COUSIN MARLA

After three consecutive weeks of blogging about Pikholz DNA, I planned to change the subject to something else - anything else.

Then I heard from Marla.

I had tweeted about having been accepted for the GRIPitt course in Practical Genetic Genealogy and Marla congratulated me on that. Having recently looked at the MtDNA matches for Pikholz descendant Amos (of the only Pikholz line that is all female) and seen Marla's name there, I decided to see whom she matched within our group.

Marla matches fifteen out of the twenty-six Pikholz who tested, but oddly enough Amos is not one of them.

The most interesting of those matches was with my father's cousin Herb, my father's sister Aunt Betty and me. Using Herb as the base, Marla matches all three of us on chromosomes 1, 16 and 22 (5.46 cM, 5.47 cM and 7.68 cM) and has another match with just Herb and Aunt Betty on chromosome 11 (5.78 cM). She did not match my second cousin Terry.

I reported this to Marla and she told me that her brother, her mother and her mother's brother also tested. Marla's brother also has fifteen matches - eleven of them are the same as Marla's and each has four that the other does not. So that's nineteen between them. Marla's mother has seventeen matches with us and the uncle has sixteen. All four have now joined our group.

Here is how Marla's group of four lines up with our three. Considering that we are defined as "remote" and cannot be closer than six generations, those seem to be very nice matches.

So I am guessing that Marla's family and mine have their Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) six-seven generations ago. Her family surnames on her mother's side do not appear in our family.Those names would be Uszerowicz, Lewkowicz, Organek (previously Organkiewicz), Herszkowicz, Szlamowicz, Lichtman, Szapsiowicz, Baltman, Baran, Rubinow, Abramahow. (Note to self - clarify with Marla that all these "...wicz" names are documented surnames, not just patronymics.)

Lloyd has the same match on chromosome 11 with Marla's mother, but not with Aunt Betty. Dalia - who is Lloyd's third cousin on that same Pikholz side - does not.

Jacob also has the chromosome 11 match with Marla's mother, but not with Aunt Betty. The other three from Jacob's group do not.

I did not discern anything significant between Marla's group and the other Pikholz matches.

What characterizes all the Pikholz who match Marla's family on chromosome 11 is that they are Skalaters and that they all come from our matching Y-DNA group. Perhaps a Y-DNA test of Marla's uncle would help here, though a negative finding would not prove or disprove anything.

I do think that of all the non-Pikholz families who match a large number of Pikholz descendants, Marla's family is the one which appears a match within six-seven generations to a particular set of Pikholz families. So with that, I'd like to extend a tentative but hearty welcome to Marla and the other members of her mother's family. You really appear to be cousins, nearly in reach.

For next week, you'll be pleased to know that I already have another topic that has nothing to do with either Pikholz or DNA.

Housekeeping notes
The left hand that appears in the right-hand column under the "followers" means that I am now registered on the Geneabloggers website. The fellow who runs it is a well-known genealogist and lecturer.

The first of the four books I need to read in preparation for the GRIPitt course has arrived.

VISITING THE X-CHROMOSOME

So until now, in the Pikholz DNA Project...
I have looked at the Y (male line) chromosome of some of the Pikholz families and we see that three of the Skalat families have a perfect match to one another at 37 markers. This tells us that these three families have a common ancestor most likely six or seven generations back. (They cannot be closer, as we know the five most recent generations.)

The Y tests also told us that certain other family members do NOT have a male line that matches the rest of us.

We did a MtDNA (female line) test on a member of the one Pikholz family that has only an all-female line. That showed a few good matches with non-Pikholz tests, but nothing good enough to work with.

And we have been looking at autosomal DNA tests, as I have discussed before on several occasions. Those are the twenty-two pairs of non-sex chromosomes. Most of the results have been ambiguous to this point.

The X chromosome
So now I'd like to say a bit about the X chromosome. Men have one, which comes from their mother. Women have two, one from the mother and one from the father. The one a woman gets from her father is the same one he got from his mother, so essentially, women have one from the paternal grandmother and one from the mother.

Genetic genealogist Blaine Bettinger put together these diagrams which show how the X chromosomes of men and woman are made up. (Pink represents female ancestors, blue male.)

The circle in the center is the male. His X is from his mother. She in turn gets from her two parents, who get from his mother and her two parents. And so on. The number of ancestors in each generation increases according to the Fibonacci Sequence.

The percentages in the illustration assume that a woman passes on half from her mother and half from her father. but this has been found to be incorrect, as Roberta Estes demonstrates. The mixture that she passes on from her parents can be 50/50, but it can also be 90/10 or 73/27 or anything else.

On the right we see the female chart from the circle in the center. Her right side is the same as that of a man's, all of it coming from the mother in exactly the same way.

But she also has an X from her father and that is what appears on the left.

Family Tree DNA, the test company our project uses, began to include the X chromosome in its results about a month ago.

(Let me emphasize that the X chromosome is not the same as MtDNA, though both involve the mother.)

The surname that will not go away
The first person I looked at was Mark. He is a non-Pikholz from a Skalat family, who matches many of us, and I wanted to examine his theory that he matches us on his mother's side.

He matches six of us on the X chromosome, in two distinct groups, both of them nearly perfectly overlapping. A seventh match (Micha) overlaps no one else, so I am ignoring that.

In the first group, Mark matches Dalia, Gadi and Robert. Mark's matches with Gadi and Robert appear identical. As it happens, both Gadi and Robert are Rozdolers, but these are X chromosomes, so they would be from their mothers' (non-Pikholz) sides.

The match with Dalia is nearly identical. In her case, the match could come from either her Pikholz father or her non-Pikholz mother. Dalia is a Skalater.

The second group has much smaller colored bits but is much more interesting genealogically. Herb and Betty are first cousins. (Betty is my father's sister.) Their matches with Mark are identical. (I could not appear there because my X is from my mother's side. My second cousin Terry could, but doesn't.)

The third person in this second group, Miriam, is a Rozdoler. Her match cannot be from the Pikholz side, as that would be her father's father's side, and her father received his X from his non-Pikholz mother.

So I looked to see what I know about Miriam's mother's side and it turns out that Miriam's mother's maternal grandmother is Miriam WACHS. Well, we certainly know the name Wachs. That was the family I discussed in my very first blog post.

We know that Herb has Wachs in his ancestral backgound, on his father's side. There is a persistent tradition, confirmed by Wachs descendants from Pittsburgh, that there is some sort of connection between them and my own Pikholz family from Pittsburgh. Unfortunately, no one has a clue what it is.

Mark tells me that his paternal grandfather had a cousin who married a Wachs in Tarnopol, but that shouldn't matter because that Wachs would have no common ancestry with Mark and besides, the connection is on Mark's father's side which doesn't affect the X chromosome.

So I haven't a clue how to resolve this.

Robert
Next, I decided to look at X matches for Pikholz males - generally their non-Pikholz sides. I wanted to see if some of the non-Pikholz who matched many of us did so on our mothers' (non-Pikholz) sides. When I did this for Robert, I find something remarkable. He matched three Pikholz on his mother's side, two of them men, which meant on their mothers' sides as well.

Not only that, but as you can see on the right, those matches overlap with one another.

Note that I had inadvertently set the level of testing to 1 cM (centiMorgan), which would include very small segments, but as you can see, these are not very small segments, so that appeared to be irrelevant. At least that's what I thought.

Since one of the excuses the experts use to explain this kind of thing is that the matching segment is too small to be meaningful, I had a look at the precise sizes. And here there was a surprise. The longish green match between Robert and Dalia turns out to be two nearly adjacent matches, the first 1.52 cM, the second 5.23 cM. Robert's matches with Micha and Gadi are 5.83 cM and 2.16 cM respectively.  The experts say to ignore bits less than 5 cM, so we can ignore Gadi here entirely.

I'm not sure what the close matches among Robert, Micha and Dalia can tell us, but we can certainly see that the size of the colored bits on the chromosome browser is very misleading. Gadi's match with Robert looks to be bigger that Micha's, but in fact it is less than half the size.

Another odd thing here is that Robert Gadi, Dalia and Micha match in the same place as Mark, Gadi and Robert but Micha and matches Mark in a different place on the X chromosome.

So I went back to Mark
The actual numbers for group with the larger colored matches with Mark are Dalia -1.29 cM. Gadi and Robert - 1.41 at exactly the same place. These numbers are supposedly too small to be on interest, but it is hard to ignore the precise overlap of the three men and the near-precise match with Dalia.

The actual numbers of the very small colored segments in Mark's second group are Herb and Aunt Betty 4.65 cM in exactly the same place and Miriam 8.2 cM. Miriam's match with Mark includes the entire segment of A. Betty and Herb. These are much more significant numbers that the ones that appear larger.

Now I have to figure out what to do with them.

But I have a plan 
I really have to learn more about how all of this works and to that end have successfully enrolled* in the week-long Genealogical Research Institute of Pittsburgh course in Practical Genetic Genealogy to be held in July in Pittsburgh.

I am hoping that that experience will make me better equipped to analyze all these test results.

I also hope that the lecturers do not end up saying that Ashkenazi Jewish (what they call AJ) DNA is too difficult to do well, because the population is too deeply inbred.

* Successful enrollment was no small matter. When registration opened last Wednesday at 7 PM my time, they had so many applicants that the server crashed. They were finally up at 7:09 and when I finished submitting my form at 7:12, all I got was a waiting list. But that came through the next morning.

Housekeeping Notes
My interview is now live.

DNA says We Are Fourth Cousins (Part 2 of 2)

Part one of this piece appeared last week, with the first of two examples. I am repeating the opening paragraphs here.

Bennett Greenspan, of Family Tree DNA, opened his presentation at the IAJGS Conference in Boston with something like "If we just looked at the raw data, all those of Ashkenazic Jewish descent would show up as second cousins."
This, of course, is a result of the relatively small pool of Jews in Europe a thousand years ago and the fact that for hundreds of years, most of them married within that pool. So your actual sixth and seventh cousins may look several generations closer because you have a handful of connections on your "other sides" two-three-four or more hundred years ago.
So Bennett says that FTDNA has an algorithm for its Family Finder (autosomal) test that takes this into account in order to give a more realistic estimation of cousinhood.

But even after that adjustment, I show 342 matches that FTDNA says are "suggested fourth cousins." That's not 342 fourth cousins in the world, that's 342 fourth cousins who have done Family Finder testing with FTDNA.  A result like that is patently absurd.

For comparison, they show me with forty-eight suggested third cousins.

The question is, are any of the suggested fourth cousins truly that. Let me bring two examples.

Now for the second example.
        

Dalia and me

I had long believed that Dalia was my fourth cousin. I'll spare you the long explanation, but my theory was this.

It appeared to me that the naming patterns indicated that my great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz had gotten his surname from his mother Rivka Feige and that she was a sister of Dalia's great-great-grandfather Mordecai. (Actually, it could have been the wife Taube who was the Pikholz sister of Rivka Feige, but I am trying to keep this explanation simple.)

Rivka Feige's husband Isak Fischel's surname was a mystery to me and I spent a lot of time examining Isak Fischels from all over east Galicia, looking for some clue to his surname.

This structure would have made their sons first cousins, our grandfathers second cousins and our fathers third cousins. So Dalia and I (marked in green) would have likely been fourth cousins.
   

Back in 2011, I did a Y-67 (male line) DNA test on the off chance that some match would prove to be from Isak Fischel's family.

When we took the plunge and began our family DNA project a year later, Dalia's nephew, Zachy, did a Y-37 test in order to compare him to other Pikholz families from Skalat. (In fact, he is a perfect match to the person I called "Y" in last week's example.)

But Zachy also matched me perfectly. That meant that the connection between Dalia's family and mine was not Rivka Feige, but Isak Fischel. The naming patterns still indicated quite strongly that Rivka Feige was a Pikholz, so my great-grandfather would have had a double dose of Pikholz DNA, one from each parent.

The calculation tool that Family Tree DNA provided showed a probability of about 93% that our most recent common ancestor was the father of Isak Fischel and Mordecai. There is still some chance that they are not brothers, but rather cousins.- and if so, we don't know whether first or second or even further. The science cannot be that precise.

In the course of our project, Dalia did a Family Finder (autosomal) test, as did several members of my close family. Her results showed her to be a "suggested third cousin" to my father's sister and a "suggested second cousin" to my father's first cousin Herb. Under the best of circumstances, they cannot be that close, as both cannot be closer than her third cousins once removed. But for our purposes, these results verify the idea that Isak Fischel and Mordecai are brothers.

Dalia's match with me is suggested fourth cousin." Perfect. Just what we wanted. I asked Bennett what he thought and he said I should definitely record Dalia as my fourth cousin based on the combination of our Family Finder results and Zachy's Y match with me.

How we overlap with Dalia together: Herb-41.98 cM, A. Betty-37.09 cM,Israel-13.83 cM and Lloyd 28.86 cM

Above is the set of matches that we have with Dalia on the seventh chromosome. Herb is the orange, Aunt Betty is blue and I am green. The purple is Lloyd, a certain-but-unproven third cousin of Dalia, an apparent descendant of Mordecai and Taube. This makes it clear that the connections we have with Dalia are all from the same source.

But it isn't really. First of all, our line has that "extra dose" of Pikholz DNA from Rivka Feige. So we almost have to be getting results that are closer than they ought to be. I guess that can explain why my aunt and Herb are a bit closer to Dalia than predicted. 
      

But it still leaves a problem with my match with Dalia. She shows up as my "suggested fourth cousin,"  just like 341 other people. (That number has grown in the last week to 343.) Most of those are surely not my fourth cousins, but appear to be because there is DNA from several different directions. Why should Dalia be any different?

Is the fact that we appear to be fourth cousins actually evidence that we almost certainly aren't?

And it's even more complicated
Just for fun, I looked at the same chromosome #7 comparison for the same five people, but changing the person in the background. Here is what I got.

The block on the right with all the matches is pretty much the same, no matter who is the "background" - with one exception. With Dalia as the background, Herb, Aunt Betty, Lloyd and I have a nice overlap, all matching Dalia and matching one another.

But using the others as background, my match (the green) disappears from that block entirely. How can all four of us match Dalia at the same place on chromosome #7, but I don't match the other three. The  answer must lie in the fact that there are two of each chromosome - one that came from the father and one that came from the mother. 

These results seem to be telling us three things.

1. I match Dalia's "other" chromosome not the one that Herb, Aunt Betty and Lloyd match..
2. My match may have come from my mother's side.
3. Dalia's two #7 chromosomes have that same patch, perhaps because her parents are related a few generations back.

Or maybe not. European Jews have been marrying within the tribe for generations, so there are overlaps all over the place.

But clearly some of my match with Dalia comes from someplace else, other than .the last few generations of Pikholz. We only appear to be fourth cousins. Or not.

 
It gives me a headache.

I definitely have to learn more and I'm working on that.
    

Housekeeping notes
1. .I have set up a new twitter account only for genealogy. Follow at @allmy4parents.  The old Twitter has been renamed @IsraelP_Jlem and is for non-genealogy matters..

2. My interview on The Genealogy Professional Podcast goes up sometime Monday. 

3. Sunday, the day this  goes up, is the yahrzeit for my father's father. I had just turned nine when he died  and was not invited to the funeral. I never actually asked to go, but I really wanted to. I was unhappy with my parents for years about that. The first time I even saw his grave was seven years later when his brother was laid beside him.

I told my mother years later that I thought they had been wrong about this and she said that there were no children there (I am the eldest grandchild) and that some of the older relatives would have objected had I come. 

I knew who she meant.

 

DNA Says We Are Fourth Cousins

Bennett Greenspan, of Family Tree DNA, opened his presentation at the IAJGS Conference in Boston with something like "If we just looked at the raw data, all those of Ashkenazic Jewish descent would show up as second cousins."

This, of course, is a result of the relatively small pool of Jews in Europe a thousand years ago and the fact that for hundreds of years, most of them married within that pool. So your actual sixth and seventh cousins may look several generations closer because you have a handful of connections on your "other sides" two-three-four or more hundred years ago.

So Bennett says that FTDNA has an algorithm for its Family Finder (autosomal) test that takes this into account in order to give a more realistic estimation of cousinhood.

But even after that adjustment, I show 342 matches that FTDNA says are "suggested fourth cousins." That's not 342 fourth cousins in the world, that's 342 fourth cousins who have done Family Finder testing with FTDNA.  A result like that is patently absurd.

For comparison, they show me with forty-eight suggested third cousins.

The question is, are any of the suggested fourth cousins truly that. Let me bring two examples.

Is Moshe Hersch the son of Nachman?

I have long believed that Moshe Hersch, the top of the RITA family is the son of Nachman (b. ~1795) of the LAOR family. I believed this because these were two of the only three Skalat Pikholz families where the given names Nachman and Getzel put in an appearance. (The third is the TONKA family, which I discussed two weeks ago.)

So when we began our family DNA project, it seemed to me that this was one of the theories we would actually be able to test.

A & B are second cousins. X & Y are probably half-first-cousins-once-removed, but it's a bit more complicated..

Two people from each of the two families did Family Finder tests and because of their requests for privacy, I refer to them here as A, B, X, and Y.  A and B are female second cousins from the RITA family, but actually they are a bit closer genetically because A's grandparents are Pikholz first cousins.  

X and Y are male descendants of Josef Pikholz, of the LAOR family. X is his great-grandson. Y is either the grandson or the great-grandson of this same Josef Pikholz, but from a different (non-Jewish) woman. The diagram above shows Y as Josef's grandson.

(Y has also done a Y-37 and matches other Pikholz perfectly, so we are quite certain the family story about Josef is correct.)

If Moshe Hersch is Nachman's son, A and B are fourth cousins of X,  and third or fourth cousins of Y, so that is what I was looking for. But that was before I realized that a designation by FTDNA as a "suggested fourth cousin" is likely a generation or three more distant..

Here on the left are the results as suggested by FTDNA. B is correctly matched to A and X, but not matched with Y at all. Y is further than expected from everyone, probably because his other side is not Jewish. A and X show up as third cousins instead of fourth, but that can be explained by A's double dose of Pikholz DNA due to the first cousin grandparents.

But as I wrote above, if FTDNA gives "fourth cousin" results that are not really fourth cousins, can we really accept these results when they are convenient? That doesn't sound rigorous to me.

So I did two chromosome browsers, one based on X and one based on A. (I couldn't do browsers based on B or Y because they do not match one another.)

The matches shown here are three or more centiMorgans.

Nowhere on these two analyses do we see a place where all four match.

Both analyses show a tiny overlap of A, B and X towards the left end of chromosome 8. There are also overlaps of B, X and Y on chromosome 12 and of A, B and Y on chromosome 5.

I'm not sure that implies the kind of relationship we really want, but maybe it is.{shrug}

This is longer than I had anticipated, so the second example will wait for next week.

Housekeeping notes

1. We are now into Adar and next Sunday we remember my father's father. 

2. My friend and fellow Skalat researcher Jurek Hirschberg is now an authorized translator between Polish and Swedish (both ways). And he speaks a fine English.

NO STONE UNTURNED, NO PAPER EITHER

The Kling Family
A few weeks ago, we were in Nahariyya for Shabbat and made a few cemetery stops on the way home, including this one in the Kiryat Yam section of the Afek Cemetery, at the edge of Kiryat Bialik. It had been on my list for years, almost since the beginning of my Pikholz research.

Yaakov and Zisl Kling and their adult son Yehudah Inbal. Zisl's stone (right) says "bat Mordecai and Sarah Pickholz."

I first came across this family fourteen or fifteen years ago in the International Tracing Service microfilms at Yad Vashem. These films were a small portion of the ITS index and had been held by Yad Vashem since the 1950s. (Only in 2008 was the whole set made available.)

Zisl Sofia Kling, formerly Willner, originally Pikholz, daughter of Markus and Sara, born 23 March 1920 in Lwow, followed by a list of places she had been from 1941  - the Lwow Ghetto and various camps - until her arrival in Israel in 1948.

I had no idea who she was. I had no couple named Markus (probably Mordecai) and Sara Pickholz (and even today I still don't have such a couple) and a family living in Lwow could have come from any of the east Galician towns where Pikholz families were known to have lived.

I found an address and phone number in Kiryat Yam (near Haifa) for Yaakov and Zisl Kling but had no success in contacting them. I even went there once, but no one answered and none of the neighbors were helpful.

Eventually, I tried the burial society, where I found that Yaakov had died in 1987. I thought that perhaps Zisl was in a retirement home or living with a son or daughter, but had no success in locating her. I set it aside. There was so much else to do and many, more promising leads to follow.

Once the full index of ITS records became available in 2008, the folks at ITS became more cooperative and I acquired copies of the substantial files for both Yaakov and Zisl. There were several mentions there of a son Leon who was born in 1947. I eventually found him buried next to his father, identified as Yehudah Inbal. He had died in 1983. By then, Zisl had died (in 2005) and was buried on the other side of her husband.

I also learned that the "Willner" on the first card was Zisl's first husband, Arthur Willner. No mention of children there..

In the meantime, I learned that the Klings had a second son, Motie (=Mordecai), born 1959, with an address in Eilat. After not succeeding in contacting him, I went to the apartment building but did not see him name on any of the boxes. I happened to see the mailman and he had never heard of Motie Kling.

I set this aside until I had the opportunity to visit the grave, but that opportunity never seemed to come up.

The Invitation
Eventually I did visit the graves and the fact that someone took the trouble to name Zisl's parents as Mordecai and Sarah Pickholz was encouraging. I figured that when I'd find someone, they'd know something. Perhaps some identification of Mordecai and Sarah. Perhaps Zisl had brothers and sisters. Perhaps birth places and ages for Mordecai and Sarah.

Then I saw the paper. Right there on Yaakov's grave, held down by two stones.

Deciding to literally leave no stone unturned, I picked up the paper and to my surprise, I found an invitation. Barely legible.

I neglected to photograph the invitation when I was there...

I could make out the date, 30 January 2013. It had been out in the elements for nearly a full year.

I could also make out the name of the wedding hall, in Haifa.

But no names of any sort. Well with any luck, that hall had only one affair that day and with a bit more luck, they'd put me in touch with the family.

... so I thank Dana Michaelovici for going to do it for me.

Than I turned the card over and learned that this was a wedding. Gal and Maor. No surnames, but a picture.

One of them must be a Kling grandchild - either from Yehudah or from Motie. I learned later in the week that there is in fact a custom among some Hassidic groups for the grandchildren to go to the cemetery to invite the grandparents and learned further that some actually leave invitations.

I get home, phone the hall, they won't give me any surnames, but they give me a cell phone number. I call but the person who answers knows no couple named Gal and Maor. I call the hall again and they refuse to give me anything else, invoking the usual claims of privacy.  They also refuse my request to forward a letter to the couple or the families.

Next I tried the Haifa Religious Council where - if one of them lived in Haifa - they might have registered the marriage. The Council might have provided the rabbi as well, if the couple had no preference of their own. The folks there were very cooperative. It was a simple search since I had the precise date. But they had no such couple. I tried Kiryat Yam.. Nothing there either. Next would be Kiryat Motzkin and Kiryat Bialik. I had had some issues with K. Motzkin regarding the cemetery there, so I started with K. Bialik.

The clerk there, a woman named Kochava, looked for all the men named Maor and found nothing. Then she checked the women named Gal and found nothing there either. Next she tried the date and there they were. Gal was the groom and Maor was the bride!

Since you have to document that you are Jewish for the Rabbinate, they had a record that Gal's mother was Sarah Kling, and HER mother was a Pickholz. Sarah was apparently named for Zisl's mother. So there is a daughter, Sarah, in addition to the two sons, Yehudah and Motie.

Kochava won't give me a phone number without permission, so after we hang up, she calls Gal, get's Sarah's phone number, calls her and comes back to me. Sarah lives in Kiryat Bialik and is very interested, but I should phone in the evening.

Perhaps she'll be interested in the seventy-odd pages that I had from the ITS.

Meantime, I recorded Sarah, Gal and Maor in my database.

Calling Sarah
In the meantime, I make a list of questions.

• What does Sarah know about her grandparents? Ages? Where were they born? Who are THEIR parents?
• Did Zisl have brothers and sisters? 
• Does Sarah have siblings besides Yehudah and Motie? 
• What other grandchildren are there besides Gal? 
• Why does Zisl's grave have Freida in parentheses, but the ITS card has the additional name Sofia? 
• What family members were killed in the Holocaust?
• Were there any children from Zisl's first marriage to Arthur Willner, who I assume was killed in the Shoah. (Note to self: Perhaps Sarah has never heard of Arthur Willner or a first marriage - I must be careful with this.)
• Does she mind if I tell the story on my blog, with names.?

So I spoke with her. She goes by Sarit. As usual, it's a bit of a project to explain who I am and what I want, especially when I have no clue who she is either. Sarit doesn't know much. She has just the two brothers, who are both dead, but they left children. She is widowed and has just the one son. She knows that her mother had a sister, but she doesn't recall if her name was ever mentioned.

She knows about her mother's first husband and even has a photograph of him. She was really surprised that I knew of him.

But she has pictures and papers, including some documents with her mother's story, which were prepared as part of her claim for reparations. That kind of thing is likely to be very helpful. Sarit will have to get that organized and scanned for me and already wants to when I am coming to Kiryat Bialik.

She explained the Sofia/Freida thing. Sofia was a name she never used here and Freida was a name she decided she liked, so she'd use it from time to time.

In the meantime, I emailed her a few of the cards like the ones that appear here above and will Dropbox her material from the ITS files. I also prepared a little chart with what I know of the family and indicating what specific information I hoped she could give me.

I am hoping that this brick wall will actually come down in the next few weeks. Perhaps we can even find her some living family, even if it's distant.


Housekeeping notes

1, I am posting this Sunday, 25 Shevat. If you don't know the significance of this date, please see my post from two years ago.

2. Last Monday, I was just interviewed by Marian Pierre-Louis for her weekly Genealogy Professional podcast series. I air on 10 Feb. Afterwards she said she enjoyed listening to me speak because my accent reminds her of her uncle who grew up in Pittsburgh. Marian has already written about the interview - and my Pittsburgh accent - on her personal blog.

Reminds me that when I was in Chicago last summer and I asked my thirteen year old grandson to bring my spare glasses from the box in my suitcase.  He goes into the kitchen and I hear my daughter-in-law say "He means BAHX."

3. Follow up from last week.  I heard from the burial society. arrangements were made by her brother-in-law. Both he and his wife (Freida's sister Rachel Rozner) are long deceased.

H is for HELLENBERG, HALPERN, HUSIATYN

Wednesday at Yad Vashem - The visit was not meant to be
A couple of weeks ago, I went to Yad Vashem to do some work in the International Tracing Service (Arolsen) database for a client.

When I got there I found that the database was down. Obviously it was not meant to be, at least not that day.

Hellenberg
In the days that followed, I learned a few things about one of my Pikholz puzzles.

In earlier visits to the ITS database, some years ago, I found these two cards.

Mendel and Frieda Pickholz, a married couple, he born 1883 in Podwoloczysk, died in 1941, she born 1893 in Czernovitz, released from the ghetto there in 1944. A handwritten note with a 1965 date seems to indicate she survived the war. Maybe she is a Hellenberg. It's not clear what the Halpern is doing here.

I ordered the files from Germany. Aside from the fact that Mendel died in the Czernovitz ghetto, my German-speaking friends could not add much.

Then came two breakthroughs, two weeks ago. First I received the 1923 Czernovitz marriage record for Mendel and Frieda, thanks to Daniel Horowitz of My Heritage. The next day, I heard from Batya Unterschatz that she had located Freida living in Tel Aviv until her death in 1971. In the same apartment was Bella Hellenberg, about the same age, perhaps a sister-in-law. Batya was not able to identify family members of either woman.

Defining Mendel
Here is the marriage record - the second one on the page.

Groom: Mendel Pickholz, son of Joel Halpern and Chana Pickholz; Bride Freida Hellenberg - with a note

Well, I certainly recognize the family of Joel Halpern and his wife Chana (sometimes Chancie) of Husiatyn. Here they are, with Mendel and his wife Freida at the bottom left.

I believe that Gabriel is the son of Nachman Pikholz (b.1795) though I have no actual evidence.

I also believe that the son Moses, born 1851, is the same man who heads the family we call TONKA. Here we have a bit of indirect evidence. Tonka is Moses' granddaughter and lived in Skalat. She wrote a piece in the Skalat memorial book about the Rebbe of Husiatyn, who used to spend several weeks a year in Skalat. Tonka's father Tuvia was a Husiatyner hassid and that fact may be connected to the fact that Gabriel - a Skalater - lived in Husiatyn.

If the two Moses are the same, we have living descendants of Gabriel and Sara. Of Chancie's children, we have not found any descendants beyond the above chart, but perhaps the newly-found marriage of Mendel and Freida gives us something to work with.

I found what the note on the marriage record says. Mendel and Freida were divorced in Czernovitz in 1936. That  explains why Freida was using her maiden name Hellenberg in Tel-Aviv.

 I did some searching in the yizkor books listed on JewishGen and found a listing in Husiatyn for "Yoel, wife, daughter Chanchia, Sons Moshe, Berl and Fishel." Close, but not quite what I wanted. But since I'd be going back to Yad Vashem in a few days to do that client work that I hadn't done a few days earlier, I figured I should have a look at the actual Hebrew version of the Husiatyn book as well as seeing if the ITS database had anything on the putative sister-in-law Bella Hellenberg.

I also decided to go to Kiryat Shaul Cemetery in Tel-Aviv, to visit the graves of the two Hellenberg women. I wanted to see if the stones said "our mother" or "our sister" or what and if there was any additional memorial to family killed in the Shoah, as is often done here.

The following Wednesday - Yad Vashem and Kiryat Shaul
Wednesday morning, I went to Yad Vashem, set myself up for a look at the ITS database and asked my friend Zvi, who was on duty in the library, for the yizkor book for Husiatyn.

First I did the work for the client.

I found ITS references to a Bella Hellenberg, but not the right woman.  I found the Joel Halpern family in the Husiatyn book but there was nothing beyond what I had already seen in the JewishGen translation.

I did find ITS references to the wrong Joel Halpern and figured I may as well order those files. The file numbers didn't make sense and I went to discuss it with Zvi, returning the Husiatyn book at the same time.

As I waited for Zvi to get off the phone, I saw a man in hassidic-dress looking at the Husiatyn book that I had just placed on the counter. I asked him not to take it until Zvi has written that I had returned it. Turns out he works at Yad Vashem and has some Husiatyn interests as well. But the person who REALLY knows Husiatyn, he told me, was out in the lobby.

David Margaliot came in a few minutes later and we introduced ourselves. Also a man in hassidic dress, he runs an organization called Maagarim in Ashdod. Something about international archival services and a Husiatyner hassid. We exchanged cards and will speak later, but now I see why the visit the week before had not worked out. It was this week that I was meant to come to the Yad Vashem research library.

I proceeded to Tel Aviv. and found the two graves in Kiryat Shaul.

Freida Hellenberg, sister and aunt. No possessive pronoun - "my" or "our. "

Bat Mordecai and Chani from Chernovitz.

And her date of death.

So there are no children, but at least one brother or sister, living at the time of her death in 1971, probably here in Israel.

I submitted a request (it carries a fee of NIS 50) to the burial society for information on next of kin or other family information and I hope to hear from them soon.

There are niece(s) and/or nephew(s) - whom I can probably find - but whether they know anything about the family of the aunt's ex-husband is another matter.

Bella Hellenberg is called Betti. "My dear mother, my dear sister." Nothing else I didn't know.  She died in 1957 at age sixty.

Neither of the women's stones mentioned family lost in the Shoah.

The possibility that Betti/Bella's son or (more likely) daughter knows anything is pretty remote, but if nothing turns up with Freida's people, I'll check Betti's.

I am not optimistic, but progress often comes as a surprise.

Housekeeping notes
1. I am to be interviewed this week by Marian Pierre-Louis who does a weekly podcast with genealogy professionals. It should play next week

2. We have a set of matches between Pikholz and Kwoczka family members and my eighth grade math teacher and her daughters.

A LESSON FROM GAZA - NOT THE ONE YOU THINK

I had planned to post this apolitical piece next summer, on the anniversary of my aliyah to Israel.

I have decided to run it now, dedicated to the memory of the man who brought peace to Gaza in the 1970s but later forgot the lesson he taught us about that very subject.

It was published in the Jerusalem Post in 1994. The context was the Oslo agreements, which set up the PLO in Gaza.

The events described took place in 1978 or 79.

 

 

 

FILING

A few weeks ago, my friend Marla Raucher Osborn posted on Facebook about a birth record for her grandmother's sister Sime Horn, who died in Rohatyn in childhood. Some discussion ensued about notes of death being recorded on birth records and about the importance of reviewing documents, letters and other papers from time to time because what looked unimportant when we first saw them, may be significant now.

Here is the Facebook discussion.

Sandy Malek, the legal counsel of Gesher Galicia, mentioned that she "always seem[s] to find something new and enlightening" when having a second look at documents. Veteran researcher Sylvia Furshman Nusinov said that she "DOES look them over from time to time - finding clues which lead to new sources."

My contribution to the discussion was to explain that this is in fact the way my three-step filing system is designed, at least regarding genealogy-related paper.

Step one

                There is way too much stuff in this box

When I have a document, whether it is a vital record or some of my own correspondence or something else, I read it, record whatever seems relevant and put it into a box.

In the case of vital records from Warsaw, I usually make a note of the family on the back.

They stay there for months. At least.

(Non-genealogy-related is another matter, which I'll mention below. Things like utility bills get filed in binders, immediately. Other receipts, insurance and bank documents etc should as well. Sometimes I fall behind. A lot.)

Client papers go in a pile in a drawer and are filed from to time - usually when I need something and can't find it.

Step two

From time to time, I go through the box and put the papers into sectioned cardboard files

(There must be a name for these - in Hebrew, it's a "sadran.") like those pictured here. The one on the left is my Pikholz filing, the one on the right is everything else.

In the Pikholz file, each section represents a group of families. In the other one, each section is an ancestral line, either one of mine or one of my wife's.

For the most part, this is not just a matter of putting the paper into the right place. In order to file them properly, I generally have to reread the documents. Often in doing so, I will see something I missed months earlier. Or there will be some piece of information which was meaningless at the time, but has since become a point of interest. The name of a witness, a town or street address, some event that suddenly takes on significance, something else I could not have known when I first touched the particular paper.

A paper like that goes through the recording process, almost as though it were entirely new.

Step three
Every once in a while, I will take the papers from one or more of these sections and and put

them into the appropriate binders.

The purple binders on the shelves on the right are all Pikholz Project families. The yellow binders are my other families and the green binders are my wife's families.

As in  step two, moving each piece of paper involves rereading it and  re-evaluating its contents. But there is more because putting the papers into the binders brings me into contact with older papers which are already filed. Sometimes it is those older papers which produces new insights.

Paperless office?
Of course all of this requires paper.  Online-genealogy guru Dick Eastman has been on a "paperless office" crusade for some time. A post last week opened as follows:

On January 1 of this year, I wrote a short article entitled A New Year's Resolution: Going Paperless in which I promised I would stop wasting paper and not file all sorts of paper in piles, nor in binders or filing cabinets. I am happy to report that I have achieved nearly 100% success during 2013.

I now print almost nothing on my computer. Most everything is saved in Evernote or in an appropriate folder in Dropbox. Of course, the same items can be retrieved quickly and viewed not only on my desktop or laptop computers, but also with my iPhone or iPad, wherever I am. (An Android phone or tablet will do the same.) The few pieces of paper that need to be given to others are usually sent by email, never printed and mailed.

He goes on to discuss different types of paper - bills, bank records and of course genealogy. (He also discusses back-ups and is partial to "the cloud" for that.) He concludes his recent piece::

I can report 99% success at being paperless during all of 2013. I no longer have mounds of paper lying around. I can find anything quickly and easily, thanks to the capability of quickly searching the computer's entire hard drive for any words. I can retrieve any item quickly when I need it. 

I can see this with utility bills and other expense records and will even give that part of paperless a try in 2014, though the eight-page monthly cell phone invoice is a challenge. . Bank and other type records are a bit more complicated because it means I have to deal with them before they pile up. But genealogy paper? 

If I were to go paperless, it would kill my entire filing system as I would never see those documents again unless I went looking for them specifically. I certainly wouldn't leaf through them, as I do with paper files..

Online genealogy
Although it was not my intention in discussing filing, I come back around to online genealogy of the Geni-type, which I discussed at length three weeks ago. But it comes up on its own.

In private correspondence, one of the Geni advocates wrote:

I make a discovery, I enter a branch into Geni, I upload all my photographs and documentation, and phew!, I can rest easy that I have put everything in its place and move on to my next interest.  And when I am looking for it again, I know where it is.

For me that's a negative. I don't want to simply "rest easy...and move on" I want to see old documents and correspondence even when I am not looking for them.  I want to have to review each document and letter in each of the three steps. It doesn't have to be how other people work, but it's my system. My research heir - if I will be fortunate enough to have one - can do it differently if he wants, when the time comes.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Housekeeping notes

1. Today, 4 Shevat is yahrzeit for my grandfather and begins a string of family memorial days during the month, a few of my wife's ancestors (including her father, her maternal grandfather, her paternal grandmother and others), my mother (here and here) and my sister - all in Shevat.

2. I have submitted two proposals for the 34th IAJGS Conference on Jewish Genealogy, to
be held in Salt Lake City next summer. And I made a reservation for the conference hotel. None of this means a commitment, just yet.


3. The following was written to me by a possible non-Jewish DNA match. The last sentence is hilarious. (Emphasis mine.)

Anyway, it's more than a little difficult to find the common thread between everyone in my search for a place of origin, but it seems *very* safe to assume that my "epicenter" for this would be the Pale of Settlement/Congress Poland... basically the [east] Galicia region you mentioned. And judging by the tiny sliver of it involved, I'm also guessing a birth from around 1700. But how/when/why they got to America is a complete mystery to me.

WRITTEN ON PAPER, HEWN IN STONE

Paper
I ordered something from a local business and the owner - a new immigrant from Detroit - brought it over to the house. As usual in this kind of meeting, I went into genealogy mode and asked him about his background. Where his family was from? And where before that? You know how it goes.

When I explained that I am a genealogy researcher, he told me that he had a problem that perhaps I could help with. He had a ketubah (=marriage contract) for an ancestral couple which adds the word "Halevi" to two mentions of the groom's name. The problem is that his family has no knowledge of coming from Levite stock. He acknowledged that this tradition may have been lost during a couple of generations of non-observance.

Still, he wanted to know as Leviim have certain perqs like being called second to the Torah. Symbolic, to be sure, but still.

I pointed out to him that it is not all symbolic. A Levite family is exempt from the commandment to redeem the first-born son. That is the case if the mother is the Levi, not just the father. Since this is a Torah commandment, he would do it even if in doubt, but a thinking rabbi, knowing the background, might have him do it without the blessing in order to avoid the "name in vain" business.

"Well," he said, "I am a first born and I know for a fact that I was redeemed."

So maybe that itself is enough to settle the question - unless of course he wants to do (or to commission) some more serious research. But the question in his mind remained, how could the error have occured to begin with.

So I countered with my own story. Well, not exactly my own, but the parents of my wife's late husband.

The wedding took place in 1949, under the auspices of the Tel Aviv rabbinate.

All five times the groom's name is mentioned (marked here in red), he is called "Halevi." The family has no Levite tradition.

The bride's's father is correctly called "Halevi" both times his name appears (marked in blue) and though that may be the source of the confusion, it certainly doesn't excuse it.

The groom, who was a Hebrew-speaking, synagogue-attending man, added his signature at the bottom (see the purple arrow). How did he not notice the error? I mean, it has to be wrong, no?

I did the due diligence and inquired among other people with the same  rare surname (including one who was in my high school class, who sent me to his father's cousin who was in my aunt's class), but none of them know anything one way or the other, about their own status.

Stone
The phrase "hewn in stone" implies both permanence and authority, the latter perhaps based on the Ten Commandments.

We know that gravestones deteriorate over time, but there are also occasions where they are wrong to begin with.  In one case I know personally, the widow made an error of over three months in the deceased husband's birth date.

Here is the footstone of a family member, who was born in August 1901.

 

The date is correct, but she was not forty-five. She was about a week past her forty-fourth birthday. I took this photograph twenty-some years after the burial, so they had had plenty of time to fix it. I am told that the stone was eventually replaced but have not seen a photograph of the new one.

Another problem with a date is this.

The date of death is the twenty-eighth of Shevat, not the twenty-eighth of First Adar. The Gregorian date is correct as is the date of birth. (Additionally, his father is Moshe Menahem, not Moshe as it appears here, and his mother is Devorah Rachel, not Rachel. But his two daughters may not have known that. And they certainly didn't ask me.)

Another oddity, this from the Pikholz Project.

It shows her name as "Olga, wife of Avraham." (It does not mention her father, Berisch.)

And here is her husband, "Matityah the son of Avraham."

Olga's stone misidentifies her husband, using her father-in-law's name by mistake. She had one living son at the time of her death.

People really have to check this kind of thing. And we genealogists need to be sure of our facts, not simply depend on what is written, whether on paper, on stone, or in any other medium.

SNOW IN JERUSALEM - 1969

It took a couple of hours before it began to stick.

It snowed recently in Jerusalem. It started light, but there were two waves later on and they are officially calling it 40-65 cm altogether. Certainly enough to disrupt daily life, close the schools etc. Lots of issues with electricity, traffic and other asopect of daily life. Here are two photographs from our window, from the early hours.

It snows here in Jerusalem about once a year, but according to this historical chart (which tracks from 1870), about once every ten years it gets up to 30 cm.  Back in the last days of the Turks, there were some monster snows of 75 and 90 cm.

And it kept coming down for a few more hours..

The first year I was in Israel, there was a famously big 30 cm snowfall that shut down everything in Jerusalem, the first big one in a dozen years. I was not in Jerusalem at the time.

The following year, I was here in Jerusalem and a few days before Tu BeShevat, on 29 January 1969, it snowed. This was not like the foot of snow that fell the previous year, snow that truly shut everything down. This was a mere 10 cm, that shut down the city on novelty value alone. People walked down the street carrying umbrellas.

There are twenty-three photos below, some of the Old City and some from Carmon Street in Bet HaKerem, where I was living at the time.

The Old City photos include some taken from atop the walls - we walked them often, back before the government limited access - and some taken from the window of an Arab school near the Lion's Gate, overlooking the Temple Mount. I had broken my right leg a few weeks earlier and was in a cast to just below the knee.

The photos on Carmon include the street in front of the building and the view across to the university campus at Giv'at Ram. The Begin Expressway is nowhere to be seen. (We used to walk through the valley to the campus.)

The young fellow who appears in a the middle photograph of the last triplet is Sam Weissman of Los Angeles.There are two other people who ought to be in these pictures, but aren't.  Maybe because we saw them later in the day, when it was too dark for good pictures...