Family history documents: Ruth Schwartz & family

Ruth (Schwartz) Black (1912-2005) is the maternal grandmother of my husband, Jeff Rosenthal; this is a collection of archival documents related to Ruth, her siblings (Helen, Mae, Blanche, Arthur, Dan, Ethel, and Gladys), their parents Benjamin Schwartz and Julia (Weiss) Schwartz, their grandparents, etc.

In researching family history, I have come across some fascinating documents such as census forms and marriage certificates. Many are digitized documents made available online by archives and/or ancestry.ca; others are not digitized, but one can order a photocopy of the original document from an archive. I decided to post these documents online, as I think other family members will find them as interesting as I did.

I am greatly indebted to Gladys (Schwartz) Kaminsky (1918-2001), whose detailed "Schwartz-Weiss Family Tree" (1980) provided a lot of facts about Ruth's grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings -- especially the names of each family member's spouse and children. Having all those names made it possible, when searching online for census forms and other documents, to determine which ones corresponded to this family.

-- Margaret Fulford, May 2017 (margaret.fulford@utoronto.ca)

Introduction:

Overview of family history (with links to selected documents) (a good place to start)
Some photos of Ruth Schwartz and her family
Family tree: Ruth Schwartz & her ancestors
Some addresses of Ruth Schwartz and her family
The story of Benjamin Schwartz and Julia (Weiss) Schwartz as told by their youngest child, Gladys (Schwartz) Kaminsky as an introduction to her "Schwartz-Weiss Family Tree," 1980 (please note that some dates in this story may not be quite right)
Childhood memories of Gladys (Schwartz) Kaminsky (Ruth's younger sister), 1987

Documents (with notes):

1. Main documents: -- these contain information about Ruth (Schwartz) Black and her siblings, parents, and grandparents

2. Additional documents -- these contain additional information about the aunts, uncles, and cousins of Ruth (Schwartz) Black

A note about sources:

For the most part I am not including information about living people; however, some publicly available documents (such as 1940 U.S. census forms) may mention people who are still with us today.
In many cases I found digitized documents online via ancestry.ca or via the websites of government archives or historical societies; in other cases the documents weren't available online but I was able to order a photocopy which arrived by mail.
I have copy/pasted online transcriptions where available; these are modern transcriptions (i.e., created recently), usually provided by volunteers who transcribe sets of handwritten historical documents. While these transcriptions are very helpful (often it's only because of them that it's possible to search for a person's name and find records about that person!), please bear in mind that they may not be entirely correct -- they're only someone's best effort to decipher the handwriting.