BENZION - A Wild Wild Ancestral Theory

Benzion. בֶּן צִיוֹן or בֶּנְצִיוֹן. Son of Zion.

Could there possibly be a better name?

One of my regrets is not giving it to Devir as a middle name.

 

With his second son, Phil

My maternal grandmother's brother, was named Chaim Benzion. Hymen Benjamin in the United States. He was born in Borisov Belarus in 1894 and had four older sisters, born about 1879, 1886, 1887, 1889. The spacing is odd, with long breaks after the first and the last of the girls.

I knew Uncle Hymen and the way he told the story, his parents had other sons who either died young or were stillborn. (I don't recall how specific his knowledge was.) So when he was born, the rabbi said to use the name Chaim (=life) for good luck.There is a Jewish tradition of playing with names to fool the Angel of Death. At least, that's the way Uncle Hymen told me the story.

So I have always assumed that Benzion was one of Uncle Hymen's ancestral names, hence one of mine. And I was pleased as punch to have a Benzion among my ancestors.

Uncle Hymen's parents - my great-grandparents - are my namesake Israel David (aka Srul) Rosenbloom, the son of Yaakov and Shayna Liba, and Etta-Bryna the daughter of Yehudah the Levite, surname and mother's name unknown. So Benzion was not Uncle Hymen's grandfather, but could have been any of his four great-grandfathers. Or perhaps an uncle, though that seems much less likely.

The Belarus database on JewishGen shows a number of Benzian Rosenbloom references, but much younger, so I always thought there was a good chance Uncle Hymen's namesake was his father's paternal grandfather. Not so good a chance as to actually write it that way in my database, but slightly more likely that any of the others.

Yesterday that changed. A woman named Michelle Sandler posted in several Facebook groups:

In the course of signing on to this project, I took another look at the JewishGen Belarus Database, which I'd not seen in some time. It had a surprise for me, in the 1858 revision lists.

There is no doubt in my mind that these are the parents of my great-grandfather Israel David Rosenbloom, together with two sisters I had not seen before. I had never seen any evidence of siblings, though I assume he had some. For both of his parents, the fathers' names were listed. New names for me. Srul's paternal grandfather is Itska (Yitzhak) and his maternal grandfather is Khaim (Chaim). No Benzion.

And the wheels began turning in my mind. Chaim was not just a good luck name to fool the Angel of Death. It was a full-fledged ancestral name. Surely Uncle Hymen hadn't made up the story of his naming from whole cloth. But maybe it was a real story with the details wrong.

There were sons who died young. Even if their names are important, we generally don't reuse them as is. That makes it too easy for the Angel of Death. My father's father's eldest brother was named Mordecai Meir after his grandfather, but he died at thirteen months. For the next son, they kept the Mordecai, but changed the second name to Shemuel and Uncle Max lived to age eighty-six.

It makes sense that the dead sons of Srul and Etta-Bryna were named for their own grandfathers. Perhaps one was Chaim Yitzhak for Srul's grandfathers. And he died young so you don't want to use it again. Maybe change the order of the names? Or maybe something more clever.

The numerical value of the four letters of name Yitzhak is 10 + 90 + 8 + 100. That's two hundred and eight. Maybe thought Srul, or Etta-Bryna, or the local rabbi - we can play with that. How about 2 + 50 + 90 + 10 + 6 + 50 = 208. BENZION! Chaim Yitzhak becomes Chaim Benzion and we fool the Angel of Death.

I love this beyond words. I love the idea that my great-grandfather and namesake might have thought of it himself, or at least adopted the idea. A solution after my own heart. I really really want this to be true. I suppose we shall never be able to prove it, but if we can find Etta-Bryna's  grandfathers' names, we can call it progress.

We cannot record it as fact, but we might accept it as our working assumption.

Rosenbloom cousins, what do you think?? 

Julius Lichterman / Joseph Davis

This blog is dedicated to my mother's first cousin Ethel Rosenbloom Klavan, the daughter of Uncle Hymen. Her fourth yahrzeit is this Thursday, 12 Kislev. It is one of my self-imposed kaddish days.

The disappearance of Julius Lichterman
My maternal grandmother Sarah Rosenbloom Gordon arrived in the United States before the First World War. She had been born and raised in Borisov - Russia then, now Belarus - as had her siblings and probably at least one of her parents. She died when I was eleven and we never had any meaningful conversation. And she never talked to her children about the past.

Left: Lichtermans. Right: Gordons.
Center: U. Hymen.

Her three younger full-siblings preceeded her across the ocean. Her unmarried sister Rachel Leah (Rosa) died the tenth of December 1910 (2 Kislev), according to her death certificate at age twenty-five . We think she was a bit younger. She was not married and had no children.

Another sister Shayna Liba (Sadie) was married to Julius Lichterman (Uncle Hymen referred to him as Zisal and the Lichtermans confirm that this is their Julius, the son of Joseph and Nechama.) She died the first of May 1916 (28 Nisan) and the death certificate says she was twenty-three. She was certainly in her late twenties. There were no children.

As I say, we know she was married to Julius Lichterman but the death certificate - which says "married" - has no space for spouse's name. Nor is there a space for "informant," though surely that would have been Julius.

After Sadie died, Julius disappeared. No one knew what happened to him. His own Lichterman family said he was so distraught at the death of his wife that he broke off contact with everyone, never to be heard from again.

My grandmother's brother, Chaim Benzion (Hymen), was the youngest and I knew him fairly well. Most of my discussions with him about family history were together with his daughter, Cousin Ethel Klavan.

It is my opinion that there was some sort of cousin relationship between the Rosenbloooms and the Lichtermans and I discussed the two families together here and here.Therefore I am interested in Julius as a family member, not just as an in-law. The Lichtermans said they were from Borisov, but were probably from a nearby town and when my grandmother arrived in the US, she said she was going to her cousin, who was married to Julius' sister.

The Rosenbloom sisters were active in revolutionary circles back in Russia and my own theory was that after their side won, Julius went back to what he expected to be the new socialist paradise. But I have no evidence of this.

In the course of my research, I have never located a marriage record for Julius and Sadie. The indispensible New York City Italian Genealogical Group site (searched by Steve Morse's site) has a marriage of Julius I. Lichterman and Bertha Kosminsky in 1909. But he is someone else, as we see in the actual marriage record.

Julius Lichterman as Joseph Davis
I looked up Julius Lichterman on the immigration and naturalization pages at Ancestry.com and found fifteen entries.  Several refer to a man born 1877, naturalized in Pennsylvania, crossed the border at Niagara Falls in 1914 and was married to Bertha. That would be the man in the previous paragraph, although the ages are not quite the same.

Several others refer to a man born 1898 in Vilna who arrived in the US in 1919 and was naturalized in 1928. Not our guy.

Others appear on undated naturalization index cards in New York and Pennsylvania with no informaation. Not good for much.

One is for a man born in 1883 in what Ancestry's transcribers call "Barieve." He crossed the border from Mexico to California in 1945. The age sounds right and the birthplace looks like a bad transcription of Borisov.

I cleaned this up a bit. There is nothing interesting on the second page except his signature.

He is indeed from Borisov. He is also known as Joseph Davies. (His signature looks more like Davis.) He was entering the US "to resume residence" at an address in Los Angeles. It seems to say that he was in California from 1909, though I cannot make out the actual location. "To resume residence" sounds like he had been away for some time, not on a vacation or business trip.

Is this "our Julius?" Well, for starters in seems unlikely that our Julius was in California from 1909 while his wife lived in New York until her death in 1916. But he is from Borisov and the age is right. On the other hand, perhaps he was in California when she died and that could explain why "mother's name" on his wife's death record was written in a different hand, probably later.

This Julius Lichterman died in Los Amgeles of 27 April 1949. He is listed in the California death index twice, once as we know him and once as Joseph Davis. (Not Davies.) The Social Security number is the same in both entries.

The death certificate tells us nothing at all, though it confirms both names.

We ordered the SS-5 from Social Security - thanks to Galit Aviv for helping with both these documents. All they could give us was the Numident version, not the original inn his own hand..

Also not useful.

I am not sure how to proceed. He seems like a loner. I expect that neither the cemetery nor a probate search would help.

It all looks so mysterious. Perhaps he was working for an intelligence agency or something.

I have more important fish to fry.

With Cousin Ethel Klavan and her son Ross, Jerusalem
May her memory be for a blessing

Scoring A Big DNA Win - For My Cousins

Dealing with Family Tree DNA "Close Match" alerts

I manage over a hundred family DNA kits, almost all with Family Tree DNA. So I get many scores of these notices every week. Not only each person, but since, for instance,  Dan is a member of all five of my projects, I get all of his notices five times. Others are members of multiple projects and for them too I get multiple notices.These notices of "Close Matches" means matches that FTDNA considers to be suggested second-third cousins.

A few months ago, I decided to deal with these alerts in a systematic fashion. As I wrote in detail at the time, I decided to download as an Excel file all the matches during the month of May for each of my project members. Then I arranged them in separate Excel files by group: my mother's side, my grandmother's side, the Rozdol-Pikholz side, etc. That's a lot of work by itself but after that I had to sort by the names of the new matches to see who may have interesting matches with several people within each of my groups.

I wrote to the ones that looked promising, asking them to give me their GEDmatch numbers so I could have a proper look. Some replied, most did not. Some gave me their GEDmatch numbers, others did not care to share this secret information with me. Others needed help even creating GEDmatch numbers. Oh, and a few would send me a list of all the GEDmatch kits in their families.

I looked at each one against all my kits - after sorting on the "Name" column of their match lists so all mine would come up together near the top  - and created 2-D Chromosome Browsers. For most I would do two or three Chromosome Browsers for different parts of my families.

There were some successes, of the sort that determined that so-and-so is definitely connected to my family through my great-grandfather's Rosenzweig or Zelinka sides or my maternal grandmother's Rosenblooms. Most were either vague or turned out to be scattered across the family with no direction at all. I wrote about the successes for May and repeated the experiment for the June alerts, writing about those successes as well.

July-August-September
Since then I have been busy with other things - including holidays - but I finally decided to look at all the alerts for July-August-September, limiting the analysis to my mother's side and my paternal grandmother's side. There were about 125 worth looking at just on my paternal grandmother's side.

I got some of that done before the Sukkot holiday and during the Intermediate Days at the beginning of last week but it was very frustrating and I was not even getting the level of successes that I had previously with the Duncans and Robbie and Sam and the others.

I worked on the responses from my mother's side last night and this morning sent out analyses of the GEDmatch kits of about thirty of these supposed matches. One of those was for a woman named Barbara Jo Strauss, who had nine matches with people on my mother's side. People who appear in the Borisov Project that I am doing with Galit Aviv Sisto.

It turns out Barbara is the sister of Mark Strauss whom I met two years ago the day of my book launch at JGS Maryland. He was there with his wife's brother's wife who is a Skalat Pikholz cousin of mine. Mark is an experienced genealogy researcher with a good working knowledge of DNA and it was he who responded when I first wrote Barbara last week.

Barbara's results
I reported to Mark that Barbara had two Borisov matches of interest, plus a third which I considered marginal at best.

The three green bits on chromosome 1 are 11-12 cM. The first is my second cousin Sam, the second my first cousin Kay and the third my second cousin Inna. That means one representative of each of the three children of my great-grandparents Israel David and Etta Bryna Rosenbloom.

This is not impressive at barely 12 cM but it is definitely a valid match. (Kay has no Jewish DNA on her father's side, so that pretty much eliminates the endogamy factor.)

We have only the one surname Rosenbloom on my grandmother's side, so it's really not much to work with - like so many others of these alerts analyses.

Chromosome 6 has a slightly stronger match - 14-15 cM - with four of my parents' children, my first cousins Kay and Leonard and a second cousin Liya. No one from Uncle Hymen's family. This too appears a legitimate match, though it was also unlikely to lead us anywhere absent some Borisov or Rosenbloom knowledge from Mark.

There was one other match I didn't even mention to Mark. A segment on chromosome 10 of near-identical 13.5 cM matches with five of my parents' children, but with not a cousin to be found, it was quite useless.

The one I thought marginal is on chromosome 12. There Barbara has matches of nearly 15 cM with my father's sister, my brother, one of my sisters and my second cousins Rhoda and Marty, who are sister and brother. Together with those are smaller matches with my other three sisters and me.


So that is a match on the east Galician Pikholz or Kwoczka side and those never go anywhere, as we have so little to work with in the way of surnames.

I reported all of this to Mark in my usual generic fashion, without all the names and numbers. His response was:

Ok.  If you give me the kit numbers of a few of the most significant matches, I can see which of my cousins also match those same segments to narrow geography and surnames.

 So I did.

Mark then asked me for more detail about Rhoda because she is Barbara's best match among my project members - 90 cM total with a largest segment of 41.1 and 11.1 cM of X to boot.

Mark's reply included:

They all share my paternal grandmother’s Berkowitz family in common, originally from around Humenne, in Eastern Slovakia, near the border with Ukraine. Other known surnames are Eichler and Burger.

For some reason I do not recall, I had discussed Rhoda's mother's family with her a couple of years ago and remembered that someone was from Slovakia/Hungary. Rather than hunt through my correspondence, I copied Rhoda on my reply to Mark. A few minutes later Mark told me that Rhoda's maternal grandmother was indeed an Eichler with the correct geography. He and Rhoda share a fourth-great-grandfather "Moyzes Eichler, who was born in 1785 in Hencovce, Slovakia."

And Rhoda (who carries the name of our second-great-grandmother Rivka Feige Pikholz) just told me that her youngest daughter has taken an interest in genealogy.

So that is a success for Mark's family and for Rhoda. For me it's a collateral success and a good reason to continue plugging away at the FTDNA Alerts. Of course, it helps when the person on the other end of the conversation understands the material.

Perhaps I'll send a notice about this blog to all those whom I've been talking to about alerts this month.

Housekeeping notes
Cousin Debbie's sister's DNA results just came in. She does not have the big segment that Debbie shares with us, but when we get her on GEDmatch, we'll see if perhaps she has some other matches of interest that Debbie does not.

Cousin Harvey

My father's sister, aka Aunt Betty, ordered her MtDNA test four and a half years ago and upgraded to the full sequence about eighteen months later. Initially, she had only three matches with no genetic difference and a fourth showed up about a year ago. Three more appeared in the final months of 2016. One of the seven was a suggested third-fifth cousin and the others were remote or not an autosomal match at all.

Aunt Betty's haplogroup is H10a1b and goes back to my great-great-grandmother Feige Stern who was born in Kalocsa Hungary about 1841. Her mother may have been Beti Grunwald.

Last week, she received a new match, a man named Harvey in North Carolina. In addition to the perfect MtDNA, they are suggested second-fourth cousins. It looked like it was worth following up. Harvey is active in genealogy but is a DNA-novice. There was nothing obvious in the surnames, and he let me upload his data to GEDmatch.

Harvey's most promising matches with my family appeared to be not on my father's side at all, but on my mother's mother's Rosenbloom side, from Borisov, NE of Minsk.

On chromosome 9, Harvey matches seven of my Rosenbloom family, all about 18 cM. The seven are my second cousins Sam and Beth (first cousins to one another), my first cousins Kay and Leonard (also first cousins to one another), my sisters Sarajoy and Jean and me.  (My other two sisters do not match Harvey at all and my brother's results are not in yet.)

On chromosome 11, there is a smaller match (on the far right) of over 12 cM with Kay, Beth and Sam's sister Beverly, one of the newer participants in our project.

Regular readers may recall that I wrote two months ago about a new project I am doing with Galit Aviv on a number of Borisov families. We are still laying the foundaton for this project, but I asked Galit to see if Harvey matches "her" members of this group. I was surprised when she said that they do. So using the GEDmatch Tier1 "Matching Segment Search" tool, I had a look at all of Harvey's matches, arranged by chromosome and segment.

When I did the matching segment search, I was able to add three of Galit's group to my family's matches with Harvey.

Then there are my Jaffe second cousins. Their grandfather is also from Borisov and Harvey has a match of about 17 cM with them.

And here too, Galit's cousin Nurit fits right in.

Galit has invited Harvey to join our project. Cousin Harvey!

But lest we forget, Harvey is a suggested second-fourth cousin to Aunt Betty. On a one-to-one comparison, we see they have three matching segments.

The small match on chromosome 5 is shared by a three other family members, but they are small, so I am not ready to draw conclusions.

The match on chromosome 13 is shared by no one else in the family. That leaves the large match on chromosome 3.

Harvey has 21.3 cM matches with Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob, as well as with my second cousins Roz (on my grandfather's side) and Susan on my grandmother's side. When you consider that there are another dozen family members who ought to fit in here, it doesn't look like anything we can work with.

Lichterman - Checking the Source

My g-gm's grave in Borisov

Etta Bryna - my great-grandmother
I wrote about the maiden name of my mother's mother's mother Etta Bryna Rosenbloom at length in the early days of this blog four and a half years ago and for those who want the details, it's worth a reread. She died probably in her late thirties and we know precious little about her. In addition to the information I presented back then, Renee Steinig found the death certificate of my grandmother's other sister in Islip, Suffolk County - but it lists both her parents' names as "unknown." The informant was the hospital.

Etta Bryna's tombstone

So I am still where I was then. Etta Bryna's father is Yehudah and he is a Levi. My conjecture that she is a Lichterman still runs up against a lack of any proof that the Lichtermans - a known Borisov family - were Leviim, but the gravestones of the known Lichterman men have no Hebrew. The traditional grave of their sister Gitta Lichterman Benenson (below) calls her father "Yosef" with no mention of his being a Levi.

This is where I have been holding for the past four or five years.

Gitta Lichterman Benenson

Our new project for several Borisov families 
Recently I joined forces with Galit Aviv to have a look at several Borisov famliies who appear to be connected to one another. These would be the Lichtermans, the Kaplanskys, the Benensons and the Rosenblooms. There are a couple of others which might belong here as well. To that end, we have added several people to the Rosenbloom Project that I set up at Family Tree DNA some years ago and are getting a few others to test - including a granddaughter of Gitta.

Galit - whom I have not met, but expect to see when I am in the US during the winter - is a good and resourceful researcher. Among other things, she came up with the following.

This is the 1908 death and burial record for Moshe Likhterman the son of R' Yudel

Map from the
JewishGen Gazeteer

Likhterman the Levi, in Slutsk. He is also called "the son-in-law of R' Eliyahu" followed by the odd notation "l'm24." The burial is next to someone named Yehuda who died a few month earlier. Could this be the brother of Etta Bryna? The fathers of both are Yehudah who is a Levi. And is that Yehudah next to him perhaps his father? And what is that odd notation "l'm24?"

Slutsk is some ninety miles SSW of Borisov, but that needn't indicate a problem. Certainly not if this Moshe held a rabbinic position.

The next step was obviously to see the actual Chevra Kadisha records, the book from Slutsk which is the source for the above record.

I contacted the people who had submitted the Chevra Kadisha records and no one was quite sure what the source was, except that it was in Israel and that the translators (from Hebrew) too were Israelis. So I had a look at the web site of the National Library, on the campus of the Hebrew University here in Jerusalem, hoping I would find it either there or at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People which is now part of the Library.

The Manuscript Reading Room

The Chavra Kadisha book of Slutsk for the years 5439-5684 (1679-1924)

The book is in the Manuscript Reading Room at the National Library, so that's where I went. It had moved since the last time I was there and is now in a pleasant room behind the cafeteria. Two young librarians, Ariel and Moriah set me up with a microfilm reader that had a scanner attached and brought out the film in a matter of minutes.

I saw that the transcription was faithful to the original text, with one small exception. (The original calls the deceased "yashish" which in modern Hebrew means elderly, while the translation is "venerable." But venerable was a more common meaning when the original was written.)

The original had the ל"מ (l"m) - left of center on the third line - but not the "24" which I assume was some sort of typographical error. But I didn't know what those initials meant or if they were significant.

Until suddenly I did. Because I had seen this before.

Four years ago, I wrote in this space about the correct name of Hersch Leib Pikholz of Rozdol and the solution to the problem was found in the records of what we call Kollel Galicia here in Jerusalem. The records in question are too poor quality to show here, but here is what I wrote in that earlier blog.

I was surprised to see that there were no contributions by anyone named Pikholz, despite the fact that Rozdol was the place that all the Pikholz families from that area had come from. There are no lists of Holocaust victims from Rozdol, but from our own records we know that there were Pikholz families there at the time. Certainly in the late 1920s. Eventually, I realized what had happened. The person in charge of collections for Rozdol, Pinchas Kerner, was himself a Pikholz son-in-law and he knew all the families personally, so instead of writing out the name each time, he simply wrote P"H as a personal shorthand.

l'm is shorthand for Likhterman!

R' Moshe's father-in-law Eliyahu is a Likhterman. I asked Ariel to have a look and he said "It wasn't uncommon for people to marry relatives." Maybe it's that simple.

But I don't think so. I read it differently. The rabbi Moshe ben Rabbi Idel the Levi Likhterman the son-in-law of R' Eliyahu Likhterman. How about Moshe (son of R' Idel the Levi) Likhterman? Ariel said he could see that possibility as well.

I think Moshe's father is a Levi but is not Likhterman. Moshe took the name Likhterman from his father-in-law. So Etta Bryna can be the sister of Moshe Likhterman without that being her maiden name - and the Likhtermans are not Leviim. The father of Etta Bryna and Moshe is. What is his - and Etta Bryna's - surname?

Now we go back to my grandmother's passenger list where she seems to be going to her "cousin J. Ben..." I demonstrated four years ago that this is Jacob Benenson, the husband of Gitta Lichterman. So is my grandmother calling a relative of her mother's sister-in-law (who lived in Slutsk!) "cousin?" Perhaps the cousin was Jacob and Etta Bryna is a Benenson.

I haven't a clue if the Benensons of Borisov are Leviim. Of the Benensons on Find A Grave, there are eight or nine men with photographs and Hebrew epitaphs. None say "Levi."

There are a lot of "if"s and "maybe"s in this highly speculative scenario and I am not about to jump to any conclusions. But for the first time in several years I see some possible movement in this part of the family. And some new possibilities. My instincts have been pretty good. Maybe we will learn something from the new DNA project and the new contacts.

Oh yes, I also looked at the burial record for the Yehudah who is buried next to Moshe Likhterman. He is someone not connected. Apparently they didn't number the plots, but recorded the locations according to the next grave over.

Housekeeping notes
Program chairs - and people who know program chairs - please note. I have some available dates during my coming US trip, particularly the weekdays between 23 January and 2 February, in the east and midwest and perhaps 14-16 February in the NY/NJ area  Perhaps even Sunday the nineteenth. Several topics are available including the Lazarus-Endogamy talk which I presented in Seattle and a new one about Uncle Selig where DNA is not the main point of interest.

The following programs are set, with some others under discussion:

22 January 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Maryland, Baltimore County Public Library, 1301 Reiserstown Road, Pikesville
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?
29 January 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Greater Philadelphia, Main Line Reform Temple 410 Montgomery Avenue, Wynnewood
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey
5 February 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Cleveland, Park Synagogue East, 27500 Shaker Blvd,  Pepper Pike
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey
10 February 2017, 11:00 – ROOTSTECH2017,
Jewish DNA: Successes and Lessons from the Journey
12 February 2017, 1:30 - Orange County JGS - details to follow.
13 February 2017, 7:30 - JGS of Los Angeles, American Jewish University, 15600 Mulholland Drive
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?

It's been awhile since I have mentioned my book, available at www.endogamy-one-family.com.

The Large DNA Matches of My Great-Grandfather

I have written about GEDmatch's Lazarus tool before - most notably here, here and here. (I had quite forgotten about the last of those three and very much enjoyed rediscovering it this week.)

I have also spoken about Lazarus in a talk I gave at the IAJGS Conference in Seattle, "GEDmatch's Lazarus Tool As It Applies to Two Kinds of Endogamy." (I would be happy to give that talk during my coming US trip - see below for available dates.) For that talk, I created a Lazarus kit for my great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz and that kit is the subject of the first of the three links above.

Fourteen descendants of Hersch who tested. Ten were used in Group 1.

Descendants of Hersch's sisters

To review, you create a Lazarus kit using descendants of the target in Group 1 and non-descendant relatives in Group 2. Of course, you cannot use people who match each other other than through the target. This produces a partial genome of the target, in this case my great-grandfather. For him we used ten descendants in Group 1, while Group 2 consisted of nine descendants of his sisters and half sisters and ten other cousins. The resulting Lazarus kit is 2742.4 cM.

I used that kit to see what I could learn about his relationships with other Pikholz descendants. In one case, it was a big help; in others it was just one more bit of vague, ambiguous evidence.

The cousins round out Group 2. Mordecai is a Pikholz, but we don't know the relationship.

Now I am ready for the next step. Who else is related to the partial genome which is the Lazarus kit of my great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz?

For that I turned to another of the GEDmatch Tier 1 tools -  the Matching Segment Search. This shows all the matching segments of a given kit, in a very convenient, visual format.

The default for the search is 7 cM, but in order to make it more manageable, I set the threshold at 20 cM. I figured it was likely that the smaller matches would not lead anywhere. Remember, both of Hersch's parents are Pikholz and we have no other surnames in his ancestry. In the results above, 28 of 29 listed matches are known family members of my great grandfather. I have no idea who the other one is - but of course that is the purpose of this exercise.

The Matching Segment Search produced 230 results of 20 cM or more, 179 of which are our own. The remaining fifty one are on twelve segments but the majority of those appear to be "pile up regions."

None of the fifty one segments are as long as 30 cM.. With one exception, all the chromosomes with multiple matches come on the same segment.

There are a few matches where we have no corresponding Pikholz matches - matches that would have been necessary to create the Lazarus kit. I suspect that these are not real segments, at least not that big, but are compounded from smaller segments. Nonetheless, I am following them up.

The kwoczka announces that 
Hersch Pikholz' match said the secret word.

So far, I have written to twenty-six of these new matches - most of whom are not people I know. We'll see what comes of that. Eight have responded so far. The very first knocked my socks off by saying that her mother was from Berehove, a city in Sub-Carpathian Ukraine where one of my close Y-DNA matches comes from. There is some serious potential here regarding where we were before Galicia.. I hope that before long Lara Diamond will be organizing record acquisition from Berehove.

Another match for my great-grandfather's Lazarus kit has Beinenson ancestors from my maternal grandmother's home town of Borisov (Belarus) and he will be joining our project there.

Actually several of the responding matches have ancestry from Belarus, which is not an area we generally associate with the Pikholz family.

Anyone who cares to do a one-to-one with my great-grandfather is welcome to do so, using his kit LL557686.

Housekeeping notes
I have added a stop at the JGS of Los Angeles to my winter itinerary. See details below. (I did my basic DNA presentation for them fifteen months ago.)

Program chairs - and people who know program chairs - please note. I have some open dates for my US trip in the winter, including Sunday 12 February in the west. Weekdays are available between 23 January and 2 February, in the east and midwest. Several topics are available including the Lazarus-Endogamy talk which I presented in Seattle and a new one where DNA is not the main point of interest.

The following programs are set, with some others under discussion:

22 January 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Maryland, Baltimore County Public Library, 1301 Reiserstown Road, Pikesville
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?
29 January 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Greater Philadelphia, Main Line Reform Temple 410 Montgomery Avenue, Wynnewood
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey
5 February 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Cleveland, Park Synagogue East, 27500 Shaker Blvd,  Pepper Pike
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey
10 February 2017, 11:00 – ROOTSTECH2017, Jewish DNA: Successes and Lessons from the Journey
13 February 2017, 7:30 - JGS of Los Angeles, American Jewish University, 15600 Mulholland Drive
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?

FTDNA's big sale is on, led by the $59 price for Family Finder. Also reduced prices for the Y and MtDNA tests, together with coupons. If you are a family member, talk to me.

Lazerus Kits For My Mother

The kits I was able to produce for my father using the Lazerus tool at GEDmatch have been easy. I have four descendants (one more is stuck in the lab in Houston) for Group 1 and various combinations of Group 2, which allow me to weed out most of the endogamous relationships. But no matter how I have done it, I get kits with at least 3400 cM.

Considering that GEDmatch defines success by "Batch processing will be performed if resulting kit achieves required threshold of 1500 cM," my father's kits are excellent.

My mother is a different matter. Mother has the same four descendants for Group 1, but candidates for her Group 2 are in short supply. My father has a living sister and brother - my mother has none. I have two first cousins on my mother's side - a son of my uncle and a daughter of my aunt - who qualify, plus two second cousins on either side, though one of those four, Beth, is not yet on GEDmatch.

So for now, I went with what I had. All the tests are FTDNA's Family Finder.

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

I decided to create three Lazerus kits for my other - one with the five cousins, one with just my two first cousins and one with Kay alone.

The kit with four of Mother's children in Group 1 and five of my cousins in Group 2 gave my mother 3137.4 cM.

But that is problematic. All of my mother's grandparents are from the same general area. Israel David is from Borisov, in what is now Belarus. Etta Bryna is likely from Borisov or nearby. So is Aunt Mary's husband.

Chana Kugel is from Pleschenitsy, now in Belarus, and Hirsch was born in Dolginov, just across the border in Lithuania. Uncle Hymen's wife is from Schedrin, a hundred miles from Borisov. So there is a high probability of a significant amount of overlapping ancestry.

So I cut back to my first cousins, eliminating any endogamy from my second cousins' other grandparents. The size of my mother's kit decreased by twelve percent, to 2766.4 cM. I thought it would shrink more. Some of that decrease is real and some is because endogamy had created a larger kit to begin with.

However, I was able to eliminate the endogamy entirely. Kay's father has no Jewish DNA, so if I used her alone in Group 2, there would be no endogamy at all. The results here surprised me even more. This Lazerus kit had 2188.8 cM. That's nearly eighty percent of the kit that was made from Kay and Leonard together in group 2.

Finally, for sport, I did a fourth kit using Leonard alone in group 2. That kit had 1527.6 cM. Kay's match with us is 43% greater than Leonard's, even with any endogamous effect that Leonard's mother might have.

Note that all these kits, including those with one person in Group 2, are above the threshold that GEDmatch sets for batch processing.

Blaine Bettinger who blogs at The Genetic Genealogist, is doing a study on the amount of shared DNA in known relationships. If you haven't participated, you should. I imagine the findings above will interest him.

The Woman Who Matches Etta Bryna

I am posting this on Sunday, the sixth of Nisan, the 118th yahrzeit of my great-grandmother
Etta Bryna bat Yehudah HaLevi Rosenbloom. We do not know her maiden name - a subject which I discussed in some detail two years ago.

This is the ancestral line about which I know the least. Even less than what I know about her husband, my namesake, Israel David ben Yaakov Rosenbloom. At least I know his mother's name - Shayna Liba.

In the case of Etta Bryna, we only know what we do because we have a photograph of her grave, with her daughter Shayna Liba standing along side.

Etta Bryna almost certainly died in her mid to late thirties. Her eldest daughter was about eighteen. Her only living son was a few weeks short of his second birthday. Her husband married again soon after she died and the new wife - who had two children of her own - may have discouraged further connections with the dead wife's family.

Perhaps Etta Bryna's family didn't live in Borisov, so seeing them would have involved some effort. Or maybe they were in town and my grandmother's younger brother Uncle Hymen (Chaim Benzion) simply never realized they were his mother's kin. When Uncle Hymen joined Social Security, he wrote "don't know" where his mother's maiden name should have been.

I am sure my grandmother would have known some things about her mother's family, but no one ever asked her.

Today I want to touch on a different side of this problem. DNA testing.

I first dipped my toe into the waters of DNA testing three years ago in connection with the mysterious line of my father's father's father's father. (That may sound trivial, but trust me, it wasn't at the time.) So I decided to order a Y-67 test to see if anyone out there matched my male line.

While I was at it, I decided to do the same thing for the line of Etta Bryna, my mother's mother's mother. The maternal test looks at the mitochondrial DNA which is separate from the 23 pairs of chromosomes we generally hear about.  It passes from mother to both daughters and sons, but only the daughters pass it along to the next generation. MtDNA tends to remain unchanged for many generations, so I decided to pay attention only to perfect matches since my dead end is so few generations ago. The testing company I used is FamilyTreeDNA. I did the test they call "MtFull Sequence," which is the highest level available.

The results came back and I had six matches. I exchanged some correspondence with the six and they were all over the map. My Etta Bryna lived in what is now Belarus and I had these matches with people from places far away - like Hungary. I had no basis for doing anything further and in any case, I had more productive things to do.

Fast forward a year when we decided to begin a DNA project for Pikholz descendants. Most of that project is based on the Family Finder test, which looks at autosomal DNA, the sort that comes undifferentiated from all ancestors. So I did the Family Finder. It was about six months ago when I had another good look at my MtDNA results.

By now I have twelve matches, all from the haplogroup U1b1, like me. None of them gave much information. Two of the twelve posted the basics of their ancestors in what they call a gedcom file. One of those two didn't have enough information to work with. The other went back six or seven generations in a family called Goldberg, in a town named Divin, in the southwest corner of Belarus, about 360 km from Borisov.

Six of the twelve had done Family Finder tests, so I figured that could give me an idea if any of those might be related to be in the more recent generations. Remember, I have no knowledge of Etta Bryna's siblings, so if she had any, their descendants could be as close to me as third cousins - well within the range of Family Finder matches.

Of those six, one was not a match at all - which means that our MRCA (most recent common ancestor) was probably really long ago. Four others showed Family Finder matches likely to be "remote," which generally means five, six, seven, eight generations back. Also not very useful.

One came out close. Well, not  exactly close close, but estimated as a third-to-fifth cousin. For convenience, we'll say fourth cousin. So this could be a descendant of one of Etta Bryna's mother's sisters.  The match is with a woman named Deborah Sirotkin Butler, and I appreciate her permission to refer to her here by name.

Deborah didn't say much about her family on the site, but was receptive when I wrote to her. She is new at genealogy and told me that her oldest maternal name is Margolin (various spellings), from Gomel, in southeastern Belarus about 160 miles (260 km) from Borisov. According to JewishGen, Gomel had some 20,000 Jews in 1897.

No known relative on my mother's side has tested thusfar, but I had a look at my Family Finder match with Deborah to see who else matched both of us.

There are 1690 people who have done Family Finder tests and match both Deborah and me. I suppose I could plug all of them into the chromosome browser to see if any of them match both of us on the same chromosome. Maybe if there were one hundred, I'd do it, but not 1690.

Thirty-four of those 1690 are projected as third cousins or better - to me. I don't know how close they are to Deborah. I could ask her to see what all of these are to her, but I am feeling my way in the dark and I think that kind of thing is premature.

But what is curious is that Deborah matches eight Pikholz descendants and my two non-Pikholz Kwoczka cousins, Baruch and Pinchas. The eight include my father's sister and a second cousin of mine, Terry. But not my father's cousin Herb.

On chromosome 18, with me as the background and Deborah in yellow, we see matches with (from the top) Aunt Betty, Terry and Baruch. There is no match with Pinchas here. So Deborah is related to me some other way that includes my Pikholz (or Kwoczka) ancestors - in addition to via Etta Bryna. Part of the "fourth cousin" that FTDNA projects for Deborah and me must be from this other source.

I also looked at the other six Pikholz matches that Deborah and I share. Three do not match Deborah and me on the same chromosomes, so they are not relevant here, for now..

The other three are interesting. (Deborah is purple here.) Robert, who is from Rozdol, matches us on chromosome 12, but Rita's cousin and Jane match us on the same chromosome 18 that my own family matches!

Deborah is orange here.

And.... I see that Deborah and I both match with nine of the non-Pikholz who match many of the Pikholz. Of those, there are three who match us on the same chromosome. And those chromosomes are #12 and #18! 
 Mark (blue) and Alexandra (green) match us on both, but not on the right parts of the chromosome. On the other hand, Debbie L. (yellow) matches Deborah and me on chromosome 12 in the same place as Robert.

Debbie, Deborah and I also have a nice little match on chromosome 8, that does not include Robert.


So that accounts for nineteen of our 1690 common matches. But of course, I am looking for my mother's mother's side, not Pickholtz Project people.

So what next? I am not sure. I have asked several of my cousins on my mother's side about testing, but thusfar none have replied. That could help - both regarding Etta Bryna's family and with her husband's Rosenbloom line.

Isn't this fun?

I think I will open a Facebook group for descendants of Etta Bryna.  If you haven't been invited, look for it. Maybe with some luck, we'll locate a descendant of her older daughter Alta Kaplan.


Alta in the mid-1920s in Russia, with sons Yakov, Baruch Yosef,
one whose name we don't know and daughter Etta Bryna

Housekeeping notes

I have the three books that my GRIPitt course recommended and I read the first already. It's called FINDING FAMILY: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA, by Richard Hill. He is an adoptee who describes his quest to find his birth parents. In addition to being an interesting story, it comes with a surprise result which would not have been possible without a little extra bit of testing, after he thought he was done.

I have completed my airline reservations for summer. The major open question is whether I'll be doing my first Shabbat in Baltimore or Pittsburgh. (The other two are in Chicago.) Since I'll be driving from Baltimore to Pittsburgh, I don't have to decide now.

I hope to visit family graves on that drive, in Harrisburg (Kesher Israel & Chisuk Emuna), Johnstown (Grandview), White Oak (New Gemillas Chesed) and Duquesne (Beth Jacob).

One of my two lecture proposals for the IAJGS Conference in Salt Lake City was accepted. I am happy to say it's the better one and the easier one to update.  The topic is Beyond a Doubt: What We Know vs. What We Can Prove

 They also approved a panel discussion called Internet Collaboration: How Do We Share Our Family Trees Online? in which I shall be participating. More on that soon.