Writing for Readers, Writing for Listeners

This article was originally published in the December 2014 issue of Association of Professional Genealogists Quarterly.  The version here is the way I submitted it to them.The phrase in red was cut by the editor.

I have never met Diana Crisman Smith, so the voice in my head that read her article ("Does It Sound Like You?" June 2014) was generic. Not even generic female. Nearly everything I read comes with a voice in my head and when I know – or have heard – the writer, I usually hear the virtual echo of the actual voice. I don't suppose there is anything extraordinary about that.

My own writing tends pretty much towards the same informal style as my speech. Certainly in my blog but also in articles that I occasionally write for publication. That is the case both in my native American-English and in Hebrew. And although I like it that way, it is not deliberate.

Even in the two short paragraphs above, I have used several sentence fragments, begun a sentence with "and" and used the informal "pretty much" and "I don't suppose." My writer-friend Varda, who looks over most of what I write for publication, knows to leave that kind of thing alone.

The Panel

During the summer, I had a different kind of challenge. I was a participant in a panel discussion at the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies' annual conference, in Salt Lake City,  on the subject "Internet Collaboration: How Do We Share Our Family Trees Online?" which was a polite way of saying "Geni – Yes or No?" I was "No." My indeterminate cousin Adam Brown was "Yes" and the publisher of the quarterly Avotaynu, Gary Mokotoff, spoke for "a third way." Sallyann Sack-Pikus, the editor of Avotaynu, was the moderator.

This panel was the continuation of a debate that began at last year's conference and continued in the pages of Avotaynu. To tell the truth, I was not crazy about doing this as I am not fast on my feet in debate – certainly not at Adam's level. But I had been front and center in this charge both in Avotaynu and on Facebook, so I hadn't much choice.

According to the rules Sallyann set, each of was to speak fifteen minutes from prepared text and then we would challenge each others' positions, before taking questions from the audience. We would see each others' remarks in advance in order to prepare our challenge questions.

The Problem

So I finally wrote it up about ten days before the conference, but when I read it aloud to myself to see how close I was to the assigned fifteen minutes, it just didn't sound right. It didn't sound like a speech or a presentation. It sounded like an article.

I have been speaking from notes since I was a youth leader in high school and have been using Power Point for years. I know how to do that. I have written letters to editors, op-eds and pieces for genealogy publications – I know how to do that too. I have never written a speech and I had just demonstrated to myself that I don't know how.

The sentences were too long, the structure of the thoughts too complex. In an article, if you don't get it right away you can reread the paragraph. That doesn't work when you speak from text, even if the full text is included in the handout

I had written this for readers, not for listeners.

The problem was that it was Thursday. I was going to the States on Sunday and would be busy with family matters followed by a week at GRIP in Pittsburgh before heading to the conference.

The Solution

The solution was in Pittsburgh, my home town. While attending my GRIP course, I stayed with Aunt Betty and Uncle Ken, one of whom – I forget which – is a sibling of my father. Uncle Ken

Photo by
Hannah Simon Goldman

has been retired from his job as a scientist for twenty-five years (do the math!) and spends one day a week at the University of Pittsburgh mentoring graduate students, mostly visiting Asians. Much of what he does involves helping them prepare and present papers.

He read my speech and asked many questions about genealogy – both the material itself and the nature of the research. And we worked on it. We looked at the sentence structure and we listened. My high school class just had its fiftieth reunion, so I am obviously not a youngster, but I was delighted to have an older, more experienced person helping me out, even if it was several hours after his bed-time.

By the time we were finished – by the time I left Pittsburgh – the words were 95% the same but it was not the same presentation. It sounded different. It sounded like it was meant to be heard, not read.

The Result

I was supposed to be showing how my way of presenting my research was collaborative and online without a "tree," so I jabbed with a few short sentences like "You can't say that's not collaborative" and "That's certainly collaborative." Those sentences get cut by an editor ten times out of ten. But they work in a speech.

My two-paragraph quote from Randy Seaver was relegated to the handout, as was my anecdote about the announcement from Geni that I am someone's "wife's aunt's husband's fourth cousin's wife's sister's husband's nephew's wife's mother's husband." The person responsible for that was in the audience and everyone already knew the joke.

The paragraph about my contact with the great nephew of Cousin Leo the Spy, received a new ending. "Now I have more. Now he knows more."

I changed my speech pattern a bit, not to slow it down, but to make it more deliberate. The punch lines punched.

The pro-tree position emphasized technology, young people and new researchers. I took a whack at that with this:

And an extensive web of DNA matches is about as collaborative as you can get! Even among the endogamous. Let me say that again for emphasis. An extensive web of DNA matches is about as collaborative as you can get! That is where much of my work is concentrated these days. And that is where many of tomorrow's researchers can be found.

In addition to issues like sentence length and complexity of thoughts, you can get away with bad syntax, bad grammar and even repeated words in speech, way more easily than in writing. And it's not that one is harder and one easier. They are simply different.

The handout referred to in this article can be found at 

 http://pikholz.org/34-SLC/Collaborative-Handout.html

Ruth: Our Mothers, Our Fathers, Our Cousins

Ruth
DNA results are in for my cousin Ruth.

I think this is the one!

Our late mothers are first cousins and and both are named for their great-grandmother Basya Gordon. Though Ruth is quite close to me in age, I am not sure we ever met more than twice. Once was when we spent my sixth birthday in New York - an event made memorable because Cousin Bessie gave me a Mr. Potato Head. The other was the bar mitzvah nearly sixty years ago of Ruth's first cousin Mickey in DC.

Ruth's grandmother is the older sister of my grandfather.

I have just begun testing on my mother's side and Ruth is one of three to test, aside from two of my sisters and me. The other two are my first cousin Kay (our mothers are sisters) and Ruth's first cousin Judy. We have one more test being processed - that one is on my grandmother's side and should help divide the matches between my mother's two sides.

Ruth's Family Finder results have given us information of interest in several different directions.

Everyone in the bottom row has done a Family Finder test.

MtDNA
In addition to the Family Finder, which I'll talk about below, Ruth also did an MtDNA test. That would be the line leading up through Gershon Kugel's wife Zelda. We received the results a month ago. Her haplogroup is R0a4.

Ruth has nine exact MtDNA matches and four more that are one step away. Now that we have her Family Finder results, I looked to see if any of those are close matches. (Three of the nine exact matches have not done Family Finder tests.)

Of the ones who have, most do not match Ruth at all and a few are remote matches. One of the "one-step-away" group is a "third cousin - fifth cousin." As it happens, this is someone I know as a researcher and who is a Facebook friend as well. There is nothing obvious between these two women that would account for a good Family Finder match, but we'll exchange information and see if anything turns up. Of course, the closeness in the Family Finder match me be unrelated to the MtDNA match.

Cyndi
When Judy's results came in about six weeks ago, I was surprised to see that her first match after my sister Sarajoy and me, even before my first cousin Kay, was Cyndi Norwitz. Cyndi is a known fifth cousin of mine on my father's maternal side (Zelinka, from Slovakia) and has no known connections to my mother's side. (For instance, she does not match Kay at all.)

Normally, I do not get involved in matches with peoples' other sides, but this was most unusual so I introduced the women and they began a lively conversation, mostly about Judy's mother's family. I think Judy is hooked. Since we knew we would be getting results from Ruth soon, I suggested we wait to see whether Ruth matched Cyndi or not. If they have a good match and passed the chromosome browser test, we could proceed assuming that Cyndi is connected to the grandfather of Judy and Ruth. If not, we would assume the connection to Cyndi goes through Judy's mother.

Cyndi and Ruth are "third cousin - fifth cousin." Not as close as Cyndi to Judy, but not bad either. There are partial answers in the chromosomes.

Judy and Cyndi match Ruth twice

Here on the left, we see that Judy and Cyndi match on chromosomes 14 and 18

Ruth and Cyndi match Judy five times!

But here on the right, there are three additional matches - on chromosomes 7, 8 and 22.

This appears to be a contradiction, but in fact it is not. Remember we have two of each chromosome, one from the father and one from the mother. FTDNA's results do not differentiate between them. What these results are telling us is that on one hand, the matches on chromosomes 14 and 18 are mutual and come therefore from Eliyahu DovBer, the grandfather of Ruth and Judy.

The matches on chromosomes 7, 8 and 22 are on Judy's two sides. The matches with Ruth (orange) are on Judy's father's side and the ones with Cyndi (blue) are probably on Judy's mother's side. In addition, Cyndi matches Judy on chromosomes 3, 6, 11, 13, 15, 16 and 17 for a total of over 50 cM. These may be on Judy's mother's side as well - or they may be from someplace else entirely. Or they may be matches that Ruth could share, but she simply didn't get those particular bits of DNA.

Oh and to complicate it further - Ruth and Cyndi have some matches that they do not share with Judy. Those are about 25 cM on chromosomes 5, 8, 10 and 16. Here too, they could be from someplace else (Ruth's father?) or they could be part of the match with Judy that Judy just didn't receive.

Unpredictability of DNA
Ruth's match with her second cousin Kay is only about 155 cM, which looks more like a third cousin than a second. That probably has to do with the fact that the adjusting algorithm that FTDNA uses does not know that Kay has no Jewish DNA from her father's side.

On the other hand, we might think that Ruth's matches with my sisters and me should be about the same. We would be wrong. Ruth and I share 496 cM, while neither of my sisters shares as much as 350 cM with Ruth. That's a difference of over forty percent. I am also significantly closer than my sisters to Judy, about 28% closer than Amy but over 50% closer than Sarajoy. I seem to be very much a Gordon!

Adam
I must touch on my obsession with finding my connection to Adam Brown.

Adam and I have a strong DNA match. We both have Kugels from Pleshchenitsy, we both have Gordons and we both have connections to Borisov where my maternal grandmother's Rosenblooms come from. When Kay's results came in a few months ago, we saw that she, Adam and I share a segment of chromosome 6 of almost 11 cM, plus two segnments on chromosome 12 of nearly 13 cM.

I was sure that this was largely on the Gordon/Kugel side and was curious to see what was on the Rosenbloom side.

To my surprise, Judy and Adam are not a match. Ruth and Adam are defined as "fourth cousin - remote cousin" and have a couple of segments in common with me. Kay matches me on segments adjacent to those, but I don't think that is significant.

So maybe we have something with Adam on the Gordon/Kugel side, but for now the Rosenbloom side looks much more promising. We'll know more about that when we see the results for our Rosenbloom cousin.

Fathers
I found it odd, to say the least, that my sisters and I have more that twice as much DNA in common with Ruth than we do with her first cousin Judy. That must come from somewhere.

Then I saw that Ruth is estimated to be a "second cousin - fourth cousin" to my father's brother and sister. And although she is a remote cousin to my father's first cousin Herb, she is not a match at all to my three second cousins on my father's side.

This almost has to come from my grandmother's side. Cyndi has no match with both Ruth and A. Betty/U.Bob, so it's not Zelinka side. I would expect my double second cousin Lee to have something matching, but no.

And even so, where is all this coming from on Ruth's end? From her father, I suppose.

Well, it also turns out that Ruth is a match with twenty-two Pikholz tests! Other than the five in my own personal family, there are only three who are not labelled "remote," two of those are from Rozdol and the third is a Pikholz by adoption, but like us, is from Skalat.

Before I start checking chromosomes for that, I want to find out a bit more about Ruth's father's family. I know his parents' names but not so much as his mother's maiden name. Ruth's parents were married in Brooklyn in 1936, so I have ordered the marriage record which should have his mother's birth name and perhaps where they came from. I have asked Ruth what she knows.

Asking is not always the way to go. Some years ago, one of the cousins sent out a genealogy questionnaire to that branch of the family. Both Ruth's older sister and her father himself reported that her parents were married in 1937 and here the database of the Italian genealogists lists the certificate in June 1936.

Oh how I love endogamy!

GENEALOGY AS A QUILTING BEE

MAINTAINING THE INTEGRITY OF THE DATABASE

A Response to Adam R. Brown and E. Randol Schoenberg

I have shamelessly borrowed the title of this essay from my cousin Adam Brown's "Big Bang" presentation in Boston. Though we have significant differences of opinion on these matters under discussion, I sincerely believe they can be discussed calmly and civilly, as befits our one big Jewish family.

In my previous encounter with Randy Schoenberg on the subject of Geni some months ago, I off-handedly told him that aside from anything else, the structure of the large Geni tree makes my ADD kick in and that I only look at Geni when a client is paying me to do so. I suppose that was a bit extreme, so in the interest of civility, I hope we both can set that aside.

The above is the opening of the first draft of an article which was just published in the Fall issue of Avotaynu, under the title   

Concerns about Geni and Other “Collaborative Genealogy” Websites.

Adam and Randy's articles were the lead in AVOTAYNU's Summer issue, which was published in September.

Rabbi Jeff Marx suggests:

that we use "Amalgamative Genealogy" for Geni and other sites that exist simply to compile names into one big unity, and reserve "Collaborative Genealogy" for the real process of give and take interaction with others using genealogical standards of proof.

 An excellent idea, though I think I prefer the term "Patchwork" to the cumbersome "Almagamative." Kind of like a quilting bee.

Following is my article as it appears in AVOTAYNU. (Click on the images to enlarge.)

Again, I want to thank Varda Meyers Epstein for assisting me with this. There was a bit of a mixup and I saw proofs of the pieces by Adam and randy only one day before AVOTAYNU wanted my first draft response. Varda reviewed my work several times during that day, otherwise there is no way I would have made that deadline. She also reviewed the subsequent  revisions.

Oh, and Sallyann Sack Pikus, the editor I worked with, wrote:

You made a substantial contribution to what I really hope will be a "serious" (good word!) discussion of the merits and drawbacks of the Geni approach.

There are a few other examples which were not included in the final draft of the article.

In one of my family branches, there is a woman who had a child from a husband whom she divorced soon after. That child was raised by the second husband, together with the subsequent children, and took his surname. The mother said she did not want the first husband mentioned on the family tree. The fact that I have a database that is separate from the website allows me to follow the mother's wishes on the website - even the password-protected page, where living people are named - while maintaining the correct information in my Brother's Keeper database, which only I see.

In another case, a third cousin on the Pikholz side was horrified that her name and the names of her brother and sister not appear anywhere. I found that a bit peculiar, especially since the sister's son was perfectly happy to appear openly on the password-protected page. That page now includes he three of them as follows

(1)  Sister of PRIVATE-PERSON-WHO-PREFERS-HER-NAME-NOT-APPEAR-IN-PUBLIC b. Denver CO 1950 m. Anthony Gronich b. Los Angeles 1949.

(2)  Brother of PRIVATE-PERSON-WHO-PREFERS-HER-NAME-NOT-APPEAR-IN-PUBLIC b. Abt 1954, m. Sandy xxxxx, b.1930's.
 
(3)  PRIVATE-PERSON-WHO-PREFERS-HER-NAME-NOT-APPEAR-IN-PUBLIC b. Abt 1957 m. MAN.

The names of the children of the sister appear in full.

Both of those examples refer to the importance of maintaining a database, distinct from what appears on a public website. I am not sure that the AVOTAYNU article was sufficiently emphatic on that point.

Adam wrote in his article about the technological advances in image identification. I agree that this is important for many people, especially the younger researchers who are Adam's target audience. I told the following story, which was edited out:

On some of these technology issues, I have to trust the experts. But there is a picture on my office wall of my son Renanel and my daughter Hadas, in profile, working in my mother's kitchen maybe a dozen years ago, when they were both teenagers. Hadas was here a couple of weeks ago and pointed out that this is not Renanel at all, but one of my nephews. The only reason she recognized him was that she remembers the occasion. But if you tell me that your facial recognition technology can get it right, then good for you.

I mentioned in my original opening that I have ADD issues with Geni and other tree-type programs. Part of that is because I have trouble telling where I am and where I am going. But there is also an issue of horizontal scrolling. This was in the first draft:

Nonetheless, my genealogy mentor Carol Skydell taught me that people build websites to scroll vertically, not horizontally, for good reason. Horizontal scrolling is much more difficult and people cannot do it as well. It's like a book – for thousands of years we have been reading from side to side within a defined area and then proceed down the page. I'd bet that no one ever wrote a Torah-type scroll with long scrolling horizontals.Perhaps that is just "old peoples' talk" but I see it in my own web behavior, even on my 24" screen.

Of course you cannot record tens of thousands of names in a vertical tree-type chart. (Real trees, are, of course, vertical.) But it doesn't mean I have to choose to work that way when I have my own options. Those invariably involve presenting one family at a time with links, rather than linking them all via dynamic screens.

I understand that Randy asked for an advance copy of this article and intends to have a rebuttal in the Winter AVOTAYNU. I told Gary Mokotoff (publisher of AVOTAYNU) that this may go on for a few iterations and he thought that would be fine. I believe that I am not alone on my side of the debate and I hope someone else would get involved in the response to Randy's next piece - if in fact it is accepted for publication. Preferably someone with more hands-on experience with Geni that I have. (I saw some of Randy's comments on his own site, and was disappointed to find my own positions presented in a distorted way.)

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BLOG #100
Believe it or not, this is my one hundredth blog post. I began nearly two years ago with a single item and chose the blog style to enable discussion among a group of people. Nothing ever came of that, but it quickly became a weekly thing that I do partly to maintain self-discipline.

Blogger tells me that there are four or five hundred unique visits each week, though the comments certainly do not reflect that. My thanks to all the readers - those who comment on the blog, those who comment on Facebook and elsewhere and those who do not respond at all.

Now it's on to the second hundred - or at least  number 101, which I can tell you now, will be about the Jerusalem snow of 1969..

TIME TO GO HOME, BUT FIRST A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE LAST FEW WEEKS

I am going home Monday (arriving Tuesday) at the end of a twenty-seven day trip to the US, so I suppose it's time to record some thughts about the time I have spent here - chiefly the Conference in Boston. (Right now, Blogger is in one of its moods and I cannot even get it to accept links.)

Last week's blog was basically a placeholder, saying nothing at all and with no announcements about it on Facebook or anyplace else. Oddly enugh, accrding to Blogger's count, I had about the same number of unique visits as any other week. So I suppose it doesn't matter if I say anything or not. But I am not so much speaking to readers as I am recording my work and experiences in genealogy.

Shabbat in Brookline was very nice. I was with a family I didn't know, arranged by a neighbor of mine who made aliyah from there a couple of years ago. In the course of Shabbat, I met a man who was getting married the following week at the Poale Zedeck in Pittsburgh, so I was able to send surprise regards to my uncle. Friday I went over to Irene's house and I talked Pikholz genealogy with her and her husband and older son. Irene participated in the Conference and our paths crossed several times a day.

The Conference hotel left something to be desired, starting with space to move around in the guest rooms. It would have been crowded in that room if I had been there with my wife. So much moreso with a roommate. A third cousin of my wife's, actually, and a very nice fellow. The lecture halls were cold, even for me. The elevators were terribly slow, but fortunately I was on a low floor and took the stairs much of the time. All told, the hotel gave us the facilities we needed and on balance was not bad. I used one of the lunch breaks to meet an old friend from my Chicago days - someone I hadn't seen in forty years. (He says he reads tis blog - Hi Zale.)

Morning minyan was well-attended, between eighteen and twenty-five people, with a brief class beforehand on the subject of exhumation and reinterment. Afternoon and evenng services were less well-attended, but we managed. The ever-reliable Elliot Greene (with whom I have a DNA connection) handled all the arrangements, including siddurim and a sefer Torah

One of the most interesting lectures was by a woman who was raised Roman Catholic who managed to prove her Jewish ancestry back to the Inquisition and added to the historical record of her ancestral Spanish town in the process. She eventually received letters both from the Rabbinate in Jerusalem and from a prominent US Sephardic rabbi attesting to the fact that she was Jewish from birth. I bought her book "My 15 Grandmothers" which tells that story. Her journey could have ramifications for many other Conversos, who are interested in returning to their historic Judaism, five hundred years after their forced cnversions.

Logan Kleinwaks spoke about what is new on his wonderful website, genealogyindexer.org. It used to be mainly directories, which can be searched using Optical Character Recognition, but he has been adding other types of records as well. I hsve to spend some time on the site when I get home.

Online Historical Jewish Newspapers was the subject of a talk by Janice Sellers. The tiny room was overflowing, with people sitting on the floor and standing along the wall. It was good, though I already knew quite a bit of what she presented.

I attended other lectures as well, but these were the best of the bunch.

I attended two meetings - one of JRI-Poland volunteers and town leaders, run by Stanley Diamond and Robinn Magid. The other was the Sub-Carpathian SIG, run by Marshall Katz (both a DNA match and a yinzer). I'll do a separate post in a few weeks about Marshall and the Sub-Carpathians and why this interests me at all. (Related to this was a lecture by Olga Muzychuk, the Deputy Director of the Ukrainian Stete Archives. Perhaps I'll have more on this when I blog about Marshall.)

My cousin Adam Brown spoke about what he considers the next big thing in genealogy - online, collaborative trees and in particular genie.com. He knows well that I have reservations about this kind of thing. In fact, I have an article in the coming AVOTAYNU called "Getting It Wrong" which the editor has apparently paired with Adam's article reviewing his talk at the Conference. I am already thinking out a response to Adam's article, for the following AVOTAYNU.

My main interest at the Conference was DNA and I attended everything I could. I started off with an hour of one-on-one discussion with Bennett Greenspan, the President of Family Tree DNA, the company we use for our Pikholz Project testing. He gave me some direction on the analysis of our Y DNA results. (We are close to thirty people so far, with results from thirteen.) Bennett also promised that he'd get Elise Friedman to give a webinar for project administrators, going through all of FTDNA's analytical tools.

I also attended his talk, which I found less useful, but it was an insight to his philosophy. I did not attend Bennett's Breakfast With The Experts session, as it conflicted with morning minyan.

There was a meeting of DNA Project Administrators, at which I had hoped to learn all about the subject. What I learned was that I was not the only clueless person in the room and I expect that the more experienced folks thought we were holding them back.

I also attended a two-hour for-pay computer session on DNA analysis for individuals who had already tested. Some came totally unprepared and we wasted upwards of half an hour because they didn't know thier kit numbers or passwords or had no idea even how to get into the site. Fortunately the room was available into the next hour, so Elise gave us some extra time at the end.

My own talk, on Tuesday at five, went very well. Barbara Stern Mannlein introduced and people seemed to enjoy it. I am still trying to get the audio recording to which I am entitled. The program people made a big deal about getting speakers' permission to video the talks, but in the end no video was done of mine. Too bad, because the audio alone is not very useful. (My Power Point was full of dynamic slides, including circles and arrows and general activity. I was surprised that in all the other lectures that I attended, Power Point served as nothing more than a slide projector. Maybe people prefer it that way.)

The next evening I had a long discusion with Russell Maurer, a micro-biologist, who had attended my talk. He seemd to think I am doing this sensibly, but cautioned about chasing any particular conclusion. That, of course, was my whle point. And as I wrote two weeks ago, subsequent test results seem to support where I am going.

I was also drafted into a Q&A panel on archives in different countries. It was a first-time event and can only get better. The biggest problem was that the questons were both rambling and off-topic.

After Boston came Miami and south Florida, Baltimore and Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Bloomington and finally Chicago and Buffalo Grove. I missed an imprtant visit at the Greyhound Station in Columbus, but more on that anther time.I saw some close family, made face-to-face connections with several Pikholz families and visited two Florida cemeteries.

Next year's conference is in Salt Lake City, the week before Tish'a beAv. My participation may be contingent on whether I am approved to speak.