Sheldon Adelson — business (las vegas) with roots in the Russian Empire
Sheldon Gary Adelson was born on 4 August 1933 in the Dorchester neighbourhood of Boston and grew up in a one-room tenement on Erie Street. His father, Arthur Adelson, drove a cab and had come from Lithuania, then in the Russian Empire; Wikipedia describes the father's family as being of Ukrainian Jewish and Lithuanian Jewish ancestry. His mother, Sarah Tonkin, a seamstress, came from Britain; Adelson said his grandfather had been a Welsh coal miner. The town the Adelsons came from is not recorded.
He started work young, selling newspapers at twelve and running vending machines at sixteen. He went to Roxbury Memorial High School, left the City College of New York without a degree and served in the US Army. He then started businesses in fields as varied as mortgage banking, charter tours and hotel toiletries; by his thirties, by one account, he had made and lost a fortune twice.
His breakthrough came in 1979, when he and partners founded COMDEX, a trade show for the computer industry held in Las Vegas, which grew into one of the largest in the world. When the group sold it in 1995 for about $860 million, his share was estimated at some $500 million. Meanwhile, in 1988, at fifty-five, he and his partners had bought the Sands Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas for $110 million, and soon afterwards opened beside it the Sands Expo and Convention Center, then the only privately owned and operated convention centre in the United States. In 1996 he demolished the Sands and spent $1.5 billion to build in its place the Venetian, a Venice-themed resort that opened on 3 May 1999; the Palazzo followed next door in 2007.
When Macau opened its gambling market to foreign operators, Las Vegas Sands opened the Sands Macao in May 2004, followed by the $2.4 billion Venetian Macao in August 2007; the company won a licence in Singapore in 2006 and opened Marina Bay Sands there in 2010. In 2015 the family bought the Las Vegas Review-Journal. He and his wife, Miriam, a physician, founded the Adelson Medical Research Foundation in 2007 and gave large sums to Jewish education and to Birthright Israel, beginning with a pledge of $25 million.
He died in Malibu, California, on 11 January 2021, aged eighty-seven.
Tracing the roots — Lithuania, then in the Russian Empire (father; town not documented)
Born in Boston in 1933, the son of Arthur Adelson, a cab driver who had come from Lithuania, then in the Russian Empire, and Sarah, a seamstress from Wales. His father's family was of Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jewish origin; the town is not recorded.
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Lithuania, then in the Russian Empire (father; town not documented). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.