The Beglers: Bonnie and Marla

So Wednesday afternoon, I am minding my own business when I get one of these "I match [so-and-so-many] of your project. Can you tell me how we are related?" messages that seem to come every other day. In this case, the writer mentioned that her grandparents came from a particular town in Poland and when they arrived in Pittsburgh, they shortened their surname. So I asked her if she is related to my seventh grade teacher and sure enough she is.

Bonnie bottom right, me top left

Later, I wrote to Bonnie Morris, who sat in front of me during much of seventh grade, and told her the story. We laughed at that and talked a bit and for the first time I asked her about her family history. I knew her family. Two of her first cousins were also in our class and during much of the 1940s and 1950s her father and my grandfather served together in various synagogue capacities, particularly in the
Men's Club. On this particular occasion, I learned that one of her cousins had an older sister I don't recall knowing about and that her father had another brother I have never heard of.

I asked her what "Morris" had been originally and where in Europe they came from and she said that her grandfather had been Matasarnik and that he had come from Uman, a well-known town south of Kiyev. Matasarnik is a name I had never heard so I had a look at the JewishGen Family Finder and saw no one listing it as a surname of interest.

Then I asked about her mother. Mrs. Morris (Pearl) was a Begler, Bonnie told me, from Russia someplace but Bonnie wasn't sure where. So I make another quick trip to JGFF and find this:

Marla Waltman, President of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Toronto, with whom I spent much of last Sunday. Marla Waltman whose mother has DNA matches with almost all the Pikholz descendants from Skalat. Marla has Beglers in what was then Russia and in what is now Pittsburgh. How cool is that!

So I opened a new Facebook chat, introduced them and the fun began.

At first Marla thought Bonnie was Bonnie Eckhouse, a known relative of hers, "the daughter of Israel Louis Eckhouse and Pollie Begler."

Wait. I know who the Eckhouses are. Louis Eckhouse's mother is Rose Braun, the aunt of my father's cousin Herb. But Herb had told me that Louis' wife was Pauline Saville, not Begler. So I go off to the indispensable Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project to look for a death notice for Pauline in the Chronicle. And there she is - sister of (among others) Jack, Sam and Paul Begler. (Scratch Saville.)

The burial database at the Rauh Jewish Archives (at the Heinz History Center) shows four Eckhouse graves at Torath Chaim Cemetery and Pauline's father is Yehudah Lev (sic - should be Leib), whose secular name is Louis.

Louis and (Bonnie's maternal grandfather) Harry (Yitzhak) Begler are brothers. Bonnie knows that. Kind of curious that the first cousins Pauline and Pearl (Bonnie's mother) Begler both married men with the same secular names as their fathers and both had daughters named Bonnie.

So what is Marla to Bonnie? Marla says that her great-grandmother Sosya Beigler is the elder sister of Harry and Louis. Sosya is the eldest and Harry the third. Sosya married Levi Ben Tzion Spektor and their son Louis is the father of Marla's father Irving Waltman.

How Spektor became Waltman is beyond the scope of this particular article, but if Marla wants to write up the family here, I'll be pleased to give her the space to do so whenever she is ready

Marla says that the parents of Sosya and Harry are Simcha Chaim Beigler and Freda Breteal. Marla says further that the family says they are from Shpikov (48 47 N 28 34 E) in the district of Bratzlav Podolia, later Vinnitsa Ukraine, but the records point to Radyanskoye some 27 miles away.

Marla and Bonnie are second cousins once removed. That's pretty close considering that they did not know of each other. For me that's a good day's work. They will no doubt continue talking and I'll be available as needed. Sometimes I'm just a facilitator. But then who else knows both Bonnie and Marla? And I love it when my friends meet each other!

COUSIN CYNDI AND OUR ZELINKA SIDE

 Cyndi Finds Me Through JewishGen Family Finder

 One of the most important parts of the JewishGen website is the JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF) which they describe as follows:

The JewishGen Family Finder (JGFF) is a compilation of surnames and towns currently being researched by over 97,000 Jewish genealogists worldwide.  It contains over 500,000 entries: 125,000 ancestral surnames and 17,000 town names, and is indexed and cross-referenced by both surname and town name.  The JGFF was originally created in 1982, and is maintained by JewishGen.

Researchers should check the JGFF for genealogists with similar research interests, and can then contact them for an exchange of information.

These are my JGFF listings on my father's mother's side

I have listed fifty-six surname-town combinations that I am interested in, including a few alternate spellings. On more than one occasion, people have looked up their names and towns and have made contact with me after seeing matching information.

JewishGen has a Value Added program for people who contribute a hundred dollars or more a year, which includes an alert system. If someone adds a name and town of interest to me, the system notifies me. That is what happened when Cyndi listed her Zelenka family from Kotesova Slovakia fifteen months ago.

(To give you an idea how JewishGen has grown in the last fifteen years, Cyndi's is researcher number 499,018. I am number 5627.)

We exchanged emails a few times over the course of a year, but hadn't really done much.  She was on my "to do" list all that time, but there were always many items ahead of her. Then she began speaking to me about DNA.

Cyndi had tested with a different company, but began pushing me to do a DNA comparison on a free site called GEDmatch.com. (At the same time, someone here in Israel was pushing me towards GEDmatch on the Pikholz or Kwoczka side.) GEDmatch had us as fifth cousins.

The Bob Hanscom Data

I have mentioned Bob Hanscom here a couple of times. Bob has two Wilhelm relatives in his family, who came from Trenscin County in western Slovakia. Fani Wilhelm (b. 1785) married Nathan Joseph Rosenzweig, the brother of Nana's great-grandfather Simon. Julianna Wilhelm (b. 1824) married Moses Zelinka, the brother of Nana's grandmother. So in the course of his research, Bob sent me extracts of all the Zelinka and Rosenzweig records that he found. 

This was eight-nine years ago and his information has provided the basis for the Rosenzweig and Zelinka trees on my web site.

But I never had much in the way of actual documentation and for the most part, the people mentioned in the records were generally from the early and mid-1800s.

The first Zelinka we have is Leopold / Levko whose son Jacob had children in the 1780s. Among Jacob's children were sons Joseph and Isaak. Isaak is Nana's great-grandfather. Joseph has a daughter Francza, which is the name of Cyndi's great-great-great-grandmother. Cyndi is missing documentation of the parents of her Francza, but the DNA test showing us to be fifth cousins fits her being the daughter of Joseph.

In the course of going over this material, I found that Bob had given me additional information five years ago, which for some reason I never wrote down. That newer material indicates that there is documentation for Cyndi's Francza.

More Zelinkas

I then went back to JGFF, to see who else was interested in Zelinkas from Kotesova. There are five, aside from Cyndi and me - four of those with online contact information.

I contacted those four and received alot of information from them, bringing their families down to the present.

Sometimes, something comes up that pushes everything aside and last week, the Zelinkas was just that. I entered over three hundred new people and I am not yet finished. The older Zelinkas had more sons than daughters, so the name (including variations such as Selinka) appears very often. As I write this, I have recorded 329 descendants of Leopold Zelinka and 162 spouses. There are also twenty-four who are probably descendants, but we are not sure how.  

One hundred twenty were born with the name Zelinka and another seventeen Selinka, so that surname is now nipping at the heels of Gordon as the second most common name in my database.

As I say, there is more I have not yet entered, so consider this an introduction. There will be more in a few weeks.

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Housekeeping announcements:


I am scheduled to speak for the Israel Genealogical Society on 19 December at Bet Frankfurter in Jerusalem on:
A DNA SKEPTIC TURNS HIS FAMILY ON ITS HEAD AND REMAINS A SKEPTIC
 
I am also speaking 20 December in Raanana and 9 January in Haifa. The topic will be:
BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT: WHAT YOU KNOW vs WHAT YOU CAN PROVE

 All three talks will be in Hebrew. Check times and addresses at http://www.isragen.org.il/siteFiles/13/239/6792.asp