...A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
A time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing...            

Ecclesiastes 3:5
 

 ...When I was a child, I did not like relatives. There were many of them. They were coming from somewhere far away . They were kissing me with the wet lips and - the most disgusting - I had to kiss them back. Mom was telling me: "Borik, kiss your auntie..." 

Those days I was not that fond of kissing... 

Sometimes they arrived with their children, my cousin-brothers and cousin-sisters and stayed with us. That was something I liked. Sometimes up to 30 relatives were coming to our house, sleeping in the attic and on the roll-out beds in the dining room... Mostly they were mom's brothers and sisters. Only once my father's older brother Ruvim came to visit us with his grandchildren Lora and Garik. It was sometime around 1950. I remember him reading newspapers with the headlines about Korean war.

My interest to ancestry first showed up in 1969, when I found in the "Smena" magazine a mentioning of a manager of some South American soccer team whose name was George Ratinov. Nobody at home ever talked about relatives abroad, so I did not make a big deal out of my finding, but retained the fact in my memory. 

A year later I was visiting my uncle Ruvim's family in Moscow. He already died by then , but his wife Olga Isaakovna - she was about 80 at that time - started to talk about past times, and I asked her about George Ratinov. Than she told me and Garik, a student those days, the history of our family.

It turned out, that a patriarch of our surname was a foundling. He was found at the door of a tavern one freezing night in the beginning of XIXth century somewhere near the border of Ukraine, Belorussia and Russia. The family of the innkeeper raised him and gave him a Jewish name Leiba - in Russian Leva. 

He grew up strong and smart. When he was 13, he began to help the master. His duties included cleaning rooms after guests left. Once a rich cattleman forgot his wallet under a pillow. Leiba returned it to the master. When the visitor came back and got his wallet, he gave a large bill to the tavern owner with the gratitude. When Leva grew up, the cattleman made him an apprentice in the cattle business and taught him how to make money selling cattle. Luck was coming along, and soon Leva became rich.

 Nobody knows exactly how many kids he had. Most likely, a lot. I tracked information about only three of them - David, Anisim and Mendel, Leiba's kids with his the last wife. Anisim was my grand-grandfather. He lived in Ukraine, in Elisavetgrad, now called Kirovograd. I do not know anything about children of David and Mendel. 

Anisim and Olga Gutchina - his wife - had 7 kids. The eldest, Victor, left for Argentina in 1882. Some of his descendants moved from South America to USA, I found them through the Internet. As Victor Ratinov emigrated through Germany, his last name was changed to Ratinoff. 

Victor's grand-grandson Eric Ratinoff lives in Sacramento, he helped me to find photos of Anisim and his wife. These pictures survived two World Wars and endured moving over the continents and oceans.

  Victor's younger brother, Boris Anisimovich, was my grandfather. He was born in Elisavetgrad. His wife, granny Sima, gave birth to 14 children, and raised 11 of them. This picture, made in 1925, shows almost all children of grandfather Boris, except for Mikhail and George. Mikhail was killed in WWI. Forth in the top row - my father Samuil.

 Step by step I was getting more and more info about relatives. At some point I decided to merge it all and expose to everyone's observation as a FAMILY TREE. I hope that this info will be of interest for Ratinovs in former USSR, as well as for members of our extended family all over the world - from South America to Israel. As you can see, the information is far from  being quite complete. I hope that together we can patch the holes in our pedigree.

  If you have anything to add to what's  written here - please call me 916-834-0422, or send a mail to Boris Ratinov, 3029 Victoria Dr, Sacramento, CA 95821, USA, or an email: bobratinoff@gmail.com. I will update this site with all newly discovered information. 

Thank you.