Hi Geoff:
I am curious as to where your family was from prior to the UK. I have
some Camber cousins in England now, and there were a number of others in the
past, but I don't see a connection with the names at your web page.
In the case of my own family, the family members of my great
grandparents, Lewis and Henrietta (Radman) Camberg, emigrated from Lithuania
(vicinity of Keidan or Kaunas, then in Kovno Guberniya [province], Russia)
between 1874 and 1876, and settled in Edinburgh. There were stories of many
people being left in Scotland by unscrupulous ship captains, thinking they
were being let off on the shores of America, but I don't know whether this
was the case with my family or not.
The name was generally rendered as Kamber in Lithuania, but picked up a
'g' on the end by the time they arrived in Scotland. My grandfather was
born in Edinburgh as Charles Camberg in 1882, but the 'g' had been dropped
by the time he arrived in the US about 1896. (Some other family members
also dropped the 'g', while others kept it to the present day.) Some of my
grandfather's 10 siblings went to Australia (two sisters who married two
brothers) and some to South Africa, while the others remained in the UK. My
grandfather was the only one to come to the US for a time, although a few
others found their way here later. Some elements of the family even settled
in Israel, where there are some present-day researchers with whom I am in
contact.
After much frustration with trying to deal with genealogical research
in the UK by long distance, I hired a local researcher there some time back
and had excellent results. The brick wall for me has been going back into
the archives in Lithuania (where my great great grandparents, Yaakov (Jacob)
and Rachel (Seigal) Camberg were born and apparently died), which I think is
where the link of many Camber/Kamber/Camberg families lies. I heard from
another researcher who has been to Lithuania to attempt research that the
Kamber families had a sort of concession by the Russian czars to cut and
process lumber for them, and the family members who left the country were
largely those who did not fit into the family business for one reason or
another. I don't know anything about the factual basis for this, but it
does seem from census records in Scotland that most of the Cambergs who were
there in the 1870s and 1880s were "jewellers," "travelling jewellers"
or
"commercial travelers." Probably because of the people being dispossessed
of their land, they moved around a great deal from one census to another,
which made tracing them significantly difficult.
You have done a nice job at your web page. The only reservation I have
about putting our genealogical data on the internet has to do with identity
theft, especially where there is no password protection of data for living
family members. I know that not everyone shares this concern, as one of my
(non-Camber) cousins put all of my data, including for my daughters, at her
website unbeknownst to me, and without password access. For this reason, I
tend to favor an approach like that of
www.myfamily.com (part of
ancestry.com).
Ken Camber
Salem, Oregon
----- Original Message -----
From: <GeoffCamber(a)aol.com>
To: <CAMBER-L(a)rootsweb.com>
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2001 2:20 PM
Subject: [CAMBER-L] New Member
By way of introduction my name is Geoff Camber and I live in Gloucester,
UK.
Having researched my surname to the 'brick wall', I have now changed my
research to a one name study. My research is restricted to the UK at
present. When I have a good database to work from I intend to expand to
Europe and beyond.....
I have started a 'Camber/Cambers/Kamber' names web site at
http://members.aol.com/geoffcamber
The data is mainly confined to data from the 1881 census, but more will be
added later. Any names that you can identify as linked, please let me
know.
Geoff Camber
Member 3539, Guild of One-Name Studies
Researching 'Camber', 'Cambers' and 'Kamber'
Email: camber(a)one-name.org