This website, a family history website, is under construction and is very much a work in progress ….. We begin this website with Hanna (Hinde) Israel and Emanuel (Menachem) Samuel (born c.1755). Emanuel Samuel, who bore the Hebrew title ‘the learned’, had left his birthplace, Kempen in the province of Posen (now Poland) and settled in London in about 1775. Emanuel died in 1800 when his youngest son Moses was just five. The two elder sons, Nathan and Louis, moved to Liverpool to seek their fortunes. The eldest, Nathan, became a pawnbroker and navy agent and in 1820 became president of the Liverpool synagogue. The second, Louis, followed him to Liverpool: starting out as a pawnbroker, he became a silversmith and watchmaker and made enough money to retire in 1846 and return to live in London. In 1805, at the age of ten, Moses too was brought by his widowed mother to live in Liverpool. This website records, and sometimes examines, the descendants of Louis and Moses Samuel and the families that married into the Samuel family and vise versa, including Reis and Wolf. With regard to Reis, because that family has complex historical roots among the rabbinical elite of Central Europe, special attention has been paid to those notable antecedent families of the Reis family.

The second Lady Swaythling lands safely on the Thames: