My Father and Uncle Selig - The Solution?

I have discussed my great-grandfather's Uncle Selig at length here, here and most recently here and I thought I had said everything there was to be said, considering the paucity of records and the few known descendants.

I am now certain that Uncle Selig is the younger brother of my great-great-grandmother Rivka Feige Pikholz and that this is the relevant family structure.

The children of Isak Fischel and Rivka Feige were born in Podkamen, near Zalosce.

I do not actually know that Uncle Selig's mother is Rojse. Due to the age difference, I suspect he may be from a second wife.

I first learned of Uncle Selig when my father sent me a note many years ago saying that his grandfather Hersch had an uncle, Selig Pikholz, and that they lived in the same area. No one else of my father's generation - at least none that was alive when I began my research - had ever heard of Uncle Selig. and I always wondered how it was that my father knew any of this. My father's grandfather Hersch died when my father was eight, so I don't imagine they had meaningful conversations. 

Great-grandfather Hersch had lived with Aunt Mary and Uncle Max for some years and their son Herb - who is five years older than my father - had never heard of any Uncle Selig.

When I found an actual reference to Uncle Selig in the records, I saw that a son was born in Skalat in 1862 and that his wife was Chana, the daughter of Markus Kaczka. The distance between Skalat and Zalosce according to the JewishGen Gazetteer is 36.7 miles (59 km) from Zalosce, where I knew my great-grandparents had lived. This does not really sound like "in the same area" for that time and place. I later found Skalat references to two older daughters.

Yes, some of the records say Pick or Pik or even Pyk rather than Pikholz.

I began considering that my great-grandmother's name, Kwoczka, was a local version of the more common Kaczka, both related to poultry. I had seen that Kwoczka is unique to Zalosce and that almost all the Kaczkas in east Galicia are from Skalat. Not to mention that the fathers of both my great-grandmother and Uncle Selig's wife are named Marcus (=Mordecai). So my first theory was that we were related to both Uncle Selig and his wife, Chana, so that had something to do with why my father had heard of him.

Not very convincing, is it?

Then when we found that Uncle Selig was present at the circumcision of his great-grandson David Eisig Lippmann in 1911, I wondered if perhaps Uncle Selig had lived into my father's lifetime and it was his longevity or perhaps his death which had brought him to my father's attention.

That theory lasted until I found Uncle Selig's death record, in 1913, some ten years before my father was born.

Then, a few days ago, because of my obsession with this particular issue - I mean it's the only real bit of genealogy that my father knew - I took a step back and saw it all fall into place.

Rivka Feige was named after (by one of the daughters of her first husband) in 1862*. She was dead by the time Hersch was ten years old. Hersch's brother Jachiel would have been no more than about seventeen, maybe a few years younger. I don't know when Isak Fischel died, but he was named after by his daughter Bassie in 1873 when Hersch was probably twenty. He could have been dead five or ten or more years. And even if Isak Fischel lived to marry off his first three children, who knows if he is the one who raised them after his wife died.

The four children seem to have been born in Podkamen, near Zalosce. Jachiel married a woman from Skalat and lived in Zalosce. Leah married a man in Zalosce and went to Pittsburgh in the mid-1880s. Bassie married a man from Skalat and her children were born there, before one-by-one the family went to the US. Hersch followed Leah to Pittsburgh - Uncle Max in 1901, the first two sisters in 1902, Hersch himself and Uncle Joe in 1903 and his wife and the three youngest in 1904.

I think it went something like this. The four motherless children were raised - at least for a time - in Skalat. Probably by Uncle Selig and his wife Chana. They surely knew their grandfather (Isak Josef) who died there in 1862. At some point, Jachiel married a local (Skalat) girl and went back to Zalosce, which was near his birthplace Podkamen. Leah too went to Zalosce and married there.

Bassie married in Skalat - not because she was sent there to marry someone the family knew, but because she was already there.

Hersch may have gone to live with Leah or perhaps the Kaczka-Kwoczka connection is real and Uncle Selig's wife arranged him a shidduch with someone in her family in Zalosce. Or maybe both. Hersch and Leah must have been close, because he followed her to Pittsburgh.

And that's why my father knew. Because someone must have said - to him or in his hearing - that his grandfather was raised by his Uncle Selig. He heard, paid attention, remembered and passed it on.

And with all that back and forth, Zalosce and Skalat were not so far apart after all.

And while I am on the road between Skalat and Zalosce, let me touch base with another family. There is an unidentified Leib Pikholz of Skalat who was married to a Rachel Qualer or Kwaller or Kwahler of Zalosce who had children in the late 1870s and through the 1880s.

The given names there include Taube, Markus, Leiser and Moshe Hersch. Sounds to me like Leib is a son of the known couple Mordecai and Taube. They have a son Aryeh Leib who had children in the 1850s and 1860s. His wife died in 1874, so this could be the same Leib with a second wife, though I don't really think so.

Most of the Pikholz-Qualer children have both death and birth records, so I have no idea if there were descendants even in 1900.

There is a Kweller family from Zalosce who may have something to do with these - a descendant of that family was in my high school class. There were quite a few Zalosce families who went to Pittsburgh during the same period as my family.

* This is why I only now noticed the fact that Hersch was orphaned young. Only now have I established that there was a first husband who had children who named their first daughters "Rivka."


Housekeeping Notes
You can hear my December 1 interview on Savory Spotlight here.

Kitty Cooper had an excellent review of my book, including this

It is as easy to read as it can be, given that genetic genealogy is not easy to understand.  

My winter speaking schedule now includes 2 February at 6 PM at the Utah Jewish Genealogical Society. That's the evening before the RootsTech convention.

My full schedule (as it stands at the moment) can be found here. There are some available dates 25 January and the week following RootsTech.

UNCLE SELIG

I think I have mentioned Uncle Selig briefly once before, but since I have no idea how to search my entire blog history in one go, I cannot be sure. If anyone knows how to do this, I'd be pleased to know for future reference.

Many years ago when I was collecting family genealogy rather than doing actual research, my knowledge

of my Pickholtz was limited to this.

Morris, the youngest of the children of Hersch and Jutte Lea, is my grandfather.

Hersch was probably born in the early 1850s and the sisters were a bit older.

My father then made his only contribution to the family history, telling me a) that his grandfather Hersch Pickholtz had a brother Jachiel and b) that Hersch Pickholtz had an uncle Selig Pickholtz, who lived in the same area.

My father's grandfather died when my father was eight years old, so my father knew him a bit, but he had no recollection of how he happened to pick up this bit of information about Uncle Selig. Surely Hersch had other aunts and uncles. What was significant about this one that he should have been mentioned?

In any case, I made the notation and the picture in my head became this, including the addition of the name of Hersch's mother and the fact that the surname had been spelled Pikholz..

We started the Pikholz Project nearly fifteen years ago and at some point we (Jacob Laor and I) decided to order records from the AGAD archives in Warsaw. This was before JRI-Poland began indexing records from east Galicia, so we were quite on our own.

We began with Skalat, which we had begun to realize was where many of the Pikholz families came from, and as I recall, our first order was for about thirty records - mostly births and a few deaths. We had no idea what we would be getting.

Among those records was the 4 October 1862 birth of Isak Josef to Selig Pick and Chane Kaczka. We knew that some Pikholz were recorded as Pick, but some really were just that, so we could not draw any conclusions about this one.

We also received a death record for Isak Josef Pik, age 78, who died on 21 March 1862 and it appeared that the October baby was named for the man who had died in March.

At about the same time, I ordered some records from Zalosce, where Hersch and family lived, and I learned that my grandfather's older brother Uncle Joe, was not Josef Isak, but Isak Josef.

Other records came in, including the birth in 1871 of Markus to David Zeiler and his wife Mincie Pikholz, the daughter of Selig and Chane. This and other related records made it clear that these Pick/Pik records were ours. So clearly this Selig - even now the only Selig anywhere among the Pikholz descendants - was the uncle of my great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz. And the fact that Hersch and Selig had both named a child Isak Josef, were a strong indication that the Isak Josef who died in 1862 was a common ancestor.

But that created another problem. Isak Josef could be the father or grandfather of Selig easily enough, but ISAK Josef could hardly be the father or grandfather of ISAK Fischel. That's just not the way Galicianers did things.

And there was an additional problem. My father had specifically said - because he had specifically been told - that they lived in the same place. But Hersch and family lived in Zalosce while Selig lived in Skalat. (Well, we knew that Hersch's wife's family, the Kwoczkas, were from Zalosce. Hersch himself seems to have been born in nearby Podkamen, a place with no records. And Skalat was quite a ways from Zalosce and Podkamen.)

So I applied the Sherlock Holmes logic ("when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth") and came up with this scenario. Selig is not the brother of Isak Fischel but of his wife Rivka Feige, who was almost certainly born in Skalat. For reasons unknown, she married Isak Fischel [surname unknown] and they lived in Podkamen, where he was from. Three of their four children married people from Zalosce and lived there, but the daughter Bassie was sent back to Skalat to marry - that part is not speculation, we know it as truth.

That scenario gives us a new diagram, one that is not influenced by what we have since learned

about the identity of Isak Fischel. It leaves open the precise relationship between Isak Josef the elder and Rivka Feige and Selig - likely their father or their grandfather, but not important for now which.

The movement between the towns and the distances involved blurs the issue of their living "in the same place," so I am not concerned about that for now.

Let me emphasize, that I have not entered these connections in my database. Selig still stands as the head of a family without being connected to parents or to a sister. I'd need actual proof to formally record them together. For now, it's just in the "comments."

But I am also left with the nagging question - why did my father know this? How important was Selig? Maybe he made the trip to visit in Zalosce. Maybe he and Rivka Feige were twins or otherwise particularly close. (We know that Isak Josef had at least one other son who lived in Skalat.) Who knows?

But there is another angle which may open the door to something else entirely.

Jutte Leah Kwoczka, the wife of Hersch came from a family who lived in Zalosce. There are no Jewish Kwoczkas anywhere else. Her father Mordecai Meir was known as Markus. Whenever the subject of Jutte Leah's family came up, it was always "Kwoczka, like duck." It was presented as the Yiddish translation.

There is another similar surname that appears in any number of Jewish communites in Poland - but in east Galicia it is concentrated in Skalat. That would be Kaczka. Selig's wife is Chane Kaczka. Her father is Markus. Perhaps the same family that is Kwoczka in Zalosce, is Kaczka in Skalat. Perhaps not only is Selig related to Hersch but their wives are cousins. That would account for his being singled out among the relatives for special mention.

Or maybe not, but it's worth considering. The most recent batch of records from AGAD includes sixteen records of Kazkas from Skalat, including the death record for Chane, Selig's wife, in 1873 at age forty-five. I have not begun to deal with them and it's not a top priority. But I am telling this story now for another reason.

The newest batch of records also includes the birth in 1896 of Bertha Zeiler, the daughter of Selig's grandson Markus. They lived in Stryyevka, just outside Zbarazh. So we now have a fourth generation for Selig - enough to officially count as a family in the Pikholz Project, not just an unconnected group.

The SELIG family now includes three children - Mincie, Markus and Isak Josef. Markus died in 1859 as a young child. We have no idea what happened to Isak Josef. Mincie and her husband David Zeiler had Markus in 1871 and Fischel in 1888 and maybe others in between. We have wives for both Markus and Fischel and now we have Bertha as well.

At this stage in our research, we celebrate the elimination of independent families which are merged into other families. I hope we shall be able to do that with the Selig family, especially since we are pretty sure how that merger would work. But for now we welcome this new four-generation Pikholz family, the family of Uncle Selig.

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HOUSEKEEPING NOTES:

Dina Ostrower has been chosen to light one of the six flames at the national ceremony opening Holocaust Memorial Day Sunday (today) evening. Dina is from Stryj and has been a part of the Pikholz Project almost from the beginning. Her mother was Scheindel Pickholz of the DINA family and her father was Matityahu Pickholz of the RavJG family. Matityahu's parents, Baruch and Yocheved, are both Pickholz descendants as well.

You can read Dina's story (or at least look at the pictures, if you do not read Hebrew) here.