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.

GENEALOGY AS A QUILTING BEE

MAINTAINING THE INTEGRITY OF THE DATABASE

A Response to Adam R. Brown and E. Randol Schoenberg

I have shamelessly borrowed the title of this essay from my cousin Adam Brown's "Big Bang" presentation in Boston. Though we have significant differences of opinion on these matters under discussion, I sincerely believe they can be discussed calmly and civilly, as befits our one big Jewish family.

In my previous encounter with Randy Schoenberg on the subject of Geni some months ago, I off-handedly told him that aside from anything else, the structure of the large Geni tree makes my ADD kick in and that I only look at Geni when a client is paying me to do so. I suppose that was a bit extreme, so in the interest of civility, I hope we both can set that aside.

The above is the opening of the first draft of an article which was just published in the Fall issue of Avotaynu, under the title   

Concerns about Geni and Other “Collaborative Genealogy” Websites.

Adam and Randy's articles were the lead in AVOTAYNU's Summer issue, which was published in September.

Rabbi Jeff Marx suggests:

that we use "Amalgamative Genealogy" for Geni and other sites that exist simply to compile names into one big unity, and reserve "Collaborative Genealogy" for the real process of give and take interaction with others using genealogical standards of proof.

 An excellent idea, though I think I prefer the term "Patchwork" to the cumbersome "Almagamative." Kind of like a quilting bee.

Following is my article as it appears in AVOTAYNU. (Click on the images to enlarge.)

Again, I want to thank Varda Meyers Epstein for assisting me with this. There was a bit of a mixup and I saw proofs of the pieces by Adam and randy only one day before AVOTAYNU wanted my first draft response. Varda reviewed my work several times during that day, otherwise there is no way I would have made that deadline. She also reviewed the subsequent  revisions.

Oh, and Sallyann Sack Pikus, the editor I worked with, wrote:

You made a substantial contribution to what I really hope will be a "serious" (good word!) discussion of the merits and drawbacks of the Geni approach.

There are a few other examples which were not included in the final draft of the article.

In one of my family branches, there is a woman who had a child from a husband whom she divorced soon after. That child was raised by the second husband, together with the subsequent children, and took his surname. The mother said she did not want the first husband mentioned on the family tree. The fact that I have a database that is separate from the website allows me to follow the mother's wishes on the website - even the password-protected page, where living people are named - while maintaining the correct information in my Brother's Keeper database, which only I see.

In another case, a third cousin on the Pikholz side was horrified that her name and the names of her brother and sister not appear anywhere. I found that a bit peculiar, especially since the sister's son was perfectly happy to appear openly on the password-protected page. That page now includes he three of them as follows

(1)  Sister of PRIVATE-PERSON-WHO-PREFERS-HER-NAME-NOT-APPEAR-IN-PUBLIC b. Denver CO 1950 m. Anthony Gronich b. Los Angeles 1949.

(2)  Brother of PRIVATE-PERSON-WHO-PREFERS-HER-NAME-NOT-APPEAR-IN-PUBLIC b. Abt 1954, m. Sandy xxxxx, b.1930's.
 
(3)  PRIVATE-PERSON-WHO-PREFERS-HER-NAME-NOT-APPEAR-IN-PUBLIC b. Abt 1957 m. MAN.

The names of the children of the sister appear in full.

Both of those examples refer to the importance of maintaining a database, distinct from what appears on a public website. I am not sure that the AVOTAYNU article was sufficiently emphatic on that point.

Adam wrote in his article about the technological advances in image identification. I agree that this is important for many people, especially the younger researchers who are Adam's target audience. I told the following story, which was edited out:

On some of these technology issues, I have to trust the experts. But there is a picture on my office wall of my son Renanel and my daughter Hadas, in profile, working in my mother's kitchen maybe a dozen years ago, when they were both teenagers. Hadas was here a couple of weeks ago and pointed out that this is not Renanel at all, but one of my nephews. The only reason she recognized him was that she remembers the occasion. But if you tell me that your facial recognition technology can get it right, then good for you.

I mentioned in my original opening that I have ADD issues with Geni and other tree-type programs. Part of that is because I have trouble telling where I am and where I am going. But there is also an issue of horizontal scrolling. This was in the first draft:

Nonetheless, my genealogy mentor Carol Skydell taught me that people build websites to scroll vertically, not horizontally, for good reason. Horizontal scrolling is much more difficult and people cannot do it as well. It's like a book – for thousands of years we have been reading from side to side within a defined area and then proceed down the page. I'd bet that no one ever wrote a Torah-type scroll with long scrolling horizontals.Perhaps that is just "old peoples' talk" but I see it in my own web behavior, even on my 24" screen.

Of course you cannot record tens of thousands of names in a vertical tree-type chart. (Real trees, are, of course, vertical.) But it doesn't mean I have to choose to work that way when I have my own options. Those invariably involve presenting one family at a time with links, rather than linking them all via dynamic screens.

I understand that Randy asked for an advance copy of this article and intends to have a rebuttal in the Winter AVOTAYNU. I told Gary Mokotoff (publisher of AVOTAYNU) that this may go on for a few iterations and he thought that would be fine. I believe that I am not alone on my side of the debate and I hope someone else would get involved in the response to Randy's next piece - if in fact it is accepted for publication. Preferably someone with more hands-on experience with Geni that I have. (I saw some of Randy's comments on his own site, and was disappointed to find my own positions presented in a distorted way.)

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
BLOG #100
Believe it or not, this is my one hundredth blog post. I began nearly two years ago with a single item and chose the blog style to enable discussion among a group of people. Nothing ever came of that, but it quickly became a weekly thing that I do partly to maintain self-discipline.

Blogger tells me that there are four or five hundred unique visits each week, though the comments certainly do not reflect that. My thanks to all the readers - those who comment on the blog, those who comment on Facebook and elsewhere and those who do not respond at all.

Now it's on to the second hundred - or at least  number 101, which I can tell you now, will be about the Jerusalem snow of 1969..