Amsterdam family

Hmmmm, very interesting indeed!
You might be interested in the following project about Jewish Amsterdam.
http://www.geni.com/projects/Mokum-Wondrous-Jewish-Amsterdam/9182

I have Amsterdams in my family, Private User. Some of the Margolis descandants (Efrati, Itelson, Prozner) married Amsterdam.

One of my cousins from another line has Amsterdamskis in his family. Beider does not explain this, says Amsterdam means "from the city of Amsterdam".

Moshe Kalman Amsterdamski A cousin to me by marriage to a Myszkowski.

Rabbi Naftali Dov Amsterdam, A.B.D. Novogrod A cousin to me by marriage to a Margolis descendant (Itelson).

http://www.amitys.com/webtrees/individual.php?pid=I9892&ged=ged...

An excellent compilation of what is known about Rabbi Amsterdam.

Hatte Blejer Wow! You continue to amaze me, as you are certainly the most connected member on Geni.

Of course surnames were just being adopted when Rabbi Amsterdam was born and it looked to me like his family had another surname and he took Amsterdam for some reason. Like my Efratis, Prozners, and Itelsons -- all siblings -- took various names. Prozner = from Pruzhany but none of the offspring ended up using that name. Instead they became Itelson -- son of the mother named Itel and Efrati from old Hebrew from Tanakh.

Hatte, a funny reason that siblings took different names was to get around certain "inconvenient" decrees.

In Romania for example, they made a law that people/Jews can't have more than 3 kids. So every three kids got listed under a different name, usually those of the women who married into the family. Thus my great-grandmother, a Hershkovitz by birth, has brothers named Preizler and another name I can't recall).

Perhaps we can share our findings on the origins of the Amsterdam surname by writing something instead of the current placeholder at http://www.geni.com/surnames/amsterdam

"Family names were often derived from place-names. Place-names chosen by Ashkenazic Jews may represent a recent place of origin or may go back to some ancestral home (real or supposed) the family was expelled from in the Middle Ages. Thus we find such names as Amsterdam, Lemberger (from Lemberg, L'vov), Halpern (from Heilbronn), Dreyfus (from Trèves), and Shapiro (from Speier). Some names are less specific like Westermann (from the West), Unger (from the Hungarian county of Ung), Schlesinger (from Schlesien [Silesia]), and Hess (from Hessen [Bavaria])." from one of those online sources on surnames...

Could you please help me so that I can do the family tree of Stella Nina McCartney Willis (Stella McCartney) who is descended by the mother of Louis Epstein and Joseph Stella Max Lindner Freyer and Stelle (Stella Dreifuss)

Could you please help me so that I can do the family tree of Stella Nina McCartney Willis (Stella McCartney) who is descended by the mother of Louis Epstein and Joseph Stella Max Lindner Freyer and Stelle (Stella Dreifuss)

My uncle Gary Amsterdam had a genealogist trace our family back 400 years to Amsterdam. In those days they were diamond setters in Amsterdam and were known as van or Von Amsterdam. And I understand all Amsterdam's are related. My grandfather Abraham was a cousin of my grandmother Gussie. Our branch is related to Birdie Amsterdam who was the first female New York State Supreme Court back in the '50's and to the comedian from the Dick Van Dyke show in which he played buddy.