Origin of the name Gershtenfeld

The name Gershtenfeld is a true Galician name that gradually with the migration of Jewish families came to the Russian empire (in the 19-th century, Jews in Russia in some sense lived better than in Austria-Hungary to which Galicia belonged). Several hundred documents about Gershtenfelds of Lvov and Tarnopol areas (birth, death and marriage records) remained from the 19-th century. The largest number of people with this family name lived around the Galician shtetl Rava-Russka which means that people having the name Gershtenfeld most probably have common roots and are members of the same clan and not just people with the same family name.

In Russia of the end of the 19 - beginning of the 20 centuries the name could be encountered at the border of Moldova and Ukraine (Hotin, Bel'tzy, Akkerman) and in some towns of Volyn (Dubno). Essentially this confirms indirectly the Galician origin of Gershtenfelds as Volyn and Moldova were traditional ways of migration of Jews from Galicia. Another traditional way of migration was moving to neighboring Polish areas where also a substantial part of the family spread before the World War II.

Now about the meaning of the family name.

On the one hand, in Yiddish the expression "gershtenfeld" has a literal meaning of "barley field". In the same places where Gershtenfeld families lived also related names occurred - Gershtenberg (barley mountain) and Gershtenblum (color of barley). Possibly life of this big family was so intimately connected with the barley trade that this fact was reflected in the choice of names by the family members.

However in our view this and related names come not from "barley" but from the hereditary clan name that was passed in this family from generation to generation. "Gershten" may be not "barley" but a form of a male name Gershon that often occurred throughout all the 19-th century among people having the name Gershtenfeld (it is also not excluded that this first Gershon was an owner of some field). It is possible that various spellings of the name have appeared because different families of descendants of Galician Gershon having fixed their ancestor's name in ages still wanted to differ from each other and this is why they might have added to the ancestor's name different endings of "berg", "blum", "feld" and others.

However all these versions have right to exist.