A Story From The Neighborhood

Last week I was doing some work for a client involving - among other things - the family of a woman who died in 1953. This is not basically a Pittsburgh case, but this particular woman lived in Pittsburgh most of her adult life. About ten minutes walk from Chez Pickholtz.

Pittsburgh is a relatively easy place to do Jewish research. Ancestry has Pennsylvania death certificates for 1906-1966 and adds more every couple of years.

Carnegie Mellon University has The Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project.

Searching for "Pickholtz" gives 678 results.

And the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Senator John Heinz History Center has burial records from seventy-eight local Jewish cemeteries, updated to 2009. In an inquiry this week, I learned that they "hope to do an update in the next few years, although the project is still in the planning phases, at the moment."

The combination of these three resources can be an extraordinary aid in Pittsburgh-area research, in addition to the standard sources such as census records, Social Security Death Index, immigration and military records.

I learned easily enough that the family of the woman I was interested in were active Tree of Life people. She and her husband are buried there, as are her sister and brother (who married a brother and sister). The home she shared with her husband and her married daughter is less than ten minutes walk from Tree of Life.

She and her husband had two daughters. One predeceased both of them and is buried at Tree of Life, as would be expected.

The other daughter was married and at some point they became affiliated with Beth Shalom, a Conservative congregation, much like Tree of Life, but about twice as far in the other direction. They are buried in the Beth Shalom cemetery. I see nothing that indicates that the husband had a prior affiliation with Beth Shalom, nor did the Rabbi's Assistant there find anything about his wider family. The husband's obituary names a sister who lived in Philadelphia. so perhaps he was not from a local family.

I wondered when and why they joined Beth Shalom. And I was not sure why this question bothered me.

The married daughter and her husband had one son, who died in his twenties, during the lifetime of his grandmother. In the course of my search, I saw the son's bar mitzvah announcement in the Criterion. At Beth Shalom. They were apparently there a long time. I wondered why. Not that it mattered.

I looked at the rest of the page and I saw that another boy was celebrating his bar mitzvah at the Tree of Life that same week. Maybe the fact that the date was taken was what brought them to Beth Shalom.

But the date wasn't taken by just a random Jewish boy from the neighborhood. The date was taken by the only non-relative I ever called "Uncle." (And his wife, also a non-relative, was one of two we called "Aunt.") I guess I was meant to know that.

Housekeeping notes 

Order here.

European Jews have always married mainly within the tribe. Whether our numbers five hundred years ago in Europe were four hundred or four hundred thousand, the pool was limited. As a result, the members of the tribe today are all related to one another, multiple times.  This phenomenon, known as endogamy, makes Jewish genetic genealogy very difficult, often impossible. There is a similar phenomenon in some other population groups.
I was convinced that this brick wall is not as impenetrable as it seems, at least in some circumstances.

I believe that this book demonstrates that I was correct.

When I decided I wanted to write a book, I was not sure if I wanted to write a “How to” book or a “How I did it” book. The decision was dictated by the facts in the field. Different family structures, widely different numbers of living family members, and other similar factors dictated that writing “How to” would be irrelevant for most researchers.

“How I did it” is more likely to be helpful to the research community and more likely to instill the confidence necessary for such a project.

It is my hope that this book will encourage and inspire other researchers of their European Jewish families and other endogamous populations to say “I can do this!”

The Beglers: Bonnie and Marla

So Wednesday afternoon, I am minding my own business when I get one of these "I match [so-and-so-many] of your project. Can you tell me how we are related?" messages that seem to come every other day. In this case, the writer mentioned that her grandparents came from a particular town in Poland and when they arrived in Pittsburgh, they shortened their surname. So I asked her if she is related to my seventh grade teacher and sure enough she is.

Bonnie bottom right, me top left

Later, I wrote to Bonnie Morris, who sat in front of me during much of seventh grade, and told her the story. We laughed at that and talked a bit and for the first time I asked her about her family history. I knew her family. Two of her first cousins were also in our class and during much of the 1940s and 1950s her father and my grandfather served together in various synagogue capacities, particularly in the
Men's Club. On this particular occasion, I learned that one of her cousins had an older sister I don't recall knowing about and that her father had another brother I have never heard of.

I asked her what "Morris" had been originally and where in Europe they came from and she said that her grandfather had been Matasarnik and that he had come from Uman, a well-known town south of Kiyev. Matasarnik is a name I had never heard so I had a look at the JewishGen Family Finder and saw no one listing it as a surname of interest.

Then I asked about her mother. Mrs. Morris (Pearl) was a Begler, Bonnie told me, from Russia someplace but Bonnie wasn't sure where. So I make another quick trip to JGFF and find this:

Marla Waltman, President of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Toronto, with whom I spent much of last Sunday. Marla Waltman whose mother has DNA matches with almost all the Pikholz descendants from Skalat. Marla has Beglers in what was then Russia and in what is now Pittsburgh. How cool is that!

So I opened a new Facebook chat, introduced them and the fun began.

At first Marla thought Bonnie was Bonnie Eckhouse, a known relative of hers, "the daughter of Israel Louis Eckhouse and Pollie Begler."

Wait. I know who the Eckhouses are. Louis Eckhouse's mother is Rose Braun, the aunt of my father's cousin Herb. But Herb had told me that Louis' wife was Pauline Saville, not Begler. So I go off to the indispensable Pittsburgh Jewish Newspaper Project to look for a death notice for Pauline in the Chronicle. And there she is - sister of (among others) Jack, Sam and Paul Begler. (Scratch Saville.)

The burial database at the Rauh Jewish Archives (at the Heinz History Center) shows four Eckhouse graves at Torath Chaim Cemetery and Pauline's father is Yehudah Lev (sic - should be Leib), whose secular name is Louis.

Louis and (Bonnie's maternal grandfather) Harry (Yitzhak) Begler are brothers. Bonnie knows that. Kind of curious that the first cousins Pauline and Pearl (Bonnie's mother) Begler both married men with the same secular names as their fathers and both had daughters named Bonnie.

So what is Marla to Bonnie? Marla says that her great-grandmother Sosya Beigler is the elder sister of Harry and Louis. Sosya is the eldest and Harry the third. Sosya married Levi Ben Tzion Spektor and their son Louis is the father of Marla's father Irving Waltman.

How Spektor became Waltman is beyond the scope of this particular article, but if Marla wants to write up the family here, I'll be pleased to give her the space to do so whenever she is ready

Marla says that the parents of Sosya and Harry are Simcha Chaim Beigler and Freda Breteal. Marla says further that the family says they are from Shpikov (48 47 N 28 34 E) in the district of Bratzlav Podolia, later Vinnitsa Ukraine, but the records point to Radyanskoye some 27 miles away.

Marla and Bonnie are second cousins once removed. That's pretty close considering that they did not know of each other. For me that's a good day's work. They will no doubt continue talking and I'll be available as needed. Sometimes I'm just a facilitator. But then who else knows both Bonnie and Marla? And I love it when my friends meet each other!