Monday, June 11, 2018

A First Look at the New Skalat Records


I have in hand the Excel file for the newly released Skalat records from JRI-Poland.. They consist of deaths for 1916-1930 and  marriages for 1902-1935. Thus far I have identified those with the name Pikholz plus a few other Pikholz married daughters. That would be twenty-two deaths out of 905 total and thirty-two marriages out of 707 total.

Of the marriages, there was one I did not know at all. I knew the bride's Pikholz parents, but not her or the groom. Another fourteen were spouses of people I had not known were married. Two others were couples I knew and for whom I now have proper identification.

One marriage record is wrong, almost certainly from the transcription process. The Pikholz groom's parents are listed with the same names as the bride and groom themselves. This is an important record because I do not know who the groom's parents are. I have asked Mark Halpern to have the indexers recheck that and he said he would.

There is one particularly odd case. We have birth records for the nine children of Jakob Pikholz and his wife Henie Malka Ginsberg. On one of those birth records, the registrar reversed the mothers' names of that birth and the following one so the mother is listed as Bleich instead of Ginsberg. On the mariage record of that child, her mother is listed as "Henie Malka Pickholz/Bleich" as though taken directly from the erroneous birth record. Two other children of Jakob and Henie Malka are listed correctly in this batch of marriages.

The deaths are more difficult. In most of the records, neither parent is named and in others only the father is listed, leaving me to guess which family the deceased belongs in. There are seven whom I have not identified - two adults, one teenager and four babies.

In one case, I was able to identify a sixty-six year old woman because she died in house 23, where most of her children had been born.

I was surprised to find a 1918 death for sixty-five year old Josef Pikholz in the village of Klimkowce. We had seen earlier that a grandson was named Josef in 1911, but we had not seen a death record for Josef. (We knew he was still alive in 1910.) So now it seems the grandson was given the name of his living grandfather - either after him or for someone else. Not totally unheard of, but unusual nonetheless.

In 1919 there is a death for ninety year old Leibysz Pikholz. We have an Aryeh Leib Pikholz born 1829, but we have a death record for him in 1901. We have another Aryeh Leib Pikholz, the son of Mordecai (b. 1805) Pikholz and his wife Taube. This Aryeh Leib's wife Sara Kreisel Glisner was born about 1829 and they had their first known child in the early 1850s.

There are grandchildren named for Sara Kreisel after she died in 1874, but I had seen none named for Aryeh Leib, until a Leon and a Leonard in the 1920s. And maybe Leslie in 1922. So I guess we can consider this an identification of ninety year old Aryeh Leib. Everything fits and there are no known alternatives. I have recorded it.

And a bonus. While I was looking at the Leib page in my Given Name Analysis, my attention was drawn to a Leibisch who appears in the Skalat death index, the fifth entry on the page.



The record it comes from is the 30 October 1866 death of nine year old Michel, with no other information. When I saw that record years ago, I considered that this may be Aryeh Leib, whom we now know as the son of Mordecai, who appears on the sixth line in that chart, with a note that they may be the same man.

I am now sure that these two Leibs are the same person, though true to my standards I will not yet merge them. After all, if I do, I will never reexamine the question. In fact I barely revisited this death even now.

But there is something else. Michel is a nickname for Jachiel. If you recall, a couple of weeks ago I was considering the identity of the father of Mordecai and Izak Fischel Pikholz and one of the candidates in my mind was some unknown Jachiel. Having one here, the son of Aryeh Leib ben Mordecai gives additional weight to that theory.

There is still much work to do here, updating the website, dealing with the unidentified deaths and combing the file for descendants of Pikholz daughters. And today I go to Herzliyya to take DNA from another descendant of Mordecai, the third in the last three months

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