And Sometimes The Record Is Plain Wrong

We all know that records can be wrong. Census records are based on self-reporting and depend on proper recording by the census taker, not to mention transcription errors before they appear online where we can find them in an index. Passenger lists have much the same problem.

The informant on a death record may have given the wrong parents' names, birth place.or other information. Naturalization records often have errors.

Birth records are less likely to be wrong, but it happens. Marriage records should not be wrong - the bride and groom know their ages, birth places and parents' names - but generally no supporting documentation was necessary so there could be errors. Especially when the bride is older than the groom and takes off a few years. Draft cards should be right, but are not always.

So I am not breaking any new ground in the title of this blog. Nonetheless, it's a story worth telling.

Earlier this week, I received a note from the great Logan Kleinwaks who was looking at Sambor records and came across one of mine.  He wrote:

While examining Sambor marriage records without public JRI-Poland indexes, I found the attached (top) involving Abraham Chaim Langenauer from Rybnik, son of Izak Pickholz and Reisel Langenauer.

The record is from 24 June 1923

I know this couple. I received a large amount of information from the eldest daughter, Mahla, who died nearly four years ago. She also sent me a recording of her recollections of growing up in France and escaping Europe. I have met at least two of the other three daughters and I think they are all still living.

Avraham Chaim died in 1954 and is buried in Raanana. His wife Hinde Lea died in 1983 and is buried in Zichron Moshe Cemetery in Benei Berak. I have been to both graves. Their one son died in France soon after his mother.

The father's grave lists him as Avraham, without the Chaim, though Mahla's grave has his full name. But on the grave, we see that Avraham's father is Yosef, not Yitzhak as in the marriage record.

The grave is correct. Yosef Pikholz was born in about 1865 to Yeroham Fischel ben Moshe Pikholz and Gittel Luftschein. He was named for father's mother's father's father Yosef Steg as were a whole set of Yosefs in that family. Yosef married Reisel Langenauer and the family used the Langenauer name. We know all this every which way.

In Skalat, we have my third great-grandfather Izak Josef Pikholz who was known as Yosef, as were most of the descendants named for him. But there was no such phenomenon with any of the descendants of Yosef Steg.

The Sambor marriage record is plain wrong. Sambor is the bride's town but obviously the groom was there and knew his father's name! It happens. So by all means, find documents - but you cannot assume that any single document is precise.

UPDATE:
Lia Landberg pointed out on Facebook that the second note in the far right column of the marriage record says that the birth record had been presented. 

So let me show you that the birth record gives the father's name as Josef, and includes his signature.



Housekeeping notes
I just posted this on Facebook.

I just heard from a known-but-missing branch of one of my mystery Pikholz families. This could be one of those where MtDNA may be very useful.

This is the family. More as it happens.

Dear Cousin Ethel, I've been working on what you wanted.

11th of Iyyar 5774             

Dear Cousin Ethel,

I am still waiting for confirmation, but I am pretty sure I have done at least some of what you asked. A bit later than I'd have hoped, considering that I have been saying kaddish for you for the last six months. But nonetheless.

This is what we knew until recently of our Rosenbloom family.

Here is a chart showing the five children of your grandparents (they are in red), the two children that your grandfather had with his second wife and, over on the far right, the two children that the second wife had with her first husband. (I learned the names Abraham and Bela Resnikov a few years ago. And of course, no one knows what became of Jack Bandis - just that your father had some contact with him early on in the US.)

Alta Kaplan and her four children

For convenience, I marked in green the ones who went to America. And on the left, I put the four children of the older sister Alta Kaplan. All we know about them is that Jakov and one other son each had a daughter before Stalin cut off communication.

There is one other person unaccounted for in that generation, which would be the half-sister Mera (your father always said "Mary")  who was a physician in Moscow. The half-brother Moshe Herschel was killed just after the end of WWI and your brother Maurice is named for him.

Those old Yiddish letters that you gave me years ago include one from Mera dated 13 October 1929, asking your father to send her one of those new devices with tubes you put in your ears, to help hear a person breathing. She wrote her mailing address in Cyrillic at the end of the letter, so we know where she was living in Moscow in 1929. She signed her name "M. D. Goldina." That is the only thing we have telling us her married name. By the time we spoke to your father, he did not remember the name "Goldin."

Top: Shayna Liba & Hymen
Bottom: Mera & Moshe Herschel

I made some unsuccessful attempts over the years to try to find Dr. Mera Goldina, but did not have anything to show for it. I figured that perhaps a medical association might have something, but nothing came of those efforts. I posted on discussion groups from time to time, but mostly moved on to other things.

My friend Logan Kleinwaks has a site where he posts all kinds of eastern European directories, searchable by OCR (that's optical character recognition, a way to search the printed page), and recently he's put up Moscow directories for the 1930s, so I decided to have a look. First I wanted to make sure I had the Cyrillic correct, so I posted the name and address on Schelly Talalai Dardashti's Tracing The Tribe discussion group on Facebook, asking for help from Russian speakers. One thing led to another and Luba Tabolova (a native Russian speaker living in the US) mentioned the "D." as a patronymic.

As you may know, Russians use the father's name as the basis for a middle name. I realized that she must have been using her father's second name David rather than Israel or Srul - perhaps because it sounded less obviously Jewish.

So, thinking that Mera might have remained in Moscow, Luba did a cemetery search for "Mera Davidovna Goldina" and she found a grave in the Malakhovskoye Cemetery in Moscow with precisely that name and the years 1903-1990. That means she died five years after your father. But is it the right person?

The same tombstone named Max Yankelovich Goldin 1905-1979, presumably her husband. We had never seen her husband's name before.

This discovery came to us the day after the yahrzeit of your grandmother and namesake, just a couple of days after your own birthday and the week before the yahrzeit of my grandmother, your Aunt Sarah.

I have no idea how long this photograph has been available online. Perhaps recently or perhaps from the time that you could have actually seen it.

We are still trying to figure out how to confirm that this is your father's half-sister. Luba is trying to get additional information from the cemetery.  She also found a phone number for a Felix Goldin whose father is Max who is about eighty years old. Problem is, the phone number is not valid. but we are working on it.

We'd like to see Felix confirm that

a) he is the son of the couple in the cemetery
b) the Mera Goldin in the cemetery is indeed "ours"
c) perhaps that he knows something about the Kaplans.

But we couldn't make contact. Then last week, I checked my new Family Finder DNA matches and found this:

David Goldin. A second-to-fourth cousin. David as in Israel David, Mera's father? If he is Mera's grandson, he would be my half-second cousin. Is this perfect or what? I emailed him.

Dear Sir,

I see that we have a close DNA match - second-fourth cousin.

My grandmother had a half-sister named Mera Goldin who was a physician
in Moscow. Our last conatct with her was in 1929.

Is it possible after all these years that this is your family? If so please tell me
where you are and how and when I can reach you by phone.

Israel David Pickholtz
Jerusalem

A day later, I received a note from a man in Massachusetts, a nephew of David Goldin. David tested at his request but asked that he not have to deal with inquiries such as mine. He didn't say how old David is, but David's father (1910-1983) was born in Greenport NY and lived his whole life there. David's grandfather went to the US from Poland. So David is clearly neither a son of grandson of our Mera.

The nephew gave me David mother's and grandmothers' maiden names and they don't mean anything to me.

Still, the DNA says that David Goldin is a second-third cousin, so the nephew will give me some additional information on those lines.

No one on my mother's side has done DNA testing, so I cannot see if he matches that side.

Luba will continue trying to get information from the cemetery and to make contact with Felix, so I am still hoping we have Mera's grave, even if we don't have any descendants yet.

I'll let you know when we know more.

Israel P.                             

PS - Funny thing. I was speaking to Beverly on the phone and I told her that I thought I had found the missing sister, the doctor. Her first reaction was "Aunt Ethel would be really happy."

A FEW NEW RECORDS

About a month ago, the following announcement showed up on several of the JewishGen discussion lists.

This is just the beginning. It continues on for several more paragraphs.

Note the reference to the All Galician Database as AGD, not to be confused with AGAD, the Warsaw archives which holds most of the available vital records for east Galicia in the late 1800s.

Having interests in most of the towns with the new records, I decided to have a look. Their drop-down menu did not include Skalat and Podwoloczysk (or for that matter Brzezany) among its choices, so I did a search for Pikholz records from Grzymalow, which is quite near Skalat.

The actual search. (I added the red arrow for the readers' convenience.)

The search produced thirty-two results, six of them from Grzymalow, the rest from elsewhere in east Galicia. Thirty-one showed the name Pikholz  - one was Pekules, which is reasonable as a sound-alike. I already had most of these records and I have actually met some of those mentioned in the Grzymalow school records. And it turns out I get the same thirty-two records regardless of which town I ask the system to search.

I would like to tell you about the four which I  am planning to order, all from the Podwoloczysk.records in the AGAD archives.

  

Prof. Jonas Zellermayer came to Israel form Vienna when he was twenty-four and lived here 

for nearly seventy years. His son-in-law was my boss thirty-five years ago.

Everything we have here lists his father as Avraham, without the second name, so we now know that his father was actually Avraham Yitzhak. One odd thing with this family - we know much  about Avraham's family, but not his parents' names. We know the names of the grandparents and his Pikholz great-grandparents, his mother's three brothers and two sisters, but we know neither the name of his Pikholz mother nor that of his Zellermayer father.

But now we know, as their marriage record was the great surprise of this new set of indexed

records. Jonas'  father Abraham Eisig was the son of Zalmen Juda Zellermayer and Ettel Pickholz.

The fact that he came from Liczkowce may also prove useful as we have several Zellermayer-Pikholz connections and it is not at all clear if there is a larger family story to be told.

In fact, at least three of the four  records I cite here are in some way connected to Zellermayers. 

In the meantime, I sent the marriage entry to the two granddaughters of Abraham and Basie and as a result had my most significant interaction with either of them in some years. Those two granddaughters are, by the way, named after Basie's parents Don and Rifke.

We have a Pikholz couple named Gabriel and Sara who lived in Husiatyn. They had a son Moshe in 1851 and a daughter Chanzie. Gabriel, who was described as "from Skalat" died in

1852 at age thirty in a house associated with a Zellermayer family. Our only knowledge of Chanzie is that she was married to Joel Halpern and lived in Podwoloczysk, which we learn from the 1887 death record of their young son Isaak and the 1893 birth record for their daughter Breine. We know nothing further of Breine.

The new records include the 1911 marriage of their previously unknown daughter Jente to Schamschon Duwid Sirki, son of Mechel and Ester. Thusfar, I have not found other references to the surname Sirki, but it would be great if we can find some descendants.

And this one must be related too. In 1896, we have the Podwoloczysk marriage of Wolf Feldman, age 29, son of Hirsch and Male of Tarnopol to Etie Golde Pikholz, the thirty-two year

old daughter of Gabriel and Breine of Husiatyn.

This cannot be the same Gabriel above - that one died 1852 and this one had a daughter in 1864. Nor can it be any other Gabriel we know. And although we do not have any ther couple named Gabriel and Breine, we do have the one Gabriel with a granddaughter Breine and another whose mother is Brane. It all seems to revolve around Husiatyn.

I haven't a clue how this couple fits in, but the existence of the marriage record opens the possibility of finding some Feldman descendant.

So I must see if I can find anything else of the Sirki and Feldman couples - nothing so far. I will also order the four records themselves from AGAD, as these are not online.

I plan to see if others want to order anything, so that I can put together a larger order, so I asked if any other new records will be added to the All Galicia Database in the coming weeks. (No sense in placing an order and finding out two weeks later that it could have been bigger.) The answer I received was "Nothing that would be from AGAD."

One other odd one. A couple of weeks ago, Jurek, a research colleague in Sweden was

looking at a 1938 telephone directory that Logan Kleinwaks had just uploaded to his wonderful site. There was a listing - apparently a business - for "Pickholz i Wachs" in Skalat. The telephone number is 8. Nothing else but the street name.

This is very strange, as there are no other Wachs in Skalat, at least during the earlier period for which we have records.

But we do have some sort of undefined relationship between the Wachs family of Zalosce-Podkamen and my own Pikholz family  who lived in that same area. So I cannot just ignore this.

I have asked one of the surviving Skalaters here if she knows anything about this business or the families involved and I plan to ask others as well.







- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
If you missed my piece about Uncle Kenny last year, you might want to have a look. His yahrzeit is Monday.

TIME TO GO HOME, BUT FIRST A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE LAST FEW WEEKS

I am going home Monday (arriving Tuesday) at the end of a twenty-seven day trip to the US, so I suppose it's time to record some thughts about the time I have spent here - chiefly the Conference in Boston. (Right now, Blogger is in one of its moods and I cannot even get it to accept links.)

Last week's blog was basically a placeholder, saying nothing at all and with no announcements about it on Facebook or anyplace else. Oddly enugh, accrding to Blogger's count, I had about the same number of unique visits as any other week. So I suppose it doesn't matter if I say anything or not. But I am not so much speaking to readers as I am recording my work and experiences in genealogy.

Shabbat in Brookline was very nice. I was with a family I didn't know, arranged by a neighbor of mine who made aliyah from there a couple of years ago. In the course of Shabbat, I met a man who was getting married the following week at the Poale Zedeck in Pittsburgh, so I was able to send surprise regards to my uncle. Friday I went over to Irene's house and I talked Pikholz genealogy with her and her husband and older son. Irene participated in the Conference and our paths crossed several times a day.

The Conference hotel left something to be desired, starting with space to move around in the guest rooms. It would have been crowded in that room if I had been there with my wife. So much moreso with a roommate. A third cousin of my wife's, actually, and a very nice fellow. The lecture halls were cold, even for me. The elevators were terribly slow, but fortunately I was on a low floor and took the stairs much of the time. All told, the hotel gave us the facilities we needed and on balance was not bad. I used one of the lunch breaks to meet an old friend from my Chicago days - someone I hadn't seen in forty years. (He says he reads tis blog - Hi Zale.)

Morning minyan was well-attended, between eighteen and twenty-five people, with a brief class beforehand on the subject of exhumation and reinterment. Afternoon and evenng services were less well-attended, but we managed. The ever-reliable Elliot Greene (with whom I have a DNA connection) handled all the arrangements, including siddurim and a sefer Torah

One of the most interesting lectures was by a woman who was raised Roman Catholic who managed to prove her Jewish ancestry back to the Inquisition and added to the historical record of her ancestral Spanish town in the process. She eventually received letters both from the Rabbinate in Jerusalem and from a prominent US Sephardic rabbi attesting to the fact that she was Jewish from birth. I bought her book "My 15 Grandmothers" which tells that story. Her journey could have ramifications for many other Conversos, who are interested in returning to their historic Judaism, five hundred years after their forced cnversions.

Logan Kleinwaks spoke about what is new on his wonderful website, genealogyindexer.org. It used to be mainly directories, which can be searched using Optical Character Recognition, but he has been adding other types of records as well. I hsve to spend some time on the site when I get home.

Online Historical Jewish Newspapers was the subject of a talk by Janice Sellers. The tiny room was overflowing, with people sitting on the floor and standing along the wall. It was good, though I already knew quite a bit of what she presented.

I attended other lectures as well, but these were the best of the bunch.

I attended two meetings - one of JRI-Poland volunteers and town leaders, run by Stanley Diamond and Robinn Magid. The other was the Sub-Carpathian SIG, run by Marshall Katz (both a DNA match and a yinzer). I'll do a separate post in a few weeks about Marshall and the Sub-Carpathians and why this interests me at all. (Related to this was a lecture by Olga Muzychuk, the Deputy Director of the Ukrainian Stete Archives. Perhaps I'll have more on this when I blog about Marshall.)

My cousin Adam Brown spoke about what he considers the next big thing in genealogy - online, collaborative trees and in particular genie.com. He knows well that I have reservations about this kind of thing. In fact, I have an article in the coming AVOTAYNU called "Getting It Wrong" which the editor has apparently paired with Adam's article reviewing his talk at the Conference. I am already thinking out a response to Adam's article, for the following AVOTAYNU.

My main interest at the Conference was DNA and I attended everything I could. I started off with an hour of one-on-one discussion with Bennett Greenspan, the President of Family Tree DNA, the company we use for our Pikholz Project testing. He gave me some direction on the analysis of our Y DNA results. (We are close to thirty people so far, with results from thirteen.) Bennett also promised that he'd get Elise Friedman to give a webinar for project administrators, going through all of FTDNA's analytical tools.

I also attended his talk, which I found less useful, but it was an insight to his philosophy. I did not attend Bennett's Breakfast With The Experts session, as it conflicted with morning minyan.

There was a meeting of DNA Project Administrators, at which I had hoped to learn all about the subject. What I learned was that I was not the only clueless person in the room and I expect that the more experienced folks thought we were holding them back.

I also attended a two-hour for-pay computer session on DNA analysis for individuals who had already tested. Some came totally unprepared and we wasted upwards of half an hour because they didn't know thier kit numbers or passwords or had no idea even how to get into the site. Fortunately the room was available into the next hour, so Elise gave us some extra time at the end.

My own talk, on Tuesday at five, went very well. Barbara Stern Mannlein introduced and people seemed to enjoy it. I am still trying to get the audio recording to which I am entitled. The program people made a big deal about getting speakers' permission to video the talks, but in the end no video was done of mine. Too bad, because the audio alone is not very useful. (My Power Point was full of dynamic slides, including circles and arrows and general activity. I was surprised that in all the other lectures that I attended, Power Point served as nothing more than a slide projector. Maybe people prefer it that way.)

The next evening I had a long discusion with Russell Maurer, a micro-biologist, who had attended my talk. He seemd to think I am doing this sensibly, but cautioned about chasing any particular conclusion. That, of course, was my whle point. And as I wrote two weeks ago, subsequent test results seem to support where I am going.

I was also drafted into a Q&A panel on archives in different countries. It was a first-time event and can only get better. The biggest problem was that the questons were both rambling and off-topic.

After Boston came Miami and south Florida, Baltimore and Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Bloomington and finally Chicago and Buffalo Grove. I missed an imprtant visit at the Greyhound Station in Columbus, but more on that anther time.I saw some close family, made face-to-face connections with several Pikholz families and visited two Florida cemeteries.

Next year's conference is in Salt Lake City, the week before Tish'a beAv. My participation may be contingent on whether I am approved to speak.