The Rosenzweigs

My paternal grandmother's paternal grandfather is Isaak Leib (Ignacz) Rosenzweig, Yitzhak Yehudah in Hebrew. He was born in Pucho in Trencin County Slovakia, about 1821 and according to my grandmother lived to age ninety-six. His wife, Mali (Miriam) Zelinka, died in 1905 at age eighty, in Vag Besztercze which is known today as Povazska Bystrica. Her death record notes that she was buried there.

I do not have a date or document for Isaak Leib, but I have certainly assumed that he too was buried in Vag Besztercze, possibly next to his wife.

Five years ago, I visited Povazska Bystrica with my cousin Linda and our fifth cousin on the Zelinka side, Cyndi Norwitz, and described that visit in a blog post, one of eight from that trip. The conditions on the ground were difficult and many of the tombstones were broken, scattered or illegible.

But we found the stone for Nathan (Nahum) Zelinka, Mali's brother. Broken off but completely legible. He was an important member of the community in Zilina. Next to Nathan were two stones that had fallen face down in the mud. There was enough of a pedestal left for one, to tell us that it is for a ninety-two year old man.

I got it into my head that these two must be my second-great-grandparents, with Mali buried between her brother and her husband, despite the small discrepancy in the man's age.

For the last few years, I have been trying to get the local Jewish community to turn those stones over so we can see if they are ours. I am not so much interested in setting the stones back in place - I do not expect that anyone in the family will ever come to visit again. I just wanted to confirm that these are my second-great-grandparents and to see exactly what is written on the stones.

A few months ago, things began to fall into place both for his couple and for several cemeteries I wanted to visit on my great-grandmother's family, in Hungary.

My wife and I bought tickets for Budapest for last Monday intending  to go to Povaszka Bystrica the first day, then to Hungary for the subsequent days. Sunday, the folks in Slovakia told me that they had turned over one of the tombstones.

Joachim Grun. Not my Rosenzweig. But the name Grun is familiar from my Rosenzweig research. My Isaak Leib's father Simon was married twice - once to Isaak Leib's mother whose name is unknown. Then to a woman named Sali Grun, whose father is Jakob. Ancestry's ThruLines keeps telling my that Isaak Leib's mother is Sali Grun when we know he isn't and the several people doing Grun research insist on leaving that as is. I have no idea who Joachim is.

So they wrote me as follows. "We turn around first grave stone, second one is bigger is larger so I want to ask if it important for you."

I replied "Let me say it this way. I do not know Joachim. But that does not mean that the second grave is not important. I do not want to go to my grave wondering if we overlooked something so close at hand. Nathan's sister died in 1905 so maybe she was buried next to him. But her husband who died ~1917 may be someplace else."

 

I had set to meet them in Povaszka Bystrica Tuesday, so we proceeded with that plan.

 

Then Monday, things began going wrong, some self-inflicted, some beyond our control. It didn't work out with our driver to the airport, so we had to drive ourselves and leave the car at long-term parking. (Please do not tell me we had other options.) It looked like we would miss the plane, but we boarded as planned. Our luggage did not. And there were a few other issues.

The plans to meet in Povaszka Bystrica fell through with one person after the other, but we made our way to the pension at about 10:30 that night. I'll spare you the details, but let's just say it was not my style.

Tuesday we left for Budapest, stopping at the Povaszka Bystrica cemetery, just to say we had been there. Rona went in; I did not. All I wanted to do was to get to the Kosher Market, since all our provisions were lost who-knows-where. I wanted to get to our Airbnb in Dunaujvaros Hungary and restart everything the next day in Hungary.

A Very Deep Connection or Just A False Segment

Every few months, I look at the recent FTDNA matches of my 100+ family kits. I save all those which the company calls "third cousin to fifth cousin" or closer, put them in separate spreadsheets for each of my families and sort by match names. Then I go through them painstakingly looking for matches which look worth following up, based on the longest matching segments. Most of my fully Jewish kits have 2-300 such matches.

Then I write to the matches and ask them to give me their GEDmatch kit numbers so I can run the match against each family, using the indispensable Multiple Kit Analysis on Tier1.

In this round, covering the previous five months, I wrote to eighty-nine people and after two weeks thirty-one have responded. I consider that a good rate of reply, perhaps helped by the fact that people are stuck at home with nothing to do. Some of those give me other family kits to check as well.

It is rare when one of these turns out to be an actual, identifiable relative - either of mine or of some of my cousins - but I find the exercise useful in giving some direction. (I plan to write about a new actual relative later this week.) I also get an occasional new match on one of my special segments, such as the right end of chromosome 21.

Then there is Helen's match.

Helen has a run of the mill match on chromosome 19 with six Pikholz descendants which is too small to be useful, probably going back well before 1800. Not only is it small, but it only includes a few of the twenty-odd family members who might match that segment.

On chromosome 10, Helen has an unusual match with both my half second cousin Fred, my fifth cousin Cyndi (over 15 cM) and Cyndi's brother. Fred's only Jewish grandparent is my paternal grandmother's half sister, so matches with Fred do not have the endogamy which so complicates our Jewish research. This should be my great-great-grandmother's Zelinka from Trencin County Slovakia, where they lived since at least as far back as the mid-1700s.

On the other hand, we have tests from descendants of my grandmother and her full brother and sister and they do not share this segment. So perhaps this segment is from Fred's grandmother's other side, who lived in Budapest.

None of this rings any bells for Helen.

Then I ran Helen's kit against my mother's side and found these two segments on chromosome 7. The one on the left is about 12 cM and the one on the right is 18 cM. The matches are with one of my first cousins and his nephew. Since there are no matches with the rest of my family, this clearly appeared to be on my cousin's mother's side, where the known surnames are Kalson (or Keilson), Sadofsky and Brinn, all from Lithuania.

Then I took a more comprehensive look. The segment on the right includes five near-identical matches of nearly 8 cM with my brother, two of my sisters, my paternal second cousin Susan and Fred. And everyone triangulated with everyone else.

There seemed only three possibilities. Perhaps my maternal cousins' Lithuanian ancestors and my own Slovakian Zelinkas or Rosenzweigs had a common ancestor who left us some common DNA. Perhaps the set of seven small matches were a false segment that somehow carried through to five descendants of my great-grandparents. Or perhaps only Fred and Susan's segments are false and this segment is on my mother's side, shared with her brother's son and grandson.

That third possibility seems wrong to me. But I am not enamored of either of the others.

But Helen has one other segment that may shed some light. On chromosome 10, Helen has a segment of 15 cM with Fred and 10 cM with my cousin's nephew. And they triangulate.

It is hard to call this one false. So there really appears to be a long ago common ancestor of my Slovakians and my cousin's mother's Lithuanians.

I think. Helen, of course, has no idea.

Ancestry's ThruLines

One week ago, I began seeing announcements on Facebook and on the genealogy blogs and discussion groups that Ancestry had announced a new feature called ThruLines. The overview of their fact sheet explained it thus:

ThruLines™​ shows you the common ancestors who likely connect you to your AncestryDNA® Matches—and gives you a clear and simple view of how you’re all related. When you link your public or private searchable family tree to your AncestryDNA results, new chapters of your family story may be revealed. You could see how your DNA Matches fit into your family tree and learn new details about the common ancestors who likely connect you.

Now let's not forget that Ancestry has long had "hint leaves" that tell you about supposed connections. These are not the alerts that FTDNA, MyHeritage and occasionally 23 and Me send out telling you about DNA matches, but are non-DNA tree sources that you can see when you visit the Ancestry site on your own initiative. Here is an example, on the right.

Not interested, push the black IGNORE button. Otherwise push the green REVIEW button and get something like this:

So, I recognize the "owner" as the wife of my cousin, who has essentially copied my own data for this part of her tree. They suggest I have three trees of interest connecting to my third great-grandfather Rachmiel Gordon and this is the first. (In this case, I'd like an ignore button, but there isn't one.)

ThruLines is supposed to be different, apparently based on DNA connections and meant to add new ancestors based on work done by other people. So I had a look.

I have a few things I wish Ancestry would address and they are marked below in red.

ThruLines tiles my screen with icons of over fifty ancestors, with about twenty marked with a green "potential ancestor" tag. (See the figure at the top of this page.) The icons are huge and would be easier to work with if they were a quarter the size or even smaller. I do not have photographs attached to my tree, but those who do see the actual people, not the pink, blue and grey generic images. I;ll probably add a few when I have a chance.

The "potential ancestor" tags are attached to named, known ancestors, as well as several categories of others.

There were four "potential ancestor" tags on known ancestors, eleven unknown but named people, six marked "private" and the one fifth great-grandmother with no identification. I immediately recognized four of the eleven as named known ancestors - two couples - that are flat out wrong because I know who belongs in those spaces. Somehow without my doing anything about it, one of the two couples has since disappeared. I'd like to know how that worked. And I'd like to get rid of the second couple. This is an example of a need for a "DISMISS" button

You can filter the ancestor page to make it easier to work with them. For instance, to show only the potential ancestors. Unfortunately when you look at one and then go back to the ancestors page, the filter disappears and you have to set it up again. That should be fixed.

The four named, known ancestors
I have no idea why my great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz and my third great grandfather Simon (Shimshim) Rosenzweig are labelled as potential ancestors. I have both of them on my tree. ThruLines names people who added them to their trees - in one case a cousin Anne on the Rosenzweig side added Hersch Pikholz as a Rosenzweig father-in-law.

In the second case, the tree owner is a fellow named Dov who has not yet responded to my "who are you?" inquiry. He added a mother, Susanna, to the named ancestor Simon Rosenzweig. After I talk to him, I hope to find out what his sources are and whether to integrate this ancestor into my own database and tree.

Incidentally, another researcher also added this same mother, Susanna, to Simon. When I wrote to him to clarify what his source is, he replied "There are 187,000 people in my family tree, data come mostly from the Internet. The data of Susanna and her relatives are derived from MyHeritage.com." Gotta be careful.

The third had no new information aside from the mention of a tree-owner who is a relative of my cousin Jessica's husband Matt. I have seen him in the hints and he is probably getting tired of my asking him who he is. In the meantime, the tag on that ancestor has mysteriously disappeared with no indication why. This is another example of a need for a "DISMISS" button - but if it disappears on its own, maybe not.

The fourth  is Jacob Zelinka. my fourth great-grandfather. I know his father to be Leopold/Levko.ThruLines tells me this:

I know the five children listed here and descendants of three. The owner of the tree that ThruLines shows me has this tree for a client she has been working with for years and is limited in what she can tell me. But ThruLines also shows me this:

Here we lose two of Jacob's children, but have a new one - Josef, who exists alongside Lemel Josef. I have known about this problem for some time and I suppose I shall have to deal with it. I know descendants of both of them. Some of the DNA matches listed are new to me and I'll have to follow those up too.

Three new generations for Etta Bryna?
My mother's maternal grandmother is my most recent brick wall. We know her father's given name and that he was a Levi. ThruLines adds a father, grandfather and great-grandfather - Juda Gurevich/Halevi, Shmerka and Urvater (=ancestor) Gurevich/Halevi - provided by a woman in Germany  who does not identify her connection to these gentlemen. I have written to her and look forward to hearing what she has to offer in the way of evidence.

One of the private potential ancestors is the supposed wife of Juda Gurevich, Tojba Shpunt Spunt, who appears in the tree of my Borisov collaborator Galit. She isn't sure that Tojba really belongs there. I'll address this after I hear from the woman in Germany.

Gershon Kugel's parents
My mother's paternal great-grandfather Gershon Kugel's parents are quite unknown, but ThruLines has names for both - Khaim Kugel and Khana Gitla Kugel. My great-grandmother is Chana, so Gershon's mother's name makes sense. The information comes from a woman I have been in touch with previously and I am waiting to hear what she has to say about the new Kugel ancestral couple.

Her tree has my Chana, but not her known brothers. She also has a second wife for Gershon - Feyga Dvora Kugel and a daughter Sora Mina Kugel (b. 1857). That may work. In any case, there is no indication how the tree owner fits in here - or how she knows what she knows.


The Rosenzweigs of Trencin County Slovakia
My third great-grandfather Simon Rosenzweig, whom I mentioned above, is known to be the son of Solomon and I have long known of some descendants of his brother Nathan Joseph. The cousin Anne, whom I also mentioned above, is a descendant of Nathan Josef and she has promised to get back to me with more complete information.

ThruLines offers me a new generation - Herschel, the father of Solomon - and gives Solomon a daughter and four additional sons. Plus at least one generation of descendants for three of the additional sons.

The owner of the tree here is probably the best of the Trencin County researchers and he gave me his source information (without the document itself and without telling me where it came from). I will accept Herschel and his children on that basis. As well as the new descendants of Solomon.

Oh, and Hershel has another son, Moses with two wives and ten children. Lots of new good information here.

But here it gets complicated and Ancestry makes it difficult to show it all here because the results change depending on which way I go into them. One way it shows Solomon Rosenzweig with three children - Nathan Joseph, Simon and a daughter Hani who married Ahron Pollack. There are three contact people for that Pollack line and I have been in touch with all of them in the past few days.

The problem is that according to the reliable researcher who brought us Herschel, Hani is not the daughter of Solomon, but rather the daughter of Herschel's other son Moses. I am going to let them work it out between them because they have better access to the documentation than I do.

Lesson learned - you cannot assume the ThruLines connections to be correct. You must check them one by one. You can decide to trust specific researchers, but you must be very careful.

Oh, and one more thing. Now that Ancestry has decided that Herschel Rosenzweig is the father of Solomon - which is almost certainly correct - their old-style hints have brought me more than half a dozen other researchers working on the same family. I have dropped notes to all of them.

Keep in mind, if Herschel is wrong, I would still be getting all these new hints to follow up with. Be careful out there!

One more note - they tell you who has done DNA testing but there seems to be no real use of DNA in the ThruLines algorithms. But make no mistake about it, ThruLines is a valuable tool. Keeping track of new developments may be a chore, plus of course running after the other tree owners to figure out what is right and what is false.

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!”

Our Genetic Portrait - Part One

DNA Painter
A few months ago, I came to the conclusion that I have been spending entirely too much time on the trees and not enough on the forest. I would hear from people who think they may be related to my family and I'd look at their GEDmatch kits, comparing them to my 110+ project members looking for segments with multiple matches of 10 centiMorgans or more to see what patterns would show up.

Most of them showed some direction, but nothing really specific, appearing mostly to be too far back in time to do anything with, especially without the benefit of common surnames, geography or multiple family kits

I decided I needed to do some chromosome mapping in order to attribute particular chromosomes to specific ancestors. I had used Kitty Cooper's wonderful Chromosome Mapper a few years ago, but I was far from comfortable with it. I circled the Chromosome Mapping course at GRIP next June and wondered if it would relate to the specific issues of endogamy.

A couple of weeks ago, someone on Facebook mentioned a new tool called DNA Painter and I decided to give it a try. This is a report on my first efforts. The chart below shows my first 183 segments - 60 on my father's side and 123 on my mother's side. And there will be more.

In the course of creating this map, I have been in contact with the developer and he has welcomed my comments and questions. There is a lot to like here.

The data comes from the GEDmatch one-to-one and X-one-to one results.

What you are probably supposed to do is take all your matches with a particular person and copy them into the Painter, but this is not a responsible way to deal with families from endogamous populations.

For us, we have to go segment by segment, analyzing each one, looking for matches with multiple people that are based on more than "I match cousin so-and-so, so we must be related IN THE MOST OBVIOUS WAY." Not necessarily. I'll get into that in greater detail on my mother's side.

First note that 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.

I decided to take the next, obvious step - the ancestral matches of my father's sister and brother, Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob, since all their ancestors are also my ancestors. But their matches are not the same as my father's matches (as represented by his children), so there will be places where the final map will include segments from both my grandfather and my grandmother AT THE SAME PLACE. This is a good thing, because it fills out the ancestors, but it will require extra care when some new person comes into the picture with a match that needs defining.

Mapping my father's side
I began with my fourth cousin Anna, the great-granddaughter of Uncle Selig about whom I have written several times.

This chart may be familiar to you from my DNA presentations.

The circled matches on Anna's chromosomes 3, 8 and 15 are definitely from our second great-grandmother Rivka Feige Pikholz and are the basis of the demonstration that Anna and her half-brother David are descendants of Uncle Selig. I also included Anna's matches on chromosome 21, as these are clearly from the same source.

But I tend to be conservatiive, so on chromosome 15 where Marty and Anna share 50 cM, I decided to record as certain only the 22.6 cM that Anna shares with Marty and Herb. The rest of Anna and Marty's long segment I recorded as "possible," though I could have chosen "very likely." Here is how that segment appears in full.

Another set of Rivka Feige matches came from my father's half second cousin Lia who contributed five segments to the map. These are the Rivka Feige segments from Anna and Lia.

Note that on chromosome 15, one segment is pink rather than red. That is Marty's "possible" segment.

The second easy match was with Debbie from North Carolina, whom I wrote about in May 2016. She has one large match with us on chromosome 2 and and another on the X. The first is definitely from my second great-grandmother Mari Zelinka and the second is either from her or from my grandmother's Bauer/Stern side, but since I have seen no other indication this might be the case, I attributed the segment to the Zelinkas and called it "very likely."

Together with two segments from my fourth cousin Milan in Prague, this is what we have from Mari Zelinka.

There is also a single segment in purple which we received from Mari Zelinka's father - based on a match with my fifth cousin Cyndi Norwitz on chromosome 18.

Two other easily identifiable ancestors on my father's side are my great-grandmothers Regina Bauer and Jute Lea Kwoczka. The first I established using fifteen matching segments with my father's second cousin Shabtai and the second using nineteen segments with my father's second cousin Bruce and another eleven with my third cousin Pinchas. Here is how those appear.

This gives me a total of sixty segments of low-hanging fruit on my father's side, supposedly representing 36% of my the ancestral DNA from that side.

But in fact that is not correct. As you can see clearly on chromosomes 3, 8 and 18 there are overlapping ancestors. Different versions of the same segment from different ancestors. Here is where I have to be very careful when I want to look at matches with new people. And the 36% is nםt representative of all the ancestors on my father's side - it just refers to segments which have at least one ancestor represented.

Perhaps I shall redo the map later, so I can show a separate set of chromosomes for each of my paternal grandparents.

My mother's side is a different story entirely and I hope to tell you about that next week.

For now I shall wish you all a happy, healthy, peaceful and prosperous 5778 and that you and your families should be written in the Book of Life.

לשנה טובה תכתבו ותחתמו

Housekeeping notes

When I visited the cemetery in Vienna a few months ago, I reported that several of the family graves had no tombstones or had tombstones in very bad condition. I was kind of hoping that close family members might address this and I can now report that one actually did. The grandson of Isidor Riss sent me photographs of the stone he put up for Isidor (who died in 1937) and his wife Ernestina who was killed in Auschwitz. 

In other news, I had a look at my Ancestry DNA matches for the first time in a long time and dropped a note to a woman named Andrea whom I didn't recognize but who seems to be fairly closely related. Turns out she is the daughter of a second cousin on my mother's paternal side. I knew her name but we have never met. I asked her to join GEDmatch and she said she would. Meantime we are now Facebook friends.

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.

Tattered and Torn - Days Three & Four : Rajec, Domaniza and the Bytca Archives

Rajec
Wednesday we were on our own. First stop Rajec (pronounced Ra-yetz), about ten miles from Zilina. Not only were we on our own but we had no contact information for the person with the key. We did, however, have the precise location of the cemetery so off we went, hoping to find some Rosenzweigs and who knows what else.

We were able to identify the cemetery from the road with no trouble. The door was locked and it was surrounded by a wall on three sides and a chain-linked fence topped with barbed wire at the top end.

Standing on a tree stump, I was able to see over the wall in a few places.

The cemetery seems to be in excellent condition and many tombstones appear, at a distance, to be legible. But we coudn't get inside.

In a group project of this sort, each person brings certain strengths. I am the one who reads Hebrew. Cyndi will pick a conversation with anyone, even though all she speaks is English. Linda? Linda is tall and climbs over walls.

And off she went, the non-genealogist, photographing all the graves in the cemetery from top to bottom.

There were probably eight or ten Rosenzweigs, three of them Jakob. A few others I don't recognize off hand. The non-matching Jewish and secular names doesn't help.

There is a Rozalie (Rachel) Rosenzweig who died in the summer of 1926. She could be my great-grandfather's sister-in-law, but her grave calls her the wife of Yaakov, while my g-gf's brother was Simon. He still may be the same person. The staones are very hard to read and I'll have to work on them later.

Dominiza
Next stop was Dominiza, a very small town not far away. That is where my great-grandfather was actually born in 1858. It was closer to the dusty village image I had from east Galicia, but even it showed some modernity.

Cyndi's directions sent us up to an empty field behind a row of houses - obviously the wrong place. So we followed Plan B, find city hall and ask.

Finding city hall was itself a project and we asked asked a woman named Melania for directions. She is a chemist in a lab in Povazska Bystrica and her English was quite good. She got into our car with her six year old Matthew and took us to city hall where we found someone who said she would search her records for Rosenzweigs and get back to me by email.

Our friends Josef, Melania and Matthew

Then Melania found us a local historian named Josef, who speaks no English, but eventually he found us the remnants of the Jewish cemetery fenced in the back yard of locked house. On the way up, Josef told us that there were basically three Jewish families in town - the Rosenzweigs, the Zelinkas and the Spitzers. As we know, they married each other. As one might expect.

We got a look through the fence by going through the field where our search had started. The cemetery is right behind where the synagogue once stood and has very few stones. But the one we could see was Joseph Spitzer, the husband of Nathan Zelinka's daughter Jeanette, whose grave we had seen Monday in Kotesova.

Josef said he would contact Pavel Frankel in Zilina about fixing it up and would try to get in and send us some photographs.

The house on the site of the synagogue, perhaps where
my great-grandfather and his brothers were circumsized.

Every person we met in Slovakia was helpful and friendly. More of both than we had any right to expect. As we prepared to wrap up that phase of our trip, we could only speak well of our Slovakian experience.

We were tattered and torn not so much physically (though I must replace my shoes when I get home), but by the experience of seeing these places where the various branches of our families lived for generations.

The Bytca Archives
We had one more stop Thursday morning, at the state archives in Bytca. It was across the street from the synagogue, which is undergoing some sort of renovation, or at least fund raising for that renovation.

The archives are upstairs in a grand old courtyard that one could easily mistake for abandoned. Here again, a nice local woman led us to the place after we passed it by a couple of times.

When we went in, we found a working archives with a few microfilm machines, some functioning. A couple of genealogists from Hungary were working with the actual documents, bare-handed. There were a few other researchers there as well. It was all in one small room, with the microfilms stored in other rooms.

We spoke with one of the Hungarian genealogists and their translator Stephan, learning that they had done the genealogy work for former French president Sarkozy. We exchanged contact information and Cyndi will probably follow up with Stephan later on.

Cyndi worked her magic with the archivist and she permitted us to photograph their paper index showing all their microfilm holdings. We will make a list of the Jewish records and perhaps put together a funding project to get them transcribed. As we left, I thought about Marla and Jay Osborne who actually live in places like this in order to get the work done.

Next stop Budapest.