The mysterious Rose Peizov

One of our many family mysteries involves a relative who was living with our Katz family in Hackney in 1911. The name on the census looked like Rose Peizov.

She was single, came from Russia, and was working as an assistant.

This week, while writing about the head of the household (my great-grandfather's brother Nathan Katz) for the family archive, I found some new records and a more likely name for her.

How did I find these now, when I had not found them before?

I started by assuming that if she was a relative she was probably born in the same place. I searched the 1921 census, looking for anyone who gave Ekaterinoslav as their place of birth, and found this one:

The place name is a mess, but Findmypast had transcribed it as Ekaterinoslav, so it came up in the search.

In this record, her name was Rosa Persof, and she was a clothing agent. She was boarding at 45 Sutton Street East in St George in the East, London, with the family of Jacob Levy. He was a boot repairer from Brest-Litovsk, and she was not shown as a relative.

With this more likely version of her name, I searched again and found her in 1901 in Bethnal Green:

She was fourteen, and a visitor in the home of Woolf Kritz, a cabinet-maker from Russia, who lived at 35 Hare Street. Again, she was not a relative but I researched the Kritz family and found that they came from Odessa.

In the 1939 Register, Rosa was at 16 Hilgrove Road in Swiss Cottage:

She died in February 1969 and was buried at Waltham Abbey, but there is no headstone on her grave.

There are quite a few Persoffs but no other Persof or Perzov in England. Short of ordering her death certificate, I am stumped! Why was she on her own in London at such a young age? How was she related? Watch this space!