The Parents of the Mościska Fathers

A few weeks ago, this dropped into my inbox.

Subject: New records on the All Galicia Database
From: Gesher Galicia SIG <sig@geshergalicia.org>
Date: Tue, 9 Jul 2019 11:38:03 +0100
X-Message-Number: 3
New vital records and Jewish taxpayer records are now available for all
to search on the All Galicia Database <https://search.geshergalicia.org>.
A. Vital records
- Mielnica (Melnytsya). Jewish deaths, 1820-1851 (162 records)
- Mosciska (Mostyska). Jewish births, 1909-1924 (1,259 records)
- Witkow Nowy (Novyi Vytkiv). Jewish births 1829-1861 (447 records)

As is my wont, I had a look, using the "Records added" option and choosing "in the past month."

The search produced two results, both in Mosciska (also known as Mostyska) which is about a third of the way from Przemysl to Lwow. It is not a town where I have ever seen any Pikholz.

The results included a major surprise. Look at what I marked in red.

The standard Galician birth records list the parents of the mother - and in Lwow the mother's mother's birth surname, at least in some years - but nothing about the father aside from his home town and occupation. But look at what we have here. 

In the first record, it shows both of the father's parents, with given names and birth surnames, as well as the mother's hometown. But oddly, not the father's. It also tells us where the parents of the child were married. The second record has all that, except the mother's surname.

This is a very big deal and I have not seen it in any other towns. There are not a lot of Mosciska birth records in JRI-Poland but the ones I found in the early 1900s had this information as well. So my impression is that this is a local custom, rather than one that simply showed up after the First World War.

How I wish we had those in Rozdol, Skalat and elsewhere!

In the case of Hirsch, the son of Benjamin Pickholz and Reisel Lowin, I did not know the parents of Benjamin. I have a birth record for Benjamin and did not have a wife or children for him. Without the paternal information in Mosciska, I would have had no way of identifying the one in this birth record as the one in the 1893 Rozdol birth.

The second record is from the Skalat part of the family. I know the maternal grandmother; she married in Podwoloczysk and her Pikholz mother was from Husiatyn. In fact, I already have both her 1893 birth record and her Podwoloczysk marriage record. This new birth record, from Mosciska, gives us the son Mechel.

Mechel's mother Brane has three grandchildren here in Israel and this record has given me another opportunity to break their collective silence on all things genealogical. One was once a neighbor of mine and all he was willing to say is "We are not from Galicia, WE are from VIENNA!".

Housekeeping notes

1. I shall be in the US for two weeks, beginning two weeks from now, visiting some of my elders. I have one presentation planned and two or three others pending.

22 August 2019, 6:30 – Jewish Genealogy Society of Pittsburgh, Multi-purpose Room of the Heinz History Center Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?

2. Family Tree DNA is having a sale through August. Here are the major discounts. There are additional discounts on upgrades.

The Murder of the First Pikholz Family in Tarnopol

Early Pikholz families in Tarnopol
We know that there were Pikholz families in Skalat - about 19 miles or 30 km ESE of the provincial capital Tarnopol - just before 1800. Later in the 1800s we find Pikholz families and individuals in nearby Mikulince, Grzmaylow, Kacanowka, Zbarazh, Klimkowce, Husiatyn and Tarnopol and its suburbs. Later we find Pikholz families in Kozivka, Buczacz, Terembowla, Podwoloczysk and elsewhere. Most of these individuals and families are traceable to known Skalat families.

But some are not. Almost certainly they come from our known families but the records don't give enough information to work with. For that matter, we have fifteen-twenty Pikholz deaths in Skalat itself whom we cannot identify.

In the case of Tarnopol, we have a few like this. Pikholz infants named Samuel, Perl, Gabriel, Moses and another young Samuel died during the period 1848-1852. Do they all have the same parents? Maybe, but we don't know.

Menie Beyle Pikholz died in Tarnopol in 1867 at age twenty-six, but she may have been a Pikholz spouse.

Jankel Pikholz was born in Tarnopol in 1854 to Marcus and Ruchel.

The 1910 Tarnopol census shows a Herman Pikholz, age 66, "born in Tarnopol."

These are the earliest records of Pikholz descendants living in Tarnopol. That would have been about 1844.

The murdered family
That changed last week when Gesher Galicia announced the availability of several new record sets including

Tarnopol (Ternopil). TsDIAL, Fond 701/1/328, 331, 332 and 334
 - Jewish deaths, May 1845-December 1869 (10,662 records).

I went to Gesher Galicia's All Galicia Database and searched "Pikholz" using the "Records added in the past month" filter

Among the search results were these:

A whole family - Abram Pikholz, his wife Welle, daughters Esther and Sara - all died on 22 March 1855 and son David died three days later. (I was not familiar with the female name "Welle" but others tell me that it indeed occurs in their families. Perhaps it is a female version of Welwel.)

And it's spelled in the German way, with a "c" - perhaps it was the custom in the provincial capital.

Tony Kahane provided the actual record and wrote:

I found the page from the Tarnopol D 1854-1857 records listing the deaths of the five members of the Pikholz family in March 1855, in Borki Wielkie, near Tarnopol. These deaths were not from cholera (unlike many others in that year). The part of the note that it is easier to decipher (attached screenshot) is line 3 and  the beginning of line 4:

"… in der Nacht v[on] 19. auf 20. d[ieses] M[onat] ermordet …".

These people were murdered in the night of 19-20 March 1855.

Roger Lustig had a look at the German-language note on the right and wrote:

was, at the Sbrutin (?) Inn in Borki wielkie, on the night of the 19th-20th of the month, murdered, and, as a result of Imperial and Royal [something] order of 20 March 1855 No. 4363, 

So the family were murdered at the inn in Borki Wielkie (currently known as Velikiye Borki) six miles ESE of Tarnopol. Were they passing through? Did they live in Borki? Were Abram and Welle the innkeepers? How is this family connected to the deaths of children in Tarnopol whom we had already seen?

Well, they seem to have lived in Borki. An additional record in the new set is this:

One-month old Chajem Moses lived in Borki and died 22 December 1854, three months before the murder. This seems to be the same family, living in Borki. So they were at the inn but lived locally. 

The actual death record of Chajem Moses

 Who is Abram?
The father, Abram, was thirty-two when he died. That seems to make him the first Pikholz in Tarnopol, though there I doubt that he was born there. Who is he? Who are his parents? How does he connect to the known Pikholz families from Skalat? 

The only other Avraham from the Skalat area, born before the 1870s is a son of Nachman Pikholz and he was born about 1841, so there is a good chance he is a son of my third-great-grandfather Izak Josef. In fact, we have no children for Izak Josef between Berl (1816) and Selig (1830) so it is reasonable that there are missing children born in the 1820s. I think I shall record Abram as a probable son of Isak Josef, though he might be a son of Berl (1789).

On the other hand, as far as I know, no Pikholz from the Skalat area named a child Avraham in the years following the murder.

I have contacted Alex Denisenko to see what might be found about the murder and the family. 

UPDATE: Traude Triebel provided a link to a newspaper report. It confirms what we already have and provides no additional information.

Mazal Tov - Uncle Selig Gets Married

The find
From the JewishGen SIG announcements from Friday.

Gesher Galicia is pleased to announce the addition of new sets of
Jewish records on the All Galicia Database
<https://search.geshergalicia.org>.
            <snip>
Tarnopol (Ternopil)
- Jewish marriages, 1859-1876. State Archive of Ternopil Oblast
(DATO), Fond 33/1/716. (379 records)

 I went in and used the new "Records Added in the Past Month" function and this came up.

I am assuming that the wife's name is Rachel.

The only Selig Pikholz we have is the brother of my great-great-grandmother Rivka Feige Pikholz. I have written about him in this space numerous times, most recently here. I even have a presentation called "Why Did My Father Know that His Grandfather Had an Uncle Selig," which I gave at JGS Maryland last winter and at the IAJGS conference in Orlando.

This find - and it is not a full document, only an simple index record - answers and documents several open points and opens the door to a possible significant new development.

Identifying Uncle Selig
This is definitely Uncle Selig, not only because there is no one else, but because the age (43) in January 1874 fits his 1830 birth year (based on the age in his death record.)

Many years ago, I concluded that Uncle Selig's (and therefore Rivka Feige's) father is Izak Josef Pikholz (~1874-1862), who was known as Josef. This was based on the fact that Uncle Selig named his son Itzig Joseph right after Old Izak Josef died and the fact that Rifka Feige had a grandson called Joseph Yitzhak but who was actually born Isak Josel.

I also have DNA evidence, as I discuss in Chapter Seven of my book "ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People."

But I never had an actual document. Now I do, for the marriage index calls him "son of Josel Pikholz."

Of course that also verifies the identity of my own third-great-grandfather, even though that has been settled in my mind for probably eighteen years. I can now totally ignore the fact that Selig was born when his father was at the relatively advanced age of forty-six. We finally have a document.

Uncle Selig in Tarnopol
Uncle Selig and his wife Chana lived in Skalat, where most of the Pikholz families lived. Chana died 11 September 1873 at age forty-five of cancer (raka).

But later in life, Uncle Selig lived in Tarnopol. And his youngest son Meir, who was born about 1872 or maybe 1874, is listed as being from Tarnopol, not Skalat where Selig and Chana lived. After visiting Meir's grave in Vienna a few months ago, I suggested:

The thing is Uncle Selig's wife Chana died of cancer in September 1873 at age forty five, so she could have had a son in 1872 but not 1874. Of course Meier could be from a second wife, but we have no evidence that Uncle Selig remarried and certainly none that he remarried so quickly after Chana died.

Except that Meir was born in Tarnopol and Chana died in Skalat, where the family lived. Maybe Uncle Selig married a second time, this time to a woman from Tarnopol. And they lived in her hometown. Where Meir was born.

So do we reopen the question if Meir was born to Chana in 1872 or the twenty-four year old second wife in 1874? That marriage was 21 January, so birth the same calendar year was certainly possible.

But we do know that Uncle Selig married a woman from Tarnopol and that is likely why he lived there from the time of that marriage.

And speaking of the second wife...
This young woman is Rachel Nagler (b. ~1849) and he married her barely four months after his first wife died.That sounds like the standard practice when a widow or widower is left with young children. (For this reason I believe that Meir is the son of Chana. We know of no other "young children.")

The new spouse is often from within one of the families.

So who might Rachel Nagler be? Peretz Pikholz (~1820-1873) is the son of Berl Pikholz (~1789-1877). We do not know how he is related to my Pikholz families. Perhaps Berl is the brother of Old Izak Josef - or a cousin or a nephew. Peretz was married to Perl Nagler (~1823-1904). Selig's wife Rachel is surely related to Peretz' wife Perl, a niece or cousin, perhaps.

Perhaps this points to a Pikholz-Nagler connection that is more substantial than the Peretz-Perl marriage. Perhaps the actual record will tell us something. Thus far, the folks at Gesher Galicia are not encouraging regarding getting an actual record from the Tarnopol archives.

Housekeeping notes
I have three talks coming up, all here in Israel. All are in Hebrew.

19 November 2017, 7:00 – Israel Genealogical Society, Bet Sapir, Sderot Yerushalayim 2 (second floor), Kefar Sava.
Lessons in Jewish DNA – One Man’s Successes and What He Learned On the Journey

8 January 2018 as part of the Yad Vashem / Central Zionist Archives series “From Roots to Trees” at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. 

5:30-6:15 – The Importance to Genealogy of Understanding Jewish Culture and Customs
6:16-7:00 – Using Genetics for Genealogy Research

Mendel (Morris) Pickholtz, 5657-5717 (1896-1957)

Twenty-fifth anniversary, 1946

My grandfather died on the ninth of First Adar - that's Monday evening - sixty years ago. He has been dead almost as long as he lived.

Everyone thought I was too young to go to the funeral, or even the unveiling - something I resented until, well forever. He had had a serious heart attack just before I was born and there was some concern that I would bear his name, but happily he recovered. He kept the extra name "Chaim" that was added during the illness.

In the end, it was a "cerebral vascular accident." Twelve hours from onset until death. I knew without anyone's telling me.

They lived in this house since sometime in the 1930s until I think 1952.

From the 1940 federal census

 
Sometime in the 1940s, my grandmother's mother moved in with them, until her death in 1950.

My father and Aunt Betty both went to their weddings from that house.

The family lived in Zalosce, east Galicia, and my grandfather's first seven siblings (four of whom survived childhood) were born there. Maybe the next two as well, but Zalosce birth records are available only through 1890, so we are not sure. My grandfather, the youngest was born in Bogdanowka, in house 95, on the holiday of Hoshanna Rabba, during Sukkot.

This Jezierna birth record is from the All Galicia Database of Gesher Galicia

Within a few years, the family began it's multi-stage migration to the Pittsburgh, where his father's sister had settled in the 1880s. My great-grandmother came last with the three youngest children, not through Baltimore or Ellis Island like the others, but through Montreal and the St. Albans Vermont border crossing.

With U. Dave (center) and U. Joe (right)

My grandfather was in the wholesale grocery business on Miller Street with two of his brothers, Uncle Joe and Uncle Dave, a business which closed when Uncle Joe turned sixty-five. I remember being there.

The children of the three brothers (the eldest, Uncle Max, had no children) were close in age and that and the business connection made my father's generation and mine closer with them then with the three sisters' children, who were older. (Not to mention that my grandfather and Uncle Joe married sisters!)

My grandfather had first cousins in Pittsburgh on both sides of his family, but the family connection didn't survive much after that first generation - until I began doing genealogy.

1953. Getting ready for the first seder on Northumberland Street, after leaving the house on Phillips Avenue.
I share the head of the table with my grandfather. Six people in this picture are still with us.

The Pittsburgh Jewish Criterion (thanks to The Pittsburgh Jewish Newspapers Project) recorded many of the key events in his life, including his regular listing as Vice-President of the Poale Zedeck Men's Club (and my grandmother's as President of the Sisterhood). Here are a few.

And finally...

Not mentioned are Aunt Becky and Aunt Bessie who predeceased him.

May his soul be bound in life. תהא נפשו צרורה בצרור החיים.

Housekeeping notes
I am speaking here in Israel in English - 16 March 2017, 7:30 – IGRA, Beit Fisher, 5 Klausner Street, Raanana
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey

I have had four proposals accepted for the IAJGS Conference in Orlando 23-28 July. No times or dates yet. But if anyone wants me to speak in the US before the Conference, now is the time to speak up.

And for the attention of any program chairs (or anyone who knows program chairs), I'll be available in the US late April-early May of 2018. Another bar mitzvah in Chicago.

Nine New Records from AGAD

Until about a year ago, east Galician records were available from the AGAD archives in Warsaw, based on the indexing done for JRI-Poland. During the previous five years, I had placed about two dozen orders for these records - for my own research, for other people and occasionally for research clients.

Then last year, AGAD put those records online and there was no longer a need for these cumbersome orders.

But in the meantime, new records have become available, some listed at JRI-Poland and some in the All Galicia Database of Gesher Galicia and among them were a few records I wanted. This order took a long time to put together because I kept hoping that additional indexed records would be posted, but finally I decided to go with what I had.

Seven records in this order were for other genealogy researchers, six of them for people in Israel. One wanted his record to help him acquire Polish citizenship. Two others were for a man in my shul, whose family comes from Rozdol. The other nine were Pikholz records.

All told, there were a dozen births, five marriages and one death. Seven were from Podwoloczysk, four from Rozdol, three from Lwow, and one each from Drohobycz, Rohatyn, Skalat and Zbarazh.

The records arrived a few days ago via an online link. The total of eighteen were actually seventeen, as two of the Rozdol records were on the same page. In one case, they sent the wrong page and I have requested a replacement.

So here are the nine new Pikholz records.

Nachman, born to Abraham Pickholz and Lea Gelbling in Drohobycz
We already had a death record for this child. He died after only sixteen days. The birth  record shows that he was born 21 September 1911.

We do not know for certain who this Abraham Pickholz is, but I would guess he is part of the family we call IF2, where the name Nachman is prominent..

We know of two sisters before born Nachman, Hinde Feige and Sara Rivka.

Sara Lea, born to Markus Pickholz and Blime Jubjener in Rozdol
Here too, we cannot identify the father's place in the Pikholz structure, as the name is common and there is no identifying information on the birth record. The mother's name also appears as Jupiener.

The birth date is 19 July 1904. The couple had older children Matias and Gittel and a younger son Michal.

Gittel Rappaport, born to Josel Rappaport and Ryfka Luftschein Pickholz in Rozdol
We know this family, although the living descendants have not been willing to speak to us.

The family went to the US in the late 1920s. Gittel was the second of four children. She married Mayer Heilweil and died at age thirty-two.

Gittel's mother is the daughter of Fischel Pickholz and they lived in Bialkes, near Skole - which is where her older brother's birth was recorded.

Josel Rappaport  was from Zurawno - so Gittel must have been born when they were visiting some part of her mother's family in Rozdol. The birth was 1 January 1905.

Izrael Pikholz, son of Moses Hersch of Kaczanowka, recorded in Zbarazh
This is a death record. Izrael is thirty-five, died of cancer and was married. He died 20 April 1909 and was buried the following day in Zbarazh.

We know this family. The deceased had five younger brothers and sisters that we know of.

The best fit I see for Izrael is a man who married Ester Lyncyz. They had a daughter in 1901 who died at birth. But maybe not.

Etie Golde Pikholz, daughter of Gabriel and Breine, marries in Podwoloczysk

This is an odd one. The marriage took place in 1896. The bride is identified as being thirty-two years old and her parents are from Husiatyn. But Gabriel Pikholz of Husiatyn died in 1852, a dozen years before Etie Golde was born. And in any case, the wife of that Gabriel was Sara, not Breine.

The groom is Wolf, the son of Hersch and Male Feldman of Tarnopol.

There is a four-part note which appears to be just technical matters, but we are trying to determine if there might be some interesting information there.

And perhaps there is a Feldman descendant out there somewhere.

Abraham Eisig Pikholz (Zellermayer) marries Basie Pudles in Podwoloczysk
This is a record that I have wanted for years but had my doubts about ever finding.

We knew that Abraham was a grandson of Eliezer and Chane Chaje Pikholz, but had no idea what his mother's name was. Abraham and Basie had three children who all lived in Israel. One granddaughter is a well-known (if you are old enough) radio personality who in recent years has been writing Hebrew subtitles on Sponge Bob and other cartoon shows. Another granddaughter is the wife of an old boss of mine.

So now we have the record showing that Abraham's parents were Zalmen Hillel Zellermayer and Ettel Pikholz, that he had a second name Eisig, that he was born in 1883 and that the marriage took place 29 June 1909.

There is also a lengthy note which we are working on. After we get that figured out, I'll send the record to the granddaughters, as best we can tell, my fourth cousins..

And they had a son in Podwoloczysk
In May 1910, Abraham and Basie have a son. We knew this, of course, but now we have the birth record.

Jente Halpern (Pickholz) marries Schamschon David Sirki in Podwoloczysk
We know this family - or at least we know the bride's parents. She was born in 1884 to Joel Halpern and Chana Pickholz of Husiatyn. Chana is the daughter of Gabriel and Sara whom I mentioned above.

The marriage took place in 1911. One of the witnesses, Salomon Lynczycz was also a witness at the marriage of Etie Golde above. We have two Pikholz men married to Lynczycz women, but I don't see a connection between either of them and a Salomon.

I have not seen the surname Sirki anywhere else. I'd really like to find a descendant.

Ester Reizie, born to Basie Pickholz and Schaje Wolf Jorysz in Podwoloczysk
This is the fourth child we have for this couple. The birth was in August 1909. Ester Reizie was married in Grzmaylow in 1939 to Ojzer Swartz. (We also have a marriage for her older sister.)  We have nothing further.

Basie - or more properly Chaya Basie - is the daughter of Josef and Fradel Taube of Tarnoruda. This should be the RITA family. We do not know if Josef or Fradel Taube is the Pikholz.

I am told that there has been a new transfer from the Civil Records Office to AGAD, but we do not yet know which towns' records those would be.

A FEW NEW RECORDS

About a month ago, the following announcement showed up on several of the JewishGen discussion lists.

This is just the beginning. It continues on for several more paragraphs.

Note the reference to the All Galician Database as AGD, not to be confused with AGAD, the Warsaw archives which holds most of the available vital records for east Galicia in the late 1800s.

Having interests in most of the towns with the new records, I decided to have a look. Their drop-down menu did not include Skalat and Podwoloczysk (or for that matter Brzezany) among its choices, so I did a search for Pikholz records from Grzymalow, which is quite near Skalat.

The actual search. (I added the red arrow for the readers' convenience.)

The search produced thirty-two results, six of them from Grzymalow, the rest from elsewhere in east Galicia. Thirty-one showed the name Pikholz  - one was Pekules, which is reasonable as a sound-alike. I already had most of these records and I have actually met some of those mentioned in the Grzymalow school records. And it turns out I get the same thirty-two records regardless of which town I ask the system to search.

I would like to tell you about the four which I  am planning to order, all from the Podwoloczysk.records in the AGAD archives.

  

Prof. Jonas Zellermayer came to Israel form Vienna when he was twenty-four and lived here 

for nearly seventy years. His son-in-law was my boss thirty-five years ago.

Everything we have here lists his father as Avraham, without the second name, so we now know that his father was actually Avraham Yitzhak. One odd thing with this family - we know much  about Avraham's family, but not his parents' names. We know the names of the grandparents and his Pikholz great-grandparents, his mother's three brothers and two sisters, but we know neither the name of his Pikholz mother nor that of his Zellermayer father.

But now we know, as their marriage record was the great surprise of this new set of indexed

records. Jonas'  father Abraham Eisig was the son of Zalmen Juda Zellermayer and Ettel Pickholz.

The fact that he came from Liczkowce may also prove useful as we have several Zellermayer-Pikholz connections and it is not at all clear if there is a larger family story to be told.

In fact, at least three of the four  records I cite here are in some way connected to Zellermayers. 

In the meantime, I sent the marriage entry to the two granddaughters of Abraham and Basie and as a result had my most significant interaction with either of them in some years. Those two granddaughters are, by the way, named after Basie's parents Don and Rifke.

We have a Pikholz couple named Gabriel and Sara who lived in Husiatyn. They had a son Moshe in 1851 and a daughter Chanzie. Gabriel, who was described as "from Skalat" died in

1852 at age thirty in a house associated with a Zellermayer family. Our only knowledge of Chanzie is that she was married to Joel Halpern and lived in Podwoloczysk, which we learn from the 1887 death record of their young son Isaak and the 1893 birth record for their daughter Breine. We know nothing further of Breine.

The new records include the 1911 marriage of their previously unknown daughter Jente to Schamschon Duwid Sirki, son of Mechel and Ester. Thusfar, I have not found other references to the surname Sirki, but it would be great if we can find some descendants.

And this one must be related too. In 1896, we have the Podwoloczysk marriage of Wolf Feldman, age 29, son of Hirsch and Male of Tarnopol to Etie Golde Pikholz, the thirty-two year

old daughter of Gabriel and Breine of Husiatyn.

This cannot be the same Gabriel above - that one died 1852 and this one had a daughter in 1864. Nor can it be any other Gabriel we know. And although we do not have any ther couple named Gabriel and Breine, we do have the one Gabriel with a granddaughter Breine and another whose mother is Brane. It all seems to revolve around Husiatyn.

I haven't a clue how this couple fits in, but the existence of the marriage record opens the possibility of finding some Feldman descendant.

So I must see if I can find anything else of the Sirki and Feldman couples - nothing so far. I will also order the four records themselves from AGAD, as these are not online.

I plan to see if others want to order anything, so that I can put together a larger order, so I asked if any other new records will be added to the All Galicia Database in the coming weeks. (No sense in placing an order and finding out two weeks later that it could have been bigger.) The answer I received was "Nothing that would be from AGAD."

One other odd one. A couple of weeks ago, Jurek, a research colleague in Sweden was

looking at a 1938 telephone directory that Logan Kleinwaks had just uploaded to his wonderful site. There was a listing - apparently a business - for "Pickholz i Wachs" in Skalat. The telephone number is 8. Nothing else but the street name.

This is very strange, as there are no other Wachs in Skalat, at least during the earlier period for which we have records.

But we do have some sort of undefined relationship between the Wachs family of Zalosce-Podkamen and my own Pikholz family  who lived in that same area. So I cannot just ignore this.

I have asked one of the surviving Skalaters here if she knows anything about this business or the families involved and I plan to ask others as well.







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If you missed my piece about Uncle Kenny last year, you might want to have a look. His yahrzeit is Monday.