Passing 10,000

No, I do not have ten thousand followers on Twitter. Nor do I have - or want - ten thousand Facebook friends.

But as of a couple of weeks ago, I do have over ten thousand entries in my genealogy database. This is not a huge number but it is a milestone of sorts so I am pleased to celebrate it..

My genealogy database - Brothers Keeper 5.2 for DOS

No, I do not have ten thousand relatives. Nor do my wife and I have ten thousand relatives combined. Some of those entries are parents of spouses. Some are affiliated families. Some are not relatives, but look like they might be so I included them in order to note that I have checked them out and found them wanting. Some are surely duplicates.

Some are what I call "Placeholders." That would be entries like "Original Pjkholz" who makes sure I don't lose track of any of the Pikholz families. Another placeholder would be "Unconnected Pjkholz" whose children include "Shoah Pjkholz," Old_European Pjkholz," "Vienna Pjkholz" and others and some of these have additional placeholders for "children."

(No, those are not typos. I deliberately write "Pjkholz" rather than "Pikholz" for the placeholders in the Pikholz families so as not to inflate the surname count. There are thirty-eight Pjkholz and Pjckholz. And they all have wives with made up names.)

 There are quite alot of wives and a few husbands whose birth surnames are unknown. Some people record these folks with the surname "Unknown." Others use a version of the name of the known spouse, making it easier to keep track of them. I prefer to use XXXXX, xxxxx, xXxXx etc with each variation representing a specific family. But I don't always remember to differentiate, so the numbers are not precise. There are over eight hundred of those.

There are also people whose given names we do not know. Some of that - but certainly not all - is due to the Holocaust. I assign the adults given names MAN and WOMAN and the children are SON, DAUGHTER or CHILD.  Occasionally I get cute and write HOMBRE, MUJER etc for South Americans.

I did counts of descendants for each of our ancestral families last week and here are the results, with the spouses in parentheses. Remember, these are descendants, so do not reflect the number of people who were called by these names.

In my father's family: Pikholz 4043 (1666), Kwoczka 292 (147),  Rosenzweig 158 (80), Zelinka 422 (210), Bauer 145 (62). I am working on the Zelinkas now (as I wrote last week), so there will be significantly more soon. And there are Rosenzweigs to add, as well. The Bauer numbers do not include other Bauers from the town where my great-grandmother was born, because I have not yet tried to fit them together coherently.

In my mother's family: Gordon 450 (228)  and Rosenbloom 169 (71). Other members of the extended Gordon family have done research, but have not shared the details, so this family is quite a bit larger than what my data shows.

In my wife's father's family: Silberstein 407 (178), Scharf 143 (64), Buchalter 235 (114),  Diamond 101 (51), Hammer 241 (98).

In my wife's mother's family: Baum 336 (119), Lindenberg 326 (140).

Note that in many of those family lines, I am not in ongoing contact with many of the descendants, so there may be quite a few births and marriages which have not been recorded.
Here are the birth surnames which appear fifty times or more, including variations:

PIKHOLZ - 1451

GORDON - 142

ZELINKA - 139

SILBERSTEIN - 86

COHEN - 86

ROSENBLOOM - 67

SCHARF - 61

ALEXANDER - 59

SCHAPIRA- 53

ROSENZWEIG - 52

BAUM - 51

ROTH - 50

SCHWARTZ - 50

Interestingly enough, when I began the Pikholz Project fourteen years ago, someone asked me how many people I thought had ever had the birth name Pikholz and my guess then was 1200-1500, based on nothing at all. So I am now holding at 1451.

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Housekeeping announcements:

I am scheduled to speak for the Israel Genealogical Society twice this week, both in Hebrew:

On Wednesday 19 December at Bet Frankfurter (Derech Bet Lehem 80) in Jerusalem on:
A DNA SKEPTIC TURNS HIS FAMILY ON ITS HEAD AND REMAINS A SKEPTIC
Doors open at 18:30, my talk at 19:00.
 
On Thursday 20 December in Raanana, Hashachar Library, Hazon Ish 90. 
The topic will be:
BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT: WHAT YOU KNOW vs WHAT YOU CAN PROVE
Doors open at 18:30, business meeting at 19:00, my talk at 19:30.

I am also scheduled to speak in Haifa on 9 January, on the same topic as in Raanana..
Check times and address at http://www.isragen.org.il/siteFiles/13/239/6792.asp