The Heidenfelds

Years ago, when I was collecting names but not really doing genealogy, my paternal grandmother mentioned that her mother, Regina Bauer, had some cousins. First cousins, second cousins, it wasn't clear. Nana knew four names - Johanna Imber, Ethel Orkin, Stephanie Juhasz and Markus Pogany. She thought the four may have been siblings but wasn't really sure.

She knew that Mrs. Imber and Mrs. Orkin had lived in Pittsburgh (where we lived) and that Stephanie Juhasz and her daughters Vilma, Anna and Olga had lived in Paris. She wasn't sure about Markus Pogany, but perhaps he had remained in Hungary.

Eventually I began to work on the genealogy of the Bauers and one of my first steps was finding the Imber and Orkin death notices in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle. Ethel Orkin, who died in 1963, was survived by her husband Harry and her sister Johanna Imber - so we know they are sisters. No children. The Orkins are buried in the same Poale Zedeck cemetery where Regina Bauer, and indeed my grandparents, is.

Johanna Imber died in 1980 and is described as "aunt of Olga and Edward Szabo, Rego Park, NY." I assumed that Olga is the daughter of Stephanie Juhasz, so Stephanie and Johanna are sisters, making three. No children mentioned for Johanna and no place of burial either.

Later when Ancestry made Pennsylvania death certificates available into the 1960s, I was able to see from Ethel's that her parents are Joseph Hydenfeld and Lina Leavy. That should be correct since her sister Johanna was the informant.

By this time, I had the names of Regina Bauer's four grandparents and I saw that neither Hydenfeld not Leavy was among them, so I began to suspect that she may have been further than a second cousin to these other women.

What I knew was that Regina's maternal grandparents were Salomon (Yehoshua Zelig) Stern from Paks and Bluma Grunwald from Perkata. They lived in Kalocsa. Regina's paternal grandfather was Lasar (Eliezer) Bauer, who lived in Kunszentmiklos.

I had a record showing a Lasar Bauer about the right age, married to Rosa Lowinger, but I had nothing to prove that this was the same Lasar. This Lasar lived in Kunszentmiklos but had been born in Apostag, about halfway from Kunszentmiklos and Kalocsa. (Many of the Bauers in Kunszentmiklos had been born in Apostag.) In the meantime, I was comfortable with Lowinger as a probable surname for Regina's grandmother.

I revisited all of this about eighteen months ago as part of my preparation for a cemetery trip to Hungary, where I founds ancestors and siblings of Regina in Kunszentmiklos, Kalocsa and Paks. I knew I would need some assistance and received it from my friend and colleague Beth Long, who is quite the expert in Hungarian Jewish genealogy, records and geography. Our joint efforts gave us the following.

1. Jozsef Heidenfeld of Osweicim Poland and his wife Magdolna (Lina) Lowy of Szecseny Hungary had six children. Stephania (1883), Eszter (1886), Johanna (1887), Markus (1888), Samuel (1890) and Hermina (1893). All the children were born in Budapest.

2. Magdolna/Lina's parents were Herman Lowi and Zilli Steinberg. But her 1912 death record calls her "Karolina" and her parents Armin Lowi and Czeczilia Brodi (I think).

3. Eszter became Ethel (Orkin), Markus changed his surname to Pogany, Samuel changed his name to Harmat.

4. Hermina married Iszak Rosenfeld of Munkacz. Samuel married Celia Braun of Arad (Rumania). Markus married Sara Sebok of Kalocsa. They certainly did not seem to be restricted to the Budapest area!

5. Markus died in 1969. We found neither death information nor children for Samuel and Hermina, which my be why my grandmother had never heard of them.

None of this helps me identify a connection with my great-grandmother. Unless perhaps Lowi is a variation of Lowinger. Lina Lowi was from Szecseny, which is north of Budapest and about 160 km on today's roads from Kunszentmiklos where Rosa Lowinger lived.

I recently joined the Facebook group Hungarian Jewish Genealogy and perhaps someone there will know something about this family.

Narrowing It Down Using The X

As I have mentioned before, every few months I review the newest autosomal matches on my many Family Tree DNA kits to see which are the best candidates to investigate further with GEDmatch. Maybe a third of those respond to my inquiries and of those perhaps one or two, maybe three, will show anything useful. On this last round, I sent out about eighty-five inquiries and was surprised how many people got back to me in the first forty-eight hours. This is the story of one of these.

The match is a woman named Donna who was adopted and is looking for information that might lead her to her birth parents. One of her two matches with my families was this, a quite ordinary segment of 16 cM with seven Pikholz descendants.

Jean, Sarajoy, Judith and Amy are my sisters. Uncle Bob is my father's brother. Roz is my second cousin on my grandfather's side. Marshal is my double second cousin - our grandfathers are brothers and our grandmothers are sisters. The seven matches triangulate; they all match one another. So this looks to be pretty straightforward. This segment comes from either my great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz or my great-grandmother Jutte Lea Kwoczka.

But this segment is from chromosome 23, the X.The chromosome that never passes from father to son.

Roz gets to our great-grandparents through her mother and grandmother, so both Kwoczka and Pikholz are viable sources for her segment. But the others are all from sons of our great-grandparents, so they would have no X from Hersch Pikholz. Which means this is a Kwoczka segment.

But that cannot be right either. Uncle Bob would have to have received the segment from his father, which is clearly impossible. Uncle Bob received this segment from his mother. That option works for my sisters and for Marshal, but Roz has nothing to do with my grandmother's Hungarians and Slovakians. The Pikholz and Kwoczka families lived in the Tarnopol area of east Galicia.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Three and a half years ago, I discovered a segment shared by two supposedly unconnected parts of my families, one being my grandmother's Hungarians and the other the Galicianers on the non-Pikholz/Kwoczka side of the family of my cousins Rhoda, Roz and Pinchas. 

I have since found about forty strangers who share this segment with matches of anywhere between twelve and twenty centiMorgans. I wrote all of them, but have not gotten any firm leads on how, when and where my two families connect. It is a good ways back, as the families have been in the same places since the mid or late 1700s, but it's recent enough to preserve this 20+ cM segment intact.

Wendy and Carolyn, at JGS Maryland, 2016,

my earliest cousins on this segment

I have also written about this segment of chromosome 21 here, here and most recently here.

My guess is that the same ancestor who gave us the segment on chromosome 21, gave us the newfound X segment, though I cannot prove it. Until now, I have had seven surnames to work with, five from the Hungarians and two from the Galicianers. Of course there was no reason to assume that the common ancestor actually used one of those seven names - if he (or she) used any at all. But they were starting points. 

Now, we know that two of those lines are completely irrelevant. The X cannot be from my third-great-grandfather Lasar Bauer or his wife Rosa Lowinger, because it could not have been passed to Cousin Shabtai Bauer. One of the forty "strangers" has a Bauer ancestor, so that was a candidate for chromosome 21. But it cannot be for the X.

The others are still possibilities simply because we do not have other known descendants of those families who might share the segments in question. We can neither confirm nor eliminate them. Here are the earliest known ancestors in each family.

On the Hungarian side:

Salomon/Yehoshua Selig STERN ~ 1805-1862, son of Izak Leib of Paks could have received this segment from his unknown mother.

Jakob GRUNWALD of Perkata whose daughter was born about 1806 could have received the segment from his unknown mother.

Fani/Feige HERCZ, Jakob Grunwald's wife, could have received the segment from either parent.

On the east Galician side:

Shimon Leib ZWIEBEL, ~1825-1910, son of Isak, from the Tarnopol area, could have received the segment from his unknown mother.

Ester Chava LEWINTER, ~1831-1907, from the Tarnopol area, could have received the segment from either parent. She is Shimon Leib Zwiebel's wife.

I would love to see some tests from any of these families. Zwiebel is probably the easiest place to start.

It feels like progress. I'll certainly notify the forty-odd strangers.