MALACHI'S BURDEN

(A representation of what I said during services last Friday night.)

My father's yahrzeit is coming up this Friday, 5 Kislev. My father was not much for speaking in shul. In fact, I can only remember one occasion from my childhood when he did so and then I only remember the way he opened. But it must have been this week.

"I want to speak in defense of Esau," he began. I don't recall any of the specifics, but I know that opening was just a rhetorical device, for after he went through the "poor victim, he loved his father" bit, it became clear that my father knew perfectly well that Yaakov Avinu was the good guy in the story.

In the course of the past thirty-three years, I have had more than my share of maftir this week, bringing with it the reading of the haftarah – the final prophet Malachi, from the beginning through the first seven verses of chapter two.  (To be clear, I know that because of Rosh Hodesh we do not actually read this haftara this year…)

The general assumption seems to be that the portion and the haftarah is contained in the opening verses:

The burden of the word of the L-rd to Israel by Malachi.

I have loved you, says the L-rd. Yet you say: 'In what way have You loved us?' Was not Esau Yaakov's brother? says the L-rd; yet I loved Yaakov;

But Esau I hated, and made his mountains  desolate, and gave his heritage to the jackals of the wilderness.

ForEdom says: 'We are devastated, but we shall return and rebuild the desolate places';[But] thus saith the L-rd of hosts: They shall build, but I will throw down; and they shall be called "the border of wickedness, and the people whom the L-rd finds offensive, forever."

OK. But there are simpler, more colorful ways to make the same point, as we will do in two weeks. Ovadiah verse 18 writes:

And it will be that the House of Yaakov is fire, and the House of Yosef is flame, and the house of Esau is straw, and they shall kindle them and devour them and there will be no remnant of the House of Esau, as the L-rd has spoken.

That is memorable. And trust me, it's even better in Hebrew.

So last year, I had maftir and read Malachi and I said to Rabbi David Shapiro, a relative newcomer to our shul who recently made aliyah from Boston, that after all these years, this particular haftarah really doesn't speak to me and that I should probably learn it more thoroughly. A couple of days later, he brought me two pages of notes from things that his rebbe – Rabbi Yitzhak Asher Twersky, the Tolner Rebbe – said twenty-four, twenty-one and eighteen years ago and those notes are the basis for what I want to say now. An approach that takes a more comprehensive view of Esau.

Despite the "to Israel" of the opening verse, malachi's words are directed specifically to the kohanim, the priests in the Temple. The Establishment.

Verse 6 (and I shall be using the Koren translation from here on, though not always their punctuation):

A son honors his father and a servant his master; if then, I am a father, where is my honor? And if I am a master, where is my fear? says the L-rd of hosts, O priests who despise my name.

And he gets specific in verses 7-8:

You offer disgusting bread upon my altar; and you say "In what have we polluted thee?" In THAT you say "The table of the L-rd in contemptible." And if you offer the blind for sacrifice, is it not evil? Offer it now to thy governor – will he be pleased with thee or will he show you favor?

What is technically valid should should always be acceptable. Like the piece of meat that fell into the chamber pot – it may be kosher, but it stinks.

And it's even worse when presented in comparison, verses 11-12.

From the rising of the sun until it goes down, my name is great among the nations; and in every place incense is burnt and sacrifices are offered to my name, , and a pure offering. For my name is great among the nations, says the L-rd of hosts. But you profane it.

The nations understand but our own, who should know better, do not.

Followed by verse 13, which the Talmud uses to illustrate a mitzvah that is facilitated by a sin:

And you have brought [as a sacrifice] that which was [stolen] and the lame and the sick…should I accept this at your hand?

And in verse 14, he begins "Cursed be the deceiver," referring to claims to do the best he can but in truth is doing the bare minimum. And he completes that verse and the chapter by once again stating that G-d's name is feared among the nations, with the implication that not so among the kohanim in His own Temple.

R' Shapiro explains, as he quotes the Tolner:

The theme here is chilul Hashem. This always means "profaning the name – the reputation, the image – of the Ribbono shel Olam [Master of the Universe] as subjectively perceived by human beings. We cannot affect His objective essence." This chilul Hashem is a function of our disingenuous relationship to Him. We have here a full-blown characterization of [Esau].

The second chapter speaks of the consequences that await these tainted kohanim, including (verse 3):

Behold I will rebuke your seed, and spread dung upon your faces, even the dung of your [holidays].

The Tolner then brings several quotes from the Rambam (Maimonides).

Not everything that is not invalid may be brought intentionally. How is that? A person who is required to bring an offering should not bring a lean or disformed sheep and say "It has no blemish." For to him it is said "Cursed be the deceiver." [verse 14 above] But anything he brings for a sacrifice should be from the very best.

Things not fit for the altar, Ch. 7

Two quotes from the Rambam refer to the bit about spreading dung and "dung of your holidays." One refers to how a respectable person should conduct himself and one refers to a person whose holiday feasts are not shared with the poor.

Rabbi Shapiro concludes:

The upshot of these three passages in the Rambam is: A [sacrifice] can be defective, indeed despicable, although there is nothing formally wrong with it; the person's insensitivity can render his [sacrifice] revolting to the [Master of the Universe]. Similarly, one's observance of [holidays] can be defective, although on the surface he is complying fully with all halachic requirements. By extension, all out activities have to be pursued with sensitivity and thoughtfulness, and with a determination to avoid insincerity, cynicism and callousness.

This is the hallmark of Yaakov and stands in contrast to [our sages'] typology of [Esau]. This is the deeper connection between today's haftarah and parshah.

Oh, how my father hated hypocrites!

SIMON AS SHIMON...OR NOT

I was editing this before posting and it suddenly went completely blank. Nothing left but the title. 
CURSES ON YOU BLOGSPOT!

I drafted this a few days ago, so don't recall enough of it to recreate it quickly. Maybe another time.

THE ROSENBLOOM FAMILIES OF BORISOV

I have referred to my maternal grandmother's Rosenbloom family on several occasions here, but neither recently nor in great detail. The truth is, there isn't much detail at hand. In fact, we have several Rosenbloom families from Borisov but we have no idea how they fit together or even if they do.

My Great-Grandfather's Family
This week, with the yahrzeit of the younger of my mother's two older sisters coming up Thursday, seems a good time to see where we stand on this family.

Aunt Sadie sits on her father's lap.
(Mother was not yet born.)

Aunt Sadie Gordon - Shayna Liba bat Yerahmiel and Sarah - died twenty-one years ago at the age of seventy. She was born in Vandergrift Pennsylvania and lived her entire adult life in Pittsburgh where she was a secretary to an attorney. She never married. When I was very young we saw her frequently, then she pretty much disappeared from our lives until after my grandfather died. I don't think I saw her after his funeral, but we did exchange letters a few times a year.

Aunt Sadie was named after my grandmother's sister who died at about age twenty-seven in New York. She was married and had no children. Her husband disappeared, perhaps returning to Russia.

The elder Sadie 1910 - 
dressed for her sister's funeral

Israel David
Rosenbloom

My grandmother's sister Shayna Liba was the daughter of my namesake Israel David Rosenbloom and was named for his mother. Aside from the fact that her husband's name was Yaakov, we know nothing further about the family. No ages, no parents, not even if they had children other than Israel David.



Israel David Rosenbloom died in Penza sometime after 1929. The family had moved there after WWI. Or perhaps had been sent there. I exchanged a bit of correspondence with the Jewish community of Penza, but they could tell me nothing about his death or burial.

I have spent very little time and effort on Rosenbloom research in the last few years and that part of my family history seems to be walled off. My DNA tests are out there, but nothing obvious showed up thusfar. I approached two of my six male Rosenbloom second cousins about doing a Y-37 test , but neither was inclined to do so. We never got as far as Family Finder, as the Y-chromosome is more valuable here..


Borisov 54°14' N 28°30' E
Borisov is located some forty-four miles NNE of Minsk in Belarus and according to JewishGen was home to 7722 Jews in 1897.

There were other Rosenbloom families in town, in addition to that of Israel David ben Yaakov. there was Zalman Rosenbloom and his wife Esther (Friedland), who had nine sons. The family went to France in the first decade of the 1900s, and I had some correspondence with a grandson, Edouard, seventeen years ago.

Zalman died in 1937 and Esther is 1935 and both are buried in Paris. The cemetery records do not include their parents' names and Edouard told me that the parents names are not on the tombstones. The cemetery records say that Esther was eighty-one, meaning she was born about 1854, So Zalman was probably born in the early or mid-1850s, only a few years after Israel David. Maybe even a bit earlier.

There are, however, voter records for the 1906 Duma, the Russian parliament, which include two listings for Zalman Rosenblium of Borisov. In one his patronymic is Beniaminovich, in the other Bonevich. I don't know if these two are the same person but Zalman is clearly not a brother to Israel David, whose father is Yaakov.

Mother, Judith & Haim, us, Rosa & Alek

Then there is the family of Alexander Rosenbloom, who lived in Borisov until the late 1990s, when he and his family came to Israel. We met him and his wife Lilla at their home in Ariel. previously we had met his daughter Rosa and her husband at my sister's home in Elkanah.

Alexander knew his family in Borisov through his father Boris (b.1897), his grandfather Shaya (b.1869), his great-grandfather Tanhum and his great-great-grandfather Moshe. There is no place on this line where Israel David ben Yaakov or Zalman ben Binyamin could possibly fit in.

In the course of preparing this blog, I received an eighteen page pdf from Alexander's son Felix with a much more detailed tree. The additions are all in the descendants of Mordecai and Tanhum, so for the purposes of determining the relationships among the families, the sketch above is adequate.

So we are still clearly talking about either distinct families or a single family that goes back quite far.

There is no question that I need to go over all my notes and papers and see what the

Felix is Alexander's son. I'm not sure who the other two are, but I wrote to them.

databases have added these past years. I had a look at the JewishGen Family Finder a few days ago and saw that there are four researchers registered and all four have logged in during October, so we are talking about people with an active interest.

It is my understanding that Zalman's French family does not have many descendants, even fewer who are Jewish. Three of Zalman's nine sons were deported to their deaths during the Holocaust. My contact Edouard was born in 1915 and his first cousin the well-known research Bernard Kouchel, who made the introduction,  died a few months ago.

So much to do. So few hours in the week.
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Housekeeping notes
You can now read my recent AVOTAYNU (Summer Issue) article GETTING IT WRONG online.

Tuesday and Thursday evenings this week, I'll be participating in webinars on DNA analysis - one for project administrators.

I plan to attend an afternoon-long seminar "Sources of Rabbinical Genealogy Research in the National Library" at the Library, on the university campus next Monday.

As I say, so much to do, not enough hours.

AGAD Archives Adventures

Back in the earlier days of JRI-Poland, there was an arrangement whereby you could find records and order them directly from the Polish State Archives (PSA), including the AGAD archives, which is located in Warsaw but holds the records for east Galicia - my prime area of interest. They charged fifteen dollars for the first record and ten dollars for each additional record in the same order and the records came by mail.

Seven years ago, under new PSA management, the arrangement came apart and both the indexing and the ordering system were shut down.

When I began working full-time on genealogy five and a half years ago, I decoded that I wanted to acquire many more Pikholz and Pikholz-related records, not just the one-or-two per family that I had ordered until then. I looked into ordering directly from AGAD and found that they insisted on being paid by bank transfer. The cost of that bank transfer was high and made small orders very expensive.

So I decided to put together larger orders, including my own and those for other people, thus diluting the bank charges. I started with a fixed charge per record - ignoring the fact that AGAD charged double for records of two pages - and hoped to get enough interest from other people to cover not only the bank charges and my mailing costs, but part of the cost of my own records. That worked well enough that I later dropped the price and dropped it even further for larger orders.

This project, while enabling me to order my own records almost at will, required alot of work and aggravation, both vis a vis AGAD and vis a vis the people who wanted the records - many of whom made errors, paid me late or became general nudniks. A few stiffed me entirely, but since I never knew what AGAD would actually deliver, I could not ask for payment in advance. AGAD itself usually sent a few incorrect records that led to a few weeks of additional correspondence and delays.

And there was always significant, time consuming correspondence with people who did not understand that "records from east Galicia" did not include Lublin, Krakow, Kielce and who-knows-where-else.

This was not, I must emphasize, designed as a commercial endeavor. I only took other peoples' orders if I was ordering anyway - whether for myself or for research customers.

Eventually, AGAD began delivering scanned records online - a savings in postage, but requiring more work to sort them out.

About a year ago, everything changed as many of the records were placed online and people could download them free. It is not a simple process, as the link does not always the target the correect image, but it's usually off by no more than fifteen-twenty pages, so with a bit of patience, it's not hard to work with. Nonetheless, even today, I am approached by strangers asking me to help find their records because AGAD's links are imprecise.

Today's story is about a specific record of mine that I had ordered last year.  A search for the births to the couple Josef Pikholz and Lea Schwager turned up these six records:

My interest was in the last three, all in the same book. I had the others from previous orders. Taube and Chana Chaje are in consecutive akts in the same year, so they are twins. Mordko Hersch was born three years later. (Smaller towns often had several years bound into a single book.) This last record shows again why we should order as many records as possible, for only in his birth record, do we see that the mother is called Feige Lea, rather than just Lea.

In the meantime, the records became available online, so there was no need to order them - nor would they have provided them if I had. Following is the record for Mordko Hersch. It is the second one on the page. (I cropped the image to exclude the two additional records at the bottom of the page.)

 And here we see the parents' names enlarged. As you can see, the father is Josef Pikholz, as

expected, but the mother is not Feige Lea Schwager, but Henie Menczer - someone else entirely. Clearly what happened was that they has stitched the correct left page with an incorrect right page.  I leafed a few pages in each direction, but did not see the correct mother.

This error was not anything I had seen before, but their online scanned project was new and probably done without quality control. Beyond that, however, the left side of the next page was correct and since that was the other side of my right side, it was clear that they had the pages in hand and in order. (Friday, I heard from Mark Halpern of JRI-Poland and he explained that the scans online were not made from the books, but from microfilms, so the problem is in the microfilms.)

Another record - this one from Skalat - that I wanted about the same time came through like this: I wanted the second record on the page and it had the mother's side completely covered.

So I wrote to them about both records. several times. Eventually they gave me a better copy of the one here on the left, but they insisted that the Mordko Hersch record was correct. I pointed out to them that the index was different, but they insisted that they were not responsible for the index.

In the meantime, I was copying JRI-Poland's management about this, largely because I was concerned that other people were seeing incorrect records but didn't realize it.

In Boston, I brought up the subject publicly at a JRI-Poland volunteers meeting and another person in attendance told me that she had the same problem with one of her Skole records. The mother's data was from some other record.

After Boston, I tried two more times and on the second, copied Stanley Diamond of JRI-Poland. I had marked this on my calendar for follow up in three weeks, but Stanley said I should let him know if I didn't get results in one week.

And so it was that I received both records correctly. Or more precisely, I received the "covered" record uncovered as well as the right side of the Mordko Hersch record. I stitched the two sides together myself. I also alerted the woman with the Skole record and I assume she is pursuing it.

Today, I looked at the search results once again and they have made a change.

They added a column for the page number. The "view image" link still goes to the incorrectly stitched record. And they show two page numbers: 375, where the correct left side is, and 386 where the incorrect right side is. So those page numbers in fact match the faulty image.

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Housekeeping notes
I plan to place an order for AGAD record in two-three weeks, including the new ones I wrote about here a few weeks ago. No one else has joined my order yet, but several people have asked about other archives.

I received my copy on the Summer AVOTAYNU this week, which includes  an article of mine called GETTING IT WRONG. When I have a few minutes, I'll put it on my website.

The same issue opens with articles by Randy Schoenberg and my some-kind-of-cousin Adam Brown on Online Collaborative Genealogy and in particular, Geni.com. They presented the same subject in Boston. The next AVOTAYNU will have my response, plus something from the editor. This is really important.

I was in Haifa this week and took photographs of five Pikholz graves that I had not gotten before. Those are now online. Two others I didn't get to.

We received new DNA results this week. One is a Kwoczka cousin who matches most of the Pikholz from both Skalat and Rozdol. Another is from a Skalat Pikholz (from Grzmaylow, actually) who had not told me that he finally sent in his test. A third is a Pikholz descendant from Brezdowicz (near Rozdol) who had not even mentioned ordering a test.

Two webinars on DNA next week. I hope I'll learn something.

Name Changes

Under the British Mandate
It was about fifteen years ago that I first learned  - on JewishGen - that under the British Mandatory Government, all name changes had to be recorded in the Palestine Gazette and that these were available on a microfiche at the National Library in Jerusalem.

There were four Pikholz listed (actually, one Pikholz and three Picholz) and because it was a microfiche, I do not have a photograph, only my notes.

In 1923, Eliezer changed his surname to Haniel. He lived in Jaffa and listed no nationality. (You can see more about him here.)

In 1939, Chaim and Malka changed their surname to Etzyoni. This married couple lived in Tel Aviv and were of Palestinian nationality, as was typical of the Jews at the time.

In 1937, Hinde Renke Pikholz changed her given name to Shulamit. She lived in the Sheinkin neighborhood of Tel Aviv and was of Rumanian nationality.

The link to the search as it appears today.

In preparation for the IAJGS Conference in Jerusalem nine years ago, the Israel Genealogical Society (IGS) put this database online.

In today's version, the search button leads to something called Eretz Israel Records Indexing (EIRI), which is meant to search any number of databases on the IGS website.

So in order to reproduce the results for this post, I did a search. First in Latin letters. Using "Pikholz" or "Pickholz" as soundex produced no results at all Exactly "Picholz" did as well. Exactly "Pikholz" produced two name changes - Shulamit above and Ilan. But for neither was the original name listed.

Ilan is an odd story because his name was changed to Pikholz. It seems his mother entered the country using false papers which showed her as married to someone else, so Ilan's original surname was that of the fake "husband."

Starts with "Pik" gave me those two again, plus a few others from the 1922 census.

Is exacty "Pickholz" gave me two entries for someone I have never heard of.

These are reports of a pharmacist license (#571) for a woman in Tel Aviv. Her maiden name, Hilsenrath, is listed in the 1946 record and I haven't clue who she is. When I am next at the library, I'll check directories for those years and see who else lived at the two addresses.

Then I checked again using the Hebrew letters in the windows on the right. There is no "sounds like" function in the Hebrew search.

 None of those Hebrew look-ups shows any of the name changes nor, for that matter, Betti the pharmacist. All I found there were two Haifa directory entries and four entries from the 1922 census.

So much for that.

After the establishment of the State

The IGS website also has name changes after the establishment of the state, until 1979.  You can see the details here on the right. Interesting is that from 1962, they say that records include women who changed their names as a result of marriage, but in fact I do not see any. My sisters, for instance..

The search is OCR so it can only be done using Hebrew letters.

So I had a look at Pikholz and found quite a few name changes of people I know. Some with addresses, some with ID numbers, some with both and some - towards the end - with neither. There was also a legal notice of a probate case.

This excerpt from 1954 shows city of residence and ID number. But this was for just a short time.

There were, however, two people I had never heard of.

This list has previous names, new names and addresses. No ID numbers.

Elisheva Pickholz changed her name to Elisheva Reiter in 1950. Her address was Bet Simani, Romema, Jerusalem. I found listings for Elisheva Reiter in 1965 and 1970 Tel Aviv phone books and a 1992 tel Aviv burial, but I have not been able to get a handle on this, including from government sources. There is no ID number listed.

Here we have two columns of names, with neither addresses nor ID numbers

And we have a 1972 change from Yehudit Pickholz to Yehudit Ilani - no address or ID number listed. Here I really have nothing.

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Housekeeping notes
1. Family Tree DNA just made some significant changes in the display of their Family Finder matches page. There has been discussion among the researchers and some are pleased because there are new things they can do or existing things which are now easier. Some researchers are simply frustrated that things are not as they were and don't want to spend time and effort getting used to something new.

Other researchers - and I am in this group - are unhappy because information that we used regularly is no longer available. It will take time and patience to figure out how to deal with this and I am in short supply of both.

The fact that there was no warning makes it worse.

2. On Wednesday, 9 October, I plan to go to Haifa to hear Dana Michaelovici speak on DNA analysis for the Israel Genealogical Society.

SOME NUMBERS ON OUR DNA PROJECT

I would like to lay out some numbers on our DNA project. (Please don't say "So what does this mean?" I will take it as a complaint, not a question.)

Last week, I told the Pikholz descendants that I would be posting about the DNA results we have received until now. After preparing a draft, we received results for three more Family Finder tests and one Y-chromosome test.

So what follows has been completely rewritten and includes results that no one has seen yet.


Family Finder (autosomal) test results

We have actual autosomal test results in hand for twenty-five people - twenty-two from "group a" above and three more from "group e." That means that each person can match up to twenty-four other people in our group. The twenty-two all have Pikholz (that specific spelling) listed in FTDAN among their ancestral surnames, so it is easy to locate them.

So let's see how that works out.

I match only twelve, but my aunt matches sixteen and my father's first cousin eighteen. There are only four that neither of them matches - oddly enough none of those are on the Rozdol side.

Only three people match fewer people than I (eight, eight and five), but two of them have non-Jewish "other sides" which means they don't have the background noise that the rest of us have.

The average tester has 14.4 matches.

The two of the three non-Pikholz we have so far have sixteen matches, higher than the average number of matches within the Pikholz testers. The third has only thirteen matches and nothing close, but he joined our group on his own initiative. He has a cousin with good, close matches and I hope she will be joining our group soon.

The two people with the most matches are Lloyd from Skalat (twenty-one matches) and Micha from Rozdol (twenty matches). Micha, by the way, has two documented second cousins once removed (third cousins to each other), but his test shows him as a suggested fourth cousin to both. This is unusual, as it more often happens that people appear closer than they actually are.

Y-chromosome (male-line) tests
Several people who have tested have done their non-Pikholz male lines. I shall not be including those in this discussion.

Eight people have done Y-chromosome tests, four from Skalat, three from Rozdol and one whom I think is Skalat.  That last one is non-trivial as he has seventeen autosomal matches within our group.

Both Lloyd and Micha have done Y-chromosome tests, but Micha has only tested at the most basic level thusfar.

Among the Skalaters, I and two others have an identical haplogroup (R-M269) and we are pretty sure that one of them is my fourth cousin once removed.

The other is a bit of a puzzle, for while he and I are perfect matches at 37 markers - which indicates that we very likely have a common ancestor about six generations ago - he is the person who has only five autosomal matches, and none with my immediate family. His known cousin has only eight autosomal matches, also with none to my own family. What probably happened here is that particular branch of that particular family did not pass on its Pikholz DNA well. Other branches might have, but there are few of those and they have not tested.

Lloyd's haplogroup is something else entirely - E-M35.1. His case is unusual as his grandfather's birth record shows both his parents to be Pikholz. We know the lineage of the mother, but not the father. When the mother went to the US, she was married to someone who is not a Pikholz and it is possible that the birth record may be in error regarding the father's surname, thus explaining the different haplogroup.

Further explanations
I think I'll forego further explanations here, at least for now. Tiptoeing around certain privacy demands makes it difficult to communicate.

I'll write to people individually, based on their own results.

This, by the way, is well worth a read - http://dna-explained.com/2013/09/29/why-dont-i-match-my-cousin/
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I am giving a serious look at attending a course called Practical Genetic Genealogy which will be held at the Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh the week preceding the next conference in Salt Lake City.

A FEW NEW RECORDS

About a month ago, the following announcement showed up on several of the JewishGen discussion lists.

This is just the beginning. It continues on for several more paragraphs.

Note the reference to the All Galician Database as AGD, not to be confused with AGAD, the Warsaw archives which holds most of the available vital records for east Galicia in the late 1800s.

Having interests in most of the towns with the new records, I decided to have a look. Their drop-down menu did not include Skalat and Podwoloczysk (or for that matter Brzezany) among its choices, so I did a search for Pikholz records from Grzymalow, which is quite near Skalat.

The actual search. (I added the red arrow for the readers' convenience.)

The search produced thirty-two results, six of them from Grzymalow, the rest from elsewhere in east Galicia. Thirty-one showed the name Pikholz  - one was Pekules, which is reasonable as a sound-alike. I already had most of these records and I have actually met some of those mentioned in the Grzymalow school records. And it turns out I get the same thirty-two records regardless of which town I ask the system to search.

I would like to tell you about the four which I  am planning to order, all from the Podwoloczysk.records in the AGAD archives.

  

Prof. Jonas Zellermayer came to Israel form Vienna when he was twenty-four and lived here 

for nearly seventy years. His son-in-law was my boss thirty-five years ago.

Everything we have here lists his father as Avraham, without the second name, so we now know that his father was actually Avraham Yitzhak. One odd thing with this family - we know much  about Avraham's family, but not his parents' names. We know the names of the grandparents and his Pikholz great-grandparents, his mother's three brothers and two sisters, but we know neither the name of his Pikholz mother nor that of his Zellermayer father.

But now we know, as their marriage record was the great surprise of this new set of indexed

records. Jonas'  father Abraham Eisig was the son of Zalmen Juda Zellermayer and Ettel Pickholz.

The fact that he came from Liczkowce may also prove useful as we have several Zellermayer-Pikholz connections and it is not at all clear if there is a larger family story to be told.

In fact, at least three of the four  records I cite here are in some way connected to Zellermayers. 

In the meantime, I sent the marriage entry to the two granddaughters of Abraham and Basie and as a result had my most significant interaction with either of them in some years. Those two granddaughters are, by the way, named after Basie's parents Don and Rifke.

We have a Pikholz couple named Gabriel and Sara who lived in Husiatyn. They had a son Moshe in 1851 and a daughter Chanzie. Gabriel, who was described as "from Skalat" died in

1852 at age thirty in a house associated with a Zellermayer family. Our only knowledge of Chanzie is that she was married to Joel Halpern and lived in Podwoloczysk, which we learn from the 1887 death record of their young son Isaak and the 1893 birth record for their daughter Breine. We know nothing further of Breine.

The new records include the 1911 marriage of their previously unknown daughter Jente to Schamschon Duwid Sirki, son of Mechel and Ester. Thusfar, I have not found other references to the surname Sirki, but it would be great if we can find some descendants.

And this one must be related too. In 1896, we have the Podwoloczysk marriage of Wolf Feldman, age 29, son of Hirsch and Male of Tarnopol to Etie Golde Pikholz, the thirty-two year

old daughter of Gabriel and Breine of Husiatyn.

This cannot be the same Gabriel above - that one died 1852 and this one had a daughter in 1864. Nor can it be any other Gabriel we know. And although we do not have any ther couple named Gabriel and Breine, we do have the one Gabriel with a granddaughter Breine and another whose mother is Brane. It all seems to revolve around Husiatyn.

I haven't a clue how this couple fits in, but the existence of the marriage record opens the possibility of finding some Feldman descendant.

So I must see if I can find anything else of the Sirki and Feldman couples - nothing so far. I will also order the four records themselves from AGAD, as these are not online.

I plan to see if others want to order anything, so that I can put together a larger order, so I asked if any other new records will be added to the All Galicia Database in the coming weeks. (No sense in placing an order and finding out two weeks later that it could have been bigger.) The answer I received was "Nothing that would be from AGAD."

One other odd one. A couple of weeks ago, Jurek, a research colleague in Sweden was

looking at a 1938 telephone directory that Logan Kleinwaks had just uploaded to his wonderful site. There was a listing - apparently a business - for "Pickholz i Wachs" in Skalat. The telephone number is 8. Nothing else but the street name.

This is very strange, as there are no other Wachs in Skalat, at least during the earlier period for which we have records.

But we do have some sort of undefined relationship between the Wachs family of Zalosce-Podkamen and my own Pikholz family  who lived in that same area. So I cannot just ignore this.

I have asked one of the surviving Skalaters here if she knows anything about this business or the families involved and I plan to ask others as well.







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If you missed my piece about Uncle Kenny last year, you might want to have a look. His yahrzeit is Monday.

YOM KIPPUR

This week, I am posting Friday rather than early Sunday, because I want to get this up before Yom Kippur. On the other hand, I will likely have what to say afterwards, so please tune back again Sunday for my additional comments.

Last year, after the holidays, I was having a conversation with Dan, a younger fellow (maybe forty-two?) in my shul, about the holiday service. He often serves as hazzan for musaf on one of the two days of Rosh Hashanah and I generally read the Torah.

On Rosh Hashanah, we crown Hashem as King and I always liked that as a powerful service, fitting for a Divine Coronation. It has been awhile since I have participated in a service in that spirit, as the folks in our shul seem to prefer a soft and sweet service, arms waving in the air, etc etc.

And I said to Dan that one of my great regrets is that none of my sons has ever heard what I always considered the really great High Holiday service that I first heard forty-five years previous. Bits and pieces of that service.used to show up here and there and from time to time, but it was usually as a poor imitation - due both to the limits of the hazzan and the limits of the smaller congregations.

Dan asked me  what great service I was referring to and I told him that it was at the yeshiva in Kerem beYavne. I was not a student there, but the first year I was here, I was on a work-study program on neighboring Kevutzat Yavne.

The afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashanah, one of my friends in the yeshiva came over and told me that I really must come the next day, as the service there was remarkable. So I did.

And I went again for Yom Kippur and again the next year for both holidays.

The hazzan was only a few years older than I, but he had a remarkable set of melodies, designed for a large,  participating congregation, which came across as extremely powerful. The hazzan himself never repeated any words, but the rest of he yeshiva seemed well rehearsed and provided a wonderful background. There were parts when it felt like the roof would lift up.

And Dan said "Do you know who that hazzan is?" When I said I didn't he continued "That's Emanuel's father and he is still there every year." Emanuel is a thirty-ish fellow in our shul and I  asked him if his father is really the hazzan I had heard so many years before. I did a few of his

tunes and he shook his head in recognition. Yes, his father, who lives here in Jerusalem, goes

back to Kerem beYavne every year for the holidays and it's just like it always was.

"So is there a way I can go for Yom Kippur next year" I asked him, "with Devir?" Emanuel said this was probably easy enough to arrange - I mean it's not like we need to be fed or anything.  (My wife does not fast well and stays in bed the whole day, so she doesn't really care where we are. Not like Rosh Hashanah, which might be a problem if Devir and I were to go away.)

So it's set. Forty-six years later, we are going. It's less than an hour's drive and we haven't decided if we will eat here or there, but we are actually going ahead with it. They'll give us couple of beds in the dormitory, which will be fine, as long as both are not top bunks. (I have never done "top bunk" and do not care to start now.)

Check back here Sunday, as I plan to add a section about what actually happens.

In the meantime, I want to thank all my readers for looking in over the past year - even if no one comments. And please forgive me if anything in this blog warrants it. I have probably gotten a fact wrong here or there, misspelled a few names, misquoted or perhaps even given more serious offense.

Gemar hatima tovah.

So, you ask, what actually happened?

Forty-five years later, the actual facility is pretty much what it was. The iron beds, which were old then, are still there, in the same rooms. Yes, the rooms have air conditioning, but you still have to go outside to get to the bathrooms.

We ate at home, but that was more than an hour earlier, so we had a bit more in the dining room. The kind of institutional setting that even the army no longer has.

To be sure, I say all this with the greatest respect, both for the institution which values simplicity and the largely overseas student body which finds it adequate.

In the evening we went from six-something until about ten-thirty, with a talk by the Rosh Yeshiva for the better part of an hour. We started at 6:45 in the morning and went until 2:45, then reconvened at 4:15 until probably a quarter to eight.

The service was, of course, not exactly as it was then. There are melodies that hadn't been written back then which were incorporated into the service – even a bit of Carlebach. And even in this old, traditional place, there were some melodies whose chief value was that people knew them from some other traditional use. But these were used just once, not over and over.

Speaking of "over and over," we were reminded that even though some prayers appear multiple times in the course of the day, there are some melodies which belong in certain places but not in others. So many places do too much homogenization for my taste.

It was a pleasure to hear certain things done right after so often hearing them done wrong.

The whole congregation, the several hundred voices, all know how it is supposed to be done and everyone unabashedly plays his part. That's where the power comes from.

The high points that I remembered were all there, pretty much as I have remembered them. I had a bit of a scare on "vechol maaminim," a long piece which is often done with a series of tunes. The one I specifically remembered only showed up at the very end, after Devir had decided that it wasn't going to come.

He has a really nice bit of "vechol maaminim" on the words "Hamamlich melachim velo hameluch" (He crowns kings but retains sovereignty) where he (with the whole congregation) quite suddenly switches briefly to the high part of Hatikvah, to make the point that our own government must remember at whose pleasure it serves.

Am I glad we went? Absolutely. Will I go again? I don't know. The itch has been scratched.

NORTH FROM HUNGARY TO GALICIA?

Why are we even talking about Hungary?

Twelve years ago, I was looking at the Social Security Death Index (SSDI) and came across a group of people named Pikolcz. I followed this up (I don't remember how, exactly) and came upon a fellow named Ron in the Chicago area who told me that this was his mother-in-law's family. Hungarians. Not Jews.

His first response was as follows:

Thank you for your note.
While I do not know if the families connect I can tell you that the minister in Visk of the Reformed Evangelical Church there (Lajos Jozan) told us that the Pikolcz name in Visk is of the earliest families in the town dating back to the beginnings of the church there in 1200.

It is told that they descend directly from one of the seven tribes in the origins of the Hungarian Nation.

The spelling Pikolcz is quite rare in Hungary and is centered pretty much around Visk now Vyskovo.

I am sorry I don't have more but information from the Ukraine is not very plentiful.
The Hungarian name is pronounced..   Peeekholts  Although in the US it kind of became Pickles.

My paternal family came from Scotland thru Ireland to the US just after the civil war.

There were seven original Hungarian tribes? Who knew!

In follow up correspondence, Ron wrote:

My wife's mother is a Pikolcz and here is a little twist on things.They lived in the Carroll Avenue Hungarian neighborhood of Chicago and next door to them was another family also spelled Pikolcz. My wife's grandfather claimed that there was no connection between the two families however they were the only two with the spelling of Pikolcz in the whole US in the 1950's.

While My wife's grandfather came from Visk the other family came from Romania. An interesting part of geography is that now Visk is only 5 miles from the Romanian border.

I do feel that they were related in some form from way back.

My wife's great grandfather was the only Pikolcz to survive from a plague that struck the town. This is one reason there are not many descendants from the Hungarian Pikolcz family.

One thing that intrigues me is the fact that your family came from Galicia. Was that is a region close to the former Hungarian border with Poland? If so that would have been fairly close to Visk. My wife's grandfather would ride on his horse into the surrounding hills during winter and would cut trees just over the border in Poland and haul them down the mountain to Visk. If they were in the same proximity then it is very interesting on the spelling between the names. As far as I know there is no Hungarian translation for the meaning of the name Pikolcz. Which in some records was spelled Pikolc. Not being familiar with Jewish naming patterns I wonder if your family did not
originate in the Visk area from early times and pick up the name there. [emphasis mine - IP]

I should also tell you that there was a very large Jewish population in Visk before the war. Their families can be traced back many generations most likely well before the 1700's and much earlier there. As a population they were second in numbers to the Evangelical (Calvinist) population there.

The church is Visk is the original building built by King Istvan in the 1200's and was Catholic till the 1500's. It is said that Martin Luther himself preached from the pulpit there and shortly after the church became Lutheran for a short period of about 5 years. It is after this that they became what it is now Hungarian Evangelical and Reformed referred to as the Reformatus Church.

The original building still stands and is used today. Only the roof was burned off when the Tatars invaded Visk.  They did not have hold of the area like Western Hungary and only occupied there a short while using the church as a horse barn.

The only other period of non use is when it was when religion was not allowed.. after W.W.II But now the church is very active again.

Across the river Tisza from Visk is Bustyhasza and it is my understanding that a very large Jewish Cemetery exists there. My wife's grandmother worked for a jeweler when she lived in Visk. They were Jewish and very close. When the family passed away they willed acreage to her, but since the Pikolcz family left in 1914 and never returned the land was never claimed.

So Visk, or Vyshkove as the Ukrainians call it, is tucked into that corner of Ukraine near the present-day borders with Hungary and Rumania, not far from Khust. Its records, such as they are, would be in the Ukrainian archives in Uzhgorod - hardly the jewel of the State Archival Service of Ukraine. Visk is at 48 03 N, 23 25 W.

The idea that we came to Galicia from Hungary appealed to me. After all, the fact that we were Galicianers during the 1800s doesn't mean that we weren't someplace else in the 1700s. These Hungarian Pikolcz were apparently some kind of minor nobility who had fallen upon hard times and Jews lived on their land. Then when the Jews had to take surnames, they - like many freed slaves in the United States - took the name of the landowner. This was pure speculation on my part and we had no way to prove it one way or the other.

Apparently we would not find vital records in Visk, but perhaps land or tax or census records or books of residents? Something showing our ancestors there, even if only recognizeable by the group of given names that we find in early-1800s Galicia.

Over the years it was on the back burner. I would come back to the question from time to time, but there was no real way to do anything. Ron is on my mailing list, but it's rare when Visk gets a mention.

A whirlwind named Marshall

A couple of months before the DC Conference two years ago, Marshall Katz - a name I had not heard before - announced the formation of the "Sub-Carpathia Portal and Research Group mail list." I confirmed that Vyshkove is within the boundaries of this group, I joined and participated in the SIG meeting in DC.

Marshall's Conference biography reads:

Marshall Katz, since retirement from the U.S. Government, has applied his talents to creating numerous KehilaLink web sites for the villages and towns of Sub-Carpathia, Ukraine. His paternal grandfather is from Klyucharki (Várkulcsa), not far from Mukacheve (Munkács).

Of particular importance was, in 2011, Marshall was instrumental in the establishment of JewishGen's newest Special Interest Group (SIG)---the Sub-Carpathia SIG. He further created a web site "portal" for the Sub-Carpathia SIG which routinely receives visitors from around the world.

Marshall is also a retired USAF Chief Master Sergeant (E-9) and is married to Helen E. Fields, formerly of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 

Well, he certainly looks like a sergeant and he is a yinzer to boot, now living in Harrisburg. And he does tend to take charge.

He has personally visited the area in each of the last three years. These were working visits, with 325 towns and villages and 198 cemeteries covered thusfar, including photographs of all the tombstones in those cemeteries.

He is the force behind the SIG's website which includes lists and documents  and maps and photographs. He is looking to add family histories, testimonies and interviews, more photographs and translations, a gazetteer and is putting together a team to translate tombstones. (Yes, I have agreed to participate in that.)

He hopes to have a list of towns for his next visit soon and is working on records issues, to help make those available to researchers.

Marshall is aware of our interest in Vyshkove and we hope that he will turn up information of use to the Pikholz Project.

Then there is DNA

As readers know, for years it was my belief that the Pikholz families from Skalat and Rozdol are unrelated. The given names in the early 1800s did not overlap. The families just seemed different. But it was also significant that the two towns are three hours drive apart and I just couldn't see how Sara Rivka Pikholz came to leave Skalat to marry Pinkas in Rozdol.

So I'm thinking there are two separate families.

But the DNA says otherwise, as I have written a few times. I have no doubt that we are talking about one family and some of the Rozdol d escendants seem to be more closely related to Skalaters than two hundred years ago, and vice versa.

But if we consider that perhaps we were in Visk in the late 1700s and the family moved north - some to Rozdol (102 miles away) and others to Skalat (151 miles away), it makes alot more sense.

Add to that, the fact that Moshe, the eldest grandson of Pinkas and Sara Rivka in Rozdol and the father of more than 750 descendants, married Sara, the daughter of the long-time rav of Skole R' Juda Zvi Steg. The Stegs have a Hungarian branch. Perhaps Sara Rivka's match with Pinkas had its origins in connection with the Hungarian Stegs. (Note to self - Find out where the Hungarian Stegs lived circa 1800.)

I really like that as a scenario, even though I cannot prove a word of it.

The ball moves to Olga's court

One of the Conference speakers was Olga Muzychuk, the Deputy Head of the State Archival Service of Ukraine. She seemed very open to inquiries and I have asked her how we might get some relevant information from Uzhgorod.

More as it happens.

MIRIAM & ZIV, DUBIE & YITZHAK and also MERISSA

MIRIAM & ZIV, DUBIE & YITZHAK
About four years ago, I was contacted by an attorney in the UK who was looking for two heirs of a woman named Margaret, with a distinctly non-Jewish-sounding surname. She wanted me to find a man named Ziv and a woman named Miriam, both with common surnames.

She had addresses for Ziv in the Tel-Aviv area and for Miriam in Haifa and there was a provision that if Miriam had predeceased Margaret, her portion was to go to her husband Dubie, a common nickname for Dov. There was no such provision regarding Ziv.

She had no other identifying information.

Of course, I found neither at the suggested addresses. If I had, there would be no story to tell.

I did find a Miriam with the correct surname at another address on the same street, but her husband was Yitzhak. There was no answer at the telephone number that was in the book.

I telephoned someone else the apartment building and was told that they had retired and moved to somewhere in Tel Aviv. Eventually I found someone in the building who had a phone number and I called and spoke to Yitzhak, a retired professor of (I think) chemistry. He told me all I needed to know.

They were indeed the couple I was looking for. Ziv was actually Zvi and he was Miriam's late brother. Zvi's wife had died some years before, so Margaret - he called her Peggy - had not mentioned her. (Ziv and Zvi look similar in Latin letters, but in Hebrew, צבי and זיו are not similar at all.)

It seems that Peggy had come from England to their native Hungary as an au-pere before the War and had worked with them as children. She did not know what had happened to them, but eventually found them here in about 1968 and they renewed their friendship. They visited each other more than once. Miriam had been wondering why she had not heard from Peggy recently.

Zvi had predeceased Peggy, so his share of the inheritance returned to the estate.

All that remained for me to do was to get a death certificate for Zvi and to report all this to the client.

Oh, and the bit about Yitzhak's being called Dubie? That came from the pajamas he had as a child. They had teddy bears on them.

MERISSA
This is part of wrapping up my trip to the US. The one clear failure of the trip.

When I was young, I tried to gather information on my family history. But I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't speak to the available elders, including my grandfather's brothers. (I knew them, but not to have an actual conversation.) And when I did speak to the elders, I never really knew what I should be asking.

Nonetheless, I acquired the reputation among the family as the one who knew something.

Twenty years ago, we all met in Pittsburgh to celebrate my grandmother's ninetieth birthday. Among those there was my first cousin Karen, who lived (still does) in Alaska. Needless to say, we didn't see much of each other and I didn't know her kids at all.

But Karen's nine year old daughter Merissa had none of the reservations that I had had at her age (and beyond) and she spoke to me about getting a copy of the family tree I had supposedly done. I didn't want to tell her that I hadn't done anything in the preceding twenty years and that all I had were some old hand-drawn charts and a packet of notes collected over the years, so I told her that I would get it in order and get back to her.

Once home, I got a copy of Brothers' Keeper from a neighbor and began what has become my life's work. And my profession.

Everything I have done regarding genealogy came from that one request from Merissa, whom I have not seen since. Without her, maybe I would have taken up genealogy. More likely not.

My recent trip to the US included a Sunday evening bus from Pittsburgh to Indianapolis, with a fify-five minute stopover in Columbus Ohio, where Merissa now lives. I told her I'd be coming through at ten-thirty and she said she'd come to meet me. (She was to be returning from Alaska that morning, so a night meeting was no easy thing.)

I was really looking forward to this. Bought something to give her. And some pictures. And sandwiches - figuring I didn't want to deal with food service at Greyhound Columbus. And I wanted a picture of us together, so I had my camera in easy reach.

The bus was more than an hour late leaving Pittsburgh and the driver split the passengers into two groups. Our group would not be stopping in Columbus. I don't think I ever stood up a date before and this was a really painful experience telling her we'd have to cancel.

Eventually we did stop in Columbus, but it was way too late to drag her out. So I ate both sandwiches.

Next time we'll do it better.

Merissa turns twenty-nine on the first day of Rosh Hashanah, this Thursday. Happy birthday, girl. I owe you.

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DNA Notes

A few hours ago, we received autosomal DNA results from at least five seven Pikholz descendants. It will take me a day or two to analyze, but two things are clear.

1. Joanna's story has legs.

2. The Rozdol and Skalat families are totally cross-matched, to the point that the idea of two separate families is obviously wrong, the idea that there are two distinct branches of the Pikholz family is probably wrong and the axiomatic belief that all the Rozdolers are descended from one couple may well be wrong.

There is much work to be done.

TIME TO GO HOME, BUT FIRST A FEW WORDS ABOUT THE LAST FEW WEEKS

I am going home Monday (arriving Tuesday) at the end of a twenty-seven day trip to the US, so I suppose it's time to record some thughts about the time I have spent here - chiefly the Conference in Boston. (Right now, Blogger is in one of its moods and I cannot even get it to accept links.)

Last week's blog was basically a placeholder, saying nothing at all and with no announcements about it on Facebook or anyplace else. Oddly enugh, accrding to Blogger's count, I had about the same number of unique visits as any other week. So I suppose it doesn't matter if I say anything or not. But I am not so much speaking to readers as I am recording my work and experiences in genealogy.

Shabbat in Brookline was very nice. I was with a family I didn't know, arranged by a neighbor of mine who made aliyah from there a couple of years ago. In the course of Shabbat, I met a man who was getting married the following week at the Poale Zedeck in Pittsburgh, so I was able to send surprise regards to my uncle. Friday I went over to Irene's house and I talked Pikholz genealogy with her and her husband and older son. Irene participated in the Conference and our paths crossed several times a day.

The Conference hotel left something to be desired, starting with space to move around in the guest rooms. It would have been crowded in that room if I had been there with my wife. So much moreso with a roommate. A third cousin of my wife's, actually, and a very nice fellow. The lecture halls were cold, even for me. The elevators were terribly slow, but fortunately I was on a low floor and took the stairs much of the time. All told, the hotel gave us the facilities we needed and on balance was not bad. I used one of the lunch breaks to meet an old friend from my Chicago days - someone I hadn't seen in forty years. (He says he reads tis blog - Hi Zale.)

Morning minyan was well-attended, between eighteen and twenty-five people, with a brief class beforehand on the subject of exhumation and reinterment. Afternoon and evenng services were less well-attended, but we managed. The ever-reliable Elliot Greene (with whom I have a DNA connection) handled all the arrangements, including siddurim and a sefer Torah

One of the most interesting lectures was by a woman who was raised Roman Catholic who managed to prove her Jewish ancestry back to the Inquisition and added to the historical record of her ancestral Spanish town in the process. She eventually received letters both from the Rabbinate in Jerusalem and from a prominent US Sephardic rabbi attesting to the fact that she was Jewish from birth. I bought her book "My 15 Grandmothers" which tells that story. Her journey could have ramifications for many other Conversos, who are interested in returning to their historic Judaism, five hundred years after their forced cnversions.

Logan Kleinwaks spoke about what is new on his wonderful website, genealogyindexer.org. It used to be mainly directories, which can be searched using Optical Character Recognition, but he has been adding other types of records as well. I hsve to spend some time on the site when I get home.

Online Historical Jewish Newspapers was the subject of a talk by Janice Sellers. The tiny room was overflowing, with people sitting on the floor and standing along the wall. It was good, though I already knew quite a bit of what she presented.

I attended other lectures as well, but these were the best of the bunch.

I attended two meetings - one of JRI-Poland volunteers and town leaders, run by Stanley Diamond and Robinn Magid. The other was the Sub-Carpathian SIG, run by Marshall Katz (both a DNA match and a yinzer). I'll do a separate post in a few weeks about Marshall and the Sub-Carpathians and why this interests me at all. (Related to this was a lecture by Olga Muzychuk, the Deputy Director of the Ukrainian Stete Archives. Perhaps I'll have more on this when I blog about Marshall.)

My cousin Adam Brown spoke about what he considers the next big thing in genealogy - online, collaborative trees and in particular genie.com. He knows well that I have reservations about this kind of thing. In fact, I have an article in the coming AVOTAYNU called "Getting It Wrong" which the editor has apparently paired with Adam's article reviewing his talk at the Conference. I am already thinking out a response to Adam's article, for the following AVOTAYNU.

My main interest at the Conference was DNA and I attended everything I could. I started off with an hour of one-on-one discussion with Bennett Greenspan, the President of Family Tree DNA, the company we use for our Pikholz Project testing. He gave me some direction on the analysis of our Y DNA results. (We are close to thirty people so far, with results from thirteen.) Bennett also promised that he'd get Elise Friedman to give a webinar for project administrators, going through all of FTDNA's analytical tools.

I also attended his talk, which I found less useful, but it was an insight to his philosophy. I did not attend Bennett's Breakfast With The Experts session, as it conflicted with morning minyan.

There was a meeting of DNA Project Administrators, at which I had hoped to learn all about the subject. What I learned was that I was not the only clueless person in the room and I expect that the more experienced folks thought we were holding them back.

I also attended a two-hour for-pay computer session on DNA analysis for individuals who had already tested. Some came totally unprepared and we wasted upwards of half an hour because they didn't know thier kit numbers or passwords or had no idea even how to get into the site. Fortunately the room was available into the next hour, so Elise gave us some extra time at the end.

My own talk, on Tuesday at five, went very well. Barbara Stern Mannlein introduced and people seemed to enjoy it. I am still trying to get the audio recording to which I am entitled. The program people made a big deal about getting speakers' permission to video the talks, but in the end no video was done of mine. Too bad, because the audio alone is not very useful. (My Power Point was full of dynamic slides, including circles and arrows and general activity. I was surprised that in all the other lectures that I attended, Power Point served as nothing more than a slide projector. Maybe people prefer it that way.)

The next evening I had a long discusion with Russell Maurer, a micro-biologist, who had attended my talk. He seemd to think I am doing this sensibly, but cautioned about chasing any particular conclusion. That, of course, was my whle point. And as I wrote two weeks ago, subsequent test results seem to support where I am going.

I was also drafted into a Q&A panel on archives in different countries. It was a first-time event and can only get better. The biggest problem was that the questons were both rambling and off-topic.

After Boston came Miami and south Florida, Baltimore and Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Bloomington and finally Chicago and Buffalo Grove. I missed an imprtant visit at the Greyhound Station in Columbus, but more on that anther time.I saw some close family, made face-to-face connections with several Pikholz families and visited two Florida cemeteries.

Next year's conference is in Salt Lake City, the week before Tish'a beAv. My participation may be contingent on whether I am approved to speak.