Name: Leo Nurkin 5/04/1911-1/10/1948
Family: Wife, Nell Margaret Webster, son, Sidney.
Leo's son Sid wrote this about his father:
My father was Leo Nurkin, the youngest son of Harry Abraham Nurkin and Rebecca Glazer Nurkin. My grandfather accompanied his older brother, Dr. Jack (Joseph Jacob) Nurkin, to Durham, North Carolina shortly after the turn-of-the-century. Dr. Jack Nurkin had been induced to come to Durham to be the "town doctor." He set up a practice on Main Street, and my grandfather, a shoemaker by trade, opened a shoe repair shop down the street. My grandfather and Dr. Jack Nurkin were two of five Nurkin brothers and one sister who had immigrated to this country from Lithuania in the 1880s. They came from a small village northwest of Vilnius. The brothers first settled in the Newark, NJ. Two of the brothers -- Ira and Louis -- opened a successful printing business based in Newark known as The Nurkin Press. The children of the fifth brother, Thomas, live on the West Coast. A sister was named Cassie. A sixth brother immigrated to South Africa where he worked in the diamond business. His descendants still live there under the name Nurek. Dr. Jack Nurkin eventually left Durham and moved to Baltimore, Md., where, he joined the medical faculty of Johns Hopkins University.
Harry Nurkin remained in Durham and ran a shoe repair shop at the corner of Mangum and Parrish streets. Harry and Rebecca Nurkin had five children. In order, they were: Jake (who married Eva, a Catholic woman he met in France while serving in World War I, and had no children), Susie (who married Mose Levy and had four children-Ed, Helen, Sidney and Sally), Elizabeth (whose married name was Krasney and had children Esther and Harvey), Michael (who did not marry) and my father Leo. My father married Nell Margaret Webster, a Christian woman who had come to Durham from Chesterfield, South Carolina to work. Leo worked for the ABC Board at its store on Ninth Street. Nell was the manager of the Style Shop, a women's dress shop on Main Street. He died in 1948 at the age of 35 from a bacterial infection of the heart.
Several years after that, my mother married Jake Nurkin, whose wife Eva had passed away from complications of diabetes. Nell was a successful businesswoman and in the 1970s was named both the Mother of the Year and the Business Woman of the Year in Durham. Jake ran a hat cleaning and pressing business on Mangum Street for many years. None of the descendants of Harry and Rebecca Nurkin live in Durham.