Talk:William Lovenstein

more work needed
Although the Berman book I cited refers to Lovenstein as a lawyer, I could not find confirmation of this. The short Virginia legislative biographies which describe education and career began after World War I and Lovenstein died in 1896. He was not listed as a lawyer nor attorney on the censuses I managed to locate. I was not able to locate the 1890 census for him (due to time constraints and probable misspelling of his name), nor was I able to read his obituary in a Philadelphia Jewish newspaper, nor was I or two research librarians able to find a Virginia obituary for him (any of which might have described his education and career at greater length). His biography is probably not in any of L.G. Tyler's volumes because of his ancestry/religion (though I noted a long article months ago on his successor H.T. Ellyson). One librarian found a large number of articles mentioning Lovenstein on the Library of Congress website (under Chronicling America), I don't know when I'll have time to explore that archive--the name might be fairly common, as I found trying to locate a death date for his only son (whose birth was mentioned on the last census for him that I found).

Lovenstein does have the same surname as one of the first two women admitted to the Virginia bar (in 1920!), Rebecca Pearl Lovenstein. However, according to her bio on jsw.org, she was born in Vilna (then in Russia) and married Benjamin Lovenstein, who was born in Philadelphia in 1883. While this important Senator Lovenstein probably often visited Philadelphia on business or to meet two of his married sisters there, they obviously had different surnames. I really don't have the time for an extensive genealogical study of the family, but hope tomorrow to at least add the slave census references for his father's household from 1850 and 1860 that I noticed a few weeks ago in another library, before ancestry.com's site revisions. I named but am not researching his two brothers, who survived him by decades and are buried in Savannah, Georgia.Jweaver28 (talk) 22:37, 13 June 2021 (UTC)