The Ancestors of Uncle Max Braun

Us and the Brauns

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

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

Morris is my grandfather.

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

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

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

 

The Elinoffs, the Katzes, the Zwiebels, the Fleischmans

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

Elinoff DNA

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

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

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

Brunn and Wachs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good luck making sense of THAT.

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

 

But here is where we are holding for now.

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO FAMILYTREEDNA , by Roberta Estes - A Review

Some weeks ago, I was asked by the Marketing Director of Genealogical Publishing Company to review "The Complete Guide to FamilyTreeDNA by Roberta Estes. I first met Roberta (online) ten-eleven years ago and she was a great help to me in my first steps in DNA, so I was pleased to say "yes." I have not discussed this review with Roberta, aside from telling her that I had received a review copy. I don't think we have ever met in person.

The 247-page paperback book is large - 8.5" X 11" (21.5 X 28 cm) - which makes it unwieldy for reading on, for example, public transportation - but this was unavoidable because of the many very large images. I wished that some of them were even larger.

The review copy does not show the colors in the images (perhaps there is color in the text as well, I cannot tell) which detracted from the reading experience and from understanding some of Roberta's points. This is not her fault, of course, and in any case is not relevant for readers of the actual book. (The marketing guy was not able to give me a working link to colored charts.) I am familiar with Roberta's blogs and her charts are always clear and useful, so I have no doubt that this is the case in the actual book.

No one ever wishes for greater detail in Roberta's blogs - at https://dna-explained.com/ - and if you try to take in too much at once, your eyes can glaze over. I certainly do not mean this as criticism, but you have to get used to her style and adjust your reading accordingly.

That said, many of the numerous footnotes are for Roberta's own blog posts where you can find even greater detail, as well as examples from her own work.

The point of view in this book is that of a "normal" researcher and there are only passing references to the endogamy which complicates Jewish research, while enriching our actual Jewish lives.

A bit about my own research, for context. I did my (autosomal) Family Finder more than twelve years ago and my MtDNA and Y-37 a year earlier. I have since done a both Y-111 and Y-700. In advancing my family projects, I have signed up over ninety Pikholz descendants for Family Finders and a dozen for MtDNA or Y-tests, as well as fifteen other family members. This does not include family members who tested with other companies. These numbers include six of my parents' seven children. (The seventh is long deceased and in any case is an identical twin.) Both my parents predeceased my DNA testing.

We have nothing exotic such as Native American and only three people whose fathers are not who they are supposed to be. Only two cases of adoptees have been identified as part of our family. As the kids say, B-O-R-I-N-G.

So I know a thing or two about testing with FTDNA and working with them afterwards. I have five FTDNA projects, but mostly for the convenience of keeping my families organized and accessible. And I do not trust any site, company or algorithm that purports to do my work for me, DNA or otherwise.

The book is divided into eleven numbered chapters plus a seventeen-page glossary, but no index. To give you an idea of how detailed Roberta is, the Table of Contents runs six and a half pages, with the headings and sub-headings of the eleven chapters.

She begins with Acknowledgements, Introduction and "How To Use This Book," followed by

Chapter 1  - TYPES OF TESTING (beginning on page 6)

Chapter 2  - SETTING YOURSELF UP FOR SUCCESS (page 11)

Chapter 3  - Y-DNA - YOUR FATHER'S STORY (page 24)

Chapter 4  -  MITOCHONDRIAL DNA - YOUR MOTHER'S STORY (page 97)
Chapter 5  - AUTOSOMAL DNA - THE FAMILY FINDER TEST (page 132)

Chapter 6  - X CHROMOSOME - UNIQUE INHERITANCE PATH (page 173)
Chapter 7  - ETHNICITY - MY ORIGINS (page 187)

Chapter 8  - ADVANCED MATCHING (page 207)
Chapter 9  - FINDING, JOINING AND UTILIZING PROJECTS (page 209)
Chapter 10 - THIRD PARTY TOOLS (page 218)
Chapter 11 - CREATING YOUR STEP-BY-STEP ROADMAP (page 225)

GLOSSARY (page 231)

As you can see, the chapter on Y-DNA is by far the largest, nearly as large as Mitochondrial and Autosomal combined.

Now to the book.

The brief How To Use section introduces us to Roberta's gray-shaded, bold-faced tips that appear throughout the book. Read all of them, even if you are only skimming some of the harder sections.

I was please to find that Roberta did not spend an inordinate amount of time on the most basic aspects of DNA - the stuff we learned in high school biology. People are learning what this is all about and we no longer have to spend a third of a lecture or an article explaining the equivalent of oceans and boats in a lecture on immigration. The brief TYPES OF TESTING chapter handles all this well.

That chapter concludes with a paragraph called "Your DNA is Archived for a Quarter Century." That sounds like a long time, but as many of us are already at the half-way point, it raises questions about the future - especially if they develop new products.

In SETTING YOURSELF UP FOR SUCCESS, we learn how to make sure our matches can know enough about us to facilitate the first stages of contact, while not surrendering more privacy than we care to. Many people do not list their known surnames, which makes it difficult to analyze matches. Roberta explains both how to do it and why it is important. This will not help us know anything about our matches, but it will help them know about us.

Part of that setting up is putting in a family tree, a matter on which I myself am negligent.

The chapter on Y-DNA is long and - for a novice - difficult. Y-DNA is different from autosomal DNA, has several types of tests and markers (STR and SNP) and a collection of analytical tools and projects. Because it is difficult, it might be wise to look at the Family Finder chapter first. That way, the novice can enjoy some tangible progress before dipping a toe into the hard stuff. That can help avoid the temptation to throw up your hands in frustration at even the basic understanding.

For "normal" researchers, Y-DNA is closely related to stable surnames. Not so with Jewish research where many of us did not have surnames before 1800 and even afterwards they were not always stable. And even into the late 1800s, many religious marriages were not recorded with the civil authorities, so the "illegitimate" children were assigned the mother's surname. (I would call that an eastern European phenomenon, but it happened with the birth of one of my grandsons!)

As my veteran readers know, I have been able to determine what our name was before it was Pikholz, probably four hundred years ago, and I did not need the Y-700 to do that. Y-111 was sufficient.

The Discover links

Roberta gets heavily into haplogroups and the haplogroup tree. If you only do Y-37 or Y-111 tests, you will be assigned to a haplogroup that goes very far back in time. So far back that Roberta and I belong to the same R-M269 haplogroup. The Y-700 brings that forward towards the present, where my haplogroup is shared by only one non-Pikholz thus far.

 

And only after that does she get to a heading called "Down in the Weeds!"

 

The Y-DNA chapter also includes a thirteen-page survey of FTDNA's "Discover" reports, which show different aspects of your male-line results. It's not for everyone but if you like your results as a narrative, you will find them useful.

Yes, Y-DNA is complicated and working with the results of the Y-700 can be difficult. But FTDNA has projects and if you are fortunate - as I am - to be part of a project with good, active administrators, there is much you can learn. This chapter covers that briefly, but well.

This chapter concludes with four case studies, each coming at Y-DNA research from a different perspective.

Mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) is passed from women to all their children. The mitochondria is small, so mutations are very infrequent. That - along with the changing surnames in every generation - makes MtDNA less useful for most people. Roberta addresses this in two sentences:

Misinformation, especially on social media, leads people to believe that mitochondrial DNA isn't useful.

As a result, fewer people test, inhibiting the growth of the database which in turn results in fewer matches.

I would like to have seen that in large, colored, bold-faced type. It cannot be overstated. (I speak as someone who ignored the "warnings" and made two significant discoveries using MtDNA.)

Roberta addresses the value of the two partial tests (no longer available but still in the database). Yes, they can be useful. I, for one, have ignored that and will have a look when I have a chance.

There is much on mutations in great detail, also including reverse mutations, unstable mutations and heteroplasmies. A few years ago, I was able to pin down one of the last in my own family by testing two family members and finding a single variation.

She goes through the steps for using the site, as well as the results - migration maps, ancestral origins, and haplogroups - though I personally do not find these features useful.

There is a one-page discussion of "Advanced Matching for MtDNA." This is an important tool that I have used successfully for years, for both MtDNA and Y-DNA. Unfortunately it has not been working for some weeks and FTDNA's support has not been responsive.

The chapter concludes with four case studies.

Autosomal DNA comes from all the reasonably close ancestors and is represented in the Family Finder test. However because it comes from all ancestors, each ancestor's representation is halved every generation. That limits its usefulness.

Autosomal DNA is what the other testing companies do and Roberta goes right into the subject of transferring results from other companies to FTDNA.

Endogamy plays a major role for groups like Jews. Roberta says she has 7878 matches altogether. I have 38,374 and some of my relatives have even more.

The chapter goes into the "buckets" that automatically sort matches into father's side and mother's side, based in part of your family tree (if you entered one). Endogamy messes with this as endogamous familes have many matches which come from both sides. And as I said above, I don't trust automatic matching functions - but that's me.

In this chapter we learn about triangulation (very important!), matching, and chromosome browsers. That last one breaks down matches into individual chromosomes and segments, allowing analysis of seven matches at once. You must understand the brief section "Do Your Matches Match Each Other?" before you do any actual triangulation and those sections should probably have been consecutive.

The chapter concludes with using spreadsheets and the site's matrix tool for analysis. I, myself, do not use either.

There are no case studies here, but the chapter has a lot of anecdotal bits.

The X chromosome, not to be confused with MtDNA, has one side from the mother but only daughters get from the father. Males do not get any X from their fathers. The number of ancestors contributing to a person's X increases from generation to generation in a Fibonacci Sequence, rather than doubling each generation like autosomal DNA.

Roberta does a nice job summarizing how the X works and how to use it in our research. It is something I need to spend more time on in my own research, though I have not neglected it completely.

Ashkenazi Jewish is the yellow bit

My Origins supposedly tells you where you came from. It may or not agree with what other testing companies say because each company has its own distribution of DNA by geography.

In my case, My Origins has me defined as 100% Ashkenazi Jewish yet I know from my Y-700 that at least my male line is from Spain or Portugal - ie Sephardi Jewish.

Advanced Matching deserves its own chapter, even the brief page and a half, even though it was mentioned briefly earlier. It is important and easy to use. When it works.

Projects is also an important subject which was discussed in earlier chapters. Different kinds of projects work for different research goals. these include surname, haplogroups and geographical projects. There is more than a bit of the luck of the draw here - some projects have active, knowledgeable administrators, some less so.

Roberta discusses two Third Party Tools - Genetic Affairs and DNA Painter. The latter is color-based and is very very popular in the research community. I dabbled when it first came out but did not see that it added to my research.

If I have one major criticism of the book, it is the omission of GEDmatch in this chapter, though it appears in the Glossary. I cannot analyze autosomal matches without it and it is useful even when all the matches are from Family Finder tests.

The final chapter discusses creating a road map or research plan. Just a few pages but they wrap it all up nicely. The last two pages - at least in my copy - look like they were meant to be in the previous chapter, as they return to Genetic Affairs and DNA Painter.

It ends with a brief section called "You don't Know What You Don't Know." A truer statement was never written. Until you get into it, you do not know where your research will lead. In fact, it may be years before the best matches show up. You need this both for yourself and to convince (potential) family members to join with you.

Roberta has produced a fine work. It will sit on a shelf at arm's length and I will no doubt refer to it from time to time, especially when I want to get into areas where I have not been before.

"Shoteh Ben Pickholz" Revisited

About four months ago, I received a note from Joel Maxman, with whom I had correspondence some years ago about our mutual connections to Zalosce, in east Galicia. This time he had something different in mind.

I'm reading a book by Itzik Manger called "The Book from Paradise" (in Yiddish, "Dos Bukh fun Gan-Eden"). He uses the expression שוטה בן פּיקהאָלץ, which I've never heard before. As you're the only person I've ever known with the name Pickholtz, I was wondering whether you have any idea what this means.

"Shoteh ben Pickholz," literally "fool the son of Pickholz," is used to mean dunce or knucklehead. It is a phrase I first heard fifty years ago or more, probably when I was on Kevutzat Yavneh, and never since. Eleven years ago, I blogged about finding it in Hebrew newspapers in 1920, 1954 and 1960 but I never heard of it in literature.

From the long-defunct newspaper HaZefirah 1920

Well, it turns out that not only the Yiddish writer Manger (1901-1969) used this rather disparaging phrase, but Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) and Solomon Rabinovitch (better known as Sholom Aleichem 1859-1918) did as well.

Rabinovitch is considerably older than the others so he may have been the person who coined the phrase - certainly neither Singer nor Manger certainly did. Or was it in use before Rabinovitch? It sounds very Galicianer and Shalom Aleichem was Russian, so I would not be at all surprised to see that someone else used it first.

These published authors used the phrase "Shoteh ben Pickholz"

My curiosity piqued, I asked my mother's second/third cousin (her great-grandparents are uncle-niece), a retired professor of literature at Tel-Aviv University if she knew the phrase and its origin. She has a vague recollection of hearing it, but nothing specific and no idea of its origin.

The man behind the Facebook page Yosl Teaches Yiddish knows the Sholom Aleichem usage, but again, no origin.

I tried contacting a well-known American Yiddish professor and although I know she saw my question, I have not (yet?) been favored with a reply.

Skalat - That Time of Year

The Skalat synagogue

As nearly every year, we gathered at the Skalat memorial in the Holon Cemetery, just south of Tel-Aviv. It is now eighty-one years since Skalat was declared Judenrein, free of Jews. 

As I have said here many tmes before, Skalat was where the eastern part of the Pikholz family lived a hundred fifty years ago. My own family left earlier, as even my great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz (~1853) was probably born in Podkamen, eighty-six km to the north. But his parents - both Pikholz - were born in Skalat.

The memorial meeting was a bit larger than in recent years, perhaps thirty people, including a few children whose great-grandparents had lived in Skalat. Bronia was the only actual Skalater in attendance. There are fewer every year. Tova (Giza) Zehavi was not up to the travel and I phoned her afterwards. All four of the Sarids were there and quite a few of the Segals. David (Dlugacz) Dekel, a Pikholz descendant was there but his sister was under the weather.

The Skalat monument in Holon

There was a collection for maintenance of the monument in Skalat. 

The memorial at the killing field in Novosielka, outside Skalat

A few people told bits of their parents' stories.  A few prayers, kaddish and of course a prayer for our soldiers protecting our country.

Same time next year.

The Mitochondrial DNA of My (Other) Great-Grandmothers

Following my recent discussion of the near-extinction of the mitochondrial DNA (U1b1) of my mother's maternal great-grandmother Etta Bryna, let's have a look at my other great-grandmothers.

Chana Kugel, my mother's paternal grandmother,

One of my second cousins on that side did a MtDNA test, so we know that Chana's haplogroup is R0a4. There are sixty-four people who have a perfect MtDNA match

Chana had two sons, my grandfather and Uncle Frank, who (being male) did not pass on any MtDNA.

The younger of Chana's two daughters, Aunt Rose, had three daughters. The eldest had two sons and a daughter and the daughter had only two sons. Aunt Rose's middle daughter had a son (who has declined to talk to me, even though we have a DNA match on Ancestry) and a daughter I know nothing about. Aunt Rose's third daughter had two children but no grandchildren.

Chana's first born, Aunt Mary, had three daughters and a son. The eldest had two daughters and two sons and one of the daughters has no children. The other daughter had eight children, six of them girls. One has two daughters, each of whom has one daughter. Three others have one daughter each. Of those one has only sons, and two are not married, but one is engaged. So Aunt Mary eldest daughter has at least three descendants who may keep the mitochondrial DNA going.

Aunt Mary's middle daughter died at age 20, with no children.

Aunt Mary's youngest daughter had two daughters and each of those has a granddaughter from a daughter.

So we have at present five carriers of Chana's mitochondrial DNA through Aunt Mary and maybe one from Aunt Rose. We know that Chana herself had two or three brothers, but do not know of sisters. Her mother's maiden name is unknown.

Regina (Rivka) Bauer, my father's maternal grandmother

This great-grandmother had two daughters. One had one daughter who had two sons and a daughter - but the daughter has no children.

The other, my grandmother, had two sons and a daughter and the daughter had only sons. The daughter (my aunt) did an MtDNA test and the haplogroup is H10a1b. She has twenty-four perfect matches.

So Regina's mitochondrial DNA is gone. She had four sisters. One died at age thirty and married but we know nothing about children. I visited her grave in Hungary two years ago and it mentions the husband (in both Hungarian and Hebrew) but no mention of children, so I am guessing there weren't any.

Another sister lived in Pittsburgh. She had a daughter, but my grandmother , who knew her well, never mentioned her son but not that daughter, so I assume the daughter died young.

The other two were killed in the Holocaust in their sixties. We have no knowledge of children.

Regina's mother, Fani/Feige Stern, had two sisters that we know of. One had four sons. The other had two sons and five daughters. One of the daughters died at age five and we know nothing about the other four. Feige Stern's mother was a Grunwald and her mother was a Hercz.

So for all practical purposes, we assume that Regina's mitochondrial DNA is gone. Or at least not accessible.

Jutte Leah Kwoczka, my father's paternal grandmother

Nearly ten years ago, the son of my grandfather's middle sister did a MtDNA test for me. The haplogroup is V7a. He had no exact matches but there were thirty-odd one step away. It occured to me that perhaps there had been a personal mutation - he or his mother - so I asked the granddaughter of my grandfather's eldest sister to do the test as well. I was right. She matched all those others. There are now 128 exact matches.

Jutte Leah had ten children: three sons who died in infancy or childhood, three sons with descendants, one son with no descendants and three daughters. Aunt Becky (#5), Aunt Mary (#6) and Aunt Bessie (#8) all were married with children. Aunt Becky had a son and a daughter and the daughter had a daughter with no children. She is the one who did the MtDNA test for me. But the mitochondrial DNA goes no further.

Aunt Mary had a daughter and two sons. Until recently, we had though that the daughter had no children, but we have learned that she had a son who was adopted out. He has been positively identified but there was no one to pass on the MtDNA.

Aunt Bessie had two daughters and a son. One daughter had no children; the other had a son and a daughter and the daughter has only a son.

So none of Jutte Leah's descendants can pass on her mitochondrial DNA. Jutte Leah herself had three brothers but no sisters that we know of. her mother's maiden name is Pollak.

Does any of this matter? I don't really know.

The Mitochondrial DNA of Etta Bryna

I have discussed my mother's mother's mother, Etta Bryna bat Yehudah HaLevi, a number of times here, mostly regarding my unsuccessful efforts to learn her birth surname. But I shall take the opportunity of her 128th yahrzeit (6 Nisan) to look at something else.

Mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA) is different from other DNA because it is located in the mitochondria, not in the cell nucleus. It is passed from women to all their children, with very infrequent mutations. Men do not pass it on.

I did a Mitochondrial DNA test about a dozen years ago, so I know that Etta Bryna's MtDNA is the haplogroup U1b1. But being a male, I did not pass it to any of my children.

Two of my sisters have no daughters, so they have not passed it on. 

Two of my sisters have one daughter each. Those daughters have eight sons between them but no daughters. So they did not pass on the MtDNA.

One sister has two daughters but no grandchildren yet.

So we may have no continuing inheritance of Etta Bryna's MtDNA among my mother's descendants.

My mother's two brothers and one unmarried sister did not pass it on.

My mother's eldest sister gave birth to one daughter and she has one daughter who has one daughter, a teenager. At this stage, this young cousin may be the only one of my grandmother's descendants who can pass this on.

My grandmother had a brother who, being a man, did not pass on his mother's MtDNA.

My grandmother had two sisters who died young, with no children.

My grandmother's older sister in Russia had mostly boys. Of her two daughters who reached adulthood, one had no children and one had only a son.

So Aunt Ethel's teen-aged great-granddaughter may be the only descendant of Etta Bryna who can preserve the U1b1 MtDNA in our known family.

For a woman who had four adult daughters, as Etta Bryna did, I think that is unusual, especially since my mother alone had five daughters. Or maybe it's not unusual at all. (I will look at my other great-grandmothers in a separate post.)