A Look at the Matching Segment Search (GEDmatch)

Last week, for the first time, I wrote about GEDmatch, just in time for the launch of their four new subscription tools which they call "Tier1.

Kitty Cooper has blogged about the triangulation feature and Blaine Bettinger has blogged about a tool they call Lazerus, which recreates the DNA of ancestors based on the tests of living descendants.

Miriam and my second cousins - a directed search
Last week I looked at GEDmatch results for a woman named Miriam who is connected to quite a few of my family. Miriam tested with Ancestry. Her matches were with two second cousins of mine of my mother's side, first cousins to one another. Miriam's two matches with these two cousins are on the order of 9-10 centiMorgans and I wrote to Miriam that we really need a tool that allows us to see who else matches her on those two specific segments - on chromosomes 8 and 15..

Later that same day, I saw the announcement of the GEDmatch Tier1 tool Matching Segment Search. It took a few days to register my subscription but by early Friday afternoon, I was ready to have a go.

I logged in at GEDmatch and found the four Tier1 links on the bottom right. You don't see the utilities until you have completed your donation. I chose the first - Matching Segment Search - and it gave me the screen below:

Note that what was called "Matching Segment Search" on the first screen is "GEDmatch DNA Segment Search" on the second.

I entered Miriam's kit number and left the minimum default values untouched. I also chose the chromosome bar (the default) in order to get a better visual picture.

The results came up in about a minute. Today (Sunday) as I repeat the same process, it is taking several minutes. I assume this is a server issue.

This is what the heading and the first few results look like after I blurred the identifying information for privacy:

The results are the matches for the twenty-two chromosomes - not the X.

You can copy and paste the results into an Excel file where you can manipulate them as you wish and save them for future use. But in this case, I had two specific segments in mind, so I saw no need for anything more than a single screen shot for each of the two relevant chromosomes.

My cousins are marked by the arrows. Kit numbers, names and emails are hidden for privacy.

The table on the left is the segment on chromosome 8 and the one on the right is the segment on chromosome 15. First I Iooked for people who matched Miiriam and my cousins on both segments and I was surprised to find none. I know a few of the names - one is a Pikholz descendant - but nothing jumped out at me as interesting.

I suggested to Miriam that she write to those matches, starting with the ones nearest my cousins on the list and ask if they have any of the ancestral surnames which are relevant for my cousins: Gordon, Kugel and Jaffe, or anything else in the right parts of Lithuania and Belarus. She can also show the charts to the matches to try to determine which of these matches match each other and if any are known family to one another.

The party on chromosome 6 - too many matches

About six months ago, I discussed the matches we have with Steve Turner on chromosome 6 and I decided to have a look at those with this new tool.

I entered Steve's kit number and set the minimum at 8 cM. Ffiteen minutes of waiting and I gave up. I raised it to 9 cM and the same thing. At 10 cM, I got results - but of course the only matches were 10 cM or more.

As I have discussed before, we are told we should ignore the smaller matches as they are probably Identical By State (IBS), splinters of DNA from the far distant past, beyond what we call genealogical time. But it seems obvious to me (though not to everyone) that when you have several matches of 10 or 12 or 16 cM and probable family members fall in the same segment with matches of 6 or 8 cM, these are almost certainly relevant.

So I wanted Steve's matches from at least 8 cM and couldn't get them. (This was Friday.)

I tried to look at Aunt Betty's matches and couldn't get anything below 10 cM there either.

Then I had a look at a few of my people whose other side is not Jewish - people who have fewer than 2000 matches on FTDNA rather that the 3500 or more that the 100%-Jewish descendants have. Those came up with no problem.

So this was obviously an issue of too many matches and the solution looked simple. GEDmatch should allow us to download a person's matches in two or three pieces.

I discussed this with GEDmatch Friday and although they understood my problem, they felt that my solution would create server pressure.

After Shabbes, I found the following message:

Israel,
I have increased the maximum number of segments to 10,000.  Please let us know if this works better for you.
John Olson
Co-Administrator, GEDmatch.Com

I wasn't sure if the 10,000 match limit was a temporary solution or meant for long-term. Keep in mind, the number of tests is rising all the time as is the percentage of tests uploaded to GEDmatch, so what works now may not work a few months hence.

I had a look and was immediately pleased by a new screen:

 Excellent.

Now I know the system is working on retrieving my data and I'm not just hanging around.

Of course, I had no idea how many segments they had been allowing before, so I did not know what to expect from the new 10,000 limit. I see now that they are at the end of the results

Aunt Betty's results came up at 8 and even 7 cM within an eminently reasonable two-three minutes.  Aunt Betty had 4174 matched segments with a minimum of 8 cM and 6477 with a minimum of 7 cM.

Steve Turner's did not. GEDmatch was having server problems.

Mark Halpern, guinea pig

One of the earliest non-Pikholz to join our project is my friend, veteran researcher, with known Skalat ancestors, Mark Halpern. Mark matches twenty-three known Pikholz descendants plus my two Kwoczka cousins. He matches seven of the nine descendants of my great-grandparents plus several others whom we think are close to us. Eight of his matches with us are suggested third-fifth cousins. Seven of his matches with us are from the Rozdol Pikholz family.

Tier1 looked like a good place to see who else matches in the same segments. It took maybe five minutes to pull down his matches at 8 cM and then quite a while to move it into Excel in six or seven pieces - probably an Excel problem on my end. Of 3771 segment matches, 61 match my families' kits. 

Of those sixty-one segments, one is 20.8 cM and only two more are more than 15 cM. Twenty-four are less than 9 cM. That sounds like a huge number of segments less than 8 cM. The IBS splinters from the distant past.

Taking Mark's matches with me as an example, we have a total of 21 matching segments at a total of 88.79 cM, but only three segments over 8 cM totalling 30.1 cM. And of the small ones, only one is more than 4.89 cM. Truly alot of splinters.

The Pikholz who matches Mark the most is Charlie, with five segments and 46.8 cM, followed by my Uncle Bob with three segments and 34.4 cM. In my personal family, Rhoda and Lee have three segments, one other Skalater, two Rozdolers and one of my second cousins on my mother's side have three segments each.

This is not an impressive set of matches. But there are nine matches which involve more than one of mine together with Mark and it's worth a look to see exactly who and where. However, I think the place to do so is the triangulation tool..

So now that the GEDmatch server seems to  be working...
I went back and looked at the Steve Turner matches. There were over two hundred matches on the same segment of chromosome 6. About half of those are between 7 and 9 cM and about half of the rest are below 12 cM. About half the matches are from 23 & Me kits, so these are clearly matches I would not see if I worked within FTDNA.

I am not quite ready to draw conclusions about the Matching Segment Search. It is certainly an excellent solution for a directed search. We'll see what else.

Housekeeping notes
Well, not strictly housekeeping, but some clean-up from last week.

I wrote last week about an apparent connection on the X chromosome between a second cousin (Rhoda) on my grandfather's side and my grandmother's Hungarian side. This was due to the fact that Rhoda and my two sisters matched Aunt Betty on the same segemnt of the X chromosome.

A closer look solved that. Aunt Betty, like all women, has two X chromosomes. Rhoda matches her on one, her father 's, and my sisters match her on the other, her mother's. I know this because Rhoda does not match my sisters on that segment.

The match that Aunt Betty and Rhoda share comes from my great-grandmother's Kwoczka side.

Using GEDmatch

GEDmatch
Anyone who is serious about doing DNA for genealogy uses GEDmatch.com. Sooner or later. It's been later for me but I am finally here.

GEDmatch is a free site run by two volunteers, which provides tools for analysis of autosomal DNA match results. People who have tested with one of the three testing companies upload their results to GEDmatch - it can be done anonymously - and the GEDmatch tools allow comparisons among results from all three testing companies, in addition to advanced analyses that even FTDNA does not offer internally.

GEDmatch is meant to be intuitive, but my own intuition on these things is not what it once was, so I have been hesitant about getting involved. (I was disappointed that my GRIP course did not include any hands-on GEDmatch exercises.)

Nonetheless, now that I have been interacting with some of the big names in the field, I felt that I was ready to have a go at it.

Matches with Miriam
My first experiment was for a woman named Miriam who tested with Ancestry and who showed many matches with my families based on a look-up on GEDmatch. Here are results from her eighteen interesting matches with us. There are five more among the Rozdol Pikholz but there was nothing significant there and I left them out for space reasons. You will probably need to click on the image to see the actual numbers. (The splotches of color I added myself and will explain below.)

The five tables on the left are Miriam's matches with me, my two sisters and my father's sister and brother.

The first two in the second column are second cousins on my mother's side (first cousins to one another). The bottom two are descendants of Peretz Pikholz (~1820-1873). 

The top two in the third column are my father's first cousin Herb and my second cousin Rhoda, followed by my two cousins on my great-grandmother's Kwoczka side.

The top three in the column on the right are descendants of Nachman Pikholz (~1795-1865) and the two at the bottom are indeterminate Pikholz/Bernstein cousins.

I then added a splotch of color to the matching (or near-matching) segments so Miriam could see her matches more specifically. For instance, my match with Miriam on chromosome 4 (starts at 97,112,821 and ends at 111,328,469) is nearly identical with her matches with one of my sisters and my aunt. I marked them in green.

My two sisters and my aunt have a match on chromosome 9 and I marked them in red.

My aunt and my uncle share three segments, one of which they share with one of the Kwoczka cousins and another with both him and Rhoda.

What does all that tell us? First it says that the grey and purple segments on chromosome 9 come from the Kwoczka side and that Miriam and my ggm have a common ancestor.

It is hard to say more about the matches with my sisters, my aunt and uncle and me. We have no one to test on my grandmother's side and there are no matches shared by the others on my grandfather's side.

Miriam has two matches with the cousins from my mother's side, but not with us. That may mean that Miriam has something in common with their Jaffe grandfather. I told Miriam Sunday morning, when we Skyped, that it would be nice if GEDmatch had a way to see who else in their database matches those two specific segments. Little did I know!

Finally, Miriam has a match with two of the descendants of Nachman. Those two are second cousins to one another and that match is likely from their "other side."

Aunt Betty's X chromosome
I have not been doing anything regarding X chromosome matches. This is one of the sex chromosomes - women have two of them and men have one plus a Y. Men get their X from the mother and women get from both parents.

Later Sunday, a woman I have been speaking with on Facebook - Kathy, who I think is in New Zealand - posted something about X chromosome analysis using GEDmatch and as a result of our ensuing discussion, I decided to have a look at Aunt Betty's X matches within the Pikholz families.

Here are her ten matches.

As in the case of Miriam's matches, I marked the identical or near-identical segments with color.  The blue segment shared by Aunt Betty, Lee and Pinchas (a Kwoczka cousin) almost has to be on the Kwoczka side. It cannot be on the Pikholz side, as my grandfather did not receive any X DNA from his father, only from his mother.

In fact, Aunt Betty cannot have any Pikholz X DNA, so her matches with Herb, Terry and Rhoda are either Kwoczka DNA or something from my grandmother's side via some unknown (and unimagined) common ancestor. That is not as trivial as it sounds, because the red segment is shared by Rhoda, Aunt Betty and my two sisters. Any X DNA my sisters received from our father must have come from his mother, as he received no X DNA from his father. (The same is the case for the green segments that my sisters share with Uncle Bob.)

But it does clearly mean that Rhoda has a connection on my grandmother's side and it must be on Rhoda's mother's side.. (Rhoda's father could not have gotten from his father, so the connection is not that way.) I know nothing about Rhoda's mother's family, but Monday evening she and I had a furious exchange of emails which included my finding quite a few documents for her mother's family.  My grandmother's known ancestral names include Rosenzweig and Zelinka from Slovakia and Bauer, Stern and maybe Grunwald from Hungary. I was hoping to find one of those surnames in Rhoda's mother's family.

I ordered the New York marriage record for Rhoda's grandparents and in the meantime she told me that her maternal grandfather was from Galicia. The documents I found this week show that Rhoda's maternal grandmother's parents were from the Humene area in Zemplen County, Slovakia. The surnames there are Eichler and Schonfeld. Perhaps something more useful will turn up later.

Tier1
In the meantime, Sunday afternoon, I saw a Facebook post by Blaine Bettinger, one of the lecturers at my GRIPitt course, saying that GEDmatch had announced four new tools in a category they call "Tier1." There was no meaningful explanation of what those four would do, but the idea is that you buy a subscription at $10 a month for access. The basic GEDmatch will remain free.

So far, Blaine has blogged about a tool they call Lazerus, which recreates the DNA of ancestors based on the tests of living descendants. As my readers know, I have been trying to do this for the last six or eight weeks, using Kitty Cooper's mapping tools which Kitty herself ran with soon after. I am thinking this Lazerus tool (Blaine has already turned "Lazerus" into a verb) may do the trick, though I am concerned that it may overlook the   endogamy problem. That could result in recreating the ancestors incorrectly, so the process will have to be monitored.

When they receive my subscription, I'll be able to have a look. Meantime, here is how Kitty describes Tier1:

I will also be looking forward to seeing what Jim Bartlett has to say about this. He is not an endogamy expert, but he is very very good at using these tools and in particular knows how to explain it to the layman. He gave an excellent talk at the recent International Genetic Genealogy Conference which I purchased.

I also very much  enjoyed the talk by Tim Janzen MD from the same conference and our subsequent discussions about chromosome mapping. Tim is considered one of the top people in the field and he has convinced me that we should have a bit of testing with the other two companies, 23 & Me and Ancestry. Both those companies have issues with orders from outside the US, so I asked Aunt Betty do those tests. In any case, her DNA is one generation better than mine  anyway. Tim also said I should get some tests from one of her sons and we are working on that.

Kitty herself has blogged about the triangulation feature of Tier1.

If you recall, I mentioned above that I told Miriam that she needed to search for people who match specific segments of my Jaffe cousins and that is another feature that we find on Tier1.

Now that the holidays are behind us, I hope to get back to my regular Sunday morning schedule, either next week or the week after.

The DNA of Adam

On Thursday (Friday for those of you still living in Exile), we conclude the yearly Torah cycle and begin again with the Creation. On Shabbat we will read about the Creation in greater detail, ending with the list of Adam's "begats" through the ten generations until Noah.

It seems appropriate, therefore, to write this week about my indeterminate cousin Adam and his DNA.

Adam and I have been in touch for probably a dozen years, beginning with the discovery that we both have Kugel ancestry from Pleshchenitsy, now in Belarus. (With all the holiday food this week, it's a good time to write about kugel as well.)

My mother's father Rachmiel Gordon is the son of Chana Kugel, the daughter of Gershon and Zelda. The only Pleshchenitsy documents we have are revision lists. All we know of the family is that Chana seems to have had three brothers, Aharon, Yaakov and probably Zalman. Yaakov was married. So given that Adam is not descended from this specific family, the closest he can be to me is a fourth cousin.

Skipping ahead for a moment, when Y DNA testing (male line) became available, Adam tested a number of Kugel descendants from Pleshchenitsy and reported that there are several distinct Kugel families from Pleshchenitsy - if they are related to one another it is not on the male line.

Adam also tells me that he has Gordon connections, but I do not know exactly what those are. Any connection we would have there would be more distant than fourth cousins.

We have another angle with Adam, as one of his ancestors is a Kapilevich from Borisov. A probable relative on my mother's mother's Rosenbloom side went to a person called "A. Kaplowitz" upon arrival in New York in 1911, so that is another  possible connection between us and Adam.

When I did my first autosomal DNA test, Adam came up as a suggested third cousin. Closer than I would have expected, but certainly reasonable if we are connected in several directions .Now that I am up to about 3400 Family Finder matches, Adam is my seventieth closest by relationship and thirty-seventh closest by total centiMorgans. We have 131.62 cM in common. My sisters have much less - 107.32 and 81.94 cM respectively.

Adam, from Belarus and Poland, and I from Galicia, Belarus and Slovakia, met three years ago at the inaugural meeting of the Sub-Carpathian SIG at the IAJGS Conference in Washington DC.


But I was busy on my father's side, while Adam is clearly on my mother's side. More than likely on both of my mother's sides - so this was not a connection I was pursuing.

The closest living relatives in my mother's generation are her third cousins so if we want to test on my mother's side, we would be looking for my first and second cousins, not anyone in her generation. (Actually, my mother's father has four living second cousins and one of those did an autosomal test with 23 & Me, but we don't have access to those results and matches.)

I only have three living first cousins on my mother's side and we have no idea where one of them is. One of the other two - Kay, the daughter of my mother's sister - did a Family Finder test and we saw the results three months ago. Adam and I have matches of 6 cM or higher in eight segments and Kay matches us in four of them.

Those four segments appear on the three chromosomes 6, 12 and 13.

However, Kay does not match Adam on 13, so he must be on my father's side there.

And the matches with Amy and Sarajoy are a bit of a mix, so there is some "mother's side / father's side" going on here. Endogamy! (Kay's father's side has no Jewish DNA, so at least we are spared complications there.)

But at least we have chromosomes 6 and 12 to work with and the question is, is Adam on my mother's mother's (Rosenbloom) side or on my mother's father's (Gordon & Kugel) side. For this we have second cousins.

My grandfather top right.
Aunt Mary bottom left.

The easy side is my grandfather's side since we begin with the assumption of a Kugel relationship. On that side, we have tests results from Judy and Ruth, first cousins to each other and second cousins to me via my grandfather's sister Aunt Mary, who is their grandmother.

Judy's results came first and I was surprised to see that FTDNA does not consider her a match with Adam at all and when I run them together against me or Kay, we see no overlap. Of course, once you get to third and fourth cousins, there is no guarantee that there will be significant DNA matches. Third cousins overlap on average 0.78% and fourth cousins only about 0.20%. (I am using the percentages provided by 23 & Me.)

Ruth is a bit better - she has 89.11 cM that match Adam. The only match that seems to fit us is on chromosome 6. There she matches Adam, Sarajoy and me, but not Kay and Amy. Oops. That seems to indicate that perhaps Adam matches me and Sarajoy on chromosome 6 on Ruth's FATHER's side, which we already know seems to match my father's side somehow.

So it appears that if Adam is connected to me on my Kugel/Gordon side, there must be some DNA that my grandfather received and passed on, but which his sister Aunt Mary did not - at least not to Ruth and Judy. My grandfather had another sister and a brother, but I am not in contact with any of their descendants.

More likely is that the connection with Adam is on my mother's mother's Rosenbloom side.

On that side, my grandmother had one brother in the US with children. We have no contact with the two who remained in Russia and two others died soon after arriving in the US, with no children. That one brother had two sons with children - one with six who have thusfar declined to test and one with three, one of whom has tested.

Beth's results came in about a week ago. Unfortunately I have not been able to get her into a project, so I cannot check her directly against Adam.

Beth has nice matches with Kay (394.98 cM), with my sisters (347.28 & 325.36 cM), with me (245.29 cM), but nothing with any of us and Adam together.

So it may be that the whole idea of Adam's being on my mother's side is totally wrong!

Which leaves my father's side.

We saw some hints of such connections on chromosomes 6, 12 and 13, where Kay seems to be on my mother's chromosome and Adam on my father's. So let's see what else we have on Adam and my father's side.

Adam and I have eight matching segments. All of those are matched by Amy or Sarajoy or both.

My father's first cousin Herb matches Adam on five segments, but none which match me.

There is this on chromosome 1. These are my matches with (in order from top) Adam, second cousins Rhoda and Terry, Aunt Betty and third cousin Pinchas on my g-gm's Kwoczka side. There is no room on the chart, but Amy and Uncle Bob match the segment on the far right.
This looks nice, but the problem is, none of the others match Adam except me, even though almost all the matching segments are identical. So the whole group matches me on my father's side, except Adam who, by process of elimination, matches on my mother's side. But we know there are no matches with Ruth, Judy and Beth.

Sheeeesh!

This whole post is rather anticlimactic. I really thought we would be able to figure out at least part of my connection to Adam. When I got my first results two-plus years ago, I was excited to see Adam on my match list as a suggested third cousin. There were nearly fifty people in that category and Adam was the only one I knew and the only one where I had even an inkling about the nature of our matches.

So what do I have now? Endogamy. Lots and lots of endogamy. Just when I think I am beginning to understand what I am doing.

Pikholz Women of the Early 1800s

The matter of ancestral women is a bugaboo of genealogists from most cultures, but as usual, it's more complicated with European Jews.  I would like to look at this within the context of the Pikholz Project, with perhaps an idea regarding all those DNA matches from non-Pikholz testers.

Given names
Let's start with one of the more obvious points and that is that we often do not even know the given names of some female ancestors, even though their husband's names are known.

Until recently, inscriptions on Jewish tombstones included the father's name but rarely the mother's name. So that source, so useful for fathers, is of no use for mothers. That may be a matter of traditional modesty, but it is more likely that since the father was more of a public figure, his name would have been how the deceased was known to the public - being also how he was called to the Torah.

So far as I know (and I have very limited experience) the same is true of kettubot, Jewish marriage contracts.

In my area of interest, east Galicia, early birth records named the parents and sometimes the maternal grandfather. Only in 1877 when Austrian law began to require the mother's parents names, did we learn the grandmother's given name.

When the mother's given name is unrecorded and there are no alternate sources, we have two problems - uncertainty and error. Uncertainty is self-explanatory - what you don't know, you don't know. I simply do not know the name of the mother of my mother's maternal grandmother. I can only speculate that perhaps my grandmother or one of her sisters bore her name.

The matter of error is more serious and here I plead guilty to a bit of systematic sloppiness. We have a marriage record for for Berl and Dwojre Pikholz in 1887, that was probably close to thirty years after their actual Jewish marriage. Berl's parents are Isak Josef and Rojse Pikholz and Dwojre's are Motie (=Mordecai) and Taube Pikholz. We know the couple Mordecai and Taube and have death records for both.

But this is the only record we have for Isak Josef and Rojse aside from Isak Josef's 1862 death record. Although I do not have documentation, I am quite sure that my great-great-grandmother Rivka Feige and her brother Selig are the children of this Isak Josef. But I have no indication that their mother was Rojse. Rivka Feige has no children or grandchildren named any form of Rojse, nor do we see any in our limited information about Selig.

Berl, on the other hand, has a daughter Rojse whose children were born from 1881.

Berl was a few years older than Rivka Feige and Selig, so it is quite possible that Rojse had died and their mother was a second wife. However, I have never laid that out before and the casual follower of the Pikholz Project could easily assume that Isak Josef's wife is always Rojse. (This is not an issue in my database, where Rivka Feige and Selig are not even attached to Isak Josef, because we have no documentation.)

There are likely a few similar cases in the Pikholz Project. Not many, mind you, but a few.

There are also several cases of Pikholz men whose names appear on birth records as fathers, but with two or three different mothers. In some of those cases, I think these are the same man, but I cannot record that as such. I can only write "probably the same as..."

Birth surnames
Even more common than women without given names are women without birth surnames.

So what is Rachel's maiden name?

Just recently, I sent my second cousin Ruth a copy of her parents' 1936 Brooklyn marriage certificate. Where it specifically says "Mother's maiden name," Ruth's father had written "Rachel." We had to find the marriage record for his sister to learn the mother's maiden name.

And often, when a form says "Mother's name" the surname given is her married name, which is usually NOT her birth name.

The Pikholz Project currently has with many such women with the surname "XXXXX."

Who is the Pikholz?
We also have couples in the old records where it is not clear whether the Pikholz is the husband or the wife or both. As we know, marriages were not always recorded with the authorities, so the children were given the mother's surname and often the father used it as well.

I think in the appropriate Given Name Analysis pages, I have recorded all these using no surnames for either of the couple and including both the husband and the wife.

The DNA angle
As I have mentioned here before, we have few dozen people whose autosomal DNA tests have shown matches to more than half of the thirty-odd Pikholz descendants who have tested. And there are surely many more. Over twenty have joined the Pickholtz Surname Project at FTDNA to allow me to include them fully in chromosome comparisons - some of which I have discussed here.

I refer to these families as "non-Pikholz" because they have no indication of Pikholz in their families. Some of them have known Galicianer ancestors and some do not. I have taken to explaining that although DNA shows that they and we have common ancestors, they are probably from the pre-surname period, likely the mid-late 1700s, so we cannot define the relationships using the usual tools.

But this period was upwards of two hundred years ago. That's six-seven, even eight generations ago, very much on the periphery of autosomal DNA's usefulness. Surely not all of these dozens of non-Pikholz matching families share common ancestors right about the time surnames were adopted. And it is almost certainly not all to be blamed on endogamy.

There must be something else. I think it's the women.

If the connections between these families and ours go through their women or our women or both, from slightly later, say the early 1800s, surely that would make more sense.

There might even be a way to find hints. The wife of Nachman Pikholz (~1795-1865) was Sure (=Sara). Her children are Moshe Hersch, Alte, Arie Leib, Itzik, Basie, Pessie, Ciril Abraham Getzel and probably Gabriel. Do any of the non-Pikholz families have a group of given names that might indicate common ancestors?

This would not be proof, but it might be a way to give us some direction. So how about it, non-Pikholz DNA matches?

My list of Pikholz women without surnames

1. Beile. Died in Skalat in 1841 at age sixty. Called "alien" on her death record. That's all we know. The first Beile births in the Skalat area are Henie Beile in the 1840s, Golde Beile on 1865 and several Sara Beile from the mid-1870s.

2. Bassie. Died in Kozowa in 1875 at age sixty. She was married to Moshe Hersch, the son of Nachman. Her children are Ari Leib, Simon, Taube Freude, Josef and Jacob.

3. Chaje Zirl. Married to Isak Elias Zellermayer and had a son Moshe Hersch in 1848. We only know her name from the son's marriage record.

4. Feige. Married to Berl (1789-1877), but she seems to be significantly younger. We have a Feige 1805-75 who may be the same person. Children are Moshe and Sara Bassie, perhaps others. Her husband seems to be the father of Peretz, but she seems too young.

5. Ryfka. Married to Gabriel Riss. That's all we know and this is from a birth to her daughter Brane, who also married a Riss. Brane had children in the period ~1860-1882.

6. Taube. Died in 1872 at age seventy. Married to Mordecai. Children are Chana Chaje, Enie, Dwojre, Chaim Yaakov and Arie Leib.

7. Sara. Married to Nachman (~1795-1865). As I said above, her children are Moshe Hersch, Alte, Arie Leib, Itzik, Basie, Pessie, Ciril Abraham Getzel and probably Gabriel.

8. Sara. Married to Gabriel (~1822-1852) a "man of Skalat" who lived in Husiatyn. Childen are Moshe, Chana and probably Schia. (It is possible that Sara is the Pikholz and Gabriel is not, but I don't think so.) I discussed this family in detail here. 

9. Eliezer (Leiser). (Yes I know he is not a woman, but bear with me.) Eliezer died in 1878 at age fifty-six and was married to Chana Chaje, the daughter of Mordecai and Taube (above).  We haven't a clue what his surname might have been but since he was a levi, we know he was not a Pikholz. He used the name as his own.

All these above are from Skalat or nearby. I do not see this problem in Rozdol.


One more category
Now that I think about it, as long as I am giving homework to our non-Pikholz DNA matches, let me list the known maiden names of some of the early Pikholz spouses. Perhaps some of those will fit someone.

In the Skalat area: Nagler, Rechel, Pollak (from Jezierna), Zellermajer, Glisner, Waltuch.

And from the Rozdol area: Steg, Rosenzweig, Kawa, Borek, Krut/Kraut. Also Kranter, a man who married an early Pikholz woman, whose parents are not yet identified.


Housekeeping notes
James Tanner wrote an important three-part series a few weeks ago which reinforces what I believe but never really put into words. It's worth a read, especially in our Jewish world where so much of what people call "proof" just isn't there.  Here is the best part.

Wishing everyone a happy Sukkot holiday. I shall not be communicating with people outside Israel from sundown Wednesday, our time, until Sunday morning..

Another Corner of the Pikholz Families

Until now, we have had Family Finder (autosomal DNA) results from five Pikholz families identified as being from Skalat.

1. Descendants of my great-great-grandparents Rivka Feige and Isak Fischel, both of whom are Pikholz, born about 1820. Ten tests plus one descendant of Uncle Selig.
2. Descendants of Nachman Pikholz (~1795-1865). Four tests.
3. Descendants of Mordecai Pikholz (~1805-1864). Two tests.
4. Descendants of three of the five children of Peretz Pikholz (~1820-1873). Three tests.
5. Descendants of Berisch ben Moshe Hersch (Berisch 1837-1918). One test.

There are an additional eight Skalat families with living descendants, but with no one who has agreed to test. Two of those eight are almost certainly descendants of Nachman.

We also have eleven tests from the Rozdol famlies and two with uncertain origins, but I will not be discussing them today.

In the past three days, three people have signed up for Family Finder tests from two families which are known to be closely related and I would like to think that they will contribute significantly to our understanding of the family structure. I have been begging for tests from two additional family members in one of those lines, one of whom is the only candidate in either of those two families for a Y (male-line) test.

When Sure (=Sara) Pickholz Aptowitzer and her husband Benzion applied in Vienna for an immigration visa to the United States on 7 August 1939, she wrote "that I intend to join distant cousin Samuel Marenus" in Elizabeth New Jersey.

I have assumed that the cousinhood is not really "distant," just that Sara did not know how to define the relationship precisely. If Sam Marenus was not reasonably close, Sara could have named her own brother who had gone to the US a year earlier.

Sam Marenus was about the same age as Sara and both he and his older brother and sister were born in the US, so they clearly didn't know each other in person, before Sara went to the US. His mother Dwojre (Dora) was the daughter of Simon Pickholz of Skalat and was one of four of Simon's children who lived in the US. (The others died in childhood, save perhaps one for whom we have nothing but a birth record.)

So I have been keeping these two families - which I call DORA and ORENSTEIN - together. (Esra Orenstein was Sara's father. Her mother Taube was the Pikholz.)

Sam is Shalom, like Sara's
grandfather. Is this significant?

Complicating any inquiry into the relationship between the two families is the fact that Sara's mother Taube had two Pikholz parents. Her father was Szulim (=Shalom, which was Sam's Jewish name) and her mother was Sara (sometimes written Sara Nesia) the daughter of Moshe Hersch and Jente Pikholz. Sara Aptowitzer was probably named for her maternal grandmother Sara (who died at age forty in 1887), but does not have the second name Nesia.

Sara and Benzion Aptowitzer had two sons, one died six years ago. The other son, Charles, ordered a Family Finder test earlier this week. I took advantage of his order to encourage Sam Marenus' daughter and two of her second cousins to test as well. She did and I think I can thank her brother-in-law Mark Strauss for encouraging that. Mark does genealogy research himself and may be related to us independently.

These two new tests may shed some light on the relationship between the two families. They also may show some connections with other Skalat Pikholz families.

The two new families being tested are the second and third from the right. But if you notice, the one on the far right is headed by a Moshe Hersch who is probably the same general age as Charles' great-great-grandfather of the same name. If we are lucky, we may find evidence that these two Moshe Hersch are the same person. We'd still need some magic path to actual documentation, of course, but it would be significant progress. More testing in both those lines would help. But unfortunately we don't have many candidates.

(There is another Moshe Hersch about the same age, but he is a son of Nachman and there is nothing to indicate that he may be the same as one of these two.)

But we also have a bit of a wild card in Leonora, whose test is now on its way from here in Israel to Houston . Leonora's mother Taube (named after her aunt, Sara's mother) had four Pikholz grandparents and at least five Pikholz great-grandparents. Leonora's father is from Central Asia and should have no Jewish DNA whatsoever, which should make it a bit easier to look at her matches.

Leonora is therefore a second cousin of Charles on their mothers' side and to the extent we can sort out that side, can help both with the connection to Sam Marenus' line and with the Moshe Hersch question.

The parents of Taube's father Eliezer are first cousins on their mother's side. His father (Isak) Josef is the son of Chana Chaje and his mother Gittel is the daughter of Devorah, both of whom are daughters of Mordecai, the ancestor of Dalia and Lloyd. (Mordecai's line and mine are a perfect Y-37 match, indicating a close common, male-line ancestor for Mordecai and my Isak-Fischel.)

Eliezer's mother Gittel is also the daughter of two Pikholz parents. Her mother Devorah is, as I said, the daughter of Mordecai and her father Berl is the son of the "original" (Isak) Josef.

Note that Eliezer's father (Isak) Josef does NOT seem to be a descendant of the original (Isak) Josef, so I am guessing that there is a close relationship between Mordecai and Old (Isak) Josef. They are about twenty-one years apart (1784 vs 1805), which could be anything - father-son, brothers or further, but I tend to think that it is one of those two. I haven't a clue where we might find more evidence on this, but there are other descendants of Berl-Devorah and of Mordecai's daughter Chana Chaje who might yet be persuaded to give us some DNA.

Housekeeping notes
May you be written and sealed in the Book of Life and have an easy and meaningful fast.

And please accept my apologies if I have offended anyone in this blog over the past year.