. All his offspring bore, or reverted to, the original single n.

The Aunt Hettie tapes provided some small extra insight into Victor’s life. We know that Victor and wife Madeline (Mathilde) lived at Crown Street, in a “beautiful” house that in 1960 had since deteriorated. Victor was described by Aunt Hettie as a character, speaking half in French and half in English, though he supposedly spoke 8 languages, being an interpreter for Cunard Line and Pacific Steam Navigation. As such he mixed with a broad variety of peoples. The Tsar of Russia gave him a breast pin, for example, and Victor used to arrive home “with his pockets full of gold sovereigns” which he’d give to his wife who’d be “sitting there putting all these sovereigns into her apron.”

He was a well-known figure in Liverpool, apparently spending much of his time between Lime Street railway station and ships in dock, presumably acting as interpreter and agent for travellers, a lot of whom would be migrating Jews using England as a land-bridge from northern Europe. During his life-time he was celebrated enough to be represented by an immediately recognisable effigy displayed in a prominent city wax-works museum, Reynolds Amusements in Lime Street.

One way or another he was a modest traveller himself. His parents were born in Schweich in Germany, Victor himself in Luxembourg, although his obituary erroneously records him as a native of Alsace. He married in Paris, then moved to Liverpool. Family hearsay hints that he was “in the navy” though in whose service we’re not told. His father Lazarus, by the way, earned the St Helene Medal for his part in fighting alongside Napoleon. Victor himself found a sword and a coin in Gibraltar Bay, both of which according to minutes he donated in 1872 to the Free Public Library, Museum and Art Gallery of the Borough of Liverpool. We have no idea what he was doing at the entrance to the Mediterranean or when he was there. Diving? We have an ancestor born in Gibraltar about 1865, Abraham Ventura, husband of Fanny Matthews (sister-in-law to our Lucy, one of Victor’s daughters). Maybe just another coincidence.

As Sherlock Holmes probably pointed out to Doctor Watson, it’s elementary that no piece of information is wholly insignificant. If you have anything new, no matter how small, please let us know. I’d like to resolve a few more cryptic clues before time comes for me to be resolved in a valedictory way.     email: contactus@kahngene.org.uk               Alan Kahn