Regina Doctor, née Heilner was born in Bad Kissingen on February 13, 1854 as the third of five children of the butcher Moses Götz/ Georg Heilner and his wife Hanna, née Schiffmann.

The ancestors of the Heilner family came from Sulzdorf near Bad Königshofen and can be traced back to the 17^th century there. Because of poverty and depressing living conditions most family members left their home area and emigrated to the United States in great numbers, others moved to towns and villages in the neighbourhood. The first member of the Heilner family who settled in Bad Kissingen was her grandfather Jeidel Abraham Heilner. In 1777, he was given a “Schutzbrief” (protection letter) by the Herren von Erthal in Kissingen that granted him the right to live and work in “Judenhof” (Jewish quarter) after paying for their protection (“Schutzgeld”) there. For many years, his second-eldest son Moses Götz/Georg fought against the restrictive provisions of the Bavarian Jews’ Edict of 1817 for getting a license for a butchery in the town. After years of trying to get it from Kissingen Town Council and the Royal Court of Justice, the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior consented in the end. In January 1849, Götz Heilner was allowed to open his butchery in Badgasse. He also had to apply to the District Court of Justice for their consent to his marriage to Hanna Schiffmann in April 1849. The couple had five children. (We owe the information on the early family history to Hans-Jürgen Beck, Bad Kissingen war unsere Heimat, p.1010ff.) 

Regina Heilner married the Meiningen merchant Louis Doctor in Bad Neustadt in 1882. He was a Protestant and lived in Meiningen after the marriage. Their three children Else (*1884), Julius (*1886), and Gustav (*1887) were born there. Regina’s husband died in February 1919, she outlived him by more than two decades and died in Meiningen in August 1941 at the age of 87.

In May 1942, her daughter Else Wendriner and her husband were deported from Weimar via Leipzig to Belzyce and murdered there. Her son Gustav, a renowned photographer in the Thuringian theater town, who published many historic photographs of the sights of the town in his publishing house, was first brought to Theresienstadt in 1942 and then to Auschwitz/ Oświęcim in January 1943 and murdered there. The older son Julius became a merchant; nothing is known about his life at the moment.