Mazal Tov - Uncle Selig Gets Married

The find
From the JewishGen SIG announcements from Friday.

Gesher Galicia is pleased to announce the addition of new sets of
Jewish records on the All Galicia Database
<https://search.geshergalicia.org>.
            <snip>
Tarnopol (Ternopil)
- Jewish marriages, 1859-1876. State Archive of Ternopil Oblast
(DATO), Fond 33/1/716. (379 records)

 I went in and used the new "Records Added in the Past Month" function and this came up.

I am assuming that the wife's name is Rachel.

The only Selig Pikholz we have is the brother of my great-great-grandmother Rivka Feige Pikholz. I have written about him in this space numerous times, most recently here. I even have a presentation called "Why Did My Father Know that His Grandfather Had an Uncle Selig," which I gave at JGS Maryland last winter and at the IAJGS conference in Orlando.

This find - and it is not a full document, only an simple index record - answers and documents several open points and opens the door to a possible significant new development.

Identifying Uncle Selig
This is definitely Uncle Selig, not only because there is no one else, but because the age (43) in January 1874 fits his 1830 birth year (based on the age in his death record.)

Many years ago, I concluded that Uncle Selig's (and therefore Rivka Feige's) father is Izak Josef Pikholz (~1874-1862), who was known as Josef. This was based on the fact that Uncle Selig named his son Itzig Joseph right after Old Izak Josef died and the fact that Rifka Feige had a grandson called Joseph Yitzhak but who was actually born Isak Josel.

I also have DNA evidence, as I discuss in Chapter Seven of my book "ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People."

But I never had an actual document. Now I do, for the marriage index calls him "son of Josel Pikholz."

Of course that also verifies the identity of my own third-great-grandfather, even though that has been settled in my mind for probably eighteen years. I can now totally ignore the fact that Selig was born when his father was at the relatively advanced age of forty-six. We finally have a document.

Uncle Selig in Tarnopol
Uncle Selig and his wife Chana lived in Skalat, where most of the Pikholz families lived. Chana died 11 September 1873 at age forty-five of cancer (raka).

But later in life, Uncle Selig lived in Tarnopol. And his youngest son Meir, who was born about 1872 or maybe 1874, is listed as being from Tarnopol, not Skalat where Selig and Chana lived. After visiting Meir's grave in Vienna a few months ago, I suggested:

The thing is Uncle Selig's wife Chana died of cancer in September 1873 at age forty five, so she could have had a son in 1872 but not 1874. Of course Meier could be from a second wife, but we have no evidence that Uncle Selig remarried and certainly none that he remarried so quickly after Chana died.

Except that Meir was born in Tarnopol and Chana died in Skalat, where the family lived. Maybe Uncle Selig married a second time, this time to a woman from Tarnopol. And they lived in her hometown. Where Meir was born.

So do we reopen the question if Meir was born to Chana in 1872 or the twenty-four year old second wife in 1874? That marriage was 21 January, so birth the same calendar year was certainly possible.

But we do know that Uncle Selig married a woman from Tarnopol and that is likely why he lived there from the time of that marriage.

And speaking of the second wife...
This young woman is Rachel Nagler (b. ~1849) and he married her barely four months after his first wife died.That sounds like the standard practice when a widow or widower is left with young children. (For this reason I believe that Meir is the son of Chana. We know of no other "young children.")

The new spouse is often from within one of the families.

So who might Rachel Nagler be? Peretz Pikholz (~1820-1873) is the son of Berl Pikholz (~1789-1877). We do not know how he is related to my Pikholz families. Perhaps Berl is the brother of Old Izak Josef - or a cousin or a nephew. Peretz was married to Perl Nagler (~1823-1904). Selig's wife Rachel is surely related to Peretz' wife Perl, a niece or cousin, perhaps.

Perhaps this points to a Pikholz-Nagler connection that is more substantial than the Peretz-Perl marriage. Perhaps the actual record will tell us something. Thus far, the folks at Gesher Galicia are not encouraging regarding getting an actual record from the Tarnopol archives.

Housekeeping notes
I have three talks coming up, all here in Israel. All are in Hebrew.

19 November 2017, 7:00 – Israel Genealogical Society, Bet Sapir, Sderot Yerushalayim 2 (second floor), Kefar Sava.
Lessons in Jewish DNA – One Man’s Successes and What He Learned On the Journey

8 January 2018 as part of the Yad Vashem / Central Zionist Archives series “From Roots to Trees” at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. 

5:30-6:15 – The Importance to Genealogy of Understanding Jewish Culture and Customs
6:16-7:00 – Using Genetics for Genealogy Research

EVERY AVAILABLE RECORD - Part 1

A proper genealogy study includes all the records. OK, so my own work doesn't qualify. I do not have birth records for my brother or my sisters. Or my parents. Or my cousins, nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles. Or even my grandchildren - except one.

So you could say I am sloppy. Or cheap. But at least in those cases, I know all the dates and other relevant facts.

In the case of the European records from the 1800s for the Pikholz Project, it is largely a matter of money. We have over four thousand people and when you have couples with seven or eight births in Galicia, it makes sense to order one or two birth records per family and rely on JRI-Poland index listings for the others, especially the stillborns and the deaths of young children.

That is good enough for basic documentation on a limited budget. If all you have are years for births, deaths and marriages, sometimes you have to settle. You can put together a nice piece of work without specific dates of birth and death. The post-1876 Galician births have the names of the mother's parents, but once you have that for one or two births, that's covered. Sure, there are house numbers and causes of death, notes and other miscellaneous information, but you can live without these if necessary. There is also the possibility that there was a transcription error in the index, but those are rare.

On the other hand, as you raise the level of your work, you find that you can develop analytical tools based on some of that information that appears only in the actual records. For instance, some years back, I began recording events in our main towns - Skalat and Rozdol - by house numbers. I was not sure where that would take me, but it turned out to be a useful tool.

Sometimes this kind of thing can help determine relationships between families or at least hint at the family structure. Below is an example which nailed down a relationship which seemed clear based on naming patterns, but which needed one more piece of evidence. I had already determined that a particular couple named David and Serka Pikholz were almost certainly the parents of a certain Yitzhak Pikholz.

We can see that David and Serka died in house #145 during the years that this Yitzhak and his wife Frimet were having children in that same house.

Not only would I have been less likely to reach my conclusion if I only had one or two births of Yitzhak and Frimet's children - without the full set of birth records, I probably wouldn't have attempted an analysis based on house numbers!

Another example is the family of Peretz and Perl Pikholz of Skalat. They were named in the birth records of the grandchildren that they had from their four daughters - Chaje Nesie Spacierer, Basie Ruchel Scharf, Sure Kornberg and Blime Brandes. Below you can see parts of some of the births which were recorded in Skalat, Zbarazh and Tarnopol.

Three records show the parents Peretz and Perl Pikholz. One shows only Peretz.

So we see that these four mothers are the daughters of Peretz and Perl Pikholz. As usual, I ordered a couple of births to each family and aside from those, the only document we have referring to the parents is the death record for Peretz. Therefore, we have no idea if the Pikholz here is Peretz or Perl. (As we know, when the marriage was not recorded with the civil authorities, the children were given the mother's surname and the father often adopted it as well.)

When the Lwow records became available, I saw in the JRI-Poland index that while six of Blime's seven children were born in Tarnopol, one - the fifth - was born in Lwow. It struck me as curious that the family had four children in Tarnopol, then one in Lwow and two more in Tarnopol, so I ordered the record, just to see what would turn up.

Here we see the parents names, Blime Pikholz and Abraham Brandes, residents of Lwow, with Blime's parents identified as Perec Pikholz and Perl Nagler.

This does not tell us why they were in Lwow - though it does indicate that they were living there, not just visiting - but it does clarify that Peretz is the Pikholz and that Perl's surname is Nagler.

This is the only record that we have on the surnames, including Perl's death record which became available only recently. The name Nagler is, of course, unknown to the living descendants - even to those who know the name Pikholz.

So we know there is value in getting all the records - the issue is the budget.

More on this in two weeks - but with examples from records from the United States.