The Ancestors of Uncle Max Braun

Us and the Brauns

I don't generally spend a lot of time looking at the ancestors of the people who married into my family, but there are exceptions.

Here are my great-grandparents and their seven children, excluding the three sons who died very young. (I am using the names, as we knew them in America, rather than their Jewish birth names from east Galicia.)

Morris is my grandfather.

The subject of this post, Uncle Max Braun, married my grandfather's middle sister Mary (Miriam). They moved from Pittsburgh to Miami in the early 1940s, so I never knew them. In Europe, the Brauns (then called Brunn) lived in and around Zalosce, which is also where my great grandmother's Kwoczka family lived. My grandfather and his older sibling were born there too. So there is a good chance that there is a family connection further back.

In addition, my great-grandfather's older sister Leah married a Braun, Uncle Max' uncle. According to his 1903 passenger list, Uncle Max (as Michael) went to Pittsburg to his uncle Jakob Braun.

Uncle Max' father was Mordecai Lipe and his father - based on Yaakov Hersch's tombstone - is Israel Aryeh.

 

The Elinoffs, the Katzes, the Zwiebels, the Fleischmans

 

 We are not related - so far as we know - to the Pittsburgh Elinoffs, but we have mutual cousins. 

 

The Elinoff grandmother (Clara/Chaje) is the sister of Harry Katz who married my grandfather's sister Aunt Becky, so we and the Elinoffs are both second cousins to the Katz cousins.

 

The mother of Clara Elinoff and Uncle Harry Katz is Beila (or Beila Nesya) Zwiebel who is a sister to Jute (maybe Jute Leah) who married the brother (Pinchas Kwoczka) of my great-grandmother Ita Leah. That means that the Fleischmans (and some others) are third cousins both to us and to the Elinoffs.

This is not endogamy. It's simply marrying among known families from the same area and often from within those families.

Elinoff DNA

I have been meaning to get some Elinoff DNA, not to test any specific hypothesis, just to see what might come up. As it happens, there is a Pittsburgh Elinoff who lives about twenty minutes from me and we now have his Family Finder results. (I would like to get some more of them to test, although I did find one other who was already on GEDmatch.)

The two Elinoff tests showed expected levels of matching DNA with our three mutual Katz cousins and a bit with the more distant Fleischmans. But they also showed a non-negligible amount of shared DNA with the Brauns - likely fourth cousin territory.

Particularly surprising was a segment (over 13 cM) shared by both Elinoff cousins with a descendant of Leah and Yaakov Hersch Braun. And that is what brought me to delve into Uncle Max Braun's ancestry. Because there is a hint of a connection between the Braun and Katz/Elinoff families that is independent of the rest of us.

Brunn and Wachs

The second record on the above page is Uncle Max' birth record. He was born on 22 March 1883 in house 428 in Zalosce. (His Social Security documents say 12 March.) He was given the name Mechel on the eighth day. His mother is Sara Dasel Brunn, daughter of Moses Jakob and Marjem of Zalosce. The sandak is Joseph Wachs and on the far right Mordche Lippe Brunn acknowledges paternity. That would be because their marriage had not been registered by the civil authorities. It appears that Mechel/Max was Brunn from both parents.

Sara Dasel's father Moses Jakob Brunn died 28 August 1891 in Zalosce, also in house 428. He was 63.

His parents names appear, which is not always the case with older people. His father is Mechel and his mother is Rosa Basie. 

Uncle Max had an older sister named Rose, who lived in Pittsburgh, so both were named for their mother's paternal grandparents. My own research produced records showing three additional sons (Wolf, Josef and Abraham Jakob) who died as babies and another (Aron) who died at age twenty-one. I have birth records for two of those sons and in both cases the sandak is Joseph Wachs.

That does it for now for Uncle Max' mother's Brunn family. Uncle Max' father Mordecai Lipe is a harder nut to crack as I see no reference to him in JRI-Poland except the births and deaths of his children. (There is a birth for a Mordecai Lippe Brunn in Zalosce but 1877 is too late to be Uncle Max' father.) Nor was I able to find anyone whom I could identify as his father Israel Aryeh. There are lots of "Israel" and similar but I have no way to sort them out. Yaakov Hersch's Penssylvania death record has his mother as "unknown."

But we have a twenty-three page tree in outline form of the descendants of Schewach Wachs. Remember Joseph Wachs was the sandak for Uncle Max and at least two of his brothers. Some of the Wachs family lived in Pittsburgh. 

Herb Braun, the younger son of Uncle Max, was named after Hersch Wachs despite the fact that his own grandfather Hersch Pickholtz was living at the time. Herb told me that his mother, Aunt Mary, was partly raised by the Wachs family, so there was a significant connection there. 

Unfortunately, there is no Joseph Wachs in those twenty-three pages.

Mordecai Lipe Braun is mentioned in the Wachs tree, but in a way that makes no sense. He is listed as the wife(!) of Israel Wachs. No one seems to know exactly who put this together and what it is based on.

Good luck making sense of THAT.

I don't know that there are more records. I don't know if more DNA might help - Brauns, Elinoffs or others. Sometimes one person's DNA can hold the key.

 

But here is where we are holding for now.