Richard Lester's Family History

Richard's father was born Elliott Liebman in Hoboken, New Jersey on July 16, 1893. Both his parents, Philip and Rosy, were Jewish and were listed in the 1900 census as having been born in Romania. They are buried in the Har Nebo Cemetery:

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/219440973/philip_liebman

At some point Elliott added Lester to his name. His draft registration card for World War I was signed Elliott L. Liebman. He was still using that name on January 16, 1924, when he gave an address on Eugene O'Neill to the Society Of Arts and Letters in Philadelphia, where he was teaching English at Central High School. On December 19, 1921, Liebman had given a lecture at the Young Women's Hebrew Association. By the time he was drafted again for World War II, however, he was signing his name as Elliott Lester, the same name he had used to write successful plays since, at the latest, 1925, when he debuted with The Mud Turtle:

https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-cast-staff/elliott-lester-5365

Richard's mother was born Ella Young in Philadelphia in 1893. Her father, William Young, was born in Artnagross, Antrim, Northern Ireland in 1854 and had emigrated to the US in 1873 (sources: 1900, 1920 and 1930 censuses). Her mother, Ella Coombs Flinn, had been born in Delaware. Although Richard's mother appears not to have been Jewish, she received her occupational qualification from the Jewish School of Nursing.

Richard Lester was born in 1932 and we may infer that his father had long-ceased using the name Liebman by that point. I have not (yet) seen a birth record that can confirm whether Liebman was part of his legal birth name. What is known, however, is that his parents had a stillborn baby and that only the surname Lester appears on the death certificate, applied to the baby and the parents (note that the stillbirth took place at the Jewish hospital and the baby was cremated here):

I infer that Richard's mother Ella took the married name Lester not Liebman when they wed in the 1920s, perhaps because she brought a daughter with her and they wanted the daughter to be a Lester not a Liebman. It logically follows that Richard would have been born Richard Lester and not Richard Lester Liebman, and that would be my working assumption unless other information emerges. 

Another factor is that Elliott and Ella were atheists and that Richard himself is a strident atheist. Lester's biographer, Andrew Yule, claims that his mother became an atheist after being abandoned by her first husband (p.22). However, Yule's book gets Lester's mother's birthplace wrong and has her father arriving two decades later than he actually did, so its reliability is suspect. The biography fails to mention his father's Jewish ancestry or birth name or the fact his mother had graduated from a Jewish school.

Yoko's Early Arts Career, 1953-1962

On December 3, 1980, Yoko gave a detailed interview to Peter Ochiogrosso for Soho magazine that covered her arts career before she met John Lennon. Below I compare its contents with other sources I have obtained on Yoko.

In the article, Yoko first reveals that she chose men who were openly "insecure" because they were the opposite of her father, who presented himself as flawless and cold. Her dad was a Tokyo banker who was transferred first to San Francisco in 1933 (a month before Yoko's birth) and then to New York. Yoko and her mother joined him in 1935 and again in 1939-40. The family left the USA in 1940-41 due to impending war and her father's new job in Hanoi. They returned to New York in 1952 and Yoko enrolled to do art and music at Sarah Lawrence. She married Toshi Ichiyanagi (then known as Tossi) in 1957 and embarked with him on pursuits in the avant garde. In 1959, they moved to 112 Chambers Street where she eventually curated concerts influenced by John Cage and attended by La Monte Young and his circle. Yoko had an affair with Fluxus founder George Maciunas at this time and dedicated poems to him.

Yoko's first musical performance was "Grapefruit in the World of Park" at Village Gate in 1961 She also performed it at the Carnegie Recital Hall on November 24, 1961. Yoko complains to Ochiogrosso that the New York Times cut her out of its report of the concert.



Yoko also did origami demonstrations, as shown in this photo from early 1962:




In 1962, Yoko went to Japan to perform at the Sogetsu Arts Centre with John Cage, David Tudor, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Kenji Kobayashi and Toshiro Mayuzumi, resulting in this photo:




Yoko stayed in Japan and, at some point in the following twelve months, she apparently had a breakdown, took an overdose and was admitted to hospital, where she met second husband Tony Cox. It was while with Cox that she would move to London in 1966 and bump into one John Winston Lennon.

Yoko Ono Family, Public Sources, 1933-1952

Yoko was born on February 18, 1933. Her father is listed on official documents as 'Eisuke' but he was known to Yoko as Yeisuke, as revealed on her flickr account. He was born around 1902 and started to work for the Yokohama Specie Bank around twenty years before World War II, according to an interview he gave in 1952. Yeisuke was transferred to the USA in 1933 and spent four years in the San Francisco branch and four in the New York one, according to that clipping. His travel record* shows that he left Yokohama on January 20, 1933, age listed as 30, on the SS Asama-Maru, and arrived in San Francisco on February 2. His arrival date was 16 days prior to Yoko's given date of birth, so perhaps the family was left behind due to his wife being heavily pregnant? The passenger manifest is below:

Yoko and her mother, Isoko, followed two years later, as shown in this document. Mother and daughter (Isoko aged 24, Yoko aged 2) sailed from Yokohama on the SS Chichibu Maru on June 13, 1935, arriving in San Francisco on June 26. Their travel was authorized under the Treaty of Commerce*:

The ship was sunk by a US torpedo on April 28, 1943.

Her father and other relatives took photographs and film footage in Japan and San Francisco that were included in her "Times Talks" interview in 2016; see the clips shown below:

The Lenono Photo Archive includes this photo of Yoko as a baby in Japan:

It also includes this image of her traveling to the US.

From the same archive, this image was taken in San Francisco in 1936:

Isoko took Yoko back to Japan in 1937, just after giving birth to her son, Keisuke, in San Francisco on December 20, 1936, but they had had returned to Yoko's father in New York by 1940 and were living at 4202 195th Street in Queens at the time of the 1940 census, shown below:

According to various unverifiable sources, Eisuke was transferred to Hanoi in 1941 and the family had already moved back to Japan due to growing tensions between the US and Japan and perhaps anticipating the racism that Japanese residents would experience in the US during the 1940s. Yoko reappears in US records in 1952 when she returns to the US presumably following her father's transfer to the Bank of Tokyo job there. However the travel record* shows Yoko's age as 23 so there is some uncertainty as to whether this is our Yoko

Yoko's sister Setsuko was born in Tokyo in 1941. Her Japanese autobiography contains this photo of the family taken in 1952 in Scarsdale, New York:

Her brother attended the local school and had this entry in its Yearbook for 1954-55:

Meanwhile her future husband, a pianist and future composer who was known at that time as Tossi Ichiyinagi, was attending the University of Minnesota and is pictured here on the right reciting his Sonata in 1953:

Yoko and Ichiyinagi would subsequently collaborate with numerous avant garde artists and musicians, as documented in the next article.

*Source Citation: The National Archives at Washington, D.C.; Washington, D.C.; Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at San Francisco, California; NAI Number: 4498993; Record Group Title: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787-2004; Record Group Number: 85

Source Information: Ancestry.com. California, Passenger and Crew Lists, 1882-1959 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2008.