History
Our earliest known Rogalsky ancestor is Isaac Rogalsky, born about 1820 in Lithuania. He studied in Kovno to become a rabbi but was also a mill owner in Pilvishki. Isaac married Rifka (surname unknown); their two children were Marks and Joheved. Marks emigrated to Minnesota to join a cousin, B.J. Summerfield, who had come to the USA in 1876 to establish himself as a merchant. Marks was one of the founders of the town of Hibbing, Minnesota, which at one time had a thriving Jewish culture. Marks and his wife Anna had five daughters: Ruth, Sarah, Frances, Beatrice and Marian.
Marks' sister Joheved married Samuel Levenson from Kovno, Lithuania, a teacher and school principal; Joheved ran the family store. Their five children were Sol, Max, Anna, Chaya (later Bessie Pauline) and Moe, all of whom emigrated to the USA starting in 1902 and continuing until after World War I. Sol, by that time a prosperous department store owner in El Paso, Texas, paid the first class passage for his mother and younger siblings.
El Paso was also the destination for Raytzel Bellman, shown at left with her young husband David in what may be a wedding portrait. Raytzel (born in 1865 to Mordecai and Leah Markson in Sakiai, Lithuania) married David Hersh (though family tradition says his middle name was Jacob) Beilman (as it was then spelled), son of Tevia and Corona Beilman of Sakiai, in 1885.
David and Raytzel settled in Mariampol and had eight children: Sam, Rachel (Rae), Charles, Lamar, Alex, Mary, Benjamin and Max.
David died unexpectedly at age 34 and Raytzel cared for the children on her
own. 
After
her oldest son
Samuel emigrated to the USA found success managing a general store in El Paso with his
wife Helen, pictured at right. Raytzel decided to
resettle there with her youngest son Max, then twenty. Just the two of them
emigrated in January 1921; Max's twin, Benjamin, had died in
1917 during a pogrom. The Ellis Island ship manifest (which misspells
Raytzel's first name as Raiche) shows mother and son
both bound for the New Mexico home of Eli Krupp, Raytzel's son-in-law who was married to
her daughter Rae.
After Max met Bessie Levenson in El Paso and they married in 1926, Raytzel emigrated to what was then Palestine and remarried there. Back in El Paso Max and Bessie had two children, Samuel and Deanna. Raytzel's other children also raised families in the El Paso area, all of whom are mentioned in the family trees available online through these pages.
We hope that new generations of family will be interested in the Bellman, Levenson and Rogalsky genealogies. There's still a lot to discover.
Pictured at left are three good candidates to carry on family genealogical research: from left, Malcolm, Corran and Benjamin Bellman, at Malcolm's bar mitzvah in December 2004.