Podwoloczysk Records - New Answers and New Questions

New records from AGAD
About two weeks ago, Mark Halpern of JRI-Poland posted the following, in reference to records from east Galician towns in the AGAD archives in Warsaw. 

Earlier this week, JRI-Poland processed and added a significant volume
of new and/or extended data. This includes about 8,000 new record
indices for eastern Galicia towns as follows:
-- Borszczow 1914, 1916-1929 M
-- Chodorow 1914-1929 M
-- Dunajow 1925-1934 D
-- Kopyczynce 1877, 1879, 1880, 1883, 1885-1914, 1916-1919 M
-- Lysiec 1919-1931 D
-- Mielnica 1898-1914, 1917-1929 M; 1910-1920 D
-- Podwoloczyska 1921-1934 M; 1920-1922 D
-- Sokal 1916-1935 D
-- Szczerzec 1917 B; 1916-1926, 1938, 1930-1932, 1934-1935 D
-- Zalozce 1914, 1916, 1920-1924 M; 1916, 1918-1921 D
-- Zbaraz 1914-1917 B; 1930-1937 M

Some of these towns are of interest to my Pikholz families and my Kwoczkas lived in Zalozce, but many of our families had left their home towns by the time we get to these records. There are some records that add a bit of information, but not much of real significance

But in Podwoloczysk, there are six records of interest, some answers and some raising new questions. (I keep expecting that new records will only provide answers, but no.)

1. The Kiwetz marriage
Tema Pikholz and Zvi Kiwetz, of Skalat, had twelve children almost all of whom lived into adulthood. Of those, only their son Yitzhak survived the Holocaust, losing his wife and three children. Another Holocaust survivor is the daughter of his brother Chaim and eventually that daughter was brought up by Yitzhak and his second wife in Haifa. The daughter was born in 1939 and I have met her, though the last time I looked for her I was not able to find her.

The new Podwoloczysk include her parents' marriage. We know them to be Chaim Kiwetz and Pinie Podhorcer, a variation of Podhoretz. She told me that her mother's mother was also a Kiwetz, a relative of her father.

In fact she is incorrect. Her mother Pinie Podhorcer is the daughter of Menachem Kiwetz and Ester Podhorcer. Her parents' fathers are brothers.

2. There are Picks in Zbarazh
When I first began looking at AGAD records nearly twenty years ago, I saw a Zbarazh couple Lewi and Malka Dwojre Pick with two children born in the 1850s. At the time, I had no idea if this Pick (sometimes Pik) family was part of the Pikholz family of Skalat so I recorded what I found. Soon enough I became convinced that this is not our family but I continue carrying them in my database. There are a few others as well, who probably fit together, but I have not put any work into this family.

I have not found any of them alive during or after the Holocaust, but frankly I have never really looked.

The new Podwoloczysk records include a marriage of a younger member of the Pick family - Israel Jakob Kahane born to Reisel Pick and her husband Nuchim Kahane in 1899. This is the youngest member of this family that I have run across.

3. Josef's son Chaim

Josef Pikholz of Klimkowce (the grandson of Nachman Pikholz of Skalat) who has been mentioned here from time to time, lost his wife Lane Feldman in 1885 at age thirty-two. Soon after, he married his first cousin Sure Elka Pikholz and we have birth records of the children they had together. We know nothing about any of them. (These are half brothers of Jacob Laor's grandfather.)

The new Podwoloczysk records include a 1926 marriage for Chaim. I have suggested to Jacob that he have a look at the Yad Vashem records to see if any of Chaim's family are listed under his wife's surname.

4. The death of Syma Pikholz
Josef's father Arie Leib (1829-1901) also lost his wife in 1885 and afterwards he married a woman named Syma Friedmann. They had a son Nachman David in 1891, about whom we know nothing. Jacob wondered not long ago whatever happened to Syma. We now have her death record; she died in 1920 at age seventy.

5. Is this our Chana?
The Podwoloczysk records have a 1920 death for Chana Halpern.  The record does not identify her parents or her husband or her house number or her home town but she appears to be the daughter of Gabriel (the son of Nachman) and Sara Pikholz of Husiatyn, the wife of Joel Halpern. Her age on the death record is 64 which means she was born about 1856.

The problem is that our Chana's father Gabriel died in 1852. So either this is not our Chana or the age on the death record is incorrect. For now, I am not going to attach this death record to our Chana, but I shall make a note that it might be our Chana with an incorrect age.

6. Brane's husband
This is the most problematic of the new records, so let me start with a bit of background. Chana Pikholz, whom I just mentioned above, and her husband Joel Halpern had a daughter Brane on 13 January 1893 in Podwoloczysk. 

In 1919, Brane had a son in Vienna. On the birth record she is identified unambiguously by her known birthplace and birth date. The father is not named.

That son, who went by Pickholz, ended up in Israel and I have visited his grave. The tombstone has the correct date of birth but the wrong year and identifies his father as Avraham. He has three children, all in Israel, who flat out refuse to talk to me - other than to say "We are not from Galicia. We are from Vienna!" If they would talk to me, I would ask about the identity and surname of Avraham, whether there were additional children, when their father came to Israel, what happened to Brane and more.

Be that as it may, the story seems clear. Brane was born in Podwoloczysk, went to Vienna, married Avraham and had a son in 1919.

But the new record in Podwoloczysk throws a monkey wrench into all of that.

On 29 September 1922, a Friday three days before Yom Kippur, in Podwoloczysk Brane Halpern the daughter of Joel Halpern and Chancie Pickholz, married Isak Siegel, the son of Chaim and Hinde Siegel. Brane's birth date is as we know it and Isak is a few months younger. (This is not the Isak Siegel of Bredowicz who is a Pikholz descendant himself.)

There is no mention in the record of her having been married previously or of her living in Vienna.

Perhaps there is an error someplace, though I cannot imagine where it might be. Might Isak and Avraham be the same person with a double name? I doubt it. What else might explain the documents?

Perhaps she didn't live in Vienna but went there to deliver her child, a child who did not have the benefit of married parents. Then she came home, married and returned to Vienna. Perhaps I should be looking in Vienna for Brane and Isak Siegel - maybe with additional children.

Housekeeping notes
I shall be speaking, in Hebrew, for the Rishon LeZion branch of the Israel Genealogical Society on Monday, 14 January at 7 PM at the Rishon LeZion Museum, 2 Ahad Haam Street. This is not a DNA presentation, though there are a few DNA references. The topic is

מֵעֵבֶר לְסָפֵק סָבִיר

מה שיודעים, לעומת מה שאפשר להוכיח

BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT

What We Know vs. What We Can Prove

Named After A Living Grandfather?

Josef Pikholz was the estate manager in Klimkowce, a town a dozen miles from Skalat and 15 miles from Zbarazh. We know he was alive in 1910. We have no birth record for him, but we have a birth record for a son Wolf in 1874 so we assumed Josef was born around 1850.

Josef's daughter Roza, who was married to Markus/Mordecai Linden, had a son named Josef on 27 August 1911. We know that Jews in Galicia did not name after the living, so we assumed that Josef Pikholz had died by the time his grandson was born.

Most of the Klimkowce records are to be found in the Zbarazh collection, even though Skalat is a bit closer, but we did not see a death record for Josef in either place.

The birth record for Josef Linden, 27 August 1911

When we received new Skalat records four months ago as an Excel file, I saw thist.

I wrote at the time, in this space:

I was surprised to find a 1918 death for sixty-five year old Josef Pikholz in the village of Klimkowce. We had seen earlier that a grandson was named Josef in 1911, but we had not seen a death record for Josef. (We knew he was still alive in 1910.) So now it seems the grandson was given the name of his living grandfather - either after him or for someone else. Not totally unheard of, but unusual nonetheless.

Josef Pickholz, age 65, died in Klimkowce in 1918. Some seven years after his grandson Josef Linden was born. The age was about right and we had no other Pikholz family in Klimkowce. Jacob Laor was certain this was indeed his great-grandfather. How could he be anyone else?

My readers know I am hesitant to jump to comclusions, even though this seemed pretty straight-forward. I was concerned about the grandson who was named Josef in 1911. But it's Jacob's personal family and he is a senior member of our project team, so the best I could do was stall until we could see the record itself.

The record itself - showing the death in Klimkowce on 20 December 1918 and burial in Skalat the next day - was clear.

In the meantime, Jacob came up with another birth record for Markus and Roza - a son Benjamin, born in 1915. The sandak, the witness to his naming, was Josef Pickholz. Well that settles that. Grandson or no, Josef was alive in 1915.

But, nonetheless, I wanted an explanation. Perhaps they didn't hold to the tradition. My grandmother and her older brother were named for their paternal grandparents while they were still living - a fact she surely knew but never mentioned to me. I had come to the conclusion that this was my Slovakian great-grandfather showing that he was not superstitious like the Galizainers.

Or perhaps young Josef Linden was named after someone in his Linden family, perhaps his paternal grandfather. I knew a few cases like that. My father's first cousin Herb was given the same name as his grandfather Hersch Pickholz, who was alive for Herb's first twelve years. He was named, not for his grandfather, but for Hirsch Wachs, who is on Herb's father's side.

In another case I know, a woman whose parents are Chaim and Chaya named her third and final son Chaim while her father was living. It seems that her husband also had parents Chaim and Chaya. His father had died and since he is an only child, it was their only chance to name for his father. They asked her father's permission, which he granted.

That wouldn't work for the Lindens because the marriage record for Markus and Roza shows Markus' father to be Isak. Not Josef.

Markus Linden, son of Isak born 1880 married Roza, daughter of Josef Pickholz and Lany Feldman

Not being in the mood to give up, I had a look at the records for the Lindens in Zbarazh.

And here we see Riwka, Ziwie, Moses Selig and Abraham Leib, children of Josef Isaac Linden and Hinde Fleischfarb all born in the same decade as Markus. Markus' birth is not here, but I am ready to consider that his marriage record had only one of his father's names and that he was in fact Josef Isaac.

And I looked at one more document. Markus' son Leon/Aryeh submitted a Page of Testimony for his father to Yad Vashem.

Markus Linden, born 1880, was murdered in Zbarazh in 1942. His father was Yosef Yitzhak.  I do not know when Markus' father died, but it is clear that he is the one whose name passed to Markus' son in 1911.

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.

Hidden Names

After getting what I could from the newly-indexed records from Skalat, Rozdol, Skole, Zbarazh and Komarno, I decided to circle back for a look at the earlier Stryj records that I had not gotten to when they came out a couple of years ago. Unlike the new records, the JRI-Poland site links to most of the actual older records.

The records in question are births, deaths and marriages for 1906-1914. I searched only for "Pickholz" and turned up thirty-five births, eleven deaths and eight marriages. Most of them are people I already knew, but there is often additional information. (Of course, I need to find others that take into account name changes based on marriage.)

Leibisch's wife Chaja Kohn
Then there was this:

The 1907 death of Beile Kohn age twenty-eight days. Her parents are Leibisch Pickholz and Chaja Kohn. We have no one named Kohn, by any spelling, so Chaja is obviously a "new" person and I hadn't a clue who brought her into the family.

My Given Name Analysis page for variations of Leib was not much use. We do have an Aryeh Leib Pickholz married to his first cousin Chaja Pickholz, with seven children born in Stryj during the period 1899-1918, but no one in Chaja's family was called Kohn. Her mother is Sara Rivka Pikholz and her father is Salomon Lerner, with the family known as Pikholz everywhere - even on Salomon's death record.

On the other hand, Solomon Lerner is a kohen. Nah...that's can't be the explanation. Quite impossible.

Fortunately when I moved on to the birth records, this same Beile appears, with the same parents - Leibisch Pickholz and Chaja Kohn. There is no house number but there is a clear identification of Chaja.

Her parents are clearly indentified as Salomon and Sara Ryfke from Rozdol. No "probably" about this one.

Someone in Stryj decided that Chaja's parents are not Salomon and Sara Rifka Pickholz - and not even Salomon's birth name Lerner - but the caste name Kohn. This was done only for this one child, and on both the birth and the death records. (We have birth records for five other children in this family, with everyone named Pickholz.)

Who would have even considered this possibility??

Leib, the father of Lea "Pickholz/Langenauer"
Having identified two "Leib Pickholz" records in Skalat in the last couple of weeks and another Leib from Rozdol/Stryj above, we have another unknown Leibisch Pickholz in the Stryj birth records.

Sara, born in 1913, is the daughter of Lea who is in turn the daughter of Leibisch Pickholz and Czarna Langenauer. (We have a Reisel Langenauer-Josef Pickholz marriage, but Czarna is not one of theirs.)

So who is THIS Leibisch Pickholz? We have the 1912 marriage record for Joel and Lea which gives her birth year as 1886. So Leibisch would have been born no later than the mid-1860s. But all the Leib Pikholz we have in the Rozdol area before 1870 are either married to other people or dead from childhood. So is this someone new?

But wait. Lea's mother is Czarna Langenauer as expected, but her father is Leibisch Mandel, not Leibisch Pickholz.

And Joel and Lea have another daughter, Lybe, whose 1912 birth record also identified Lea's father as Leibisch Mandel.

So is this Leibisch a Mandel or a Pickholz? Or maybe both?

(Bear with me a minute)
As it happens, we have a marriage between Kalman Pikholz and Libe Mandel. Might Leibisch be their child? (Joel and Lea named their first daughter Lybe.) We have three records for daughters of Kalman and Libe - a death for infant Hendel (or Heudel) in 1886 and births for Chawa (1887) and Serka (1891). Might Kalman and Libe have had a son twenty years earlier?

And who is Kalman? We have only two Kalman Pikholz in our database, this one and the son of David Pikholz and Serka Kawa. Serka died in 1888, so when Libe and Kalman have a daughter in 1891, it gives me the idea that these two Kalmans are the same person.

The first Kalman, the documented son of David and Serka, was marriied to Feige Lerikstein and they had children in 1879 and 1880. Perhaps Feige died and Kalman then married Libe Mandel. That theory has worked for me until today and it is noted in my database as "probably."

But Leibisch puts paid to that. I have no reason to think that Kalman had a son with Libe before he married Feige, then had more children with Libe after Feige died.. Besides, we have Kalman's birth record from 30 Septenber 1856. No way was he Leibisch's father at age ten.

So we are back to the question who is Leibisch who was married to Czarna Langenauer? (Wait for it...) I have a theory. One that doesn't rely on an actual error in the record. Nor is it connected to the fact that Libe Mandel had a brother Leib (1858-1912).

Libe Mandel - the same one, her identity confirmed by her parents' names - was married to Abraham David Wiesler. They had two daughters - Chaje Jochewed (1876-79) and Rachel (1878-79). Abraham Wiesler died at age thirty-two on 30 November 1880. Was Leibisch his son? (Named for the same person as Libe's brother?) Then when Libe married Kalman, some people referred to her son as Pickholz? I think that is what happened. I am not sure that this rises to the level of "probably," but certainly warrants a strong "maybe." I find it satisfactory, for now.

Rosa Pickholz, the Teacher, Her Family

I posted this on the small Shoah section of the Pikholz Project website, with permission. It was published by Avraham Weissbrod in his Yiddish yizkor book "Skalat, Death of a Shtetl," pp. 58-59 of the Hebrew translation and reprinted in Haim Bronstein's Hebrew-language "Skalat - A Community Destroyed," pp. 68-69.

The Weisbrod version contains one additional sentence which Bronstein omits.

The crowd envied her pain-free death.

So why am I writing about this pre-Passover event now? Well, it's about the new records and her family.

Until now, we knew that her parents are Eliezer and Gittel and that she was 35 years old, based on a Page of Testimony submitted to Yad Vashem by Yitzhak Kiwetz in Haifa. Yitzhak filled out scores of Pages of Testimony and did not explain his relationship with any of the victims.

A later Page submitted by Giza Zehavi names Rosa's father but not her mother and says she was 38.

Yitzhak's grandmother Chana Chaja Pikholz was married to a man named Eliezer (~1822-1878) with dozens of descendants, including a number of Eliezers, but I could not find anyone among them who might be Rosa's father. (I have just submitted a Y-37 test for the one living male-line descendant of this Eliezer.)

The identity of Rosa's Pikholz family has been nagging at me for nearly twenty years. The only other thing I knew was that Rosa had a younger brother Moshe (aka Munio) whose wife was Giza's aunt. And that Rosa herself was never married.

Last week, I reported on my first look at the newly-available Skalat records from JRI-Poland and I have now had a deeper dive. One of the new marriage records was Leiser Ber Pickholz (b. 1876) and Marjem Gittel Baras from Zbarazh. Leiser Ber's parents are Leibisch and Ruchel Pickholz, according to the marriage record, which we have only as an index.

I have long known of Leib Pickholz and his wife Rachel Qualer (or Kweller). She was from my grandfather's Zalosce. (There was a Zalosce Kweller in my high school class in Pittsburgh.) I had always assumed that their first known child Leiser Ber had died in childhood, as they had a son Markus Leiser in 1884. But this marriage record made it clear that he lived to adulthood. I went back into my colllection of records for people whose places in the Pikholz family were unknown.

For instance, this:

Reisel born in Skalat 7 February 1903 to Leiser Pickholz and Gittel Barasch of Zbarazh.

And this:

Max born in Skalat 8 April 1905 to Leiser Pickholz and Gittel Baraz of Zbarazh.

So Rosa was shot dead two months after her fortieth birthday and her brother was killed the same day. Moshe was Max, a name almost always associated in east Galicia with Mordecai.

So we now know Rosa's parents are Leiser Ber and Marjem Gittel and that her grandparents are Judel and Reisel Baras(ch), Leib Pickholz and Rachel Qualer. Leiser Ber had five siblings at least three or four of whom did not survive early childhood.

Who is Rosa's grandfather Leib? I mentioned this last week. We know Aryeh Leib Pikholz who was born about 1829 and lived until 1919. His wife Sara Kreisel Glisner died in 1874. They had six children, four of them under age fifteen when Sara Kreisel died. It would have been normal for Aryeh Leib to marry again.

Did this forty-five year old widower with youngish children marry Rachel Qualer, who was barely twenty. Their first child Leiser Ber was born in 1876. I think that is what happened but I am not going to enter that into my database, other than in the comments as a "probably." I am too conservative for more than that. But if it is true and if Aryeh Leib's father Mordecai is indeed the brother of my g-g-grandfather Izak Fischel, Rosa is my father's third cousin. I shall begin referring to her that way.

Now I wonder who Rachel Qualer's family is. She and Leib didn't find each other on J-Date. And Skalat and Zalosce are not close enough for casual contact. She must have been someone's relative. I'm betting it had something to do with my Uncle Selig.

I Have Waited Nearly Twenty Years For This Record

Throughout the life of the Pikholz Project, we have taken as axiomatic that all the Pikholz families from Rozdol are descended from Pinkas and Sara Rivka. Two sons are documented - Israel Joel (1807-1882) with 798 known descendants and Aron (1818-1883) with 81 known descendants.

Anther presumed son is David, the father of Hersch. Hersch was born in 1835 and his mother is Gittel Kraut. And there is evidence of a Samuel, though I have long suspected that Samuel is David's middle name.

There is evidence of a son Berl, about whom we have no information and no known descendants.

And we have four families headed by a couple named Yitzhak and Feige from this first generation. It may be, however that there are two couples - Yitzhak who married Feige and Feige who married Yitzhak, both having children at the same time, all named Pikholz. (For my own convenience, I call these families IF1, IF2, IF3 and IF4.

We also have two families headed by Pinchas, one of whom may have been born to Yitzhak and Feige in 1832 or perhaps to Israel Joel. And a Gittel born about 1840. And another Yitzhak of unknown parentage born in the 1850s.

This has been my best guess of the structure for more than a dozen years.

The four red bars are my conjecture.

Both Hersch and one of the two Pinchas have sons named David Samuel born in 1860 and 1861, and it has been my feeling that Hersch and this Pinchas are brothers. But there was no documentation. Pinchas has a grandson named Pinchas who was born in 1904 and I have long hoped that a death record for Pinchas would identify his parents by name. But we only had access to death records until 1897 - and there is no death record for this Pinchas. So I waited. and waited.

Every time Mark Halpern announced new records from the AGAD archives being released to JRI-Poland, I would ask him about Rozdol deaths. And I waited.

And I worried because even if there were a record, it may not identify his parents.

A couple of months ago, Mark announced a large set of new records and this time it included Rozdol deaths for 1898-1914. This morning, Mark announced that those Rozdol records are now indexed. I went straight to the death record for Pinchas. And here it is.

From the JRI-Poland index. The actual record is not yet available, but this is good enough.

Pinchas died in 1901 at age seventy and his parents are David Samuel and Gittel. Not only is Pinchas definitely the brother of Hersch, but we now have documentary evidence that their father David is in fact David Samuel, as I had suspected.

I can now get to work merging the two families in my database and my web site. The merged family will have eight generations and 271 documented descendants.

The new records include thirty-one other Rozdol deaths with the name Pikholz from this period. There are likely others from married daughters. Plus nine marriages during the period 1909-1916. I will wait with all those until I see the Excel version. Today I celebrate.

I Have Never Seen A Record Like This

A few days ago, a girl from my high school class came to visit. Well, not just visit. She is going to see her brother and cousin in the US next week and wanted to bring them new information on her parents' families. This was my third inquiry from a high school classmate in the past month.

Her parents were older Holocaust survivors, with all that implies. Her father and his first wife were born in Pohorylce, in the Glinyani district of east Galicia (Tarnopol Province). Her mother was from a small village near Peremyshlyany, only a few miles away. We spent most of our time on her father's family and we found many documents in JRI-Poland, showing a large and heavily endogamous family.

Her father was born in 1900 and most of our searches were concentrated on the late 1890s and the following decade. (The Social Security Death Index has his birth nearly a full year later than the birth record that we found.)

As Galicia researchers know all too well, post-1876 birth records name the mother and her parents and usually the father, but never the father's parents. This makes it much more difficult to determine if, for instance, two males with the same surname are father-son, brothers, or perhaps cousins, uncle-nephew or something else. We do not have this problem with women, at least not to this degree.

In most of the records I have seen, the mother's parents are listed but with only the dominant surname. I have seen exceptions to that in Lwow, where the mother's parents are named, each by full birth name.

Peretz (aka Piotr) was born on 1891 to Blime Pikholz and Abraham Brandes. Blime's parents are identified as Perec Pikholz and Perl Nagler of Skalat. This is the only record we have which shows Perl's birth surname. Peretz is the only one born in Lwow.

But this is old news.

This week I saw something new.

In going through the JRI-Poland search results, we found the 1901 birth of her father's first cousin Chajm Moshe Baum, a name she knew. His father is Samuel Baum, the brother of her paternal grandmother after whom she herself is named. (Her own father is also Chaim Moshe.) The birth record names young Chajm Moshe's mother as Lea Weiz.

The record names the mother Lea Weiz and the father as Samuel Baum and adds the grandparents Chajm Moses and Fraide Baum. Not Weiz, the mother, but Baum, the father. And this is not an error, for my friend knows her grandmother to be the sister of Samuel Baum and knows her grandmother's parents to be Chaim Moshe and Fraide.

I have no idea why this was recorded like this. It was not like this on the other records we looked at from the same town in the same period. I am not inclined to examine additional records to see whether this is a unique record in that respect - I expect it is not. Why should it be? But then, why should it be at all?

In any case, it is a reminder to all of us to check all the family records, not just the index entries and not just a few representative family records. You never know until you look, what new information appears someplace where it shouldn't be.

Housekeeping notes
Friday morning I posted the following on Facebook.

I awoke this morning to find a notice from Mark Halpern that it is time to do more fundraising for indexing of AGAD records for JRI-Poland.
Even with all my DNA work and blogging, nothing energizes me more than new records from my main towns of interest.

The towns for which I am responsible which have new records are Rozdol, Skalat, Komarno, Skole, Zbarazh and Zalosce. The records include deaths, births and many more marriages than we are used to seeing. The Rozdol records include deaths for 1898-1914, some of which I have been looking forward to for at least fifteen years.

As more modern records become available, the fundraising becomes more difficult because people are less interested in what happened after their own (great-)grandparents left for greener pastures. On the other hand, I have found that the Excel files that donors receive are more important as married daughters bring new surnames into our families.

Violating My Own Rule? - Mina's Parents

Israel's Rule
There is a presentation that I have given a few times and will be reprising (with updates and revisions) at the IAJGS Conference in Orlando, called

Beyond a Doubt: What We Know vs. What We Can Prove

which explores the question "What do you do when the hard proofs just aren't there, but you are as sure as you can be what they would show if you could find them?" An integral part of that presentation is this slide.

That "one more piece of evidence" is often no simple matter.

Rita's Family

Rita and I go back to the beginning of the Pikholz Project. Her Pikholz family is from the Skalat area, like mine, and she knew most of the descendants of her great-grandfather Arie Leib Pikholz and his wife Ricie Epstein, including those here on the right.

Sara Beile, also known as Soltche, went to the United States in 1907.

Sophie's husband went to the US in 1909 and went back to bring his wife and daughter. Chaje's husband (Rita's grandfather) went to the US in 1913. Apparently the plan was that Sophie's family and Chaje and her daughter would follow soon after, but the First World War intervened and travel was impossible.

In the meantime, Sophie's husband died and eventually the two sisters, each with a daughter, sailed to the US on the Aquitania, arriving at Ellis Island 22 February 1921.

Note that Sophie and Mina are Pickholtz. That's because Sophie's husband was her cousin, Solomon Pikholz. Ray and Mina's daughter "GGR" (the fake name she used on her DNA test) thought that Sophie and Solomon were first cousins, but there was no documentation and no one had any idea who his parents were.

(On the right are Ricie, Chaja, Arie Leib, Sophie and Mina, about 1911.)

I dealt with that like this:

That's how this has stood for years.

Solomon and Sophie get married

Last week, Mark Halpern announced some new records in the JRI-Poland index and while looking at them, I noticed some records that I had downloaded earlier but had not gotten around to recording - or even looking at.  This, for instance.

Groom: Salomon Pikholz, son of Ojzer Pikholz and Chaja Dwora Zlotnik, born 28 February 1879.

Bride: Sossie Epstein, daughter of Ryssi Epstein and Leib Pikholz, born 1880. (She herself said 1881.)

Hey, I know these people! Not only that, but I know him from before.

A birth record for Salmen, same mother, same birthdate.

And the same father acknowledging paternity.

We have two older sons for this couple, both known only by their death records - Jacob who died in 1900 at age 34 and Isak who died in 1882 at age ten.

Based on the eldest known son's birth in 1866, Ojzer was probably born about 1841. As it happens, we have no other Ojzer, but we do

have an Ajzer, who died in Vienna 21 April 1893 at age 51. So he was born about 1842. Vienna records show he was from Kozivka, which is where Arie Leib's family lived. 

He is buried in an unmarked grave.

Right about here.

So it looks like Arie Leib's mystery brother is Ojzer, buried in Vienna. What's the story? The family moved to Vienna, the father died and the son went back to Galicia to be raised by a family member? Maybe that'e why Rita's cousin Benny (Ray's brother) "knew" that Solomon's father was Arie Leib's brother Simon. Because he raised him? Simon had a son Ojser born 1893 in Kozowka, so that actually makes sense.

"My grandparents were cousins"
When I first met some of the Rozdol Pikholz descendants, they all knew to tell me that their grandparents, Berisch and Golda, were both Pikholz. First cousins, in fact.

But as I proceeded to document the family, that turned out not to be the case. Isak and Pinchas were not brothers and their wives had nothing to do with one another or with the Pikholz family.

Isak's parents are Dawid and Serka and Pinchas' parents are Hersch Leib and Sara. Berisch and Golde are not first cousins. They may well be second cousins, but I cannot even prove that beyond a doubt.

Which brings us back to Mina's parents Sophie and Solomon. Everyone says they were first cousins. But maybe not. No one - except Mina as a child - knew Solomon, who had died in Europe. Maybe "cousins" was understood to be first cousins but was actually second cousins or first cousins once removed. Or even uncle and niece.

More than likely they were indeed first cousins, but as I say so often, once I write that down, the subject will be closed and no one will even re-examine it. So which of these do I choose? 

 Even if I am really really convinced, my own rule says "one more piece of evidence." 

Might DNA help?
There are three people in this close family who have done autosomal tests - Rita, Mina's daughter "GGR" and Ray's daughter Thelma. Before we factor in Mina's double dose of Pikholz DNA, the three are simply second cousins to one another. GGR is also a third cousin to the other two.

The wiki at the International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG) tells us that a typical second cousin match would be 212.5 cM. All three matches here are well above that, moreso than I would expect from second cousins, even in an endogamous population.

I am in the midst of preparing some new statistics from my own families for Blaine Bettinger's Shared cM Project, and of seventy-three pairs of known second cousins, I am seeing an average of 395 cM total and an average longest segment of 50 cM. Rita's match with GGR is 30% above my average for total cM and Thelma's two matches are very close to my average.

Mina's father, Solomon Pikholz

So GGR's double dose of Pikholz DNA does not show up at all with Thelma and I really cannot say if the 513 cM that GGR shares with Rita says anything about the degree of cousinhood of GGR's grandparents. There is nothing here that qualifies as "one more piece of evidence." But I have no idea where such evidence might come from.

So although I now know that Solomon's parents are Ojzer Pikholz and Chaya Dwora Zlotnik,  I cannot in good conscience say that Ojser is definitely the brother of Arie Leib. Though I am pretty sure he is. But both Rita and Mina's grandson are really quite certain they are, so I guess I will go with it - rule or no rule.

As an aside, Rita wondered if the 1914 marriage was an actual marriage or just one to "regulate" an earlier Jewish marriage, perhaps in preparation for emigration. (After all, Mina was born in 1903!) This is easily settled.

Please click so you can see this properly.

Solomon's 1909 passenger list says he is married to Sophia and he is going to his sister-in-law, Soltche. So Solomon and Sophie were married by 1909 and the 1914 marriage was indeed a formality. Rita says it probably had to with his having been drafted and she needed the formal marriage to get spousal benefits.

Housekeeping notes
Dates and times for the 37th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy have been published. Here are mine.

 –   Monday 24 July 9:45-11:00, Room Swan 9  
Beyond a Doubt: What We Know vs. What We Can Prove
–   Monday 24 July 2:00-3:15, Room Osprey 2
Lessons in Jewish DNA – One Man’s Successes and What He Learned On the Journey
–   Tuesday 25 July 2:00-3:15, Room Osprey 2
GEDmatch.com’s Lazarus Tool As It Applies to Two Kinds of Endogamy
–    Wednesday 26 July 8:15-9:30, Room Swan 8
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?