CADASTRALLY SPEAKING - The Pikholz Families in Skalat

A few weeks ago, Jay Osborne's Map Room on the Gesher Galicia website added a cadastral map of Skalat from 1862.

The maps themselves are held by TsDIAL (the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine) in Lviv and we are grateful to them for making these maps available.

The value of these maps is in the numbered houses - who lived near whom and where the various houses are in relation to markets, roads, waterways and public buildings. The houses are not laid out on a grid with numbers befitting that structure, but simply reflect the order in which the houses were built. 

Many of the vital records which the Polish State Archives has made available through JRI-Poland have house numbers where the event occurred. These are not necessarily where the family lived, as a young woman may have had her child at her mother's house and of course some people died in hospitals.

Some years ago, I cobbled together charts of where the Pikholz families lived in our main towns - Skalat and Rozdol. These charts are not meant to be comprehensive, but they have helped me to understand which families were connected. 

The names of the families in the charts are the ones I have developed for my own convenience and don't mean much to outsiders, but I recently added some color coding to identify the family groups.

The links on the house numbers lead to details of the records. House 60, for instance.

 

 Jay was kind enough to mark up the relevant part of the Skalat map with the Pikholz houses.

The road to the northeast leads to Novosielke, where much of the killing was done in 1942-43 and where a memorial site was established nearly thirty years ago. The road leading south in the center of the image leads to Grzymalow where there were additional Pikholz families.

Most of the Pikholz houses are just east of the road to Grzymalow. Most of the families there are descendants of (Izak) Josef and Mordecai, who are known to be closely related. West of that road is house 132 - descendants of Nachman Pikholz - and more of that family lived in house 23 (up towards the market). House 418, also near the market, was the family of Peretz Pikholz. 

There is no doubt that all these families are related, but they had drifted apart over the years. Living descendants of the different families told me "We are not related to them." The fact they lived in different areas testifies to the distance within the families themselves.