Another Pikholz-Zellermayer Marriage

About a dozen years ago, I wrote a piece about the multiple marriages between the Pikholz and Zellermayer families from the Skalat/Husiatyn area. We can see three marriages between the two families on this chart that I made back then. Those named Pikholz are shaded blue and the Zellermayers are shaded yellow.  I am not sure exactly how the Zellermayers on the right connect to those on the left, but there are clear indications that they do, including the fact that one on each side (in red) was born in Liczkowce. 

   

We also have a Gabriel Pikholz who died in a house which is clearly associated with the Zellermayers and I speculated that Gabriel's wife Sara may have been a Zellermayer. If so, that would be the fourth. But Gabriel is a son of Nachman Pikholz (b. ~1795) so not closely related to the Pikholz descendants in the above chart.

 

Now we have another.

  

My half-third cousin Erika Herzberg Fraga is part of the Riss family. We share a second-great-grandmother (Rivka Feige Pikholz) from her two husbands. I met Erika about ten years ago in Los Angeles, with the assistance of her cousin George Gutman. She had done DNA - including MtDNA - for George and she is part of our Pikholz DNA group.

 

Recently, while looking for something else, I noticed this bit of information on the MtDNA Results Classic page of my project. Erika's most distant female-line ancestor is her great-grandmother Rosa Zellermayer, born 1835, died 1913. I don't know if I simply never noticed this before or if FamilyTreeDNA made a change in the layout of the page.

I wrote to George. He did not recall what was from Erika herself and what was from his research, but he had been able to add Rosa's parents Josef Zellermayer and his wife Fryma. Rosa and both parents were born in Husiatyn. I found the record in JRI-Poland but nothing further.

 

I see nothing that specifically connects Rosa to the other Zellermayers, but they are all from the Husiatyn area and the name is unusual, so it is reasonable to assume they are the same family. Erika's family is closer to the three couples in the chart above than she is to Gabriel, but they are not part of that bit of the family. On the other hand, four other Riss cousins were born in the small town of Liczkowce, where two of the Zellermayers were born. (Liczkowce is only 13 miles north of Husiatyn.)

I have long felt that there is a deeper connection between the Pikholzes and the Zellermayers. This Rosa strengthens this conviction without adding and more proof. There is a lot of that.

CADASTRALLY SPEAKING - The Pikholz Families in Skalat

A few weeks ago, Jay Osborn's Map Room on the Gesher Galicia website added a cadastral map of Skalat from 1862.

The maps themselves are held by TsDIAL (the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine) in Lviv and we are grateful to them for making these maps available.

The value of these maps is in the numbered houses - who lived near whom and where the various houses are in relation to markets, roads, waterways and public buildings. The houses are not laid out on a grid with numbers befitting that structure, but simply reflect the order in which the houses were built. 

Many of the vital records which the Polish State Archives has made available through JRI-Poland have house numbers where the event occurred. These are not necessarily where the family lived, as a young woman may have had her child at her mother's house and of course some people died in hospitals.

Some years ago, I cobbled together charts of where the Pikholz families lived in our main towns - Skalat and Rozdol. These charts are not meant to be comprehensive, but they have helped me to understand which families were connected. 

The names of the families in the charts are the ones I have developed for my own convenience and don't mean much to outsiders, but I recently added some color coding to identify the family groups.

The links on the house numbers lead to details of the records. House 60, for instance.

 

 Jay was kind enough to mark up the relevant part of the Skalat map with the Pikholz houses.

The road to the northeast leads to Novosielke, where much of the killing was done in 1942-43 and where a memorial site was established nearly thirty years ago. The road leading south in the center of the image leads to Grzymalow where there were additional Pikholz families.

Most of the Pikholz houses are just east of the road to Grzymalow. Most of the families there are descendants of (Izak) Josef and Mordecai, who are known to be closely related. West of that road is house 132 - descendants of Nachman Pikholz - and more of that family lived in house 23 (up towards the market). House 418, also near the market, was the family of Peretz Pikholz. 

There is no doubt that all these families are related, but they had drifted apart over the years. Living descendants of the different families told me "We are not related to them." The fact they lived in different areas testifies to the distance within the families themselves.

No Jews in Skalat

According to Yad Vashem's Pinkas Kehillot, there were 3256 Jews in Skalat in 1890, out of a total population of 5889. Now there are none. The Germans - with the willing, enthusiastic help of the local Ukranians - killed as many as they could. The last of the official killing was on the holiday of Shavuot, seventy-five years ago. Some were left hiding in the forests, but the community was gone. Skalat was declared Judenrein.

The old shul, eighteen years ago.
More recently a warehouse

In some sense, the community lives on among the survivors and their descendants, a group in which I count myself even though no ancestor of mine has lived there for nearly 150 years. I have been attending the annual memorial for Skalat for eighteen years, the day after Shavuot, at the town monument in the cemetery in Holon. Part of a row of monuments which includes other "Pikholz towns" (Zbarazh and Husiatyn) and a couple of my mother's ancestral towns (Pleshchenitsy and Vilieka).

Since the illness and passing of Chaim Braunstein, Zvika Sarid has been running the ceremony, such as it is. Until this year, it has been his mother Yocheved Sarid who has made the phone calls to remind everyone. Her husband Yitzhak died twelve years ago and her older brother Motel Weissman died four years ago at age ninety. And now in her ninety-second year, Yocheved has passed the phone-calling duties to Edna Nakdimon of the second generation.

The last few times I have written about the Skalat, I found it depressing. The number of actual survivors who are well enough to attend has dwindled and participation of the second and third generation has waxed and waned. Mostly waned. We barely reached twenty two-three years ago. I was pleased to see that the numbers were up this year. We were thirty

Yocheved spoke about her own experiences during the dark days. Tova Zehavi - known to everyone as Giza - talked about finding life in the forest, beginning with the Kol Nidre service there. Bronia spoke about the day the Germans came. I do not remember hearing Giza and Bronia speak at such length during previous memorials.

Yocheved with the microphone, Bronia in blue, Giza in between

Yocheved's four children were all there as was her sister's son and grandson, the latter a captain in the army, in uniform. Shammai Segal's family was well-represented, as usual, including grandchildren.

Henia is one who has not attended for several years. A monument to her father's town of Jawarow is in the same row. Her mother was born in Skalat but is no longer well enough to attend the memorial. Henia is finishing a book about her mother Tonia's Kaczor family. I helped her with some of the research eight or ten years ago. Now she is ready to do DNA. I suggested she do her mother's as well, while she still can. Who knows what might turn up.

So this is where we meet. Once a year. We all said kaddish together.

There are no Jews in Skalat. May their memory be for a blessing.

That Time of Year

Skalat
The Jewish community of Skalat, one of the two ancestral Pikholz towns in east Galicia, suffered its final aktzia on the holiday of Shavuot in 1943 and here in Israel some of the remaining survivors and descendants gather the following day at the monument in the Holon cemetery. I have described this service in earlier years here and here and here.

The beginning of the scroll of martyrs'
names that is inside the monument

We had a bigger turnout this year than last. Something more than two dozen people and no problem with a minyan. There was no mention of the passing of survivors in the past year.

Yocheved Sarid spoke first. Her three children and her late brother's wife were all there. The row of monuments is along the east side of the cemetery with a major highway right outside, so I found it difficult to hear her.

Tova Willner Zehavi spoke at great length. I don't remember her ever speaking before. She spoke with special emphasis about a baby - one who was never properly given a name. Pikholz descendants, the sister and brother Tzipi Tal and David Dekel are also Willner descendants through their mother's mothers mother. (Before the service began, David and I discussed his DNA results which indicate pretty clearly that he is connected to my family in a way we haven't figured out yet. I discuss this in Chapter Eight of my book.)

There was one new participant - Koby Willner, an American immigrant who got in touch with me last year. Koby's Skalat connections are both Willner and Bomse.

David Braunstein, who has come the last few years after his father's death read a piece that his father had written. (Chaim Braunstein edited the Hebrew yizkor book and was the prime mover in setting up the memorial sites in the Skalat-area itself.)

Zvika Sarid reported that both the Skalat monuments are in need of maintenance and asked that those who can send contributions to Yocheved Sarid at Kevutzat Yavneh and she will send them to Skalat.

We concluded with everyone saying kaddish.

Correcting the database
Steve Pickholtz sent me a very long list of Pickholtz (that specific spelling) on MyHeritage which includes a Rachel Weisinger married to Joseph Pickholtz. There was no identifying information here and I haven't a clue who this Joseph is. I had seen this couple before on Geni.com, but as I have seen before, you cannot always get responses from the folks who manage the Geni.com information.

This time, I got a response via MyHeritage and Olivier in France checked with his family sources and reported that he had no information on the couple but did know the name of a nephew of Joseph. That was enough for me to recognize Joseph as the son of Benjamin (Bendit) Pickholtz of Rozdol, Skole and New York. Joseph had no children but a nephew had told me years ago that his wife was Rae Gross.

I went back and forth with both families for a few hours and then decided to check the theory that made the most sense to me. Using Steve Morse's One-Step site, I found this:

Rae (Rachel) Weisinger married Harold Gross in 1934. That triggered memories in both families where everyone agreed that Rae had been married before she married Joseph Pickholtz. Database corrected.

Housekeeping notes
Family Tree DNA has announced a Fathers' Day sale. I for one am disappointed as I can only see one of our pending orders for which it is relevant. This is their announcement.

I will get one second cousin out of this. The rest will wait. I hope.

I have just set up a couple of additional visits with cousins as I work my way from Baltimore to North Carolina next month. The "new" Pikholz family in Durham has still eluded me.

My Father and Uncle Selig - The Solution?

I have discussed my great-grandfather's Uncle Selig at length here, here and most recently here and I thought I had said everything there was to be said, considering the paucity of records and the few known descendants.

I am now certain that Uncle Selig is the younger brother of my great-great-grandmother Rivka Feige Pikholz and that this is the relevant family structure.

The children of Isak Fischel and Rivka Feige were born in Podkamen, near Zalosce.

I do not actually know that Uncle Selig's mother is Rojse. Due to the age difference, I suspect he may be from a second wife.

I first learned of Uncle Selig when my father sent me a note many years ago saying that his grandfather Hersch had an uncle, Selig Pikholz, and that they lived in the same area. No one else of my father's generation - at least none that was alive when I began my research - had ever heard of Uncle Selig. and I always wondered how it was that my father knew any of this. My father's grandfather Hersch died when my father was eight, so I don't imagine they had meaningful conversations. 

Great-grandfather Hersch had lived with Aunt Mary and Uncle Max for some years and their son Herb - who is five years older than my father - had never heard of any Uncle Selig.

When I found an actual reference to Uncle Selig in the records, I saw that a son was born in Skalat in 1862 and that his wife was Chana, the daughter of Markus Kaczka. The distance between Skalat and Zalosce according to the JewishGen Gazetteer is 36.7 miles (59 km) from Zalosce, where I knew my great-grandparents had lived. This does not really sound like "in the same area" for that time and place. I later found Skalat references to two older daughters.

Yes, some of the records say Pick or Pik or even Pyk rather than Pikholz.

I began considering that my great-grandmother's name, Kwoczka, was a local version of the more common Kaczka, both related to poultry. I had seen that Kwoczka is unique to Zalosce and that almost all the Kaczkas in east Galicia are from Skalat. Not to mention that the fathers of both my great-grandmother and Uncle Selig's wife are named Marcus (=Mordecai). So my first theory was that we were related to both Uncle Selig and his wife, Chana, so that had something to do with why my father had heard of him.

Not very convincing, is it?

Then when we found that Uncle Selig was present at the circumcision of his great-grandson David Eisig Lippmann in 1911, I wondered if perhaps Uncle Selig had lived into my father's lifetime and it was his longevity or perhaps his death which had brought him to my father's attention.

That theory lasted until I found Uncle Selig's death record, in 1913, some ten years before my father was born.

Then, a few days ago, because of my obsession with this particular issue - I mean it's the only real bit of genealogy that my father knew - I took a step back and saw it all fall into place.

Rivka Feige was named after (by one of the daughters of her first husband) in 1862*. She was dead by the time Hersch was ten years old. Hersch's brother Jachiel would have been no more than about seventeen, maybe a few years younger. I don't know when Isak Fischel died, but he was named after by his daughter Bassie in 1873 when Hersch was probably twenty. He could have been dead five or ten or more years. And even if Isak Fischel lived to marry off his first three children, who knows if he is the one who raised them after his wife died.

The four children seem to have been born in Podkamen, near Zalosce. Jachiel married a woman from Skalat and lived in Zalosce. Leah married a man in Zalosce and went to Pittsburgh in the mid-1880s. Bassie married a man from Skalat and her children were born there, before one-by-one the family went to the US. Hersch followed Leah to Pittsburgh - Uncle Max in 1901, the first two sisters in 1902, Hersch himself and Uncle Joe in 1903 and his wife and the three youngest in 1904.

I think it went something like this. The four motherless children were raised - at least for a time - in Skalat. Probably by Uncle Selig and his wife Chana. They surely knew their grandfather (Isak Josef) who died there in 1862. At some point, Jachiel married a local (Skalat) girl and went back to Zalosce, which was near his birthplace Podkamen. Leah too went to Zalosce and married there.

Bassie married in Skalat - not because she was sent there to marry someone the family knew, but because she was already there.

Hersch may have gone to live with Leah or perhaps the Kaczka-Kwoczka connection is real and Uncle Selig's wife arranged him a shidduch with someone in her family in Zalosce. Or maybe both. Hersch and Leah must have been close, because he followed her to Pittsburgh.

And that's why my father knew. Because someone must have said - to him or in his hearing - that his grandfather was raised by his Uncle Selig. He heard, paid attention, remembered and passed it on.

And with all that back and forth, Zalosce and Skalat were not so far apart after all.

And while I am on the road between Skalat and Zalosce, let me touch base with another family. There is an unidentified Leib Pikholz of Skalat who was married to a Rachel Qualer or Kwaller or Kwahler of Zalosce who had children in the late 1870s and through the 1880s.

The given names there include Taube, Markus, Leiser and Moshe Hersch. Sounds to me like Leib is a son of the known couple Mordecai and Taube. They have a son Aryeh Leib who had children in the 1850s and 1860s. His wife died in 1874, so this could be the same Leib with a second wife, though I don't really think so.

Most of the Pikholz-Qualer children have both death and birth records, so I have no idea if there were descendants even in 1900.

There is a Kweller family from Zalosce who may have something to do with these - a descendant of that family was in my high school class. There were quite a few Zalosce families who went to Pittsburgh during the same period as my family.

* This is why I only now noticed the fact that Hersch was orphaned young. Only now have I established that there was a first husband who had children who named their first daughters "Rivka."


Housekeeping Notes
You can hear my December 1 interview on Savory Spotlight here.

Kitty Cooper had an excellent review of my book, including this

It is as easy to read as it can be, given that genetic genealogy is not easy to understand.  

My winter speaking schedule now includes 2 February at 6 PM at the Utah Jewish Genealogical Society. That's the evening before the RootsTech convention.

My full schedule (as it stands at the moment) can be found here. There are some available dates 25 January and the week following RootsTech.

Pamela Weisberger - חבל דאבדין ולא משתכחין

The Aramaic phrase in the title is from the Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, page 111a. Rashi explains that it means that it is a tragic loss when a great person dies and there is no one to replace him.

All the talk in the world of Jewish genealogy today is of the passing Friday of Pamela Weisberger. We say that the cemeteries are full of people whom we once thought couldn't be replaced. Pamela is probably as close to such a person as anyone most of us will ever know.

Barely thirty days ago in Los Angeles

There is no need for me to weigh in on the acute loss to her husband Ken and to her three children. Nor is there any need for me to speak to Pamela's many job descriptions and accomplishments in the world of genealogy.

I also need not speak about what the so-premature death of a friend and colleague does to all of us in our sixties who think we have all the time in the world. Especially so close on the heels of the high holidays.

But I shall say a few things about my own relationship with Pamela.

Mea Shearim

Our first contact was maybe fifteen years ago. She sent me a photograph of a building in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of Jerusalem which she said that some relative of hers had donated to a synagogue or a yeshiva seventy or eighty years earlier. There were two signs attesting to this in the photograph. She wanted me to find the building and make some general inquiries about the family.

I found the building easily enough, in a prominent place on Mea Shearim Street itself. One of the signs was still there. (It isn't any more and no one seems to know where it is.) The building was being used as a yeshiva and there was also a store of some sort using part of the ground floor. I made some inquiries and passed them on.

Eventually, Pamela made contact with these Krishevsky and Eisner relatives and on two or three occasions I went with her to visit them. I was there to translate. Some of them understood the connection, others didn't really. They were all very pleasant visits. Pamela - classy that she always was - would change into a long skirt, shawl and hat, so as not to make anyone uncomfortable.

We were going to go to see them just before the Conference here in Jerusalem in July. We had it pretty much set up, but we had some miscommunication (strictly my fault!) and it didn't happen. We figured it would keep until next time.

I don't know if there is anyone in Pamela's family who will tell the Mea Shearim relatives. I called one of them. She will tell the others. She asked for Pamela's Jewish name and her father's. They will light a candle for her soul. I said I'd try to find out. They don't really know her, but she cared about them and they reciprocated.

Gesher Galicia

I was not a joiner back then, but Pamela decided I should be a member of Gesher Galicia. I  am not sure who else was involved in the decision but one day Pamela informed me that I (a non-member) had been co-opted to the Gesher Galicia Steering Committee. And what size T-shirt did I want.

When Gesher Galicia was incorporated in 2009, I served as Secretary and as such was a member of the Board, with Pamela as President.

Gesher Galicia had become Pamela's show and most of us were happy to be role players. It worked well, but now it will all be very different. Not just a change in titles.

We had some common research interests - mostly in Skalat and nearby Grzmaylow, but also apparently in our Hungarian families. Every couple of months, Pamela would feed me some Pikholz reference that she'd run across while doing something else. We were friends that way.

On her first visit to Israel, I took her to the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hevron and we visited the Hevron cemetery together.

ENDOGAMY

In the "Acknowledgements" section of my recently published book "ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People" under the heading "Encouragement," the second item is

I spoke of my plans for a DNA testing project to Pamela Weisberger while she was visiting Israel in 2012. She encouraged me to submit a presentation for [the IAJGS Conference planned for the following summer in] Boston. I did and it was well-received, though even when I presented my talk, I had very few results to report. From there it has been a runaway train.

Pamela and her daughter Lily appear in Chapters Eleven and Eighteen, where I looked at some people who have many DNA matches with Pikholz descendants. We surely have multiple common ancestors - probably within the last three hundred years.

Pamela welcomed my suggestion to speak to JGSLA in August despite the fact that they had  already done an August program, and was instrumental in setting up a Phoenix talk the next day. She posted about it on Facebook here. The photo at the top of this page is from that post. She was always classy.

Finding Max Greenberg

The family
Fifteen years ago, back before JRI-Poland began working with the AGAD archives in Warsaw on east Galician records, Jacob Laor and I had our own project to collect records from from the Pikholz strongholds Rozdol and Skalat. One of the searches we ordered produced a three-page list of records and we ordered all of them.

Among the Skalat families we were able to reconstruct was Jakob Pikholz and his wife Henie Malka Ginsberg, the daughter of Abish and Lea Mariem. In time, we gathered what appears to be the whole set of births for this couple.

Two of those records are for the eldest daughter, Leie Mariem, one dated 22 September 1877 and the other dated 1 November 1877. When we saw the actual records, it turned out that the second was a death record dated 4 November

Second was a son Perec (=Peretz), born 1878. He went to New York in 1902 and we are in touch with his granddaughter. In New York, he was known as "Barney."

Third was a daughter Jente Rachel, born 1880. Seven years ago, we learned that she arrived in Jerusalem during WWII and died here in 1970. She has one granddaughter and I have met her several times. The granddaughters of Perec and Jente Rachel are the same age and both work in the legal profession.

Fourth was a daughter whom AGAD listed as Bassie, born 29 August 1882. The actual birth record calls her Bassie Rosa.

Fifth was a daughter whom AGAD called Roze, born 28 July 1884. The conflict between daughters named Roze and Bassie Rosa was obvious and we assumed that Bassie Rosa had died and the name Roze was recycled to the next daughter. Fifteen years ago, I was quite the greenhorn.

Sixth was a son Abysch Abraham, born 1886 and died 1889.

Seventh was a son Szyje Izak, born 30 September 1888. Shammai Segal told me that he knew a butcher by this name, but knew nothing about his family.

Last were a daughter Cirl Ester, born 22 November 1890, and a son Berysz, born 18 January 1894, about whom we know nothing at all.

Rose in New York
In 1907, Rosa went to New York on the President Lincoln. She is clearly identified on the passenger list as Rosa Pickholz, age 22 from Skalat, daughter of Jakob Pickholz who lived in Skalat.

In 1912, she married Samuel Greenberg, a fellow Skalater. He spelled it Gruenberg in Skalat. The parents' names are correct and she gives her age as 26 instead of 28.

In the 1920 census, they are in the Bronx with a son Max, age four years and some illegible number of months. Rose is thirty-four years old and both she and Samuel are clearly identified as born in Skalat.

And there, dear readers, the story ended for me. I could not find any of the three anywhere, including in the Social Security Death Index. Neither of Rose's great-nieces had ever heard of her or of Max. I would look at records from time to time, but either I was not seeing them or they were not there. Sam, Rose and Max Greenberg are common names and that certainly didn't help. It's not like looking for Pikholz.

Martin
When I had another look at the 1930 census three months ago, I saw Max, age fifteen born in New York, with his widowed mother Rose, age forty-one born in Austria. They were living in Brooklyn.

I moved on to the 1940 census and found them, still in Brooklyn. Max is a twenty-five year old law clerk (the law runs in this family!) and has acquired the middle initial "M."

Rose is married to Morris Gross and his daughter, son-in-law and granddaughter are part of the household. Rose is fifty-two. I found the 1937 marriage record of Rose and Morris, which named her parents and thus nailed down Rose's identity.

I enlisted the help of Renee Steinig, who is way better at finding living people in the United States than I will ever be, and she found Morris Gross' granddaughter. The granddaughter did not know Max, but she did know of Martin. She had a name for his wife, who predeceased him by some fifteen years. There is - or was a second wife - before Martin M. Greenberg, the attorney, died in 1991. He had one daughter who died at fifty-six in Montgomery County Maryland. Her son is on Facebook, but has not yet responded to my attempts at contact.

Rose, who died in 1965, Martin and Martin's first wife are buried in adjacent graves in Montefiore Cemetery. Rose's age is seventy-seven. Samuel is elsewhere and I have not yet identified him among the 1920s New York deaths.

I acquired a copy of the probate file and it contains Martin's death certificate, excerpted below. The informant was the second wife.

His mother is not Rosa. His mother is Basha Rosa. Bassie Rosa, the older sister born in 1882? But how can this be? If Bassie Rosa was alive, how was the next daughter called Roze?

Similar names
I went back to have a look at Roze's birth record, but rather than rummage through my printed records from fifteen years ago, I went through JRI-Poland. There I saw that the indexer in Warsaw had written "Raze," not "Roze" and that was, in fact a much better transcription of the original. Raze (pronounced "Rah-tze") is not a form of Rosa. It is a distinct Yiddish name. So in fact there is no conflict between the names of the two sisters, Bassie Rosa and Raze. I have no idea what became of Raze.

It is important to work with original documents whenever possible. Judy Russell, The Legal Genealogist, addressed this issue a few weeks ago, and not for the first time.
Of course, it helps  to know what you are talking about. Fifteen years ago, I did not know the name Raze, so looking at the original more carefully would not have prevented my error.

That brings me back to one of my favorite points. I am supposed to know what I am doing. Other members of the family assume that I do and are hardly likely to recheck my work. Heck, if not for Martin's death certificate, I wouldn't have rechecked it either!

Small But Meaningful Segments on DNA

Some short but meaningful segments, all of them about DNA.

(Note: There is now an email sign-up box, here on the right. Thanks to genealogy blogger Lara Diamond for showing me how to do that.)

Lazerizing my mother
Recreating my father's DNA using Lazerus last week was easy. I mean, he has three descendants who have tested, both his brother and his sister and one of his two living fIrst cousins. I didn't need to use the first cousins once removed and the second cousins and I still got about 62% of his 22-chromosome set.

My mother is another story. The same three descendants for Group 1, two of my sisters and I. But my mother's two brothers and two sisters predeceased her and the first yahrzeit of her last first cousin is this Wednesday evening. To top that off, Mother has only one niece and

YOU'VE BEEN LAZERIZED

one nephew we can work with and the nephew has not tested. We do have two of my second cousins on my grandfather's side who have tested. One on my grandmother's side has tested but I cannot get her onto GEDmatch. So all we have for Group 2 are Kay, Ruth and Judy - the last two first cousins to one another.

The resulting kit is about 36.6% of a full set of 23 chromosomes - including the X - if I have the math right. I am quite sure that we have some endogamous segments here from Ruth's father and probably from Ruth and Judy's grandfather, so maybe it's just 32% or 28 %. But since I am not planning on doing anything with my mother's kit for now, it doesn't matter.

I am just trying to get a handle on how many people we need in Group 1 and Group 2 (and how close) in order to get some meaningful results. GEDmatch will not do "one-to-many" comparisons with the Lazerus kit unless it gets over a certain threshhold and Mother's kit passes that test.

Meantime another of my sisters has ordered a test.

Matching my mother-in-law
Tuesday evening Jerusalem time, I posted the following on the Facebook pages International Society of Genetic Genealogy (ISOGG) and Tracing the Tribe, as well as my own timeline.

It provoked quite a few "Likes" and comments.

My point was not to be entertaining, though it certainly got its share of yuks (and some yucks).

My point was to say something about endogamy and how and why I do what I do with autosomal DNA.

I would guess that of those using DNA for recent genealogy (not, for instance, deep ancestry or medical matters), almost all are either looking for new relatives in hopes of working their ancestry back additional generations or are looking for specific unknown individuals, as in cases of adoption and abandonment.

The problem with Jews using DNA to look for new relatives is that when you get right down to it, we are all related, very possibly in the last fifteen-twenty generations and often many fewer.

We keep marrying withing the closed tribe and we share many ancestors, not only with others but with ourselves. So when someone shows up as a suggested fourth cousin (on average about 50 cM of matching DNA), the relationship is usually composed of multiple incidents of more distant cousinhood.  Sixth, seventh and eighth cousins share on average12.5 cM, 6.25 cM and 3.125 cM so there are many ways to use small numbers to build to the 50 cM that makes it look like fourth cousins.

This is not as much of an issue with close cousins. Second cousins share an average of 200 cM, so some distant cousinhoods floating around in the background are part of the margin of error and don't really affect the larger number.

I am not looking for new relatives, nor do I have specific missing fathers or grandfathers to look for. I won't say that what I am doing is unique, but I can say that no one I know is doing it. 

My Pikholz research is single-surname. I have a number of Pikholz lines that go back to 1800-1830, three with pre-1800 patriarchs. I also have a few lines that only go back to the mid- or late-1800s because the name of the partriarch or matriarch is too common to identify further. I am using DNA to figure out how those families connect to one another back then.

Although I am still on the trail of documented proof, I have reduced the number of "free-standing" Pikholz families from Skalat by at least two and have laid the groundwork for at least four more, pending tests that are either in process or in begging-mode. I have also disproven at least two putative connections, when DNA did not show the expected results, (and not due to "false fathers").

I discussed some of that recently here and here, for instance.

This works. Slowly and carefully. Trying not to jump to conclusions. Doing my best to remain relatively free of endogamy.

Yes we are all related. But some of us are more related than others. I think I can demonstrate it. (See "Moshe Hersch" below.)

But back to my mother-in-law
Awhile back, I decided to get a DNA sample from my wife's mother, since she is the last of her siblings and on her father's side, the last of the cousins. I figured some day I might have reason to work on her family and who knows if she will be here by then.

I had no intention of doing anything but skimming the results, for now.

But her results showed matches with seven of the nine descendants of my great-grandparents, four of whom including Aunt Betty and my sister Amy are suggested third-fifth cousins. On the other hand, my sister Sarajoy is among the missing. She also matches both Kwoczka cousins, from my g-gm's family.

My mother-in-law also has remote matches with eleven other Pikholz descendants, including the putative descendant of Uncle Selig. Also Jane, who looks to be quite close to my own family.

So this really does seem focused on my personal family, probably from the Kwoczka side. She does not match any of my four first and second cousins on my mother's side.

My mother-in-law's mother was born in Przasnysz Poland and her father's family is from Kurima Slovakia. I am curious which of her sides is connected to my father's people, so I wrote to some of her first cousins on her mother's side and first cousins once and twice removed on her father's side, asking them to test. We'll see how that goes. The first three have agreed to test..

I have no idea what I am getting into with this.

Meantime, I'll let this exchange speak for itself.

Moshe Hersch
Two posts ago, I wrote about the second cousins Charles and Leonora, whose great-grandmother Sara Pikholz (~1847-1887) is the daughter of Moshe Hersch. I also wrote that the second cousins Jane and Nan are the great-granddaughters of Berish (1837-1918), whose father is also Moshe Hersch.

I suggested that these two Moshe Hersch may be the same person, which would mean that Charles and Leonora are third cousins of Jane and Nan.

At the time, we had test results from Jane, Leonora and Charles. Nan and her two children had submitted Family Finder tests. Nan's daughter's results just came in.

I couldn't have hoped for better than this

And the chromosomes look very good - see the nicely triangulated bits on 2, 16 and 20. Nan's results can only make this better.
 
Nonetheless, there are two things that bother me here. First, if Charles is indeed a third cousin of Jane and Nan, then their parents are second cousins. So why was there no known contact between Charles' mother in Newark and the others in the Philadelphia area either as part of the 1939 immigration or afterwards? I do not think that Charles' mother would have been closer to Sam Marenus (who assisted with her immigration) than to Jane and Nan's family. This does not necessarily indicate a problem with the "one Moshe Hersch" theory, but it does raise a small doubt.

The other is the given names. Berish has children named Olga (Alte), Anna (Chana), Fannie (??) and Odessa-born Vodolya Volodya* (Zev/Wolf). Sara, Berisch's putative sister, had Josie, Perl, Osaias, Leisor, Jenta and Taube. I would have expected at least a few names to appear in both families. Again, it proves nothing, but it makes me uncomfortable.

Small segments
In recent days, there has been quite a bit of very lively discussion on Facebook on the value of small segments of DNA in evaluating matches. The consensus is, and has loing been, that small segments are not really indicative of inherited DNA in any meaningful sense. There are, of course, differences of opinion about what size segments should be ignored because of their smallness.

Blaine Bettinger responded to the debate with a major article, full of numbers and graphs. I have not yet read it but I understand that he presents alot of statistics about the likelihood of small segments being useful and about what exactly is a  small segment.

The article has prompted a new Facebook discussion about the article itself.

It is my nature to distrust rules that put everything into a single category and that's how I feel about small segments. Sometimes they are meaningful and useful, sometimes not.

When I reconstructed my father's DNA using Lazerus (described last week in Genes From My Father), I happily accepted all small segments of whatever size because those small segments were in the DNA of at least one of his children and at least one of his brother/sister/first cousin. If I have a particular small segment, I must have received it from my parents. If my father's brother (or sister) has it as well, then it is eminently clear to me that I got it from my father and that it came to him and his brother from my grandfather. And it is not reasonable to say that a sliver of that small segment might have come from my mother, because my father's people share it.

Whether that segment came down unchanged and intact from one of my great-grandparents can be a matter of legitimate debate. Whether it came unchanged and intact from someone two-three generations further back can be a matter of legitimate doubt.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Housekeeping notes
Seven Eight Pikholz descendants, all from Skalat, have ordered Family Finder tests in the last week.

*Thanks to Liba Zilber for correcting my typing error.

Differently Every Year - Remembering Skalat

The memorial for Skalat
I was not planning on writing about the annual Skalat memorial this year, except perhaps a brief passage at the end. I have written about this previously on this blog - here and here and here. The meeting is important, but not what you would call "interesting." Pretty much the same from year to year.

We met at five o'clock Thursday afternoon, the seventh of Sivan - which outside of Israel is the second day of the Shavuot holiday.

There is a whole row of town monuments along that stretch. Maybe thirty or so. At the other end is Husiatyn, a town near Skalat which I have written about here and specifically about the Zellermayer-Pikholz connections here.  Near that is a monument to Vileika, where many of my mother's Gordons lived in the early and mid 1800s, probably earlier too. There is Pleshchenitsy where my Gordon grandfather's mother, Anna Kugel, came from. And Zbarazh, not far from Skalat, where we had other Pikholz families.

We were about twenty-five or so. Zvika Sarid led us. We lost his mother's brother Mottel Weissman a few months ago, so again we all said kaddish together. We did that last year when Mottel was too ill to attend. Zvika pointed out that there were only four people in attendance who had actually lived in Skalat. The rest were children and grandchildren, plus a few spouses. I wondered about some of the missing. I knew that Tonia Winter was not well, but her daughter always came. And Giza - she is young for a Holocaust survivor. Giza came a few minutes later.

Zvika's daughter Chava took a picture of their mother Yocheved standing next to the monument and I made a comment about the monument's being the same as it was last year. But of course, that is not the point. The point is that while Skalat is frozen in time, Judenrein for seventy-one years, Yocheved is not. She left, made aliyah, married had children and grandchildren. That is what Chava was recording. Her mother growing older.

Some of the topics of discussion at the last few memorials were not mentioned. Nothing about the monuments in Skalat itself or the money to maintain them. No one spoke of plans to go back to visit. Skalat had been planning to make itself a five-hundredth birthday party last August. No one mentioned that either.

Mottel's daughter Chanaleh had written something years ago - perhaps a school project - about the yearly visit of the Rebbe of Husiatyn, who used to spend several weeks in Skalat on his way from his home in Vienna to his father's grave in Husiatyn. This was along the same lines as Tonka Pikholz had written in one of the Skalat memorial books. Tonka herself is buried in Holon and her sister's son and daughter visited her grave, as they always do. Tonka would be a hundred this year.

Zvika read from what Chanaleh had  written, which included something about the Rebbe's friend Yosef Milgrom, on whose property there was a small house in which the Rebbe stayed in Skalat. People came from all around to seek his advice and blessings, including the non-Jews.

Bronia said that no one was left from Yosef Milgrom's family.

So I spoke up. And told this story. Three years ago, I spoke at the IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy in Washington DC, and in the course of my talk mentioned the Husiatyner Rebbe and his visits to Skalat. I spent the following Shabbes in Lakewood NJ, where my son and daughter-in-law and family were spending two weeks at the yeshiva. Someone asked me who I am etc and I said I am a genealogist, so he said that one of the rabbis who was there at the time had just written a book about his family.

I had a look at the book and saw a chapter about the Husiatyner Rebbe. So I went over to the writer, introduced myself and told him that I had just referred to the same subject in my conference talk. Across the table from him, and quite unrelated to him, sat an older woman who said "My husband's uncle Yosef Milgrom, built the hoiuse where the Rebbe used to stay when he was in Skalat."

"Small world" is a cliche, but cliches generally come from some truth. And Bronia was pleased that Yosef Milgrom has living family.

Zvika announced that he wanted to introduce something new for the memorial program. He read from the Hebrew version of the Weisbard memorial book, a personal testimony by Yoel Ben-Porath (Julek  Weinraub), as transmitted in 1995 to Lusia Milch. Zvika wants to "feature" a Skalater each year at the memorial meeting. He already told Zvi Segal that he wants him to prepare something about his father Shammai for next year.

No one wants to be the first to leave. We all hope that everyone will be there next year.

Other cemeteries
I usually use the day in the Tel Aviv area for other cemetery matters.

Gil Mordecai Scharf is a third cousin of my wife's, buried in the military section of the Holon cemetery.

He was a gunner in a tank and was killed during Operation Shelom HaGalil in 1985. He was nearly nineteen.

I went to the Kiryat Shaul cemetery to visit the two Zellermayer graves that I wrote about not long ago. Avraham's grave has his full birth name "Avraham Isak ben Zalman Yehudah." I wasn't sure it would, as his children's graves just have "Avraham." His yahrzeit was the day after my visit.

Also in Kiryat Shaul, I visited the grave of Zvi (Stanislav) Domnivsky. I mentioned him three weeks ago when I discussed the family of my Uncle Jachiel. Stanislav had submitted Pages of Testimony for two of Uncle Jachiel's Tunis grandsons and had defined himself as a relative. I was hoping the gravestone would give me a clue exactly how he was related. But it did not.

From there I went to the Yarkon cemetery to the grave of Stanislav's daughter Lydia.

That did give me some information. It says "My dear mother."

I will have to contact the burial society to see what they can tell me about the son or daughter - who probably has no idea who the Tunis family is.




Housekeeping notes
Occasionally I order records from Polish State Archives other than AGAD, when I need something for myself or for a client.  I made an exception recently when I placed an order with the Przemysl Archives - my sixth time ordering from them.

They are awkward to work with. They require statements explaining how the person placing the order is related to the person in the record, they send poor-quality paper copies by mail rather than scans, they cover up the other records on the page lest someone learn something that hasn't been paid for - and they take a very long time to process the orders even after they have been paid.

But in this case, a family member wanted  ten records on his other side, so I gathered up a few other people and placed an order on 11 September. The records came this week. Finally. One person received the single record he ordered. One got nothing. Another received part of an order. The original fellow who wanted ten got three of the ten, but also a handful of others that he hadn't ordered.

I think I am finished with Przemysl. (As my father would say "Famous last words?")

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.

Simon's Youngest Son, Joseph Leisor

Simon Pikholz and the Waltuch sisters
Simon Pikholz lived in Skalat. We don't know who his parents were, but we think he is closely connected to my own family. (It would help if some of his living descendants would take DNA tests, especially the one male line descendant who could do a Y test. Thusfar no one has agreed to do so.)

Anyway, Simon was married to Dwore Waltuch, the daughter of Herz and Lea, also from Skalat. They had two daughters that we know of - Lea and Breine. Breine was born in 1860 and Lea probably before our earliest Skalat records in 1859.

Lea married Berl Pfeffer and I have written a bit about her children here. We know nothing about Breine aside from her birth.

Dwore died in 1861 at age twenty-three and as was customary when there were small children,

Dwore's death record - 30 November 1861, age 23

Simon married within the family soon afterwards. His second wife was Chana Waltuch, Dwore's sister. They had nine children (1863-1885), four of whom died in childhood, four went to the US and for one we have only a birth record.

We have no record for Simon after the birth of the last child.

Chana and her son Max followed her two daughters to the US in 1892 and by all indications,she was a widow. She lived in Elizabeth NJ until her death in 1923. We have census and other documents for her daughters Malka Dwojra (aka Dora) and Ryvka (aka Beatrice) and her son Max and I am in occasional contact with descendants of all three.

Jossel Leisor and his children
There were five Pikholz births in Skalat in 1881, three more in nearby towns. Jossel Leisor was born to Schimon and Chana on 25 July.

We next see him getting married in 1899 to Katie Smith in Elizabethport NJ. Katie's parents came from Russia and somehow in the US Lechowitz became Smith. The Smiths lived in Philadelphia and the young couple did as well. The 1900 census says that Joseph (who for some reason is called John) worked as a window cleaner.

Joseph and Katie had four children in fairly rapid succession - Sam, Ida, Selma and in 1906,

Katie's grave site

Leonard J. Pickholtz. Katie died in November 1909 and is buried in an unmarked grave in Har Jehudah Cemetery, Upper Darby PA. In the 1910 census, Ida is in an orphanage, the other three children are with the Smith grandparents and Joseph is nowhere to be seen.

By the time of the 1920 census, the elder Smiths have died, Leonard and Selma are in other Philadelphia orphanages and Sam has disappeared. Still nothing on Joseph. We began working on the assumption that he was dead, but could find no trace of death or burial. And none of the descendants of his brother and sisters had ever heard of him. As though he had been some kind of black sheep.

Much of the work on this family was done by Steve Pickholtz of New Jersey, who grew up in Philadelphia. We were joined in this search by a descendant of one of Katie's sisters.

Joseph's older sister Dora had gone to the US with my grandfather's first cousin Sara Frankel, who had ended up in Denver, so I had this cockamamie theory that Joseph had gone to Denver to join family and look for work. I brashly predicted to Steve that we would find that he had died in Denver or en route, probably while Katie was still alive. I even considered that he died before the youngest child was born and that "Leonard J." would turn out to be in memory of Joseph Leisor.

We found a directory reference to Selma Pickholtz in New York in the 1930s. And a file for Ida showing that she had married in 1922 and had a son and that she was in poor health. Steve made contact briefly with the son a few years ago, but we have not been able to find him again.  He knew nothing of the family history. Ida died in 1938.

Ida's file included the name Pickford and it took quite awhile for Steve to convince me to follow that up. He was right.

Sam indeed had become Pickford. He added five years to his age when he married an older woman, Lillian, but he kept the same birthday, making it easy to recognize him. He married in 1917 and took on her son and daughter. In 1919 Sam and Lillian had a son.

Sam, Lillian and the two sons, one unmarked

Sam died in 1996. Lillian's family has a plot in Montefiore Cemetery in Philadelphia and they are buried there. So are the two sons - the younger one in an unmarked grave. Ida too is in that family plot and her grave also contains the remains of an unnamed daughter of Lillian's older son.

I phoned the cemetery to ask about Ida's grave and it turned out that the woman who answered the phone at the cemetery had been a neighbor of Sam and Lillian. She told me what she could. She knew Selma, who had married in NY - there were no children. She knew nothing of Joseph or of Sam's brother Leonard. I think she felt she had spoken too freely and she never took my calls again or answered my letters. When I visited the cemetery three years ago, she had retired.

Following the Pickford name, we found Leonard, in a military cemetery in Houston. He too had lived into his nineties. And I found his wife. His second wife, who didn't know he was a Pickholtz, didn't know he was Jewish, didn't know that he had two sons (one deceased). She certainly didn't know anything about Joseph.

We corresponded for a couple of years and she tried to do some family research. Then she died. Leonard's other son died a bit later, as did the first wife.

So what happened to Joseph?
Joseph was definitely alive in 1909-1910, involved in some matters that are better not spoken of. There is an indication that he had spent some time in Pittsburgh before that.

Then I found this.

Joseph Lewis Pickholtz, born 1 October 1881, registered for the draft in Kansas City Missouri in 1918. He is married to Elsie, is in the junk business and is missing three fingers on his right hand. "Lewis" is a reasonable substitute for "Leisor" and the birth year is correct, though not the full date.

And then he disappears again. Neither he nor Elsie shows up in the 1920 census or anyplace else. I wondered if he was on the way to Denver.

There is a Joseph Pick in Perth Amboy in the 1920 census, born in Galicia in 1881. He said that he came to the US in 1906. With him were his wife Catherine and children John, Joseph, Josephine, Mary and Sophie. Catherine and John entered the US in 1913. It looked too strange and I never followed it up. Perhaps I should.

I considered that he continued his life with the 1 October 1881 birth date that was on the draft registration and just for sport, I looked up people named Joseph with that birth date in the Social Security Death Index, which normally begins in 1962. And this turned up.

The middle initial "L" again. He died in 1953, when we generally do not find SSDI results. And Gatewood certainly sounds like something that could have been derived from Pickholtz!

I went to the 1940 census and found him with his wife Pauline, twenty-four years his junior, in Natchituches Louisiana. The census record says he was born in Kentucky and was a farmer.

Unlikely to be our guy? You bet. I ordered the death record from the State of Louisiana. His parents are not Simon and Anna, but John Gatewood and Amanda Smith, both of Hartford Kentucky. Close but no cigar.

Back to the drawing board.

Housekeeping notes
Motel Weissman died last week. He was born in Skalat ninety years ago and was the person who said kaddish at our annual Skalat memorial.