The Rosenzweigs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

A Very Deep Connection or Just A False Segment

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

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

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

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

Then there is Helen's match.

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

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

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

None of this rings any bells for Helen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Politzer

Customers of Family Tree DNA are familiar with the match alerts we get from time to time, whether our own kits or the kits of members of our projects.

As I manage over a hundred kits, I am not about to stop what I am doing to look at these every time I receive one and in any case, I want to see how a match fits not just with me  but with other family members including those not close enough to warrant an alert. So nearly two years ago, I decided to look at all the new matches across my family members every few months. Then I write to the ones that look interesting and ask them to upload to GEDmatch to see if these matches are on shared segments.

Usually nothing much comes of it. Even when the DNA points to a very specific portion of my family, the match usually doesn't know any of my surnames or even my geography.

Last week I prepared the matches for the past four months and Sunday I sent out messages to the scores of matches who looked even a little bit promising. So let me tell you about Cynthia, who happens to be the wife of a fellow I actually know.

So I asked her to register for GEDmatch/Genesis and after it batched I looked at her top 20,000 matches using the Tier1 one-to-many search. She matches seventy-eight of my kits and I did some chromosome browsers to see how her matches line up in family groups. As usual I was looking for segments of over 10 centiMorgans with multiple meaningful matches with my families.

On chromosome 3, she matches seven of us - four of my parents' children, one first cousin and two second cousins, all pointing to my maternal grandfather's side. All we have there are the surnames Gordon and Kugel. And it was a small match anyway, so probably from a pre-1800 common ancestor.

Chromosome 5 showed a 12 cM match with a pair of second cousins in the Nachman Pikholz branch of the family. Not much with that either - but if Cynthia had the relevant surnames, it could have been nice.

Chromosome 6 had two segments of minor interest - one with some second and fourth Pikholz cousins of mine and another with one first cousin and three second cousins on my maternal grandmother's Rosenbloom side. Here too, we have no other surnames, but we do know that the
family lived in Borisov (Belarus) for at least half of the 1800s.

Both chromosomes 16 and 20 brought matches with small groups of my third and forth cousins on

the Pikholz side.

Chromosome 22 has seven descendants of my Pikholz great-great-grandparents. Both of these ancestors are Pikholz.

Then there is the X, chromosome 23. The relevant matches look like this.

The four nearly identical matches belong to two of my sisters, my father's brother and my fourth cousin Lydia. They all triangulate, so they are all from a common ancestor.

This cannot be from my grandfather, because Uncle Bob gets no X from his father. So we know it's my grandmother's side. So given Lydia, who is part of my grandmother's paternal grandmother's Zelinka family, how exactly does this fit together and who is the candidate for the common ancestor?

Uncle Bob is a third cousin to Lydia's mother
so we and Lydia are fourth cousins.

Nathan / Nahum Zeinka's fallen gravestone

Our most recent common ancestral couple are Isaak and Sari Zelinka, who were born in the mid-1780s. But Lydia's second-great-grandfather Nathan Zelinka received no X from his father, the source of the match between Lydia and Uncle Bob must be from Sari, Isaak Zeinka's wife.

Nearly two years ago, Uncle Bob's daughter Linda and I were in Slovakia, together with our fifth cousin on the Zelinka side, Cyndi and while in Zilina we met Lydia. In the course of taking down her family information, I asked if she knows anything about our third-great-grandmother Sari. Lydia said that she understood that her surname is Politzer. This made sense to me because many years ago, my grandmother had told me that her father was related somehow to Joseph Pulitzer - he of the prize. - but she had no idea how. I have tentatively recorded Sari as Politzer, pending some kind of actual documentation.

So last year, Lydia gave our third-great-grandmother a name and perhaps a family and now we have an actual bit of her DNA.

(Note, I could have seen this with an analysis of Lydia, having nothing to do with Cynthia, but I didn't - so I can thank Cynthia for that.

Caveat - it is theoretically possible that the segment comes from my grandmother's MOTHER's side and that Lydia has some unknown ancestry in Hungary, but I consider this to be a vanishingly small possibility.

The Matching Segments tool on GEDmatch does not include the x chromosome, but on Genesis it does. They call it "Segment Search" and it is on Tier1. There are about three dozen people who share that match with both Uncle Bob and Lydia and I suppose I should write to them. Maybe something else will turn up.

(What I don't understand is why Uncle Bob and Lydia do not show up on Cynthia's Segment Search. I'll have to speak to GEDmatch about that.)

Housekeeping notes 

Order here.
European Jews have always married mainly within the tribe. Whether our numbers five hundred years ago in Europe were four hundred or four hundred thousand, the pool was limited. As a result, the members of the tribe today are all related to one another, multiple times.  This phenomenon, known as endogamy, makes Jewish genetic genealogy very difficult, often impossible. There is a similar phenomenon in some other population groups.

I was convinced that this brick wall is not as impenetrable as it seems, at least in some circumstances.

I believe that this book demonstrates that I was correct.

When I decided I wanted to write a book, I was not sure if I wanted to write a “How to” book or a “How I did it” book. The decision was dictated by the facts in the field. Different family structures, widely different numbers of living family members, and other similar factors dictated that writing “How to” would be irrelevant for most researchers.

“How I did it” is more likely to be helpful to the research community and more likely to instill the confidence necessary for such a project.

It is my hope that this book will encourage and inspire other researchers of their European Jewish families and other endogamous populations to say “I can do this!”

Our Genetic Portrait - Part One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

לשנה טובה תכתבו ותחתמו

Housekeeping notes

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

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

Stiff and Sore - Day One: Zilina

The cemetery visits began today, Monday. We met Pavel Frankl at the entrance to the cemetery in Zilina a few minutes walk from where we are staying. The cemetery has been in use since 1857 and still serves the local Jewish community. It is clearly identified, has a large chapel for funeral services and well-kept graves in numbered rows, with the locations listed in neatly organized books. It is a model of what we would like to find in any cemetery.

Pavel in the Zilina cemetery

Pavel himself looks after all the Jewish cemeteries in the area, though the others have not been used for decades. He has also written a book (500 pages, small print, lots of photographs) about the Jewish community of Zilina and has written a book on the subject - in the Slovak language. Cyndi bought a copy.

We were not there for long because we wanted Pavel to take us to the Kotesova cemetery and knew we could come back to the one in Zilina at our leisure, though it is generally closed before noon. (The First of May is a holiday here, hence the morning hours.)

Not well-kept graves, no numbered rows and most critically - not flat.

Pavel told us that students had cleared away much of the trees and branches a few weeks ago, but what with the hillside, a bit of mud, and the rest of the underbrush it appeared more than a bit treacherous.

Cyndi expected to find loads of our Zelinkas here and some others from her part of the family. It was not so simple, starting with the fact that most of the tombstones do not have surnames. Many others are only partially legible or are broken or inaccessible. Many of the better quality stones were stolen by neighbors or local government.

Among the more interesting stones is Esther, the wife of Ber Meilech. Her father's name does not appear and there is a very nice inscription, but the interesting thing is at the top.

The broken candle.

I had not seen this particular symbol before, but I have no doubt about its meaning - a married woman who died young.

Another interesting stone is Yosef. There are certainly many stones where the deceased's name appears as an acrostic in a set of often rhyming lines.

This Yosef (on the left) is an example. We see his name Yosef the son of Dov Ber on the fifth line. We also see the four letters of Yosef at the beginning of the first four rhyming lines.

This is the oldest grave we saw. The year is off the top left edge of the photograph and shows 5590. This Yosef died in late 1839.

But it was a different Yosef whose stone was more interesting. The date of death is the twentieth of Av 5670 (1910) and it appears at the very top, outside the photograph below.

There are four rhyming lines and the fifth says "ben R' Menashe Schlesinger."

But no given name at all.

It took a few minutes until I realized that the four rhyming lines begin with the letters of Yosef. I don't recall seeing a grave where the only appearance of the deceased's name is in the acrostic. Certainly not when there is no emphasis of those letters.


I spent a lot of time on the ground. Mostly awkwardly. Usually long enough each time for my knees and feet to become stiff. This is one of my better positions. And it's a Zelinka grave as well, though we don't know who she is.

I ended up on the ground for maybe eight graves, both for the photography and in order to decipher and copy the inscriptions. We have more days like this ahead of us, both here in Slovakia and in Hungary.

Late Tuesday afternoon, Lydia came to visit at our Airbnb apartment. I was introduced to Lydia by Miri Turcan - a DNA contact - who lives in Israel but who comes from Slovakia. Lydia was born in Zilina and now lives in Prague, so we have been talking about meeting up for some time. She speaks no English, but some Hebrew as she lived in Israel for two years. Neither Cyndi nor Linda is conversant in Hebrew.

We had hoped to meet Lydia in Prague, but she was in Zilina and expected to return the day we were making the reverse trip. But she stayed here a few extra days. We were all pleased she did. First of all, we nailed down how we are related. Lydia's mother's father's mother's father Nathan Zelinka is the brother of my father's mother's father's mother Mali/Miriam Zelinka Rosenzweig. That makes Lydia a fourth cousin to Linda and me and a fifth cousin to Cyndi.

The parents of Nathan and Mali are Isaak and Sari Zelinka and Lydia told us that she thinks Sari is a Polizer. Now that I think about it, Nana's half brother Uncle Fred had said there was a relationship with the Polizers but Nana thought it was on Uncle Fred''s mother's side, not on our side. Maybe not. Or maybe both. In any case, I am recording this with a question mark, because we have only Lydia's "I think" to go on.

Lydia sketched out her family - her children and grandchildren, and the same for her brother and her three first cousins. One of those first cousins, Milan, was supposed to meet us in Prague, but we didn't connect properly. Linda will be returning to the US from Prague next week and will meet there with Lydia and Milan together. That should give me time to organize all this new information into a printout so that Lydia can check it and add appropriate details on dates, spouses etc.

Lydia's great-grandmother has a sister Jeanette Spitzer whose tombstone was one of those we visited in Kotesova earlier today. She died in 1891.

Lydia did a DNA test with MyHeritage and just sent it in. We'll get her on GEDmatch when she gets her results. She also has a tree on MyHeritage. She is also related on her other side to Dana Michailovici from Kiryat Hayyim and perhaps we will get together in Haifa next time Lydia is in Israel.

Lydia's mother has a sister who is married to a Rosenzweig. We'll have to find out exactly how he fits into our family too.

Tomorrow we look for Nana's grandparents.

Moritz Rosenzweig, Eighty-Eight Years Later

My great grandfather Moritz Rosenzweig died 19 Heshvan 5689, eighty-eight years ago today.

With his wife Regina and children, ~1905

He was born 26 November 1858 in Domaniza, Trencin County, Slovakia to Ignac (Yitzhak Yehudah) Rosenzweig and Mali (Miriam) Zelinka. Both his parents' families had lived in Trencin County for several generations.

He had a sister who died just before her sixth birthday and three brothers, two older and one younger.

The towns in red are "ours," as is
Považská Bystrica (aka Vag Bestercze)

Moritz' mother Mali died in 1905 at age eighty and Ignac in probably 1917 at age ninety-six. Both are buried in Vag Bestercze.

In February 1885, Moritz Rosenzweig married Hermina (Chana) Schaefer in Budapest. They had a daughter Elvira and a son Siegfried (aka Aunt Ella and Uncle Fred). Hermina died in 1889 and the next year, Moritz married Regina (Rivka) Bauer of Kunszentmiklos. They had three children in Budapest - Sigmund, Albert Jules and Ilona (later Helen). Uncle Julie (later AJ Rosen) was named Yitzhak Yehudah in 1893, after his grandfather who lived another two dozen years.

In 1901, Moritz went to the United States, arriving in New York but bound for Allegheny Pennsylvania, now the North Side of Pittsburgh.

According to the passenger list, he was going to his cousin in Allegheny. I cannot read the name precisely and do not know who it might be.
 
The following year, Regina arrived in Allegheny with the five children and one year after that my grandmother was born. She was named Miriam (Margaret) after Moritz' living mother.

He became a US citizen in 1906. I see no evidence that he ever returned to Europe, not for his parents' funerals nor to visit his ninety year old father. (I checked both US passport applications and incoming passengers on Ancestry.)

Moritz worked as a cabinet maker and the family attended the (predominantly Hungarian) Poale Zedeck synagogue in the Hill District. He served on the building committee for the new building in Squirrel Hill and died at age seventy, just after the first High Holiday services were held in that building.

Housekeeping notes
I have just set for 12 February at the Orange County JGS.

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

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

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

Chromosome Mapping - It's Not So Simple

At the end of last week, I put my toes into the water of chromosome mapping to show which bits of my own DNA came from which of my father's ancestral lines. I looked at family matches with Debbie and Cyndi on the Zelinka line, Fred on a combination of the Rosenzweig and Zelinka lines and Shabtai on Bauer and Stern lines. That was on my grandmother's side. On my grandfather's side, I looked at Bruce, Pinchas and Ben on the Kwoczka side and the Baar and Riss cousins as descendants of my great-great-grandmother from her first husband.

I tried to be conservative, leaving out a number of segments that were small or otherwise suspect and looking for additional matches within the family.

The result was forty-five segments, totaling something over 550 centiMorgans or about one-sixth of the DNA that I received from my father. Not a lot, but a start.

Debbie's segments
Well, it may be a start, but it's a rough one. First there is this:

Erika is one of the Riss cousins, a descendant of my great-great-grandmother Rivka Feige from her first husband. Debbie's segment is part of Erika's segment and yes they triangulate. They are on the same chromosome 11. None of this "maybe on my mother's chromosome 11."

Although I overlooked this when I did the mapping last week, I should not have been surprised. Debbie matches my family in multiple ways and I have begun using her matches in my Power Point presentations to illustrate endogamy.

From one of my Power Point slides, showing Debbie's multiple matches with my families

Right there in point 3, I note that Debbie has matches with Rivka Feige's family, not only with the Zelinkas.

In fact, I discussed that specific segment on chromosome 11 when I introduced Debbie several months ago.

So I misattributed this segment to the Zelinkas when in fact it comes from Rivka Feige.

And what about the third of Debbie's three segments from last week's mapping, the one on chromosome 19? I mentioned that too in the original blog about Debbie's matches, but without showing the chromosome browser. So here it is.

This segment where Debbie and I match has also reached me from Rivka Feige. (Jane is my fourth cousin on that side.) So that's two segments that move from "Zelinka" to "Rivka Feige."

There could be a similar problem with Cyndi's two segments, but we thus far have not identified any effects of endogamy with Cyndi, so I'll leave that alone. For now.


Shabtai, Fred, Bruce

But that's not all. In reviewing last week's mapping, I saw this - a three-chromosome round robin of conflicting matches with Shabtai, Bruce and Fred - each of them supposedly unrelated to the others.

(Shabtai and Bruce have the same Y-haplogroup, but too far from one another to be considered a Y match.)

None of the three pairs triangulates. Not even the pair on chromosome 5 where the end point appears the same for Shabtai and Bruce. So this is not showing us that Bruce and Shabtai have a common ancestor we don't know about. Nor do Bruce and Fred. Or Fred and Shabtai.

(To be precise, they do have matching segments - in fact Bruce and Fred have two - so there is common ancestry between each pair. But not on chromosomes 1, 5 and 15. And not in any of their matches with me.)

For each pair, there are two possible explanations. One might be a match on my mother's side - after all, I have two chromosomes each numbered 1, 5 and 15, one from each of my parents. The other explanation is that catch-all, circular answer that one (or both!) of those matches is IBS, Identical By State, a false match. Although I know better, I think of the IBS answer as a refuge of scoundrels.

So let's see if anyone can be from my mother's side. As I have explained before, six cousins on my mother's side have tested: my first cousins Leonard and Kay, my second cousins on my grandfather's side Ruth and Judy and my second cousins on my grandmother's side Beth and Sam. Each of those pairs are first cousins to one another.

On chromosome 1, Fred matches only my cousin Ruth, but not on the segment where he and Bruce match me. That does not prove that he cannot match me there on my mother's side, but it is something of an indication., especially since he doesn't match the other cousins on my mother's side ANYPLACE.

Bruce's matches on chromosome 1 include Ruth, Judy and Sam, but interestingly not my first cousins - whom he doesn't match at all.

Bruce's matches with Ruth, Judy and Sam and with me, my sisters and family on my father's sides.

There is no triangulation here between Ruth, Judy or Sam with me, nor do those segments triangulate with any of Bruce's other matches on my father's side, so Bruce does not appear to match me here on my mother's side.

So since neither Fred nor Bruce appears to match me on this segment on my mother's side, one of them must be IBS - a false match. I will nominate Fred for IBS since his 7.85 cM segment is smaller than Bruce's 10.49 cM segment. My match on this segment would therefore be on Bruce's Kwoczka side. But there is a large dose of guesswork here.

On chromosome 15, Fred matches no one on my mother's side and Shabtai's matches with Leonard and Sam do not line up with mine, so we are pretty safe in saying that neither is on my mother's side. Fred's segment with me is 14.49 cM and Shabtai's is only 6.06 cM, so Shabtai's is almost certainly the IBS and this segment is on Fred's Rosenzweig or Zelinka side.

Chromosome 5 is a bit more complicated. Shabtai and I have a 35 cM segment and he has segments of just over 5 cM with Leonard and Sam.

Theirs do not triangulate with mine.

With Bruce, there is no triangulation and no matching at all with me. So here too, this is not from my mother's side.

But Bruce's match with me is 12.42 cM - a bit large for IBS. Yet, I haven't much choice. Shabtai's 35 cM segment is certainly not IBS. So I must ignore Bruce's segment and attribute this DNA to Shabtai's Bauer or Stern lines.

Endogamy is hard and the results of this kind of mapping are far from certain. Throwing it all into a machine and cranking out results makes a pretty, multi-colored chart, but I wouldn't try to take it to the bank. Even with tweezers and a microscope it's no simple or certain matter.