Another Etta Bryna - Is She One Of Ours?

I have written in this space about my mother's mother's mother, Etta Bryna Rosenbloom, over the years. She died young - maybe her late thirties - and we know very little about her. Not even her birth surname. From her 1896 tombstone, we know that her father was Yehudah and he was a Levi. She lived in Borisov, but that was her husband's town, not necessarily hers.

We know that her maternal haplogroup is U1b1 as I did that test myself. Ten years ago, I wrote about finding a MtDNA match, with a fairly close autosomal match. And that tester's great-grandmother was Yenta (or Yetta) Bryna, probably ten years younger than our Etta Bryna. The given name combination is unusual and I am quite certain that these two women are first or second cousins.

That led me to adopt a strategy based on that given name combination. I discuss it with DNA matches and occasionally search the Belarus database on JewishGen. I have even paid a research organization a significant sum for document searches, but they had nothing that was not available from public sources.

Recently a new search on JewishGen turned up. 

A death record for Ita Brama Levit, died at nine months on 2 December 1872, the fourteenth of Kislev. The original includes some Hebrew and it is clearly Ita Bryna.

The full record is below.

Her father is Arya (Aryeh), which is interesting because our Etta Bryna's father is Yehudah and those male names are similar.

In the Hebrew, the surname actually appears to be Levite (pronounced with three syllables) which is not necessarily a form of "Levi."

This death was in Mogilev, about 154 km east of Borisov.

I wrote to a few Levitt/Levite researchers in Mogilev and elsewhere, but no one seems to know the family of this child. There are a few Arya in the 1858 revision lists for Belarus, but nothing I can do anything with.

So we file away another lead. Perhaps for future reference.