According to the chronicle listed at the Shtetlinks 

Jewishgen.org/litin, on March 14, 1919, a pogrom took place in Litin and ten Jewish residents were murdered. (In the year 1919, many pogroms took place in Litin.)  The date March 14 is very significant to the Los Angeles Porvin family because the date represents the birth date of Beverly Porvin, the youngest of Samuel and Shiva Porvin's five children.  Rochell, one of the daughters of Beverly recalled that her mother never believed that the date was for her actual birth but instead the date represents the date when Shiva was killed during the pogrom.  Our speculation is that it was the surviving family's way of memorializing the anniversary of the death of the children's mother.

 Of note, the Porvin family does not have any written records to indicate that Samuel and his family lived in Litin.  We do know they were born in Bagrinovtsy and left for US from the same town.  It is possible that they lived in Litin and commuted to their factory at Zaluzhna. It is also possible that they lived in Bagrinovtsy instead while commuting to Zaluzhna.

On the first day we arrived in Litin, our search to find the house of Samuel and Leib began with "a large church".  This clue was based on the Tobisman records which indicated that Samuel and his children lived next to "a large church."  It did not take even 5 minutes for us to locate a renovation site of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral at the town's central park.  According to the construction workers, the Cathedral was the oldest of all in the town.  Next to the construction site there is an open area where once stood a long, large Jewish residence composed of two adjacent homes according to Sasha, the inspector of the construction.  The building was demolished in the 1960s after the current 4-story city hall was built. This description of the house appears to fit our description of Leib and Samuel's house. We went to the city's museum and found a photo (shown above) which shows the house next to the city hall.

At the same time, we could not totally abandon the possibility that Leib and Samuel lived in Bagrinovtsy instead in Litin, when they were commuting to the factory.  We had to consider the date the factory was destroyed by the Bolsheviks -  some time after 1917.  The US census of 1920 lists the immigration of Samuel as 1913.  He came to the US alone in order to prepare bringing his family to Detroit. Since WWI began the following year, he could not get back to his family.  It is conceivable that the factory had already been sold to the new owner Poriakov Pan, the Polish Lord when Samuel arrived in Detroit. That means Leib and his family moved to Litin while Samuel's family remained in Bagrinovtsy, suffered the pogrom in Bagrinovtsy, not in Litin in the year 1919.

Heidi and I, therefore, also searched for any evidence in Bagrinovtsy of a long, large Jewish residence near "a large church".  However, we saw only a large Orthodox cemetery in the center of Bagrinovtsy where a bus stop now stands across the road.  This is the only likely location of the residence of Pervin and Porvin if...an Orthodox or Catholic cathedral stood nearby.

- Norimi and Heidi　

*****************************************

Photo (A) a view of the currently named Lenin Street in the central park area of Litin where the old residence of Leib and Samuel may have been situated.

Photo (B) Heidi stands to the right of the building where the Pervin residence once stood in Litin.

Photo (C) shows a closer view of the same building of Photo (A) in Litin.

Photo (D) shows the open space where once the Pervin residence stood in Litin.

Photo (E) Both pillars are remnants of Soviet construction in Litin.

Photo (F) is an old photo that shows the Pervin residence next to the City Hall in Litin.

Photo (G) is the central section of  Bagrinovtsy where the three main streets meet in front of the bus stop.

Photo (H) shows the left hand side of the street of Photo (G), a possible site of "an old church" in Bagrinovtsy. 

Photo (I) is a frontal view leading to the Christian cemetery in Bagrinovtsy.

Photo (J) is the side view of Photo (H) where is a war memorial statue stands. Somewhere near by this site could be the residence of Pervin and Porvin family (Bagrinovtsy).