Another Pikholz-Zellermayer Marriage

About a dozen years ago, I wrote a piece about the multiple marriages between the Pikholz and Zellermayer families from the Skalat/Husiatyn area. We can see three marriages between the two families on this chart that I made back then. Those named Pikholz are shaded blue and the Zellermayers are shaded yellow.  I am not sure exactly how the Zellermayers on the right connect to those on the left, but there are clear indications that they do, including the fact that one on each side (in red) was born in Liczkowce. 

   

We also have a Gabriel Pikholz who died in a house which is clearly associated with the Zellermayers and I speculated that Gabriel's wife Sara may have been a Zellermayer. If so, that would be the fourth. But Gabriel is a son of Nachman Pikholz (b. ~1795) so not closely related to the Pikholz descendants in the above chart.

 

Now we have another.

  

My half-third cousin Erika Herzberg Fraga is part of the Riss family. We share a second-great-grandmother (Rivka Feige Pikholz) from her two husbands. I met Erika about ten years ago in Los Angeles, with the assistance of her cousin George Gutman. She had done DNA - including MtDNA - for George and she is part of our Pikholz DNA group.

 

Recently, while looking for something else, I noticed this bit of information on the MtDNA Results Classic page of my project. Erika's most distant female-line ancestor is her great-grandmother Rosa Zellermayer, born 1835, died 1913. I don't know if I simply never noticed this before or if FamilyTreeDNA made a change in the layout of the page.

I wrote to George. He did not recall what was from Erika herself and what was from his research, but he had been able to add Rosa's parents Josef Zellermayer and his wife Fryma. Rosa and both parents were born in Husiatyn. I found the record in JRI-Poland but nothing further.

 

I see nothing that specifically connects Rosa to the other Zellermayers, but they are all from the Husiatyn area and the name is unusual, so it is reasonable to assume they are the same family. Erika's family is closer to the three couples in the chart above than she is to Gabriel, but they are not part of that bit of the family. On the other hand, four other Riss cousins were born in the small town of Liczkowce, where two of the Zellermayers were born. (Liczkowce is only 13 miles north of Husiatyn.)

I have long felt that there is a deeper connection between the Pikholzes and the Zellermayers. This Rosa strengthens this conviction without adding and more proof. There is a lot of that.

CADASTRALLY SPEAKING - The Pikholz Families in Skalat

A few weeks ago, Jay Osborn's Map Room on the Gesher Galicia website added a cadastral map of Skalat from 1862.

The maps themselves are held by TsDIAL (the Central State Historical Archives of Ukraine) in Lviv and we are grateful to them for making these maps available.

The value of these maps is in the numbered houses - who lived near whom and where the various houses are in relation to markets, roads, waterways and public buildings. The houses are not laid out on a grid with numbers befitting that structure, but simply reflect the order in which the houses were built. 

Many of the vital records which the Polish State Archives has made available through JRI-Poland have house numbers where the event occurred. These are not necessarily where the family lived, as a young woman may have had her child at her mother's house and of course some people died in hospitals.

Some years ago, I cobbled together charts of where the Pikholz families lived in our main towns - Skalat and Rozdol. These charts are not meant to be comprehensive, but they have helped me to understand which families were connected. 

The names of the families in the charts are the ones I have developed for my own convenience and don't mean much to outsiders, but I recently added some color coding to identify the family groups.

The links on the house numbers lead to details of the records. House 60, for instance.

 

 Jay was kind enough to mark up the relevant part of the Skalat map with the Pikholz houses.

The road to the northeast leads to Novosielke, where much of the killing was done in 1942-43 and where a memorial site was established nearly thirty years ago. The road leading south in the center of the image leads to Grzymalow where there were additional Pikholz families.

Most of the Pikholz houses are just east of the road to Grzymalow. Most of the families there are descendants of (Izak) Josef and Mordecai, who are known to be closely related. West of that road is house 132 - descendants of Nachman Pikholz - and more of that family lived in house 23 (up towards the market). House 418, also near the market, was the family of Peretz Pikholz. 

There is no doubt that all these families are related, but they had drifted apart over the years. Living descendants of the different families told me "We are not related to them." The fact they lived in different areas testifies to the distance within the families themselves.