Pinkas

I have long said that one of the advantages of a surname such as Pickholtz is that it is both uncommon and unusual, so most anyone who has ever met one of us will remember. Since I have been working with genealogy records, I can add to this that many people recognize the name and send me references that I otherwise might not see.

The newly released AGAD records at JRI-Poland have produced several of these in the last two weeks.

The great Logan Kleinwaks sent me two records. The first is a marriage record from Chodorow, a town which I do not think appears in any of my family records.

I know the father of the groom, Aba Pickholz from Zurawno but this is the first I have seen his wife or any children. And here his son Mojzesz Jozef is being married.

The second is a death record from Bobrka, which appears in a few Pikholz records, mostly in regard to spouses.

On 20 January 1920, Nuchym Pickholz the son of Abraham and Taube died at age 76. They have him marked as a female, but that has to be just a clerical error.

We actually have someone who nearly fits, in this 1855 birth record..

Nachim Bikholz, the son of Abraham and Taube was born in house 295, a known Pikholz house. So this is the birth of the man who died almost sixty-five years later at age seventy-six. Wait, that cannot be right. The age on the death record almost certainly wrong and I will probably record it as such.

So Logan gave me two records which added significant information about people I already knew.

Early last Friday morning I received a record from Mark Jacobson who was working on Boryslaw records. The first is a death record for a woman we know.

Sara Tallenberg (sometimes Thalenberg), the wife of David Samuel Pikholz, died on 4 June 1920 at age 83.

Mark came back to me a bit later with a Drohobycz death record for someone who is clearly her son. As Mark said a couple of times as we discussed it, "This family definitely wanted to be found today."

Pinkas died 15 May 1921 at age sixty. His parents are clearly identified. But although I have birth records for this couple beginning 1865, I do not have this older child. At least if I do, I do not have him attributed to these parents.

As I discussed a few weeks ago, we have a number of David Samuel in the Rozdol Pikholz family. Three of them have sons named Pinkas and all three of those have death information. So this must be someone else.

There are two Pinkas who are about the right age for the death record (based on the ages of their children) whose parents are unknown. The first lived in Stryj with his wife Feige Nestel and their first child was born probably 1877 or 1888. They have living descendants.

The second was married to Esther Neuman. They lived in Zydachow and had four known children, the first was born in 1890 and lived for two days. Their second child was named David Samuel and he lived to age five and a half. I have no idea what became of their two younger children. The David Samuel angle was intriguing, but I had nothing to connect this man in Zydachow to Drohobycz. But a second look made it clear.

The Pinkas who died in 1921 in Drohobycz lived, in fact, in Zydachow. It says so right on the death record.

So we now have four David Samuel Pikholz from the Rozdol area, with sons named Pinkas, after the patriarch of the Rozdol Pikholz family.

As Mark said, "This family definitely wanted to be found today."

"Today." Last Friday. The Torah portion we read yesterday begins "Pinehas ben Elazar ben Aharon Hakohen..." So on Friday we identified this Pinkas.

The one whose unnamed first son was born on the second day July 1890. The 24th of Tammuz, 128 years ago yesterday.

WHO IS THIS LEA PICKHOLZ?

Lea Pickholz Keller of Drohobycz
After the Second World War, the allies set up an organization called the International Tracing Service (ITS) with headquarters in Bad Arolsen Germany, to deal with all documentation regarding civilians during and after the war. This included deportations, camp records, refugees, people looking for other people, slave labor, etc. Over the years, ITS did lookups for people but did not make records or indecies available for general research, aside from some microfilms which have been available at Yad Vashem since the 1950s.

Attitudes began changing a few years ago and in early 2008, a much larger index was made available to the public at Yad Vashem. My first search of the new index showed files of a number of Pikholz descendants whose names I had not known before, among them Lea Pickholz Keller of Drohobycz. She was born in 1906 to Ben Zion and Rifka Rachel, but it was not clear which of her parents was the Pickholz. Lea was killed in Belzec in 1942.

I requested the file from Arolsen and learned that Lea's husband Pinchas had had some post-war correspondence wth the ITS from his Tel-Aviv address. I found two Pinchas Keller buried in Greater Tel-Aviv cemeteries, both of whom were age-appropriate for Lea and both of whom had died within the past fifteen years. I located the son of the right one.

The son was very surprised to receive my letter. He knew that his father had lost a family in Drohobycz, but didn't know any details.  He certainly didn't know anything about the first wife's lineage. But I did learn about the two children that Pinchas and Lea had together and who were killed. A son Shlomo and a daughter Rachel. I found an ITS card at Yad Vashem for Shlomo, but none for Rachel. Shlomo too had been killed in Belzec.

So this is where I was left, with a Lea Pickholz born 1906 in Drohobycz, to Ben Zion and Rifka Rachel. Another unidentified Pikholz descendant, at a time in my research when I'd have thought I'd be solving these questions, not finding new ones.

Identification
Birth, death and marriage records from east Galicia are held in the AGAD archives in Warsaw, but they may not be released from the Civil Records Office to the archives until the last record in the set is a hundred years old. Even then, we cannot order these records until they have been processed, fumigated, microfilmed and indexed. And there are no plans at the moment for additional indexing. AGAD's staff will not do searches, even if there is a precise date, which I didn't have in Lea's case. So the transfer in 2010 of Drohobycz birth records for 1906-09 was not much help.

In the course of some other inquiries, I found a man - I think he is a former AGAD employee - who is able to do searches in the newly transfered records based on surnames, and provide extracts of the records. He charges by the hour but can do several surnames at once. I got a quote from him for a number of record sets and contacted a few other researchers for each town, to spread the costs. (By the time of this writing, I have done this with three groups of record sets.) The extracts came quickly, but since there were dozens from the main Pikholz towns Rozdol and Skalat, Drohbycz took a back seat. (I had not done this project specifically to find Lea's birth.)

The five record sets I had ordered provided extracts of four births from Drohobycz, three from neighboring Boryslaw, thirty from Rozdol and thirteen from Skalat, as well as thirteen Skalat deaths. Lea was born to Ryfka Ruchel Pikholz and Benzion Flam/Kornhaus(l)er (it is not clear which surname comes from Benzion's mother and which came from his father) on 16 August 1909 in Boryslaw. That's 1909, not 1906 and Boryslaw, not Drohobycz. The record further tells us that Ryfka Ruchel's parents are Dawid Samuel and Sara Pikholz, a couple we know well.

We certainly know this couple. Dawid Samuel Pikholz was born in Rozdol in about 1838 to Aron and Chaje Pikholz. Aron was born about 1818 to the original Pikholz couple in Rozdol, Pinkas and Sara Rifka. Dawid Samuel and his wife Sara Thalenberg had four children that we knew of: Schaje, Chaja Lea (m. Samuel Glucksman), Abraham and Iszak. There are a few descendants of Schaja in the US and Canada, but they have no interest in contact. Chaja Lea and Abraham each had a number of children, but I have found no trace of anyone beyond their birth records. Iszak was known as Tallenberg and lived in Budapest and had three children. I am in touch with one of Iszak's two grandsons, who lives here in Jerusalem, and he was interested to hear of his mother's previously unknown first cousin.

I am pleased that Lea now has a place in the Pikholz tree.