I Have Waited Nearly Twenty Years For This Record

Throughout the life of the Pikholz Project, we have taken as axiomatic that all the Pikholz families from Rozdol are descended from Pinkas and Sara Rivka. Two sons are documented - Israel Joel (1807-1882) with 798 known descendants and Aron (1818-1883) with 81 known descendants.

Anther presumed son is David, the father of Hersch. Hersch was born in 1835 and his mother is Gittel Kraut. And there is evidence of a Samuel, though I have long suspected that Samuel is David's middle name.

There is evidence of a son Berl, about whom we have no information and no known descendants.

And we have four families headed by a couple named Yitzhak and Feige from this first generation. It may be, however that there are two couples - Yitzhak who married Feige and Feige who married Yitzhak, both having children at the same time, all named Pikholz. (For my own convenience, I call these families IF1, IF2, IF3 and IF4.

We also have two families headed by Pinchas, one of whom may have been born to Yitzhak and Feige in 1832 or perhaps to Israel Joel. And a Gittel born about 1840. And another Yitzhak of unknown parentage born in the 1850s.

This has been my best guess of the structure for more than a dozen years.

The four red bars are my conjecture.

Both Hersch and one of the two Pinchas have sons named David Samuel born in 1860 and 1861, and it has been my feeling that Hersch and this Pinchas are brothers. But there was no documentation. Pinchas has a grandson named Pinchas who was born in 1904 and I have long hoped that a death record for Pinchas would identify his parents by name. But we only had access to death records until 1897 - and there is no death record for this Pinchas. So I waited. and waited.

Every time Mark Halpern announced new records from the AGAD archives being released to JRI-Poland, I would ask him about Rozdol deaths. And I waited.

And I worried because even if there were a record, it may not identify his parents.

A couple of months ago, Mark announced a large set of new records and this time it included Rozdol deaths for 1898-1914. This morning, Mark announced that those Rozdol records are now indexed. I went straight to the death record for Pinchas. And here it is.

From the JRI-Poland index. The actual record is not yet available, but this is good enough.

Pinchas died in 1901 at age seventy and his parents are David Samuel and Gittel. Not only is Pinchas definitely the brother of Hersch, but we now have documentary evidence that their father David is in fact David Samuel, as I had suspected.

I can now get to work merging the two families in my database and my web site. The merged family will have eight generations and 271 documented descendants.

The new records include thirty-one other Rozdol deaths with the name Pikholz from this period. There are likely others from married daughters. Plus nine marriages during the period 1909-1916. I will wait with all those until I see the Excel version. Today I celebrate.

New Rozdol Births 1906-1915

According to Yad Vashem's Pinkas Kehillot, there were 2262 Jews in Rozdol in 1900, 2110 in 1910 and 1725 in 1921. In all three of those years, the Jews were just under half the town's population. The population was decreasing but Jewish babies were still being born. According to JRI-Poland, 997 of them in the years 1906-1915. Thirty-eight have at least one parent named Pikholz, though that spelling was gone - replaced by "Pickholz."

http://kehilalinks.jewishgen.org/rozdol/Rozdol_Shul.htm

Of the thirty-eight, twelve are people I already have in my database, usually with birth dates and house numbers. Sometimes the birth years are not the same as what their relatives remembered in my interviews with them or in Pages of Testimony.

Parents of seventeen others are known from previous births and I simply have to add these new ones. The Excel file has the house numbers, the parents' names and towns of origin. It does not have birth dates other than the years or maternal grandparents' names and there is no indication if the child died while young. Those seventeen births were to ten sets of parents.

One birth is to a couple whose identity is unclear because we have several of them, but the actual birth record, when it becomes available, should give us the maternal grandparents' names, thus solving that question.

The remaining eight births are to couples I cannot yet identify.

• Three births to Markus Ber Gross or Grossman and Szerka Pickholz.
• One birth to Samuel Leuter and Rechel Pickholz.
• One birth to Symon Harzstark and Rechel Pickholz, both of of Mikolayev.
• Two births to Aron Schymin Morgenstern or Morganthau and Syma Pickholz, both of Mikolayev.
•  One birth to Tobias Pickholz and Marjem Kleingesich.

The maternal grandparents' names on the actual records should help, at least for the four couples where the Pickholz is the mother.

There are also four births to Benzion Bender or Bander and Selda Pickholz or Pistohl, both of Mikolayev. I don't know if this is ours or not. (There seem to be a lot of Mikolayev births here. Very possibly the mothers are sisters. But there are also a lot of non-Pikholz Mikolayev births.)

I have noted some additional records which may be ours. As we move further from the original families, we have more married daughters' names to keep track of. I can no longer do a straight "sounds like Pikholz" search and assume everyone is covered. I'll deal with this when we see the actual records linked online.

I'm still hoping to see post-1901 Rozdol deaths.

Housekeeping notes
For the first time, I am actually thinking about checking into the conference hotel Friday.
Dates and times for the 37th IAJGS International Conference on Jewish Genealogy have been published. Here are mine.

 –   Monday 24 July 9:45-11:00, Room Swan 9  
Beyond a Doubt: What We Know vs. What We Can Prove
–   Monday 24 July 2:00-3:15, Room Osprey 2
Lessons in Jewish DNA – One Man’s Successes and What He Learned On the Journey
–   Tuesday 25 July 2:00-3:15, Room Osprey 2
GEDmatch.com’s Lazarus Tool As It Applies to Two Kinds of Endogamy
–    Wednesday 26 July 8:15-9:30, Room Swan 8
Why Did My Father Know That His Grandfather Had An Uncle Selig?

A Party on Chromosome 6

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Dr. Steven Turner in the United States telling me that he had some DNA matches with a number of people in our DNA project. At first, he thought he matched eight Pikholz descendants.  I gave him my standard response about our project's being about how to connect our own families with one another, not so much about connecting with non-Pikholz from the pre-surname period two hundred-odd years ago. And I told him that if he matches more than half of our twenty-seven Pikholz testees, we could talk.

That twenty-seven is a new number. We just received results for my double second

cousin, Lee. Our grandfathers are brothers and our grandmothers are sisters. .I really wanted his mother to test, but it didn't work out. Lee ought to match the other Pikholz very much as I do, but that is not the case at all.

I have thirteen matches within the Pikholz group and Lee has eighteen. In additioon, we have a documented fifth cousin named Cyndi on our grandmothers' side, whom I match accordingly. But Lee matches her much closer - probably due to something on his father's side. I have not gone back to check how Lee matches with the non-Pikholz I have discussed here earlier, but for the newest ones, his place in the DNA analysis is prominent.

Yet another reason that we should test as many people as we can and not just say "Well, my third cousin already tested."

So Steve Turner had a closer look via the ancestral surname window on FTDNA and it turns out

he is a match for fifteen Pikholz descendants. That put him across my threshold of 50% and I had a closer look.

He also matches both my Kwoczka cousins, descendants of the brothers of my great-grandmother. In fact, one of those, Pinchas, is better than all of Steve's Pikholz matches but one.

He joined our surname project at FTDNA, making it easier for me to examine his data. He added his mother to the project as well. She matches fourteen Pikholz, and not all the same as Steve. So clearly he has matches with us both on his mother's side and on his father's side.  (Steve's father's family is from Rohatyn, which is between Rozdol and Skalat, so there is some geographic logic to that.)

So I ran Steve's results on a chromosome browser against all his Pikholz matches, as well as his matches within the non-Pikholz who match most of us. There were a number of very interesting matches, but the match on chromosome #6 was remarkable.

Look at his matches with our group on chromosome #6 between the two vertical red lines on the left. He matches nine Pikholz (the ones whose names are underlined in red) and twelve non-Pikholz. He also has four significant matches towards the center of the chromosome, between the blue vertical lines. Now I have to figure out how to do more with those twenty-one matches on the left.

Well, the one thing I know how to do is to look at those same twenty-one people against Steve's mother. Some of them do not match at all and I omitted them from the comparison below.

The whole group on the left has all but disappeared. Those twenty-one matches of Steve's do not come from his mother. But the large matches towards the center, with Terry and Herb, together with the smaller match with Vladimir, are still there, so those must be matches on Steve's mother's side. Plus a match with Pinchas in the same place, that Steve didn't have.

But aside from the DNA party on chromosome #6, there were a number of other interesting areas. I present here, in table form a number of areas in chromosome #10 and one in chromosome #15. The column headings are: name of the person who matches Steve, chromosome number, spot where the match begins, spot where the match ends, "length" of the match in centiMorgans and number of matching SNPs.

On chromosome #10 on the left, there are six areas with interesting matches, some of which are known close relatives (Marla and Hartley in the third and fourth segments are siblings as are Douglas and Pamela in the fifth), but in general, most are people whom we do not know to be related either to us or to each other. But obviously they are. Probably in the 1700s.

The experts tell us to ignore the small matches, the ones with fewer than four or five or eight centiMorgans (depends which expert you ask). The small segments are supposed Identical By State (IBS) which means they are just left over from some really ancient ancestor and not significant for us today. The larger more interesting matches are said to be Identical By Descent (IBD) which means they match because of some relatively recent, theoretically knowable, mutual ancestor.

But look at the matches on chromosome #15 in green, above. (Or below or wherever Blogger has decided to put them today.) These are all very small matches and nine of the eleven are perfect matches. None of the eleven are as close to one another as second cousins. So I take issue with the IBS/IBD distinction especially when a large group share that small match. I mean, it had to come from somewhere, no? And if it were ancient, would it really have preserved itself in so many distantly related descendants - known to be related by other parts of their DNA?

I really have to learn more about this analysis business. Eleven weeks until the course at GRIPitt.

BARUCH, OF THE ROZDOL GRANIWITTERS

This Wednesday, we celebrate the liberation of Jerusalem forty-six years ago, after nineteen years of occupation by the Jordanians. It seems like a good time to tell the story of Baruch, a freshly-retired superviser for Gihon, the Jerusalem water company.

I have been going to this particular shul fairly regularly for maybe two years and that's where I met Baruch. He has an Israeli surname which was obviously something else beforehand and one day I asked him about it. He told me that his name was originally Graniwitter and that his father had changed it after coming to Israel from Europe.

Right: Golda bat Zvi Aryeh, died 18 Kislev 5719
Left: Israel ben Nachman, died 22 Teveth 5748

I asked him where his father was from (Baruch himself was born here) and he said "Galicia." I asked him where and he said "a small town you have never heard of Roz..-something." "Rozdol?" I asked. Yes it was Rozdol. It's a town I know well, because the "other" Pikholz families are from there. He wasn't sure exactly when his father - Israel ben Nachman - was born.

Baruch's mother had died when he was young and he didn't know much about her family. Her name was Golda bat Zvi Aryeh and he knew she was born in Stryj in 1902. But no surname.

Later, at home, I went to work, beginning with JRI-Poland. Rozdol birth records are indexed only through 1900, so I was not surprised that Baruch's father Israel did not appear. I found four other records - three births to (Jakob) Israel and one Nachman Sisze born to Mendel Zaumfus and Taube Granivetter.

The "View Image" links are new and were not  available when I first did this search.


I saw quite a few Graniwitters in other towns in the area and several Nachman Sisze of one spelling or  another, so it appeared likely that the one born in 1878 was Baruch's grandfather. It would not be the first time that a middle name was lost along the way.

I turned my attention to Baruch's mother. Golda bat Zvi Aryeh, born 1902 in Stryj, without a clue to her surname. Clearly Zvi Aryeh would appear in Galician records as Leib Hersch so I searched for the given names Golda, Leib and Hersch in Stryj and limited the search to the 1898 and on.  (We only have indexed births for Stryj through 1903.)



Here too, we did not have the benefit of the "View Image" link at the time.



The third one here looked good. I presented it to Baruch and he said that his older sister Hencha is named for their maternal grandmother, so it makes sense. He later spoke to his sister and she recognized the surname Messinger.

I ordered the records for Baruch's mother and paternal grandfather, learned their mother's parents' names and ordered a few more records. In the end, I put together a nice picture of Baruch's ancestors, complete with documents - including for some of those ancestors' siblings.

But it wasn't the end.

As I said, we have a large number of Pikholz records from Rozdol and in the course of scanning some of them, I came across this:

Click to see a larger version

The record before the 7 April 1875  birth of Jakob Pikholz was the birth - on the same day - of Nachmen Granenweter. His parents are Israel Jakob and Golde. That's the other Rozdol family that had shown up earlier. This made way more sense to be Baruch's grandfather. Nachman without Sisze. The father Israel Jakob, where Baruch's father (Nachman's son) is Israel.

Now I can go to the birth records of Nachman's younger brother and sister and get the mother's parents' names.

Why didn't this birth show up before? Well, the "sounds like" function does not catch everything that we might think sounds like what we want. In this case, the second "n" in Granenweter was enough to keep it out of the results. And of course, since there was another reasonable-looking result, I fell into the trap of thinking it is correct. I should know better, of course.

I have since done some additional searches, including "starts with Gran," but this was the only result that I really missed. I gave Baruch this newfound record and he was pleased.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Housekeeping note

I am speaking (in Hebrew) at the Israel Genealogical Society's Petah Tikva branch on Wednesday evening 29 May.  The subject is

BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT: WHAT YOU KNOW vs WHAT YOU CAN PROVE

"ARE YOU RELATED TO RABBI PICKHOLTZ FROM CLEVELAND?"

Cleveland
When this Pittsburgher first began having New York friends, they would always ask me how I am related to Rabbi Pickholtz from Cleveland, whose five sons went to Yeshiva University. In fact, over the years, most everyone I have ever met from Cleveland has asked that as well. Sometimes I joke that this is why I do genealogy - when my time comes after a hundred and twenty, I will no doubt be asked that again and I would be well advised to know the answer.

In the course of my genealogy work, I have corresponded by email with two of the sons of Rabbi Pickholtz and even had the occasion to speak with the rabbi himself on the phone, but it never worked out that I actually met any of them.

Noah
Soon after we moved to Jerusalem four years ago, we learned that Noah Pickholtz, the middle son of the youngest son of Rabbi Pickholtz, was studying at a yeshiva not far from us. We had him over for lunch and although it was very nice, it turned out to be a one-time thing.

We kind of kept up on his doings - mostly via the grapevine and Facebook - as he went into the army and eventually became engaged to Michal. We invited him to some of our activities, but as I say, it never worked out.

So we were really pleased to receive an invitation to the wedding, which was last Monday evening, not far from Jerusalem. Aside from the simcha itself, I was looking forward to meeting whatever of his family would be coming from the US. I don't think his father and I had ever had contact (though he had been in contact with my son in suburban Chicago on shul business), but I had a bit of contact with some of his father's brother's families.

I had also heard from Noah's older brother on the births of each of his four girls.

A couple of weeks before the wedding we received a Facebook invitation to the kiddush they were making the Shabbat before the wedding. It was at a shul about thirty minutes' walk from here, so we said we would be there. (It was a hot day and the walk was mostly uphill.)

I met his parents. (His father says "You are the one from the website." I suppose that's one way to put it.) And we met the bride's parents - they are from Basel Switzerland. I introduced my self to people as the Pickholtz genealogist, without getting into specific relationships.

The wedding itself was nice. It actually started on time. Since both families live abroad, most of the guests were friends of the couple, so we older folks were distinctly the minority. We met Noah's brothers and his sister-in-law. We sat at a table full of Clevelanders.

There were four people there named "Mrs. Pickholtz." During our trip to the US last summer, there were three occasions where there were three, but it has been some years since I have been with four. There should be a photograph which includes all of them - and the men too.

The family structure
So now you know why I am writing about this particular family at this time. Let me explain the structure.

The late Rabbi Isidore (Israel) Pickholtz was one of four children of Berisch and Golde Pickholz. That's Pickholz for both of them. They said they were cousins and some of the descendants took that to mean first cousins, which as you can see below is incorrect.

Berisch and Golde were both born in Rozdol, east Galicia. The four children were all born in Galicia and they went to the US in the early 1920s. Berisch went first, with some of his brother's family and Golde went with the children in 1924, after the quota system had been instituted - a fact which necessitated some "special payments."

To the right is an outline of eight generations of the family, beginning with Isak and Feige Pikholz (maybe one couple or maybe two with the same names - a discussion for another time) and going down to Noah and his brothers. Nine, if you add in Dov and Tammy's four girls.

It is clear that Berisch and Golde are, at best, second cousins.

We accept as axiomatic that the generation above Isak and Feige is Pinkas and Sara Ryfka Pikholz and that all the Pikholz families from Rozdol are descended from this couple. I think that the name Pikholz came from Sara Ryfka, rather than Pinkas.

Our family website has more detailed information about the family of David and Serka Pikholz (the grandparents of Berisch) and that of Hersch Leib and Sara Pikholz (the grandparents of Golde), for those who are interested.

Are you related to Rabbi Pickholtz from Cleveland?
None of this addresses the original question about my relationship to "Rabbi Pickholtz from Cleveland."

My Pikholz family - as I have written here before - comes from Skalat, about a three-four hour drive from Rozdol in today's conditions. The Skalat families go back further than the original Rozdol couple and there are more of them. It is possible that Sara Ryfka, the wife of Pinkas of Rozdol, came from Skalat around 1800, but there doesn't seem to evidence of that. Not even a significant overlap of given names.

So the answer to the question remains as it has always been - not that we know of.

Oh and let's not forget:

MAZAL TOV TO MICHAL AND NOAH