Breaking With Tradition

I was planning to blog my usual Sunday morning about the two programs I have attended these past two weeks, but it is too much, so I am putting this up now and will do the second half probably Monday.

DNA at GRIP
The week before last was the course in Practical Genetic Genealogy at GRIP in Pittsburgh. It was a wonderful course with excellent instructors. I really wish I could bring up the lectures again in podcast form, but that is not an option.

If I had any illusions about there being some simple solution to the endogamy problem - endogamy being the tendency of certain groups to marry within a relatively small tribe - those illusions would be banished. To be sure, our three wonderful lecturers, Debbie Parker Wayne, Blaine Bettinger and CeCe Moore referred to Ashkenazi Jewish endogamy frequently, but it was generally as an example of where the usual rules do not work.

(I sat in the center of the front row and was rather undisciplined when it came to comments and questions, and all three of them were very graceful about it. As were the other students. And everyone was very concerned for me and my family because of the war going on in Israel.)

The course was well-structured and included homework, which we'd go over at the end of the following day.

If I had to name one lesson I took away from the course it is that although the smaller matching segments may indeed be real, they are probably more generations in the past and it is not an efficient use of my time to be looking at them. I should really be concentrating on only the larger matches.

Of course, that and getting more family members to test.

During the course, I received test results for my third cousin once removed, Ralph, and it showed some really nice matches that brought smiles to the lecturers as well. I'll probably discuss those matches in about two weeks.

Wednesday evening, I gave a talk to people from the entire program (the DNA course and the five others) on "Special Challenges of Jewish Genealogy." For the most part, they hadn't a clue about what we have to deal with as researchers, aside from our unusual alphabet. There were probably forty people in attendance and it was well-received.

I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised that many of the people in the class take clients and want to upgrade their DNA skills in order to better serve their clients or widen their client base. That may work for the general population, but I wonder whether Jewish clients would be patient with all the difficulties and ambiguities. ("This is all I get for my money?") For now, I am sticking to the Pikholz Project and my other families, plus lending a hand elsewhere when I can.

I did not tweet or blog the course, but I did put a few things I learned at GRIPitt.org on Facebook:

Things I have learned at GRIPitt.org - everyone but me pronounces it "autozomal" as though it were written with a "z."

Things I learned at GRIPitt.org. CeCe Moore says that the day is coming when we will be able to get DNA from more obscure sources. So Save and label your gf's false teeth, your gm's hair, your father's baseball cap etc etc. But NOT in plastic, which promortes bacteria.
And tell people (us!) you have it so we can create the demand.

Things I learned at GRIPitt.org: Genealogists will stand in line for ten minutes to get M&Ms and bottled water.

Things I learned at GRIPitt.org: The world of genealogy is full of old friends whom I haven't met yet.

The week as a whole was wonderful and I came away with a lot of old friends. I had had some contact with some of the students before the course, as well as exchanges with some of the instructors (from my course and others). Now I consider them my friends. A few have asked me a week later how things are going in Israel.

There should be a class picture here, but they have not been distributed yet.

I had a feeling of swimming with the big fish. I spoke briefly with Judy Russell, Cyndi sat next to me the first evening, Kikmberly Powell of the APG Quarterly was in our course, and more.

My new old friend Pittsburgher Elissa Scalise Powell put together a really nice program.

A bonus for the week was spending time with Aunt Betty and Uncle Ken, as I stayed there during the course and for three days beforehand.


Housekeeping Notes
Although I don't use it myself, I am sad to see the demise of The Master Genealogist. It's another step on the road that leads to only online trees, where we will no longer be able to maintain definitive databases distinct from illustrative websites.

Your Mother Went By Salomea?

No, not my mother. Joe's mother. He is where this story kicks off.

Joe's article appeared in the issue of The Galizianer (the quarterly publication of Gesher Galicia) that came out a few days ago. He gave his kind permission to reproduce it here.
The article was originally published in the Winter 2013-2014 issue of L'dor V'dor, the quarterly newsletter of the Jewish Genealogy Society of Maryland and they too have given their permission.

 

From my side, the story began when the International Tracing Service (ITS) index became fully available at Yad Vashem. My first look was in March 2008 and I found this. (I redacted the address.) 

Josef Nathanson of Baltimore had inquired in 1994 about Yetta Pickholz Schaffer of Lwow, born 1880, which may or may not be a precise year. He also inquired about her son and three daughters. As I have mentioned here on other occasions, east Galician families came to Lwow from all over, so there was no telling if this Yetta was from the Rozdol families or the Skalat families. I had no Yetta or Etta or similar born around that time, so I had no idea who this might be.

I wrote to Mr Nathanson at the address listed on the cards and we had quite a flurry of correspondence over several weeks. I had not yet begun my subscription to ancestry.com and my friend Renee Steinig found the passenger list with the name Salomea. But I still could not identify Yetta, so I could not place the Schaffers into the Pikholz family structure.

Joe had a precise date of birth for his mother, but despite my inquiries, we could not get the record from AGAD.  So there we sat for two years.

In 2010, AGAD received a few more years of records from the Civil Records Office in Warsaw, but there was a lot to be done before they would allow them to be indexed. I paid someone in  Warsaw to do an unofficial search, from which he could give me only extracts.

The search results included two daughters and a son of Yetta and the extract identified the mother as "Jenta Pikholz, c. Salomon Striks i Szejndel Pesel Pikholz." Jenta, not Yetta. And parents we knew. In fact, we had Jenta's 1883 birth record.

Scheindel Pescha's grave - Vienna. Joe's great-grandmother.

Scheindel Pescha was the daughter of David Pikholz and his wife Szerke Kawa. She was born 1846, probably in Rozdol, and died in Vienna in 1925. David and Szerka had four sons that we know of and are in touch with a number of descendants. This is the family I call IF4.
    

One of at least ten ITS cards for Friedrich

Scheindel Pescha was married to Salomon Strix or Strycks or some similar spelling. It varied from document to document. They had five children before Jenta, apparently four who went by some form of Stryks and Mordecai, who was Pickholz. Mordecai had four sons in Vienna, with the wonderfully Viennese names Siegfried, Friedrich, Ernst and Otto. Their Jewish names: Shelomo, Gabriel, David and Avraham. They died in London, Dachau, Haifa and Buenos Aires and I am in contact with children of Ernst and Otto.

Otto's daughter gave me some bits of information on the Stryks cousins, but I was never able to make contact with them.

Oh, and eventually we found Salomea's birth record. She was born ten days earlier than what the family had "known."

Now if we could only get some DNA out of these folks...

Housekeeping notes

I have an article of my own scheduled for the next issue of The Galizianer.

The practical genetics course I am taking next month at GRIPitt carries with it a discount coupon for Family Tree DNA tests for my project members. Thus far three new signups and at least two working on it. Thank you GRIPitt and FTDNA!

Friday, I visited Hevron with my son Devir and my cousin Ari. We photographed twenty-two graves that were not there on my last visit nearly two years ago. (I really must get back to going more often.)  There is an entirely new section with four graves, next to the section with the old rabbinic graves. You can see my Hevron site here. I should have it fully updated in the next day or two.

A Party on Chromosome 6

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Dr. Steven Turner in the United States telling me that he had some DNA matches with a number of people in our DNA project. At first, he thought he matched eight Pikholz descendants.  I gave him my standard response about our project's being about how to connect our own families with one another, not so much about connecting with non-Pikholz from the pre-surname period two hundred-odd years ago. And I told him that if he matches more than half of our twenty-seven Pikholz testees, we could talk.

That twenty-seven is a new number. We just received results for my double second

cousin, Lee. Our grandfathers are brothers and our grandmothers are sisters. .I really wanted his mother to test, but it didn't work out. Lee ought to match the other Pikholz very much as I do, but that is not the case at all.

I have thirteen matches within the Pikholz group and Lee has eighteen. In additioon, we have a documented fifth cousin named Cyndi on our grandmothers' side, whom I match accordingly. But Lee matches her much closer - probably due to something on his father's side. I have not gone back to check how Lee matches with the non-Pikholz I have discussed here earlier, but for the newest ones, his place in the DNA analysis is prominent.

Yet another reason that we should test as many people as we can and not just say "Well, my third cousin already tested."

So Steve Turner had a closer look via the ancestral surname window on FTDNA and it turns out

he is a match for fifteen Pikholz descendants. That put him across my threshold of 50% and I had a closer look.

He also matches both my Kwoczka cousins, descendants of the brothers of my great-grandmother. In fact, one of those, Pinchas, is better than all of Steve's Pikholz matches but one.

He joined our surname project at FTDNA, making it easier for me to examine his data. He added his mother to the project as well. She matches fourteen Pikholz, and not all the same as Steve. So clearly he has matches with us both on his mother's side and on his father's side.  (Steve's father's family is from Rohatyn, which is between Rozdol and Skalat, so there is some geographic logic to that.)

So I ran Steve's results on a chromosome browser against all his Pikholz matches, as well as his matches within the non-Pikholz who match most of us. There were a number of very interesting matches, but the match on chromosome #6 was remarkable.

Look at his matches with our group on chromosome #6 between the two vertical red lines on the left. He matches nine Pikholz (the ones whose names are underlined in red) and twelve non-Pikholz. He also has four significant matches towards the center of the chromosome, between the blue vertical lines. Now I have to figure out how to do more with those twenty-one matches on the left.

Well, the one thing I know how to do is to look at those same twenty-one people against Steve's mother. Some of them do not match at all and I omitted them from the comparison below.

The whole group on the left has all but disappeared. Those twenty-one matches of Steve's do not come from his mother. But the large matches towards the center, with Terry and Herb, together with the smaller match with Vladimir, are still there, so those must be matches on Steve's mother's side. Plus a match with Pinchas in the same place, that Steve didn't have.

But aside from the DNA party on chromosome #6, there were a number of other interesting areas. I present here, in table form a number of areas in chromosome #10 and one in chromosome #15. The column headings are: name of the person who matches Steve, chromosome number, spot where the match begins, spot where the match ends, "length" of the match in centiMorgans and number of matching SNPs.

On chromosome #10 on the left, there are six areas with interesting matches, some of which are known close relatives (Marla and Hartley in the third and fourth segments are siblings as are Douglas and Pamela in the fifth), but in general, most are people whom we do not know to be related either to us or to each other. But obviously they are. Probably in the 1700s.

The experts tell us to ignore the small matches, the ones with fewer than four or five or eight centiMorgans (depends which expert you ask). The small segments are supposed Identical By State (IBS) which means they are just left over from some really ancient ancestor and not significant for us today. The larger more interesting matches are said to be Identical By Descent (IBD) which means they match because of some relatively recent, theoretically knowable, mutual ancestor.

But look at the matches on chromosome #15 in green, above. (Or below or wherever Blogger has decided to put them today.) These are all very small matches and nine of the eleven are perfect matches. None of the eleven are as close to one another as second cousins. So I take issue with the IBS/IBD distinction especially when a large group share that small match. I mean, it had to come from somewhere, no? And if it were ancient, would it really have preserved itself in so many distantly related descendants - known to be related by other parts of their DNA?

I really have to learn more about this analysis business. Eleven weeks until the course at GRIPitt.

VISITING THE X-CHROMOSOME

So until now, in the Pikholz DNA Project...
I have looked at the Y (male line) chromosome of some of the Pikholz families and we see that three of the Skalat families have a perfect match to one another at 37 markers. This tells us that these three families have a common ancestor most likely six or seven generations back. (They cannot be closer, as we know the five most recent generations.)

The Y tests also told us that certain other family members do NOT have a male line that matches the rest of us.

We did a MtDNA (female line) test on a member of the one Pikholz family that has only an all-female line. That showed a few good matches with non-Pikholz tests, but nothing good enough to work with.

And we have been looking at autosomal DNA tests, as I have discussed before on several occasions. Those are the twenty-two pairs of non-sex chromosomes. Most of the results have been ambiguous to this point.

The X chromosome
So now I'd like to say a bit about the X chromosome. Men have one, which comes from their mother. Women have two, one from the mother and one from the father. The one a woman gets from her father is the same one he got from his mother, so essentially, women have one from the paternal grandmother and one from the mother.

Genetic genealogist Blaine Bettinger put together these diagrams which show how the X chromosomes of men and woman are made up. (Pink represents female ancestors, blue male.)

The circle in the center is the male. His X is from his mother. She in turn gets from her two parents, who get from his mother and her two parents. And so on. The number of ancestors in each generation increases according to the Fibonacci Sequence.

The percentages in the illustration assume that a woman passes on half from her mother and half from her father. but this has been found to be incorrect, as Roberta Estes demonstrates. The mixture that she passes on from her parents can be 50/50, but it can also be 90/10 or 73/27 or anything else.

On the right we see the female chart from the circle in the center. Her right side is the same as that of a man's, all of it coming from the mother in exactly the same way.

But she also has an X from her father and that is what appears on the left.

Family Tree DNA, the test company our project uses, began to include the X chromosome in its results about a month ago.

(Let me emphasize that the X chromosome is not the same as MtDNA, though both involve the mother.)

The surname that will not go away
The first person I looked at was Mark. He is a non-Pikholz from a Skalat family, who matches many of us, and I wanted to examine his theory that he matches us on his mother's side.

He matches six of us on the X chromosome, in two distinct groups, both of them nearly perfectly overlapping. A seventh match (Micha) overlaps no one else, so I am ignoring that.

In the first group, Mark matches Dalia, Gadi and Robert. Mark's matches with Gadi and Robert appear identical. As it happens, both Gadi and Robert are Rozdolers, but these are X chromosomes, so they would be from their mothers' (non-Pikholz) sides.

The match with Dalia is nearly identical. In her case, the match could come from either her Pikholz father or her non-Pikholz mother. Dalia is a Skalater.

The second group has much smaller colored bits but is much more interesting genealogically. Herb and Betty are first cousins. (Betty is my father's sister.) Their matches with Mark are identical. (I could not appear there because my X is from my mother's side. My second cousin Terry could, but doesn't.)

The third person in this second group, Miriam, is a Rozdoler. Her match cannot be from the Pikholz side, as that would be her father's father's side, and her father received his X from his non-Pikholz mother.

So I looked to see what I know about Miriam's mother's side and it turns out that Miriam's mother's maternal grandmother is Miriam WACHS. Well, we certainly know the name Wachs. That was the family I discussed in my very first blog post.

We know that Herb has Wachs in his ancestral backgound, on his father's side. There is a persistent tradition, confirmed by Wachs descendants from Pittsburgh, that there is some sort of connection between them and my own Pikholz family from Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, no one has a clue what it is.

Mark tells me that his paternal grandfather had a cousin who married a Wachs in Tarnopol, but that shouldn't matter because that Wachs would have no common ancestry with Mark and besides, the connection is on Mark's father's side which doesn't affect the X chromosome.

So I haven't a clue how to resolve this.

Robert
Next, I decided to look at X matches for Pikholz males - generally their non-Pikholz sides. I wanted to see if some of the non-Pikholz who matched many of us did so on our mothers' (non-Pikholz) sides. When I did this for Robert, I find something remarkable. He matched three Pikholz on his mother's side, two of them men, which meant on their mothers' sides as well.

Not only that, but as you can see on the right, those matches overlap with one another.

Note that I had inadvertently set the level of testing to 1 cM (centiMorgan), which would include very small segments, but as you can see, these are not very small segments, so that appeared to be irrelevant. At least that's what I thought.

Since one of the excuses the experts use to explain this kind of thing is that the matching segment is too small to be meaningful, I had a look at the precise sizes. And here there was a surprise. The longish green match between Robert and Dalia turns out to be two nearly adjacent matches, the first 1.52 cM, the second 5.23 cM. Robert's matches with Micha and Gadi are 5.83 cM and 2.16 cM respectively.  The experts say to ignore bits less than 5 cM, so we can ignore Gadi here entirely.

I'm not sure what the close matches among Robert, Micha and Dalia can tell us, but we can certainly see that the size of the colored bits on the chromosome browser is very misleading. Gadi's match with Robert looks to be bigger that Micha's, but in fact it is less than half the size.

Another odd thing here is that Robert Gadi, Dalia and Micha match in the same place as Mark, Gadi and Robert but Micha and matches Mark in a different place on the X chromosome.

So I went back to Mark
The actual numbers for group with the larger colored matches with Mark are Dalia -1.29 cM. Gadi and Robert - 1.41 at exactly the same place. These numbers are supposedly too small to be on interest, but it is hard to ignore the precise overlap of the three men and the near-precise match with Dalia.

The actual numbers of the very small colored segments in Mark's second group are Herb and Aunt Betty 4.65 cM in exactly the same place and Miriam 8.2 cM. Miriam's match with Mark includes the entire segment of A. Betty and Herb. These are much more significant numbers that the ones that appear larger.

Now I have to figure out what to do with them.

But I have a plan 
I really have to learn more about how all of this works and to that end have successfully enrolled* in the week-long Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh course in Practical Genetic Genealogy to be held in July in Pittsburgh.

I am hoping that that experience will make me better equipped to analyze all these test results.

I also hope that the lecturers do not end up saying that Ashkenazi Jewish (what they call AJ) DNA is too difficult to do well, because the population is too deeply inbred.

* Successful enrollment was no small matter. When registration opened last Wednesday at 7 PM my time, they had so many applicants that the server crashed. They were finally up at 7:09 and when I finished submitting my form at 7:12, all I got was a waiting list. But that came through the next morning.

Housekeeping Notes
My interview is now live.