The Ancestors of Uncle Max Braun

Us and the Brauns

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

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

Morris is my grandfather.

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

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

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

 

The Elinoffs, the Katzes, the Zwiebels, the Fleischmans

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

Elinoff DNA

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

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

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

Brunn and Wachs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck making sense of THAT.

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

 

But here is where we are holding for now.

Cousin Herb's Y-DNA

My father's first cousin Herb Braun was the third person to test for my family DNA project. That was five and a half years ago. We had met once, when I was fourteen but had been emailing for a few years about family history.

We met a second time, in 2013

Herb's mother is my grandfather's older sister, so he carries the mitochondrial DNA of my Kwoczka great-grandmother and Pollak second great-grandmother. At first he did the Family Finder (autosomal) test alone and then did the basic MtDNA. Later I upgraded him to the full MtDNA. That test led do a second family test, which I wrote about last year.

Herb's Braun (then Brunn) family lived in Zalosce (east Galicia, about twenty miles NNW of Tarnopol) where the Kwoczkas also lived and I figured that since the families might have other connections in the near background, I should probably test his Y-DNA as well. I ordered a Y-67 after he died last year at ninety-seven and we were fortunate that his initial swab was good enough for this fourth test.

Herb's results at 67 markers show 133 matches, one at a genetic distance of one and three at a genetic distance of two, with nothing that stood out to me. (At 37 markers, he is a genetic distance of four with our cousin Bruce who tested for the Kwoczka male line.)

One of Herb's GD-2 matches is Gary Simon, whose sister is married to a first cousin of mine. But more important, Gary's wife Judy is one of the administrators of the Y-DNA project that both Gary and Herb belong to.

Gary has a terminal SNP called Y-18621 and Judy asked me if Herb could test for that SNP with Y-SEQ. Herb, of course, can no longer test for anything and his two sons predeceased him. But I am in touch with one of his two grandsons and he agreed to my request to do the Y-SEQ test.

I guess we'll see what happens.

Join projects. It can help you and as it helps others.

Fiftieth Reunion, Genealogy, Young Cousin Matt, Geni - and More About Marla's family

My Class Reunion
The fiftieth reunion of my high school class (Taylor Allderdice, in Pittsburgh) is planned for the

No, I do not plan to attend

end of the summer. I never had much to do with my 462 fellow graduates during the two years I was there, but it's amazing what happens when you fill in your profile on the reunion website and write "Occupation: Genealogist."

This one writes to me and tells me what his family name was in Europe and throws in some Hebrew ("Shalom Chaver") for good measure. That one remarks on how interesting it must be for me. Others had questions about their families or how to do this or that.

There are also a few whom I approached, because their unusual surnames had some family connections with me. Or with my wife. In one case, a classmate has the same rare name as my wife's late husband. In another, the surname is almost surely from my ancestral town Skalat. (Actually, I think the family of my wonderful fourth grade arithmetic teacher at Linden School may also have been from Skalat.)

The truth is there may be some meaningful communal genealogy to be done among my classmates and others in my home community, based on their towns of emigration.

Zalosce and Podkamen
My great-grandfather, Hersch Pickholz, was probably born in Podkamen, though his family had been from Skalat. Other Pittsburgh families that I knew were also from Podkamen - the Klahrs and the Steins, for a start. But there are no Podkamen records, so I could not do anything on that front.

Hersch Pickholz married Jutte Lea Kwoczka from neighboring Zalosce and their older children were born there. His brother and one of his sisters also raised their families in Zalosce. When JRI-Poland came out with indexed birth from Zalosce for 1877-1890, I was eager to see them. I went through the lists and saw so many names that I knew from Pittsburgh, including from school and the neighborhood. Kweller, Lewinter, Papernik, Chotiner, our own Braun and Kwoczka, Charap, Schwadron, Wachs and others.

There must have been a lot of chain migration from the Zalosce area to Pittsburgh in the 1890s. I don't know if the chain was mostly intra-family or just people who knew each other. There is at least one person is my class whose (great-)grandparents were from two families on the list above.

After WWI, Rabbi Wolf Leiter, the son of the rabbi of Zalosce, came to Pittsburgh where he served until his death in 1974. His memoirs helped me solve a major family relationship in a different town. A story for another time.

Enter Matt
One of the girls in my class (I am allowed to say "girls" in this context even though the next big birthday will be 70, right? Nana always called her friends "The Girls.") tells me that her grandfather came from a town called Nasielsk, not far from Warsaw. The grandfather died here in Israel and is buried in Petah Tikva. She has never been here.

I am not sure how much effort I am interested in putting here, but I figure I can do a bit of poking around to see what comes up.

The grandfather is listed in the cemetery website and appears on JOWBR, with a photo.

His grave is the next section over from my parents, so it's easy enough to visit, next time I am there.

Anyway, just as she and I are corresponding, I meet Matt. Matthew Saunders is newly married to Jessica Gordon, whose late father David is my first cousin. Jessie and Matt were visiting from New York and spent Shabbes here, together with her brother and sister-in-law Ari and Bobbi, who live here in town with their baby daughter Devorah. We had a lovely time, full of Torah and genealogy, as Matt is very much into both of these.

So Friday afternoon we are sitting at the computer talking and Matt says something about his grandfather's having come from Nasielsk. I had him write a note to the girl from my class right there on the spot. We'll see if that leads anywhere.

Matt and I also discussed Geni.com, which he uses. Some of my thoughts on that appear here. It turns out that despite what Geni says, Matt and my mother-in-law are NOT related. There is a chain leading from one to the other, but as soon as I saw that it depends on a "brother-in-law relationship" in the middle, I knew they could not be truly related.

Speaking of Geni
Which reminds me, I received a note from an experienced genealogy researcher in the US purporting to show how we are related. I removed the names aside from my own, leaving the initials of the fellow who sent me this.

As you can see, there are twenty-one steps here from him to me, including half a dozen in-law relationships, which jump bloodlines It misspells my name and includes a photograph of me that I don't think I have ever seen before; I certainly didn't authorize its use on Geni.

It's hard to take this stuff seriously. But we have to, if only to protect ourselves. And laughter can be oh so effective.


Leftovers from last week
After posting last week, I added a comment, which I revisit here with some illustrations and further explanation.

If Marla and her brother match nineteen Pikholz descendants between them, but their mother matches only seventeen, we must consider that there are some who would match on Marla's father's side. (There are also two that only the mother matches, but that is not a problem.)

The four that the mother doesn't match are Bonnie, Gene, Gadi and Micha. Bonnie and Gene are third cousins from Skalat and Gadi and Micha are from Rozdol. The only interesting overlap involving those four is on chromosome 19, where Bonnie has a 5.97 cM match with Marla and Gadi has a 6.33 cM match, with a large overlap between them.

Marla as background, from top to bottom:
Marla's brother, mother, uncle, Bonnie, Gadi

In fact all four of Marla's group match the entire length of chromosome 19, so I thought that perhaps there was some kind of testing anomaly such that Marla's mother did not match Gadi and Bonnie.

But I ran them against Marla's uncle - who as I say matches them with Marla as a background. But he in fact does not match them on chromosome 19 at all, even though FTDNA calls them remote matches.

Here with Marla's uncle as background,
Bonnie and Gadi disappear entirely.

So it is clear to me that at least Bonnie and Gadi match Marla on her father's side.

Marla's father is deceased so we have to see if she has anyone else on his side who can test.

Her brother did a Y-37 test last week. It was always a longshot, but their surname has a meaning that is related to wood and maybe around 1800 two brothers chose different wood-related names, perhaps as a reflection of their family occupation..There was no match. Too bad. I liked the theory.

Oh, and one other thing for the consideration of the professional explainers. Since both Bonnie and Gadi have an overlapping match on chromosome 19 on Marla's father's side, a chromosome check of either Gadi or Bonnie that includes the other should show that both match Marla and her brother.

Gadi matches Marla and her brother,
on their father's side, but not Bonnie

Bonnie matches Marla and her brother
on their father's side, but not Gadi

So does this mean that Bonnie and Gadi are on different sides of Marla's father?

So much to learn.

Housekeeping notes
1. As a result of what I consider a nearly-confirmed relationship with Marla's family, I had a look at how her family connects DNA-wise with some of the other non-Pikholz families who also match with many of us. We have had an ongoing discussion among half a dozen such families the last few days and I would like to think that we will eventually nail something down. As I write this, several others of the non-Pikholz have joined our surname project at FTDNA, making it easier to do these comparisons.

2. I ordered four books from Amazon to help prepare for the GRIPitt.org course on Practical Genetic Genealogy in July. Matt brought one of them. My cousin Linda will be here next month and already has the other three. I am really placing alot of faith in this course.


GRIPitt has spaces available in some of the other courses.

3. PIT-ORD flight booked. ORD-SLC-ORD flights booked. International flights will wait until I am more certain of when I want to travel. Prices are way higher than last year.- more than 50% higher.

Wachs-Braun-Pickholtz

I have decided to put this into a blog format so that everyone can see everyone else's comments. Please sign your name to comments, with something that indicates who you are. You can also write me privately by email if you wish to say something not for general consumption.

I have tried to bring this to the attention of most of the relevant Pickholtz descendants, to a number of the descendants of Schewach Wachs (of Podkamen), to the genealogy researchers who responded to a question I posted on jewishgen.org a few weeks ago and to some of my gen-friends whom I think might be interested.

BACKGROUND
There are two bits of background:

Isak-Fischel and Rivka-Feige
The earliest couple we have in our own Pickholtz family is Isak-Fischel and Rivka-Feige, who were probably born around 1820 and lived in Podkamen (49°56' N 25°19' E), a town in east Galicia for which there are no records. It is my firm belief that Rivka-Feige is the Pikholz and we haven't a clue what Isak-Fischel's surname was.  Rivka-Feige is occasionally referred to as Feige-Rivka. Her father was almost certainly Isak-Josef Pikholz (~1784-1862) of Skalat.

Isak-Fischel and Rivka-Feige had four children that we know of - Yechiel, Leah (married Yaakov-Hersch Brunn/Braun), Bassie (married David Lazel Frankel/Franzos/Francis) and Hersch (married Jutte-Leah Kwoczka), during the approximate period 1843-1855.

Diagram 1

Yechiel's family was lost in the Holocaust, Bassie's family was largely in Denver (though she and her husband were in the New York area) and Leah and Hersch lived in Pittsburgh, though Leah lived for a time in Denver as well.  Hersch is my great-grandfather.

David Lazel Frankel was from Skalat, where the Pikholz families (including Rivka-Feige) came from, but the spouses of the others were from Zalosce, the next town over from Podkamen.  We have access to birth records from Zalosce for 1877-1890 plus quite a few years of death records, though these have little actual information.

In the course of my genealogy work over the years, I have sought out records of anyone named Izak-Fischel or Fischel-Izak, particularly in the records from east Galicia, just to see if something might turn up. Of the six I found, two lived in Tarnopol and one lived near Skalat, but there wasn't much I could really do with any of them. (Fischel is usually found as a Yiddish form of the Hebrew names Ephraim or Yeroham.  We know that our Isak-Fischel is Yeroham, not Ephraim.) I suspect something may show up in nearby Brody, but I haven't found anything yet.

Where the Braun and Wachs connections fit in
My father's first cousin, Herb Braun - who lives in Florida - is named for Hersch Wachs, who died 20 March 1917 in Pittsburgh. Hersch Pickholtz, Herb's grandfather, was alive at the time, so Hersch Wachs must have been quite close to the family. (We don't name for living relatives, so using the name while the grandfather was alive would be unusual, even if it were after someone else. So I figure it has to be someone important.)

Diagram 2

When Herb told me this about a dozen years ago, I made contact with a number of Hersch Wachs' descendants.  Some of them were aware of a vague connection with the Pickholtz family, but aside from Herb, no living Pickholtz descendant had ever heard of such a connection.

Diagram 3

When I made some broader inquiries, I learned that the brothers Zale and Chatzkel Anis - whom I knew well during my brief Chicago period forty years ago - were descendants of one Schewach Wachs and Chatzkel had a tree that included the Hersch Wachs from Pittsburgh, as well as his namesake who was born about 1814. Chatzkel put me in touch with Lenny Schorr - a native Pgher living in Haifa, whose grandmother was Devorah Feige Shapiro, the sister of Hersch Wachs. Lenny told me back then that the Wachs were not related to the Pickholtz family, but to the Brauns - Herb's father's side.


Diagram 4-Note the twenty-year age difference between the groups of step-siblings.

That's where things stood until this past summer.

Feige Rifke Silbermann, daughter of Chana Wachs
Last summer, I was preparing a large order of east Galician records from the AGAD archives in Warsaw and while looking for something else, I happened to see a listing in the JRI-Poland index for Feige Rifke Silbermann, daughter of Chaskel Silbermann and Chana Wachs. This Feige Rifke was born in 1878 in Tarnopol, which is the provincial capital of an area which includes all the small towns I mentioned above. The juxtaposition of my great-great-grandmother's given name Feige Rifke and the surname Wachs was intriguing, so I ordered the birth record, without doing any further research in the index.

The record came in early December and much to my amazement, it showed that Chana Wachs' parents were Isaak and Feige Rifke Wachs. Those are the same given names as my great-great-grandparents', minus the "Fischel."  My first thought was that this was perhaps the same couple and that there was a fifth child, Chana, whom we had never heard of. Not to mention perhaps finally putting a surname on our Isak Fischel.

That euphoria didn't last long.  I went back to JRI-Poland and found the marriage record for Chaskel and Chana.  Chana was born about 1842, which - if she had been a sister to my great-grandfather - would have made her the oldest, but well within the normal range of birth years. But the marriage record also showed that her father was not Isak Fischel, but Isak Leib.  Still it was worth following up.

I also posted on several of Jewishgen's message boards as follows:

Does anyone have any Isaac WACHS references in the mid-late 1800s, particularly one with a daughter Chana who married Chaskel Silberman?

These would likely be in (or from) the Tarnopol area.

I also went to the JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF) to see who else was researching Wachs in the right area and sent those researchers a similar message.

I received a number of responses, none of which made specific contributions to my search. All those who responded have been invited to this conversation.

I then touched base with Chatzkel Anis and Lenny Schorr and had another look at the list of Schewach Wachs' descendants. Perhaps the most striking thing there is the total absence of anyone named Isak. Schewach Wachs (b. ~1770-1780) was known to have had seven children, but the chart has names for only four of them.  (See Diagram 3, above.)

One of those sons is connected to the town of Husiatyn, a town the other side of Skalat.  (The chart says "Rusiatyn," but that is surely an error.) The Husiatyner Rebbe had a large following in Skalat, so those towns were well connected to one another. One of the researchers in JGFF has Wachs in Husiatyn.

It is entirely possible that one of the less developed lines from Schewach Wachs has the Isaks. And it may or may not have anything to do with our Isak Fischel. But I can't just walk away from it.

I have been trying to make contact with the keeper of the Schewach Wachs chart to see what she might know and what her sources are.

So...

I'd like to get some thoughts and advice, particularly from the Schewach Wachs family and other Wachs researchers, as well as my gen-friends. How might we proceed to see if the several Isak Wachs who appear in JRI-Poland's database are somehow part of the Schewach Wachs family?

Incidentally, this index entry, which I just found now, is particularly interesting

and I will include it in my next order, in the spring. It is from Mosty Wielkie, which is about 55 miles NW of Podkamen and includes an Isak whose surname is both Schewach and Wachs and who has a specific connection to Podkamen and Brody.

That's it for now.  Thank you for your attention. (If you click on the images, you can see a larger version.)