Valerie,
Your Carpenters may have been Jewish, but they were not Yiddish, which
refers only to a language--that spoken mainly by the Jews of Eastern Europe
(consisting mostly of medieval German, with borrowings from Hebrew and Slavic). If
your Carpenters came from that region, it's probable that the surname is an
English translation of the German/Yiddish _Zimmerman_ or _Tischler_; the
Yiddish _Stolyer_ or_Zegman_; the Polish/Russian _Plotnik_, or something
comparable. If they were from Spain they would have spoken Ladino (Judeo-Spanish);
their name might have been the Spanish Carpintero. (Ladino may have its own,
distinctive word for carpenter, but I don't know it.) The Jews of France,
Italy, Greece, Turkey, etc., spoke Jewish--not Yiddish--dialects of those
countries' native languages.
Gene Z.
Message: 1
Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2006 09:29:50 -0700
From: Valerie Barbeau <vbarbeau(a)winterskye.com>
Subject: Re: [CARPENTER] Fernado Carpenter
To: DCUZZE <dcuzze(a)earthlink.net>, carpenter(a)rootsweb.com
Message-ID: <44F46B7E.9050304(a)winterskye.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Yiddish also. My Carpenters were Yiddish.
Valerie Barbeau
DCUZZE wrote:
>A search of Ellis Island comes up with several spellings of
Carpenter that
>might be Spanish or Italian :
>
>Carpenteri - Carpentero - Carpentera
>
>He might want to check some of them out.
>
>Donna Cuzze