BENZION - A Wild Wild Ancestral Theory

Benzion. בֶּן צִיוֹן or בֶּנְצִיוֹן. Son of Zion.

Could there possibly be a better name?

One of my regrets is not giving it to Devir as a middle name.

 

With his second son, Phil

My maternal grandmother's brother, was named Chaim Benzion. Hymen Benjamin in the United States. He was born in Borisov Belarus in 1894 and had four older sisters, born about 1879, 1886, 1887, 1889. The spacing is odd, with long breaks after the first and the last of the girls.

I knew Uncle Hymen and the way he told the story, his parents had other sons who either died young or were stillborn. (I don't recall how specific his knowledge was.) So when he was born, the rabbi said to use the name Chaim (=life) for good luck.There is a Jewish tradition of playing with names to fool the Angel of Death. At least, that's the way Uncle Hymen told me the story.

So I have always assumed that Benzion was one of Uncle Hymen's ancestral names, hence one of mine. And I was pleased as punch to have a Benzion among my ancestors.

Uncle Hymen's parents - my great-grandparents - are my namesake Israel David (aka Srul) Rosenbloom, the son of Yaakov and Shayna Liba, and Etta-Bryna the daughter of Yehudah the Levite, surname and mother's name unknown. So Benzion was not Uncle Hymen's grandfather, but could have been any of his four great-grandfathers. Or perhaps an uncle, though that seems much less likely.

The Belarus database on JewishGen shows a number of Benzian Rosenbloom references, but much younger, so I always thought there was a good chance Uncle Hymen's namesake was his father's paternal grandfather. Not so good a chance as to actually write it that way in my database, but slightly more likely that any of the others.

Yesterday that changed. A woman named Michelle Sandler posted in several Facebook groups:

In the course of signing on to this project, I took another look at the JewishGen Belarus Database, which I'd not seen in some time. It had a surprise for me, in the 1858 revision lists.

There is no doubt in my mind that these are the parents of my great-grandfather Israel David Rosenbloom, together with two sisters I had not seen before. I had never seen any evidence of siblings, though I assume he had some. For both of his parents, the fathers' names were listed. New names for me. Srul's paternal grandfather is Itska (Yitzhak) and his maternal grandfather is Khaim (Chaim). No Benzion.

And the wheels began turning in my mind. Chaim was not just a good luck name to fool the Angel of Death. It was a full-fledged ancestral name. Surely Uncle Hymen hadn't made up the story of his naming from whole cloth. But maybe it was a real story with the details wrong.

There were sons who died young. Even if their names are important, we generally don't reuse them as is. That makes it too easy for the Angel of Death. My father's father's eldest brother was named Mordecai Meir after his grandfather, but he died at thirteen months. For the next son, they kept the Mordecai, but changed the second name to Shemuel and Uncle Max lived to age eighty-six.

It makes sense that the dead sons of Srul and Etta-Bryna were named for their own grandfathers. Perhaps one was Chaim Yitzhak for Srul's grandfathers. And he died young so you don't want to use it again. Maybe change the order of the names? Or maybe something more clever.

The numerical value of the four letters of name Yitzhak is 10 + 90 + 8 + 100. That's two hundred and eight. Maybe thought Srul, or Etta-Bryna, or the local rabbi - we can play with that. How about 2 + 50 + 90 + 10 + 6 + 50 = 208. BENZION! Chaim Yitzhak becomes Chaim Benzion and we fool the Angel of Death.

I love this beyond words. I love the idea that my great-grandfather and namesake might have thought of it himself, or at least adopted the idea. A solution after my own heart. I really really want this to be true. I suppose we shall never be able to prove it, but if we can find Etta-Bryna's  grandfathers' names, we can call it progress.

We cannot record it as fact, but we might accept it as our working assumption.

Rosenbloom cousins, what do you think?? 

Julius Lichterman / Joseph Davis

This blog is dedicated to my mother's first cousin Ethel Rosenbloom Klavan, the daughter of Uncle Hymen. Her fourth yahrzeit is this Thursday, 12 Kislev. It is one of my self-imposed kaddish days.

The disappearance of Julius Lichterman
My maternal grandmother Sarah Rosenbloom Gordon arrived in the United States before the First World War. She had been born and raised in Borisov - Russia then, now Belarus - as had her siblings and probably at least one of her parents. She died when I was eleven and we never had any meaningful conversation. And she never talked to her children about the past.

Left: Lichtermans. Right: Gordons.
Center: U. Hymen.

Her three younger full-siblings preceded her across the ocean. Her unmarried sister Rachel Leah (Rosa) died the tenth of December 1910 (2 Kislev), according to her death certificate at age twenty-five. We think she was a bit younger. She was not married and had no children.

Another sister Shayna Liba (Sadie) was married to Julius Lichterman (Uncle Hymen referred to him as Zisal and the Lichtermans confirm that this is their Julius, the son of Joseph and Nechama.) She died the first of May 1916 (28 Nisan) and the death certificate says she was twenty-three. She was certainly in her late twenties. There were no children.

As I say, we know she was married to Julius Lichterman but the death certificate - which says "married" - has no space for spouse's name. Nor is there a space for "informant," though surely that would have been Julius.

After Sadie died, Julius disappeared. No one knew what happened to him. His own Lichterman family said he was so distraught at the death of his wife that he broke off contact with everyone, never to be heard from again.

My grandmother's brother, Chaim Benzion (Hymen), was the youngest and I knew him fairly well. Most of my discussions with him about family history were together with his daughter, Cousin Ethel Klavan.

It is my opinion that there was some sort of cousin relationship between the Rosenblooms and the Lichtermans and I discussed the two families together here and here.Therefore I am interested in Julius as a family member, not just as an in-law. The Lichtermans said they were from Borisov, but were probably from a nearby town and when my grandmother arrived in the US, she said she was going to her cousin, who was married to Julius' sister.

The Rosenbloom sisters were active in revolutionary circles back in Russia and my own theory was that after their side won, Julius went back to what he expected to be the new socialist paradise. But I have no evidence of this.

In the course of my research, I have never located a marriage record for Julius and Sadie. The indispensable New York City Italian Genealogical Group site (searched by Steve Morse's site) has a marriage of Julius I. Lichterman and Bertha Kosminsky in 1909. But he is someone else, as we see in the actual marriage record.

Julius Lichterman as Joseph Davis
I looked up Julius Lichterman on the immigration and naturalization pages at Ancestry.com and found fifteen entries.  Several refer to a man born 1877, naturalized in Pennsylvania, crossed the border at Niagara Falls in 1914 and was married to Bertha. That would be the man in the previous paragraph, although the ages are not quite the same.

Several others refer to a man born 1898 in Vilna who arrived in the US in 1919 and was naturalized in 1928. Not our guy.

Others appear on undated naturalization index cards in New York and Pennsylvania with no information. Not good for much.

One is for a man born in 1883 in what Ancestry's transcribers call "Barieve." He crossed the border from Mexico to California in 1945. The age sounds right and the birthplace looks like a bad transcription of Borisov.

I cleaned this up a bit. There is nothing interesting on the second page except his signature.

He is indeed from Borisov. He is also known as Joseph Davies. (His signature looks more like Davis.) He was entering the US "to resume residence" at an address in Los Angeles. It seems to say that he was in California from 1909, though I cannot make out the actual location. "To resume residence" sounds like he had been away for some time, not on a vacation or business trip.

Is this "our Julius?" Well, for starters it seems unlikely that our Julius was in California from 1909 while his wife lived in New York until her death in 1916. But he is from Borisov and the age is right. On the other hand, perhaps he was in California when she died and that could explain why "mother's name" on his wife's death record was written in a different hand, probably later.

This Julius Lichterman died in Los Angeles on 27 April 1949. He is listed in the California death index twice, once as we know him and once as Joseph Davis. (Not Davies.) The Social Security number is the same in both entries.

The death certificate tells us nothing at all, though it confirms both names.

We ordered the SS-5 from Social Security - thanks to Galit Aviv for helping with both these documents. All they could give us was the Numident version, not the original inn his own hand..

Also not useful.

I am not sure how to proceed. He seems like a loner. I expect that neither the cemetery nor a probate search would help.

It all looks so mysterious. Perhaps he was working for an intelligence agency or something.

I have more important fish to fry.

With Cousin Ethel Klavan and her son Ross, Jerusalem
May her memory be for a blessing

Our Genetic Portrait - Part Two

In my post last week, I introduced DNA Painter and described how I identified sixty segments that my family received from specific ancestors of my father. The ancestors concerned are three of my father's grandparents, two of his great-grandmothers and one second great-grandfather. The segments are pretty much low-hanging fruit - easy to identify and confirm.

Reminder - this profile is called "Israel Pickholtz family," not just "Israel Pickholtz." I saw no reason to use only my own segments when my brother and four sisters have segments from those same ancestors which can only enhance my map. That decision required calling this profile "female" because my sisters have a paternal X, even though I myself do not.

Mapping my mother's side
My mother's side is quite a different story. Not only do we have few known ancestral lines, but we have no test results from third or fourth cousins. Since all we have are second cousins (plus two first cousins, Kay and Leonard), I can only use DNA Painter to attribute segments to my grandparents, Rachmiel Gordon and Sarah Rosenbloom. I have no idea what they received from which of their parents.

There are now 132 identified segments on my mother's sides, which is an update since last week.

On the Gordon side, we have two second cousins on GEDmatch - Judy and Ruth. They are first cousins and their grandmother is Rachmiel Gordon's older sister. Andrea, the daughter of Judy and Ruth's first cousin, has also tested is new to GEDmatch and she adds nine segments that Ruth and Judy do not have.. And there are two third cousins who tested but have declined to upload to GEDmatch.

We have six tests on the Rosenbloom side, three from my grandmother's older sister Alta and three from her younger brother Hymen (Chaim Benzion). Here is the  structure of the family - both sides together. Those who have tested and uploaded to GEDmatch are in yellow.

The Gordons
I started with Judy and Ruth. Judy has twelve matches with us - "us" being the eight grandchildren of my grandparents. Ten of those twelve have enough good matches that I consider them certain. On chromosome 5, Judy has a match with Kay and a similar-sized match with my sister Sarajoy. Normally I would reject that as being not good enough, but the fact that Kay's father has no Jewish DNA gives her a bonus since there is no endogamy from that side. Nonetheless, I rated this match "very likely" rather than "certain."

On chromosome 9, Judy has a match with me, a similar match with my sister Judith and a much smaller match with my brother Dan. I would like to see more people here, especially either Kay or Leonard, so here too I rated it "very likely."

Next I looked at Ruth's matches with us, ignoring those which she shares with Judy and which I had already recorded. There are fifteen. Ruth's total match with me is nearly 500 cM, much higher than we would expect from a second cousin, and I suspect that her father has significant Galitzianer in his background. (His parents died when he was young, so we really don't know.) Here Kay and Leonard become more important. Matches which include them, I regard as certain . Matches which do not, I downgraded to "very likely" because there is a non-negligible possibility that this such matches come from our fathers rather than our Gordon mothers.

I also downgraded a match between me and Ruth because although Leonard is there, his match is much smaller. It simply doesn't feel certain. All told, Ruth has eight certain matches with us and seven "very likely."

Andrea has nine matches but six of them are only with my mother's children. I marked those as "very likely" rather than certain. I left a comment in those cases.

This is the set of matches between Ruth, Judy and Andrea and my grandparents' eight tested grandchildren.

The Rosenblooms
A bit of background on my grandmother Sarah's family. She and her sisters and brother were born in Borisov in what is now Belarus. Her father Israel David Rosenbloom appears in the 1874 revision list in Borisov so I assume that's where his family had lived. His wife Etta Bryna - whose surname is unknown - could have been from anywhere.

My grandfather Rachmiel Gordon was born in Dolginov which is not far away and it is possible, even likely, he had some family in Borisov. Sarah's sister Alta married Berl Kaplan whom we think was from Borisov, but we are not sure. Uncle Hymen married in Pittsburgh - to a woman from Schedrin, also Belarus, but over a hundred miles from Borisov.

So I decided that I could not set matches that did not include any of Uncle Hymen's grandchildren as "certain" due to the possibility that there was some kind of connection between Sarah and Alta's husbands' families.

But it is more complicated yet. Louis Jaffe, Judy and Ruth's grandfather, was also from Borisov, so I had to be on the lookout for matches that might have included his family mixed in with the Rosenblooms.

I will spare you all the detail, but there are a lot of segments that required analysis and decisions. These are the results of the six Rosenbloom second cousins - three from Alta's granddaughters and three from Uncle Hymen's grandchildren. (Hovering over and clicking on the segments gives much additonal information.)

Lots of segments here. Quite a few overlapping segments as well, because a match with one of Alta's granddaughters may be similar to but different from a match with one of Uncle Hymen's grandchildren. This is not trivial, even if there is some (unnecessary) duplication.

If you look at the segment at the far right end of chromosome 19, you will find a similar match on the Gordon set above. Here is the chromosomal view.

The green match is from Judy. The brown match is from Lydia and Inna.

These are not distinct Gordon and Rosenbloom matches. Judy triangulates here with Lydia and Inna. Like some kind of general Borisov segment. And who know how many more are similar, but we cannot identify them. I rated it as "very likely" but I'm not even sure what that means in this context.

And can you imagine, there are people who would do this automatically!! Endogamous populations are hard to do well. Anyone can do them badly.

Success Using Family Finder Match Alerts

Family Tree DNA Alerts
I manage over ninety family kits, most of whom tested with Family Tree DNA. So I get many scores of these notices every week. Not only each person, but since, for instance,  Dan is a member of all five of my projects, I get all of his notices five times. Others are members of multiple projects and for them too I get multiple notices.

These notices of "Close Matches" means matches that FTDNA considers to be suggested second-third cousins. Readers may recall that several months ago I challenged FTDNA to explain why the more recent kits are getting far and away more close matches than earlier kits from the same families. We are four months and counting and FTDNA has not yet addressed this issue. (Janine, if you are reading this, see my help request 565856  which was opened 17 February.)

I cannot just limit myself to those matches which FTDNA calls "close." I also want the 2-4 cousins and the 3-5 cousins. After all, if one person has is a suggested 2-3 cousin, it is relevant to consider siblings or other close relatives who are 2-4 or 3-5 with that same person.

So between the huge numbers of alerts and the inconsistency in reporting them, I have yet to find a way to make use of them properly. After all, if I get a close match with Joe Schmoe, I cannot look at his matches with my other kits. It all becomes unwieldy and my worry that I will miss important matches competes for my time with more immediate demands.

An Attempt to Manage the Alerts
A few weeks ago, I decided to try something new. I decided to download in an Excel file all the matches during the month of May for each of my project members. then I arrange them in separate Excel files by group: my mother's side, my grandmother's side, the Rozdol-Pikholz side, etc. That's a lot of work by itself but after that I have to sort by the names of the new matches to see who may have interesting matches with several people within each of my groups. There is no macro that will do that for me.

I then sent out over two hundred emails like this.

Some replied, most did not. Some gave me their GEDmatch numbers, others did not care to share this secret information with me. Others needed help even creating GEDmatch numbers. Oh, and a few would send me a list of all the GEDmatch kits in their families.

I looked at each one against all my kits - after sorting on the "Name" column of their match lists so all mine would come up together near the top  - and created 2-D Chromosome Browsers. For most I would do two or three Chromosome Browsers for different parts of my families.

In one case after another - particularly within the Skalat Pikholz families - I would get results that I couldn't do anything with. The only segments over 10 cM were individuals, not groups. And when they were groups, they were vague and appeared weak and distant. I mean, if I have a segment shared only by a third cousin here and a fourth cousin there and a double fourth cousin another way, how serious can this be. It almost has to be long ago and in most of my directions I have only two or three ancestral surnames to work with, even when I can go back two hundred years or more.

I was also hampered by the total inadequacy of the Tag Groups that GEDmatch inaugurated a few months ago. I have been meaning to write about that and will try to do so soon.

I really began wondering what was the point of all this work. After all, if I were serious, I'd have to do this every month! I would send the results to the matches and began concluding with "Thank you for humoring me."

First Partial Success
Last week I saw some progress. Kind of.

I heard from Ellen, the wife of one of my new matches of interest, a man named Robert. She gave me his GEDmatch number and I went to work. My Chromosome Browser gave me this:

Identical segments with two of my sisters and my brother, a similar segment with my half-second cousin Fred, and a smaller segment in the same place with my second cousin Susan. This is not large but it is unambiguous. My father's mother had a half sister (same father, different mothers) named Ella. Aunt Ella's husband was not Jewish, nor was the wife of their son. So my half second cousin Fred has all his Jewish DNA from one grandparent, Aunt Ella. Susan is a full second cousin on that side. There is no way that our common ancestor with Robert is not an ancestor of my great-grandfather - either a Rosenzweig or a Zelinka. Both families lived in the area of Trencin County Slovakia back into the 1700s.

It reminded me of the match with Cousin Debbie last year, on a segment that looked like this:

True, Debbie's segment with us is larger than Robert's and she has more matches, but nonetheless this is the same logic and I can accept Robert as a family member with the same authority.

And Robert has another match, this one with Fred and my double second cousin Lee. It is possible, though unlikely, that this comes from  different common ancestor that the match on chromosome 7, but even if so, it does not challenge the conclusion.

However, whereas Debbie is definitely Zelinka, not Rosenzweig and she knows of Trencin County ancestors, Robert's position is less well-defined. He could be either Rosenzweig or Zelinka and in any case, he knows his family to be from Horodenka in southeastern Galicia. So we have work to do here, but we know there is at least a small pot of gold to be claimed.

The Duncans
When it rains, sometimes it pours. Or at least rains a little more. The next GEDmatch I looked at after Robert was a brother and sister pair, Evelyn and Adam. Their father is Scottish, a Duncan, so my families' matches with them are on their mother's side.

I started off with this excellent set of matches for Evelyn on Chromosome 12. Regular readers will recognize them easily enough.

Evelyn's matches with my mother's mother's Rosenblooms, from Borisov in Belarus.

• The first two, Inna and Lydia are granddaughters of my grandmother's sister Alta. They are first cousins.
• The next two, Beverly and Sam are grandchildren of my grandmother's brother Hymen. They are siblings.
• My sisters Amy and Sarajoy and I are on lines 5, 6 and 9.
• My first cousins Kay and Leonard round out the group.

Evelyn has another match with Inna and Lydia on Chromosome 20, of about 11 cM.

Evelyn's brother Adam has much the same segment on Chromosome 12.

It's a bit different from Evelyn's matches, but with the same clear message. We share a common ancestor upstream of one of our great-grandparents Israel David Rosenbloom or his wife Etta Bryna. And speaking of Etta Bryna, my maternal haplogroup, as seen in my MtDNA test is U1b1. Evelyn's is U1b. These are very close and may refer to the same common ancestor as these matching segments, though the matching segments appear more recent.

Adam has another segment that Evelyn does not.

This points in a slightly different direction. It does not have the Rosenbloom cousins, but it has five of my mother's children plus our first cousin Kay - and our second cousin on our mother's father's side, the Gordons. I am not quite sure what to make of this because Judy's Jaffe grandfather also came from Borisov. What is certain is that Evelyn and Adam are our cousins - probably fourth, maybe fifth or even third. Galit has added them to our Rosenbloom Borisov project.

The problem is, we do not know how to go from there. We do not have additional known ancestral surnames from our side and though they have a few, we cannot put it together. And their geography is Pinsk rather than Borisov - that's a distance of nearly 400 km.

I also had a look at the matches on Chromosome 12 on the GEDmatch Matching Segment tool to see if there is anyone else who matches both the Duncans and the Rosenblooms on that segment. I see none.

Now I have to decide if I want to do this again for the June matches.

Housekeeping Notes
I'll be speaking on the Hebrew version of
Lessons in Jewish DNA – One Man’s Successes and What He Learned On the Journey
this week, 19 June at 6:30, for IGS Rishon Lezion, Museum of Rishon Lezion, Ahad Ha’am 2.

Also, my son in Chicago is making his next bar mitzvah the first Sunday in May. If any program directors are looking for something around then, please drop me a note.

Lichterman - Checking the Source

My g-gm's grave in Borisov

Etta Bryna - my great-grandmother
I wrote about the maiden name of my mother's mother's mother Etta Bryna Rosenbloom at length in the early days of this blog four and a half years ago and for those who want the details, it's worth a reread. She died probably in her late thirties and we know precious little about her. In addition to the information I presented back then, Renee Steinig found the death certificate of my grandmother's other sister in Islip, Suffolk County - but it lists both her parents' names as "unknown." The informant was the hospital.

Etta Bryna's tombstone

So I am still where I was then. Etta Bryna's father is Yehudah and he is a Levi. My conjecture that she is a Lichterman still runs up against a lack of any proof that the Lichtermans - a known Borisov family - were Leviim, but the gravestones of the known Lichterman men have no Hebrew. The traditional grave of their sister Gitta Lichterman Benenson (below) calls her father "Yosef" with no mention of his being a Levi.

This is where I have been holding for the past four or five years.

Gitta Lichterman Benenson

Our new project for several Borisov families 
Recently I joined forces with Galit Aviv to have a look at several Borisov families who appear to be connected to one another. These would be the Lichtermans, the Kaplanskys, the Benensons and the Rosenblooms. There are a couple of others which might belong here as well. To that end, we have added several people to the Rosenbloom Project that I set up at Family Tree DNA some years ago and are getting a few others to test - including a granddaughter of Gitta.

Galit - whom I have not met, but expect to see when I am in the US during the winter - is a good and resourceful researcher. Among other things, she came up with the following.

This is the 1908 death and burial record for Moshe Likhterman the son of R' Yudel

Map from the
JewishGen Gazetteer

Likhterman the Levi, in Slutsk. He is also called "the son-in-law of R' Eliyahu" followed by the odd notation "l'm24." The burial is next to someone named Yehuda who died a few month earlier. Could this be the brother of Etta Bryna? The fathers of both are Yehudah who is a Levi. And is that Yehudah next to him perhaps his father? And what is that odd notation "l'm24?"

Slutsk is some ninety miles SSW of Borisov, but that needn't indicate a problem. Certainly not if this Moshe held a rabbinic position.

The next step was obviously to see the actual Chevra Kadisha records, the book from Slutsk which is the source for the above record.

I contacted the people who had submitted the Chevra Kadisha records and no one was quite sure what the source was, except that it was in Israel and that the translators (from Hebrew) too were Israelis. So I had a look at the web site of the National Library, on the campus of the Hebrew University here in Jerusalem, hoping I would find it either there or at the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People which is now part of the Library.

The Manuscript Reading Room

The Chevra Kadisha book of Slutsk for the years 5439-5684 (1679-1924)

The book is in the Manuscript Reading Room at the National Library, so that's where I went. It had moved since the last time I was there and is now in a pleasant room behind the cafeteria. Two young librarians, Ariel and Moriah set me up with a microfilm reader that had a scanner attached and brought out the film in a matter of minutes.

I saw that the transcription was faithful to the original text, with one small exception. (The original calls the deceased "yashish" which in modern Hebrew means elderly, while the translation is "venerable." But venerable was a more common meaning when the original was written.)

The original had the ל"מ (l"m) - left of center on the third line - but not the "24" which I assume was some sort of typographical error. But I didn't know what those initials meant or if they were significant.

Until suddenly I did. Because I had seen this before.

Four years ago, I wrote in this space about the correct name of Hersch Leib Pikholz of Rozdol and the solution to the problem was found in the records of what we call Kollel Galicia here in Jerusalem. The records in question are too poor quality to show here, but here is what I wrote in that earlier blog.

I was surprised to see that there were no contributions by anyone named Pikholz, despite the fact that Rozdol was the place that all the Pikholz families from that area had come from. There are no lists of Holocaust victims from Rozdol, but from our own records we know that there were Pikholz families there at the time. Certainly in the late 1920s. Eventually, I realized what had happened. The person in charge of collections for Rozdol, Pinchas Kerner, was himself a Pikholz son-in-law and he knew all the families personally, so instead of writing out the name each time, he simply wrote P"H as a personal shorthand.

l'm is shorthand for Likhterman!

R' Moshe's father-in-law Eliyahu is a Likhterman. I asked Ariel to have a look and he said "It wasn't uncommon for people to marry relatives." Maybe it's that simple.

But I don't think so. I read it differently. The rabbi Moshe ben Rabbi Idel the Levi Likhterman the son-in-law of R' Eliyahu Likhterman. How about Moshe (son of R' Idel the Levi) Likhterman? Ariel said he could see that possibility as well.

I think Moshe's father is a Levi but is not Likhterman. Moshe took the name Likhterman from his father-in-law. So Etta Bryna can be the sister of Moshe Likhterman without that being her maiden name - and the Likhtermans are not Leviim. The father of Etta Bryna and Moshe is. What is his - and Etta Bryna's - surname?

Now we go back to my grandmother's passenger list where she seems to be going to her "cousin J. Ben..." I demonstrated four years ago that this is Jacob Benenson, the husband of Gitta Lichterman. So is my grandmother calling a relative of her mother's sister-in-law (who lived in Slutsk!) "cousin?" Perhaps the cousin was Jacob and Etta Bryna is a Benenson.

I haven't a clue if the Benensons of Borisov are Leviim. Of the Benensons on Find A Grave, there are eight or nine men with photographs and Hebrew epitaphs. None say "Levi."

There are a lot of "if"s and "maybe"s in this highly speculative scenario and I am not about to jump to any conclusions. But for the first time in several years I see some possible movement in this part of the family. And some new possibilities. My instincts have been pretty good. Maybe we will learn something from the new DNA project and the new contacts.

Oh yes, I also looked at the burial record for the Yehudah who is buried next to Moshe Likhterman. He is someone not connected. Apparently they didn't number the plots, but recorded the locations according to the next grave over.

Housekeeping notes
Program chairs - and people who know program chairs - please note. I have some available dates during my coming US trip, particularly the weekdays between 23 January and 2 February, in the east and midwest and perhaps 14-16 February in the NY/NJ area  Perhaps even Sunday the nineteenth. Several topics are available including the Lazarus-Endogamy talk which I presented in Seattle and a new one about Uncle Selig where DNA is not the main point of interest.

The following programs are set, with some others under discussion:

22 January 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Maryland, Baltimore County Public Library, 1301 Reiserstown Road, Pikesville
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?
29 January 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Greater Philadelphia, Main Line Reform Temple 410 Montgomery Avenue, Wynnewood
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey
5 February 2017, 1:30 – JGS of Cleveland, Park Synagogue East, 27500 Shaker Blvd,  Pepper Pike
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey
10 February 2017, 11:00 – ROOTSTECH2017,
Jewish DNA: Successes and Lessons from the Journey
12 February 2017, 1:30 - Orange County JGS - details to follow.
13 February 2017, 7:30 - JGS of Los Angeles, American Jewish University, 15600 Mulholland Drive
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?

It's been awhile since I have mentioned my book, available at www.endogamy-one-family.com.

Ruth: Our Mothers, Our Fathers, Our Cousins

Ruth
DNA results are in for my cousin Ruth.

I think this is the one!

Our late mothers are first cousins and and both are named for their great-grandmother Basya Gordon. Though Ruth is quite close to me in age, I am not sure we ever met more than twice. Once was when we spent my sixth birthday in New York - an event made memorable because Cousin Bessie gave me a Mr. Potato Head. The other was the bar mitzvah nearly sixty years ago of Ruth's first cousin Mickey in DC.

Ruth's grandmother is the older sister of my grandfather.

I have just begun testing on my mother's side and Ruth is one of three to test, aside from two of my sisters and me. The other two are my first cousin Kay (our mothers are sisters) and Ruth's first cousin Judy. We have one more test being processed - that one is on my grandmother's side and should help divide the matches between my mother's two sides.

Ruth's Family Finder results have given us information of interest in several different directions.

Everyone in the bottom row has done a Family Finder test.

MtDNA
In addition to the Family Finder, which I'll talk about below, Ruth also did an MtDNA test. That would be the line leading up through Gershon Kugel's wife Zelda. We received the results a month ago. Her haplogroup is R0a4.

Ruth has nine exact MtDNA matches and four more that are one step away. Now that we have her Family Finder results, I looked to see if any of those are close matches. (Three of the nine exact matches have not done Family Finder tests.)

Of the ones who have, most do not match Ruth at all and a few are remote matches. One of the "one-step-away" group is a "third cousin - fifth cousin." As it happens, this is someone I know as a researcher and who is a Facebook friend as well. There is nothing obvious between these two women that would account for a good Family Finder match, but we'll exchange information and see if anything turns up. Of course, the closeness in the Family Finder match me be unrelated to the MtDNA match.

Cyndi
When Judy's results came in about six weeks ago, I was surprised to see that her first match after my sister Sarajoy and me, even before my first cousin Kay, was Cyndi Norwitz. Cyndi is a known fifth cousin of mine on my father's maternal side (Zelinka, from Slovakia) and has no known connections to my mother's side. (For instance, she does not match Kay at all.)

Normally, I do not get involved in matches with peoples' other sides, but this was most unusual so I introduced the women and they began a lively conversation, mostly about Judy's mother's family. I think Judy is hooked. Since we knew we would be getting results from Ruth soon, I suggested we wait to see whether Ruth matched Cyndi or not. If they have a good match and passed the chromosome browser test, we could proceed assuming that Cyndi is connected to the grandfather of Judy and Ruth. If not, we would assume the connection to Cyndi goes through Judy's mother.

Cyndi and Ruth are "third cousin - fifth cousin." Not as close as Cyndi to Judy, but not bad either. There are partial answers in the chromosomes.

Judy and Cyndi match Ruth twice

Here on the left, we see that Judy and Cyndi match on chromosomes 14 and 18

Ruth and Cyndi match Judy five times!

But here on the right, there are three additional matches - on chromosomes 7, 8 and 22.

This appears to be a contradiction, but in fact it is not. Remember we have two of each chromosome, one from the father and one from the mother. FTDNA's results do not differentiate between them. What these results are telling us is that on one hand, the matches on chromosomes 14 and 18 are mutual and come therefore from Eliyahu DovBer, the grandfather of Ruth and Judy.

The matches on chromosomes 7, 8 and 22 are on Judy's two sides. The matches with Ruth (orange) are on Judy's father's side and the ones with Cyndi (blue) are probably on Judy's mother's side. In addition, Cyndi matches Judy on chromosomes 3, 6, 11, 13, 15, 16 and 17 for a total of over 50 cM. These may be on Judy's mother's side as well - or they may be from someplace else entirely. Or they may be matches that Ruth could share, but she simply didn't get those particular bits of DNA.

Oh and to complicate it further - Ruth and Cyndi have some matches that they do not share with Judy. Those are about 25 cM on chromosomes 5, 8, 10 and 16. Here too, they could be from someplace else (Ruth's father?) or they could be part of the match with Judy that Judy just didn't receive.

Unpredictability of DNA
Ruth's match with her second cousin Kay is only about 155 cM, which looks more like a third cousin than a second. That probably has to do with the fact that the adjusting algorithm that FTDNA uses does not know that Kay has no Jewish DNA from her father's side.

On the other hand, we might think that Ruth's matches with my sisters and me should be about the same. We would be wrong. Ruth and I share 496 cM, while neither of my sisters shares as much as 350 cM with Ruth. That's a difference of over forty percent. I am also significantly closer than my sisters to Judy, about 28% closer than Amy but over 50% closer than Sarajoy. I seem to be very much a Gordon!

Adam
I must touch on my obsession with finding my connection to Adam Brown.

Adam and I have a strong DNA match. We both have Kugels from Pleshchenitsy, we both have Gordons and we both have connections to Borisov where my maternal grandmother's Rosenblooms come from. When Kay's results came in a few months ago, we saw that she, Adam and I share a segment of chromosome 6 of almost 11 cM, plus two segnments on chromosome 12 of nearly 13 cM.

I was sure that this was largely on the Gordon/Kugel side and was curious to see what was on the Rosenbloom side.

To my surprise, Judy and Adam are not a match. Ruth and Adam are defined as "fourth cousin - remote cousin" and have a couple of segments in common with me. Kay matches me on segments adjacent to those, but I don't think that is significant.

So maybe we have something with Adam on the Gordon/Kugel side, but for now the Rosenbloom side looks much more promising. We'll know more about that when we see the results for our Rosenbloom cousin.

Fathers
I found it odd, to say the least, that my sisters and I have more that twice as much DNA in common with Ruth than we do with her first cousin Judy. That must come from somewhere.

Then I saw that Ruth is estimated to be a "second cousin - fourth cousin" to my father's brother and sister. And although she is a remote cousin to my father's first cousin Herb, she is not a match at all to my three second cousins on my father's side.

This almost has to come from my grandmother's side. Cyndi has no match with both Ruth and A. Betty/U.Bob, so it's not Zelinka side. I would expect my double second cousin Lee to have something matching, but no.

And even so, where is all this coming from on Ruth's end? From her father, I suppose.

Well, it also turns out that Ruth is a match with twenty-two Pikholz tests! Other than the five in my own personal family, there are only three who are not labelled "remote," two of those are from Rozdol and the third is a Pikholz by adoption, but like us, is from Skalat.

Before I start checking chromosomes for that, I want to find out a bit more about Ruth's father's family. I know his parents' names but not so much as his mother's maiden name. Ruth's parents were married in Brooklyn in 1936, so I have ordered the marriage record which should have his mother's birth name and perhaps where they came from. I have asked Ruth what she knows.

Asking is not always the way to go. Some years ago, one of the cousins sent out a genealogy questionnaire to that branch of the family. Both Ruth's older sister and her father himself reported that her parents were married in 1937 and here the database of the Italian genealogists lists the certificate in June 1936.

Oh how I love endogamy!

The Woman Who Matches Etta Bryna

I am posting this on Sunday, the sixth of Nisan, the 118th yahrzeit of my great-grandmother
Etta Bryna bat Yehudah HaLevi Rosenbloom. We do not know her maiden name - a subject which I discussed in some detail two years ago.

This is the ancestral line about which I know the least. Even less than what I know about her husband, my namesake, Israel David ben Yaakov Rosenbloom. At least I know his mother's name - Shayna Liba.

In the case of Etta Bryna, we only know what we do because we have a photograph of her grave, with her daughter Shayna Liba standing along side.

Etta Bryna almost certainly died in her mid to late thirties. Her eldest daughter was about eighteen. Her only living son was a few weeks short of his second birthday. Her husband married again soon after she died and the new wife - who had two children of her own - may have discouraged further connections with the dead wife's family.

Perhaps Etta Bryna's family didn't live in Borisov, so seeing them would have involved some effort. Or maybe they were in town and my grandmother's younger brother Uncle Hymen (Chaim Benzion) simply never realized they were his mother's kin. When Uncle Hymen joined Social Security, he wrote "don't know" where his mother's maiden name should have been.

I am sure my grandmother would have known some things about her mother's family, but no one ever asked her.

Today I want to touch on a different side of this problem. DNA testing.

I first dipped my toe into the waters of DNA testing three years ago in connection with the mysterious line of my father's father's father's father. (That may sound trivial, but trust me, it wasn't at the time.) So I decided to order a Y-67 test to see if anyone out there matched my male line.

While I was at it, I decided to do the same thing for the line of Etta Bryna, my mother's mother's mother. The maternal test looks at the mitochondrial DNA which is separate from the 23 pairs of chromosomes we generally hear about.  It passes from mother to both daughters and sons, but only the daughters pass it along to the next generation. MtDNA tends to remain unchanged for many generations, so I decided to pay attention only to perfect matches since my dead end is so few generations ago. The testing company I used is FamilyTreeDNA. I did the test they call "MtFull Sequence," which is the highest level available.

The results came back and I had six matches. I exchanged some correspondence with the six and they were all over the map. My Etta Bryna lived in what is now Belarus and I had these matches with people from places far away - like Hungary. I had no basis for doing anything further and in any case, I had more productive things to do.

Fast forward a year when we decided to begin a DNA project for Pikholz descendants. Most of that project is based on the Family Finder test, which looks at autosomal DNA, the sort that comes undifferentiated from all ancestors. So I did the Family Finder. It was about six months ago when I had another good look at my MtDNA results.

By now I have twelve matches, all from the haplogroup U1b1, like me. None of them gave much information. Two of the twelve posted the basics of their ancestors in what they call a gedcom file. One of those two didn't have enough information to work with. The other went back six or seven generations in a family called Goldberg, in a town named Divin, in the southwest corner of Belarus, about 360 km from Borisov.

Six of the twelve had done Family Finder tests, so I figured that could give me an idea if any of those might be related to be in the more recent generations. Remember, I have no knowledge of Etta Bryna's siblings, so if she had any, their descendants could be as close to me as third cousins - well within the range of Family Finder matches.

Of those six, one was not a match at all - which means that our MRCA (most recent common ancestor) was probably really long ago. Four others showed Family Finder matches likely to be "remote," which generally means five, six, seven, eight generations back. Also not very useful.

One came out close. Well, not  exactly close close, but estimated as a third-to-fifth cousin. For convenience, we'll say fourth cousin. So this could be a descendant of one of Etta Bryna's mother's sisters.  The match is with a woman named Deborah Sirotkin Butler, and I appreciate her permission to refer to her here by name.

Deborah didn't say much about her family on the site, but was receptive when I wrote to her. She is new at genealogy and told me that her oldest maternal name is Margolin (various spellings), from Gomel, in southeastern Belarus about 160 miles (260 km) from Borisov. According to JewishGen, Gomel had some 20,000 Jews in 1897.

No known relative on my mother's side has tested thus far, but I had a look at my Family Finder match with Deborah to see who else matched both of us.

There are 1690 people who have done Family Finder tests and match both Deborah and me. I suppose I could plug all of them into the chromosome browser to see if any of them match both of us on the same chromosome. Maybe if there were one hundred, I'd do it, but not 1690.

Thirty-four of those 1690 are projected as third cousins or better - to me. I don't know how close they are to Deborah. I could ask her to see what all of these are to her, but I am feeling my way in the dark and I think that kind of thing is premature.

But what is curious is that Deborah matches eight Pikholz descendants and my two non-Pikholz Kwoczka cousins, Baruch and Pinchas. The eight include my father's sister and a second cousin of mine, Terry. But not my father's cousin Herb.

On chromosome 18, with me as the background and Deborah in yellow, we see matches with (from the top) Aunt Betty, Terry and Baruch. There is no match with Pinchas here. So Deborah is related to me some other way that includes my Pikholz (or Kwoczka) ancestors - in addition to via Etta Bryna. Part of the "fourth cousin" that FTDNA projects for Deborah and me must be from this other source.

I also looked at the other six Pikholz matches that Deborah and I share. Three do not match Deborah and me on the same chromosomes, so they are not relevant here, for now..

The other three are interesting. (Deborah is purple here.) Robert, who is from Rozdol, matches us on chromosome 12, but Rita's cousin and Jane match us on the same chromosome 18 that my own family matches!

Deborah is orange here.

And.... I see that Deborah and I both match with nine of the non-Pikholz who match many of the Pikholz. Of those, there are three who match us on the same chromosome. And those chromosomes are #12 and #18! 
 Mark (blue) and Alexandra (green) match us on both, but not on the right parts of the chromosome. On the other hand, Debbie L. (yellow) matches Deborah and me on chromosome 12 in the same place as Robert.

Debbie, Deborah and I also have a nice little match on chromosome 8, that does not include Robert.


So that accounts for nineteen of our 1690 common matches. But of course, I am looking for my mother's mother's side, not Pickholtz Project people.

So what next? I am not sure. I have asked several of my cousins on my mother's side about testing, but thus far none have replied. That could help - both regarding Etta Bryna's family and with her husband's Rosenbloom line.

Isn't this fun?

I think I will open a Facebook group for descendants of Etta Bryna.  If you haven't been invited, look for it. Maybe with some luck, we'll locate a descendant of her older daughter Alta Kaplan.


Alta in the mid-1920s in Russia, with sons Yakov, Baruch Yosef,
one whose name we don't know and daughter Etta Bryna

Housekeeping notes

I have the three books that my GRIPitt course recommended and I read the first already. It's called FINDING FAMILY: My Search for Roots and the Secrets in My DNA, by Richard Hill. He is an adoptee who describes his quest to find his birth parents. In addition to being an interesting story, it comes with a surprise result which would not have been possible without a little extra bit of testing, after he thought he was done.

I have completed my airline reservations for summer. The major open question is whether I'll be doing my first Shabbat in Baltimore or Pittsburgh. (The other two are in Chicago.) Since I'll be driving from Baltimore to Pittsburgh, I don't have to decide now.

I hope to visit family graves on that drive, in Harrisburg (Kesher Israel & Chisuk Emuna), Johnstown (Grandview), White Oak (New Gemillas Chesed) and Duquesne (Beth Jacob).

One of my two lecture proposals for the IAJGS Conference in Salt Lake City was accepted. I am happy to say it's the better one and the easier one to update.  The topic is Beyond a Doubt: What We Know vs. What We Can Prove

 They also approved a panel discussion called Internet Collaboration: How Do We Share Our Family Trees Online? in which I shall be participating. More on that soon.

THE ROSENBLOOM FAMILIES OF BORISOV

I have referred to my maternal grandmother's Rosenbloom family on several occasions here, but neither recently nor in great detail. The truth is, there isn't much detail at hand. In fact, we have several Rosenbloom families from Borisov but we have no idea how they fit together or even if they do.

My Great-Grandfather's Family
This week, with the yahrzeit of the younger of my mother's two older sisters coming up Thursday, seems a good time to see where we stand on this family.

Aunt Sadie sits on her father's lap.
(Mother was not yet born.)

Aunt Sadie Gordon - Shayna Liba bat Yerahmiel and Sarah - died twenty-one years ago at the age of seventy. She was born in Vandergrift Pennsylvania and lived her entire adult life in Pittsburgh where she was a secretary to an attorney. She never married. When I was very young we saw her frequently, then she pretty much disappeared from our lives until after my grandfather died. I don't think I saw her after his funeral, but we did exchange letters a few times a year.

Aunt Sadie was named after my grandmother's sister who died at about age twenty-seven in New York. She was married and had no children. Her husband disappeared, perhaps returning to Russia.

The elder Sadie 1910 - 
dressed for her sister's funeral

Israel David
Rosenbloom

My grandmother's sister Shayna Liba was the daughter of my namesake Israel David Rosenbloom and was named for his mother. Aside from the fact that her husband's name was Yaakov, we know nothing further about the family. No ages, no parents, not even if they had children other than Israel David.



Israel David Rosenbloom died in Penza sometime after 1929. The family had moved there after WWI. Or perhaps had been sent there. I exchanged a bit of correspondence with the Jewish community of Penza, but they could tell me nothing about his death or burial.

I have spent very little time and effort on Rosenbloom research in the last few years and that part of my family history seems to be walled off. My DNA tests are out there, but nothing obvious showed up thusfar. I approached two of my six male Rosenbloom second cousins about doing a Y-37 test , but neither was inclined to do so. We never got as far as Family Finder, as the Y-chromosome is more valuable here..


Borisov 54°14' N 28°30' E
Borisov is located some forty-four miles NNE of Minsk in Belarus and according to JewishGen was home to 7722 Jews in 1897.

There were other Rosenbloom families in town, in addition to that of Israel David ben Yaakov. there was Zalman Rosenbloom and his wife Esther (Friedland), who had nine sons. The family went to France in the first decade of the 1900s, and I had some correspondence with a grandson, Edouard, seventeen years ago.

Zalman died in 1937 and Esther is 1935 and both are buried in Paris. The cemetery records do not include their parents' names and Edouard told me that the parents names are not on the tombstones. The cemetery records say that Esther was eighty-one, meaning she was born about 1854, So Zalman was probably born in the early or mid-1850s, only a few years after Israel David. Maybe even a bit earlier.

There are, however, voter records for the 1906 Duma, the Russian parliament, which include two listings for Zalman Rosenblium of Borisov. In one his patronymic is Beniaminovich, in the other Bonevich. I don't know if these two are the same person but Zalman is clearly not a brother to Israel David, whose father is Yaakov.

Mother, Judith & Haim, us, Rosa & Alek

Then there is the family of Alexander Rosenbloom, who lived in Borisov until the late 1990s, when he and his family came to Israel. We met him and his wife Lilla at their home in Ariel. previously we had met his daughter Rosa and her husband at my sister's home in Elkanah.

Alexander knew his family in Borisov through his father Boris (b.1897), his grandfather Shaya (b.1869), his great-grandfather Tanhum and his great-great-grandfather Moshe. There is no place on this line where Israel David ben Yaakov or Zalman ben Binyamin could possibly fit in.

In the course of preparing this blog, I received an eighteen page pdf from Alexander's son Felix with a much more detailed tree. The additions are all in the descendants of Mordecai and Tanhum, so for the purposes of determining the relationships among the families, the sketch above is adequate.

So we are still clearly talking about either distinct families or a single family that goes back quite far.

There is no question that I need to go over all my notes and papers and see what the

Felix is Alexander's son. I'm not sure who the other two are, but I wrote to them.

databases have added these past years. I had a look at the JewishGen Family Finder a few days ago and saw that there are four researchers registered and all four have logged in during October, so we are talking about people with an active interest.

It is my understanding that Zalman's French family does not have many descendants, even fewer who are Jewish. Three of Zalman's nine sons were deported to their deaths during the Holocaust. My contact Edouard was born in 1915 and his first cousin the well-known research Bernard Kouchel, who made the introduction,  died a few months ago.

So much to do. So few hours in the week.
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Housekeeping notes
You can now read my recent AVOTAYNU (Summer Issue) article GETTING IT WRONG online.

Tuesday and Thursday evenings this week, I'll be participating in webinars on DNA analysis - one for project administrators.

I plan to attend an afternoon-long seminar "Sources of Rabbinical Genealogy Research in the National Library" at the Library, on the university campus next Monday.

As I say, so much to do, not enough hours.