The Ancestors of Uncle Max Braun

Us and the Brauns

I don't generally spend a lot of time looking at the ancestors of the people who married into my family, but there are exceptions.

Here are my great-grandparents and their seven children, excluding the three sons who died very young. (I am using the names, as we knew them in America, rather than their Jewish birth names from east Galicia.)

Morris is my grandfather.

The subject of this post, Uncle Max Braun, married my grandfather's middle sister Mary (Miriam). They moved from Pittsburgh to Miami in the early 1940s, so I never knew them. In Europe, the Brauns (then called Brunn) lived in and around Zalosce, which is also where my great grandmother's Kwoczka family lived. My grandfather and his older sibling were born there too. So there is a good chance that there is a family connection further back.

In addition, my great-grandfather's older sister Leah married a Braun, Uncle Max' uncle. According to his 1903 passenger list, Uncle Max (as Michael) went to Pittsburg to his uncle Jakob Braun.

Uncle Max' father was Mordecai Lipe and his father - based on Yaakov Hersch's tombstone - is Israel Aryeh.

 

The Elinoffs, the Katzes, the Zwiebels, the Fleischmans

 

 We are not related - so far as we know - to the Pittsburgh Elinoffs, but we have mutual cousins. 

 

The Elinoff grandmother (Clara/Chaje) is the sister of Harry Katz who married my grandfather's sister Aunt Becky, so we and the Elinoffs are both second cousins to the Katz cousins.

 

The mother of Clara Elinoff and Uncle Harry Katz is Beila (or Beila Nesya) Zwiebel who is a sister to Jute (maybe Jute Leah) who married the brother (Pinchas Kwoczka) of my great-grandmother Ita Leah. That means that the Fleischmans (and some others) are third cousins both to us and to the Elinoffs.

This is not endogamy. It's simply marrying among known families from the same area and often from within those families.

Elinoff DNA

I have been meaning to get some Elinoff DNA, not to test any specific hypothesis, just to see what might come up. As it happens, there is a Pittsburgh Elinoff who lives about twenty minutes from me and we now have his Family Finder results. (I would like to get some more of them to test, although I did find one other who was already on GEDmatch.)

The two Elinoff tests showed expected levels of matching DNA with our three mutual Katz cousins and a bit with the more distant Fleischmans. But they also showed a non-negligible amount of shared DNA with the Brauns - likely fourth cousin territory.

Particularly surprising was a segment (over 13 cM) shared by both Elinoff cousins with a descendant of Leah and Yaakov Hersch Braun. And that is what brought me to delve into Uncle Max Braun's ancestry. Because there is a hint of a connection between the Braun and Katz/Elinoff families that is independent of the rest of us.

Brunn and Wachs

The second record on the above page is Uncle Max' birth record. He was born on 22 March 1883 in house 428 in Zalosce. (His Social Security documents say 12 March.) He was given the name Mechel on the eighth day. His mother is Sara Dasel Brunn, daughter of Moses Jakob and Marjem of Zalosce. The sandak is Joseph Wachs and on the far right Mordche Lippe Brunn acknowledges paternity. That would be because their marriage had not been registered by the civil authorities. It appears that Mechel/Max was Brunn from both parents.

Sara Dasel's father Moses Jakob Brunn died 28 August 1891 in Zalosce, also in house 428. He was 63.

His parents names appear, which is not always the case with older people. His father is Mechel and his mother is Rosa Basie. 

Uncle Max had an older sister named Rose, who lived in Pittsburgh, so both were named for their mother's paternal grandparents. My own research produced records showing three additional sons (Wolf, Josef and Abraham Jakob) who died as babies and another (Aron) who died at age twenty-one. I have birth records for two of those sons and in both cases the sandak is Joseph Wachs.

That does it for now for Uncle Max' mother's Brunn family. Uncle Max' father Mordecai Lipe is a harder nut to crack as I see no reference to him in JRI-Poland except the births and deaths of his children. (There is a birth for a Mordecai Lippe Brunn in Zalosce but 1877 is too late to be Uncle Max' father.) Nor was I able to find anyone whom I could identify as his father Israel Aryeh. There are lots of "Israel" and similar but I have no way to sort them out. Yaakov Hersch's Penssylvania death record has his mother as "unknown."

But we have a twenty-three page tree in outline form of the descendants of Schewach Wachs. Remember Joseph Wachs was the sandak for Uncle Max and at least two of his brothers. Some of the Wachs family lived in Pittsburgh. 

Herb Braun, the younger son of Uncle Max, was named after Hersch Wachs despite the fact that his own grandfather Hersch Pickholtz was living at the time. Herb told me that his mother, Aunt Mary, was partly raised by the Wachs family, so there was a significant connection there. 

Unfortunately, there is no Joseph Wachs in those twenty-three pages.

Mordecai Lipe Braun is mentioned in the Wachs tree, but in a way that makes no sense. He is listed as the wife(!) of Israel Wachs. No one seems to know exactly who put this together and what it is based on.

Good luck making sense of THAT.

I don't know that there are more records. I don't know if more DNA might help - Brauns, Elinoffs or others. Sometimes one person's DNA can hold the key.

 

But here is where we are holding for now.

Cousin Herb's Y-DNA

My father's first cousin Herb Braun was the third person to test for my family DNA project. That was five and a half years ago. We had met once, when I was fourteen but had been emailing for a few years about family history.

We met a second time, in 2013

Herb's mother is my grandfather's older sister, so he carries the mitochondrial DNA of my Kwoczka great-grandmother and Pollak second great-grandmother. At first he did the Family Finder (autosomal) test alone and then did the basic MtDNA. Later I upgraded him to the full MtDNA. That test led do a second family test, which I wrote about last year.

Herb's Braun (then Brunn) family lived in Zalosce (east Galicia, about twenty miles NNW of Tarnopol) where the Kwoczkas also lived and I figured that since the families might have other connections in the near background, I should probably test his Y-DNA as well. I ordered a Y-67 after he died last year at ninety-seven and we were fortunate that his initial swab was good enough for this fourth test.

Herb's results at 67 markers show 133 matches, one at a genetic distance of one and three at a genetic distance of two, with nothing that stood out to me. (At 37 markers, he is a genetic distance of four with our cousin Bruce who tested for the Kwoczka male line.)

One of Herb's GD-2 matches is Gary Simon, whose sister is married to a first cousin of mine. But more important, Gary's wife Judy is one of the administrators of the Y-DNA project that both Gary and Herb belong to.

Gary has a terminal SNP called Y-18621 and Judy asked me if Herb could test for that SNP with Y-SEQ. Herb, of course, can no longer test for anything and his two sons predeceased him. But I am in touch with one of his two grandsons and he agreed to my request to do the Y-SEQ test.

I guess we'll see what happens.

Join projects. It can help you and as it helps others.

Mendel (Morris) Pickholtz, 5657-5717 (1896-1957)

Twenty-fifth anniversary, 1946

My grandfather died on the ninth of First Adar - that's Monday evening - sixty years ago. He has been dead almost as long as he lived.

Everyone thought I was too young to go to the funeral, or even the unveiling - something I resented until, well forever. He had had a serious heart attack just before I was born and there was some concern that I would bear his name, but happily he recovered. He kept the extra name "Chaim" that was added during the illness.

In the end, it was a "cerebral vascular accident." Twelve hours from onset until death. I knew without anyone's telling me.

They lived in this house since sometime in the 1930s until I think 1952.

From the 1940 federal census

 
Sometime in the 1940s, my grandmother's mother moved in with them, until her death in 1950.

My father and Aunt Betty both went to their weddings from that house.

The family lived in Zalosce, east Galicia, and my grandfather's first seven siblings (four of whom survived childhood) were born there. Maybe the next two as well, but Zalosce birth records are available only through 1890, so we are not sure. My grandfather, the youngest was born in Bogdanowka, in house 95, on the holiday of Hoshanna Rabba, during Sukkot.

This Jezierna birth record is from the All Galicia Database of Gesher Galicia

Within a few years, the family began it's multi-stage migration to the Pittsburgh, where his father's sister had settled in the 1880s. My great-grandmother came last with the three youngest children, not through Baltimore or Ellis Island like the others, but through Montreal and the St. Albans Vermont border crossing.

With U. Dave (center) and U. Joe (right)

My grandfather was in the wholesale grocery business on Miller Street with two of his brothers, Uncle Joe and Uncle Dave, a business which closed when Uncle Joe turned sixty-five. I remember being there.

The children of the three brothers (the eldest, Uncle Max, had no children) were close in age and that and the business connection made my father's generation and mine closer with them then with the three sisters' children, who were older. (Not to mention that my grandfather and Uncle Joe married sisters!)

My grandfather had first cousins in Pittsburgh on both sides of his family, but the family connection didn't survive much after that first generation - until I began doing genealogy.

1953. Getting ready for the first seder on Northumberland Street, after leaving the house on Phillips Avenue.
I share the head of the table with my grandfather. Six people in this picture are still with us.

The Pittsburgh Jewish Criterion (thanks to The Pittsburgh Jewish Newspapers Project) recorded many of the key events in his life, including his regular listing as Vice-President of the Poale Zedeck Men's Club (and my grandmother's as President of the Sisterhood). Here are a few.

And finally...

Not mentioned are Aunt Becky and Aunt Bessie who predeceased him.

May his soul be bound in life. תהא נפשו צרורה בצרור החיים.

Housekeeping notes
I am speaking here in Israel in English - 16 March 2017, 7:30 – IGRA, Beit Fisher, 5 Klausner Street, Raanana
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey

I have had four proposals accepted for the IAJGS Conference in Orlando 23-28 July. No times or dates yet. But if anyone wants me to speak in the US before the Conference, now is the time to speak up.

And for the attention of any program chairs (or anyone who knows program chairs), I'll be available in the US late April-early May of 2018. Another bar mitzvah in Chicago.

ROZ!

I could call this post Herb's MtDNA (Part Two) because it's the continuation of something I wrote more than eighteen months ago. I even wrote at the time "I hope there will be a Part 2." But it's worth starting this from scratch. You can go back and reread Part One later.

Prologue - Mutations in Y-DNA
Back when I first started looking at DNA, I had a brief discussion with Bennett Grerenspan of Famliy Tree DNA about the rate of mutations in Y-DNA. At the time, Zachy Pickholz and I had a perfect Y-37 match and I was trying to get a handle on how my g-g-gf and his g-g-g-gf are related. FTDNA's TiP Report said that there was a ~93% chance of having a common ancestor six generations ago and I did not find that answer satisfying.

Bennett  responded:

[T]his is about as close a percentage as you can expect from [Y] DNA since mutations happen unpredictably.
[F]or example I am 36 of 37 with my own father, dad having passed a mutation to me that he did not pass to my brother.

In time, Zachy upgraded to Y-67 and we added a third line from Filip. We all matched perfectly at Y-67 even after 200+ years, so I was not going to spend much time worrying about mutation rates.

Aunt Becky and Aunt Mary
My great-grandparents, Hersch Pickholz and Jutte Leah Kwoczka had seven children who survived childhood.

The seven children in birth order

Aunt Becky and Aunt Mary, being the two older girls, were apparently close. They even crossed the ocean together, barely into their teens, to join Uncle Max. They were the two I never met. Aunt Becky died first, long before I was born and Aunt Mary, though she died last almost exactly forty-one years later, had moved to Florida before I was born. I knew the four brothers and I remember going to see Aunt Bessie before she died in 1953.

Uncle Max had no children. The other three brothers were in business together and their children were mostly the same age cohort - younger than the children of the three sisters - so I knew those cousins (both in my father's generation and in my own) well. And Uncle Joe and my grandfather married sisters. That is why I never knew my second cousin Roz, Aunt Becky's younger granddaughter, even though she lived in the neighborhood and was in my brother's high school class!

I had, however, developed a relationship with Aunt Mary's younger son Herb, though until recently we had met only once, when I was fourteen. When I started with DNA testing, my first priority was the older generation and I was comfortable asking Herb to do both a Family Finder and an MtDNA (Mitochondrial) test on his mother's line.

Herb's Mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA)
MtDNA is passed by the mother to all her children. Males have it but do not pass it on.

Mt great-grandmother, Jutte Leah Kwoczka, had two brothers, so only her descendants are useful for MtDNA in that line.

Aunt Becky and Aunt Bessie each had one son whose only daughters have since done Family Finder tests for our project. But their MtDNA would be their mothers' sides, so they would not help us here. Each of the aunts also had a daughter with one daughter each, but I am not in touch with either of them. One of those is Roz.

Herb's sister had no children.

So Herb is the only source we have for MtDNA in that line - my Kwoczka great-grandmother of Zalosce, my Pollak great-great-grandmother of Jezierna and my third-great-grandmother for whom all we have is a given name, Chaie Sara.

Herb initially did the lowest level MtDNA test and later I upgraded him to the full test.

He has no perfect matches. But as of nineteen months ago, he had thirty matches at a genetic distance of one.  That is, he and they are the same, but one mutation away. That number has grown from thirty to fifty-five but I shall continue referring to them as "the thirty."

It occurred to me then that if the thirty are one group, perhaps the mutation that Herb carries is fairly recent, since he has no exact matches. In MtDNA terms, that can be two or three hundred years ago or it could have originated as recently as Aunt Mary or my great-grandmother. But if it is recent, then I should treat the thirty as if they were exact matches to Herb, for the purpose of further inquiry.

I asked one of the thirty, someone I know who lives here in Israel, to check those matches and when he did not respond promptly, I asked another of the thirty - Dr. Richard Pavelle - who agreed immediately

Dr. Pavelle was a perfect match for the other twenty-nine, which means that our line broke away from theirs. (In theory, they could have broken away from us, but since they are thirty and we are one, that is highly improbable.) I confirmed that by looking at the actual mutations. Herb has one extra mutation: something called C6925Y.

Herb's mitochondrial mutations, representing my Kwoczka great-grandmother's maternal line

So I went to work on the thirty. First I looked at the Family Finder matches of those who had done that test. I didn't see any point in chasing after people who were remote matches or no match at all. There were only a handful of the thirty who were third-fifth cousins or closer to Herb. There was next to nothing coming from any of them in response. I also contacted the nine who had not done Family Finders - FTDNA was willing to offer them a special price. No takers.

The effort petered out, as expected. After all, there was a good possibility that our line had separated from theirs two hundred or more years ago, so what was the point. We didn't know enough to chase down relatives that far back anyway.

Roz
Yet in the back of my head was this nagging feeling that maybe our mutation was very recent. Really really recent. I could call Roz - still in the neighborhood - and have an awkward conversation which would end up costing me a few hundred dollars for nothing. Keep in mind, that in the last two years, I have become acutely aware of the importance of doing Family Finders for as many people as possible, so I'd have to have Roz do both tests.

I had spoken with Roz' cousin Rhoda - who had already tested - so I knew that Roz had no Internet or email, but Rhoda gave me her phone number.

Then FTDNA had their Mothers' Day sale with a package for MtDNA and Family Finder. I called Roz. She knew who I was, knew (from Rhoda, I suppose) that I was working on the family genealogy with the help of DNA and was only too happy to oblige.  I ordered the kit and promised to see her when I come to Pittsburgh for GRIP-July.

FTDNA's track record on getting results on time leaves much to be desired, but Roz' Family Finder results were nearly two weeks early. Roz' results were what I had expected and I have not had the time to look more deeply. I phoned Roz and set up to go to dinner the Monday of GRIP. And I wrote Rhoda.

I also redid the numbers for the Lazarus talk I am preparing for Seattle, to include Roz.

Roz' MtDNA results came in a few hours ago - also nearly two weeks early. She matches Herb at a genetic distance of one. She is a perfect match with the entire group of thirty - now fifty five. Herb's mutation is his and his alone. We cannot know if it was  created by my great-grandmother Jutte Leah or by Aunt Mary. In any case, it ends with Herb.

It looks like we have threaded the needle here and Roz' test was not money thrown away. What it does mean it is that the group of thirty could include some relatives close enough to make the effort worthwhile. We have pretty much pinpointed the MtDNA mutation. Now how do I use this to our advantage?

I'll see Debbie Parker Wayne soon enough - perhaps she'll have some tricks to suggest. I hope there will be a Part Three.

Housekeeping notes
Last call for ordering books in advance for Seattle.  I will have some with me, of course, but if you order now, you are guaranteed my having one signed for you.

Once again, my speaking schedule begins in Buffalo Grove Illinois next Thursday and is laid out in full here.

I submitted two proposals for RootsTech, to be held in Salt Lake City the second week in February. If that works out, I'll be available for speaking, probably with new material. Anyone interested, please drop me a note.

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.