Emmanuel Saltiel - a Jew from Portugal? And his cousins, the Harts:

I love how oral histories turn into something they are not.  I have read so many places where the author will state that E. H. Saltiel came to America from Portugal.

I think not!

It does state that he was a "Portuguese Jew" -  and I'm sure that's where others come up with the notion that he was from Portugal.   However...the term is slang meaning that he was a Sephardic Jew.  And that would separate him from the Ashkenazi Jews who were the colonists.

What is the difference?  Check here - not much!

I have done the family tree for Emanuel, I have collected the census records....he was born in Bath England.  He immigrated to this country at a very young age about 1862 and he immediately entered the military in the Civil War.  His father, grandfather, gr grandfather and gr gr grandfather were all born in England.  His 3rd gr grandfather was born in Greece.  The next one born in Italy and the next one in Crete.

Saltiel was not Portuguese, nor did he come from Portugal!  But he was a Sephardic Jew - and he probably practiced it some of the time.  He married Elizabeth M. Wolfe in 1870 in New York City.   In a 1871 newspaper article, he state that she was Episcopalian.  But further research shows she was born a Jew.  He was buried as a non-catholic in a catholic cemetery at Rawlins WY in 1900.

What's interesting is that he was a Sephardic Jew who arranged to have a group of Ashkenazi Jews brought to Cotopaxi in 1882.  Fascinating chapter of the Jewish migration to the Western United States.

Along with Saltiel was his cousin, Eleazer Samuel Hart, better known as E. S. Hart.  He had a store and a hotel in Cotopaxi.  Hart was raised as an Ashkenazi Jew (see that story here).   Hart's daughter was married in a synagogue in Chicago.  After Cotopaxi, this family migrated Denver, then  to Chicago IL where we find them in the census records.

His son, Myer Hart, had a son Robert M. Hart, who at some point moved from Chicago to Boulder CO.  Robert married Miriam Rothberger.  They were united by a Rabbi in Colorado.

they were living in Chicago in the 1940 census:

Robert and Miriam Hart were living in Boulder where she died in 1986.  He died there in 1995.

The Miriam R. Hart Regional Radiation Center in Boulder was built in her honor.  An amazing contribution to Colorado from the descendant of someone who was part of the Cotopaxi Colony.  So while most of the story of the Cotopaxi Colony has been one of the ashkenazi jews who were escaping persecution in Russia, I think we cannot forget the sephardic Jews who were there at the same time.

Wonder what I can find on other descendants!

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