Erzsebet Kornberg(er) in Budapest

The inimitable Lara Diamond gave me a heads-up just before her most recent blogpost, telling me that she had seen some of my Pikholz (assorted spellings) in a Hungarian archival database she was writing about. She also sent me a Budapest death record which she had happened across.

The 9 December 1938 report of the death three days previous of Erzsebet Kornberger, wife of Jozsef Pikholz. She was seventy-two and her parents were Abraham Kornberger and Roza Korberg.

This looked familiar, but not quite as I remembered this person.

I have a Budapest birth record for Sara Rebekka Stefania born 24 August 1898 to Mozes Pikholz (mentioned in the notes on the record) and Erzsebet Kornberg, age 31 of Tarnopol Galicia. Close but no cigar.

We have additional information on this couple from their 1908 (late) Budapest marriage registration. We see Mozes' mother and birthdate, both of which we know from the Rozdol birth records. Erzsebet is called by a Jewish name "Lifsche" and she was born 30 May 1867 to Chaim Kornberg and Sara Rivka Stein.

Lifsche's birthdate and parents' names (plus her maternal grandfather Eisig) appear in the Tarnopol birth records.

So are these two women the same person?

The ages look right. The surname Kornberg vs. Kornberger are within the norm of clerical error. (Mozes is dead by then, and he would have been the best source of information when his wife died.)

On the other hand, the husbands - Mozes and Jozsef - are different. We have no evidence of any Jozsef either in that part of the family or in any other Pikholz Budapest family. And the parents of Erzsebet/Lifsche are completely different - Chaim vs Abraham and Sara Rivka vs. Roza.

(I suppose it is possible that after Mozes Pikholz died, Erzsebet married Jozsef Pikholz, but I find that highly unlikely. And it only solves part of the contradiction.)

I really find it hard to believe that these are two different women, but the errors look too great to be clerical.

There is one other bit of information which seems to seal the deal. The address 36 Nyar Street appears for both. It appears on the 1938 death record, on the 1908 marriage record and on several birth records for the children.

As it happens, Mozes and Lifsche have a granddaughter living in Belgium. She has done DNA for our project and I am Facebook friends with her daughter. I do not assume that the granddaughter - who was born after the Holocaust - will be able to clarify this, but we shall ask.

In the meantime, I shall hold off on recording Erzsebet's death record in my database. And hope for the best.

The Gabriels, The Breines And The Etie Goldes

The Budapest records
Last week, the incomparable Lara Diamond had a blog post abut Hungarian Civil Records on FamilySearch and I figured I should have a look. Before I got to it, she sent me links to nineteen records which mention people named Pikholz, with one spelling or another. There were two births, seven deaths and ten marriages. (Elizabeth Long helped out with deciphering some of these records.)

Two births, two deaths and seven marriages are people I already knew from one particular Pikholz family that lived on Nyar Street - Mozes and his wife Lifsche Kornberg and their children. They are part of a family that I call the IF3 family from Rozdol, where Mozes was born. (Lifsche was from Tarnopol and I have long wondered how they met.) I am in touch with one descendant of that family group and she has even done a DNA test for my project.

Two other records are the marriage (1907) and death (1922) of Matel Lam, whose mother is a Rozdol Pikholz of unclear lineage. The marriage was recorded when Matel and her husband Feiwel Bohrer were in their forties.

Four death records and one marriage appeared to be from the non-Jewish Pikolcz family and I passed them on to Ron McComb who confirmed that they belong to his wife's family..

That leaves one.

Etie Golde Gottlieb
I had never heard of Etie Golde Gottlieb, but I knew her parents Dawid Gottlieb and Regina (Rivka) Riss, my grandfather's half first cousin. Some of the Riss family were recorded as Pikholz and that is why the record showed up in Lara's search.

Dawid Gottlieb was born in Kopicienice and Regina in Kolaharowka (near Husiatyn). Three of the five children I already knew about had been born in Kopicienice and my guess was that the other two were as well. Of the five, two died in childhood, two went to Vienna where one survived WWII. The fifth ended up in Sweden and no one knows what happened to her. Dawid and Regina also lived in Vienna where they died before the War.

So now we have a sixth, this Etie Golde who was born in Kopicienice in 1897 and married in Budapest in 1919, four months after her mother died. Etie Golde's husband Kalman Markovits was from Budapest. I am in touch with several of the Riss cousins and no one ever mentioned this couple. Nor am I aware of any other connections between our Riss family and Budapest.

But the name Etie Golde was familiar to me in another context connected to Husiatyn. Some time ago, I found an 1896 marriage record in Podwoloczysk for Wolf Feldman of Tarnopol and Etie Golde Pikholz, age 32, the daughter of Gabriel and Breine of Husiatyn. It was not at all obvious whether Etie Golde's Pikholz parent was her father Gabriel or her mother Breine, but the record appeared to me to be in error.

I had no couple named Gabriel and Breine, but I did have father-daughter and grandfather-granddaughter pairings, both connected to Husiatyn. And one of them lived in Podwoloczysk. So although this marriage record appeared in some way wrong, I recorded it as is.

The Gabriels and the Breines

So these (on the right) are all the people we know in the Pikholz family represented in the 1896 Podwoloczysk marriage record. Gabriel and Breine, one of whom is a Pikholz, and their daughter Etie Golde, born about 1864.

We have seven Pikholz named Gabriel from the Skalat area. Etie Golde's father is the second one in the following Gabriel Chart. I cannot attribute the third and fifth in the Chart to specific families and in any case, they both died as infants.

Nachman Pikholz (1795-1865) had a son Gabriel who had a granddaughter Brana. What's makes this family interesting here is that Brana's mother Chana (Gabriel's daughter) was born in Husiatyn and, after her marriage, lived in Podwoloczysk.

This is the first line in the Gabriel Chart above. The Gabriel on the last line is a grandson of this Gabriel, the son of Gabriel's son Moshe.

We might consider that if Gabriel's wife Sara died and he later married a Breine, he could have been the father of Etie Golde. But that is quite impossible as Gabriel died at age thirty in 1852, a dozen years before Etie Golde was born in about 1864. But the Husiatyn/Podwoloczysk angle remains intriguing.

Now we have this new Etie Golde Gottlieb, who has a grandmother named Breine and an uncle and great-grandfather named Gabriel. (That Gabriel is married to a Pikholz, so does not appear on the Gabriel Chart himself.) Etie Golde's uncle is the fourth line of the Chart and another cousin is the sixth line.

Obviously Gabriel Wolf Riss, the uncle, cannot be the father of Etie Golde who married Wolf Feldman, because he would have been only abut four years old when she was born.

We run into many coincidences in genealogy, particularly with repeated naming patterns within a family. But this triple Gabriel-Breine occurrence has me flummoxed, even before we find the name Etie Golde in two of those cases. Yes, I know that the two Etie Goldes are thirty-three years apart, but that too may be one named for the other or both named for the same person. Or maybe it's just a coincidence.

In the meantime, I shall send this blog post to the surviving members of the Riss family. Perhaps they can shed some light.


Housekeeping notes 

Order here.
European Jews have always married mainly within the tribe. Whether our numbers five hundred years ago in Europe were four hundred or four hundred thousand, the pool was limited. As a result, the members of the tribe today are all related to one another, multiple times.  This phenomenon, known as endogamy, makes Jewish genetic genealogy very difficult, often impossible. There is a similar phenomenon in some other population groups.

I was convinced that this brick wall is not as impenetrable as it seems, at least in some circumstances.

I believe that this book demonstrates that I was correct.

When I decided I wanted to write a book, I was not sure if I wanted to write a “How to” book or a “How I did it” book. The decision was dictated by the facts in the field. Different family structures, widely different numbers of living family members, and other similar factors dictated that writing “How to” would be irrelevant for most researchers.

“How I did it” is more likely to be helpful to the research community and more likely to instill the confidence necessary for such a project.

It is my hope that this book will encourage and inspire other researchers of their European Jewish families and other endogamous populations to say “I can do this!”

Going Where Nana's Recent Ancestors Lived

My father's mother, Margaret/Miriam Rosenzweig, was born in Allegheny Pennsylvania - what is now Pittsburgh's North Side - in 1903. Her father, Moritz/Moshe Rosenzweig, arrived in the US first and her mother, Regina/Rivka, followed in 1902. With her came the five older children: Elvira (Aunt Ella) age 16, Siegfried (Uncle Fred) age 14, Sigmund age 11, Gyula (Uncle Julie) age 9 and Ilona (Aunt Helen) age 6. They were all born in Budapest.

In the 1910 census,  Moritz, Regina and their mothers and fathers are all listed as having been born in "(Hun) Magyar."

The first European document I ever ordered

But they came from two different areas. Moritz' father's Rosenzweigs and his mother's Zelinkas were from Trencin County in what is now northwest Slovakia. Both families were in Trencin County since at least the 1700s, in several towns.

Nana's grandparents are buried in Vag Bestercze. I want to visit them. This is the hundredth year since my great-great-grandfather died at ninety-six, but we do not have a date.

Moritz' wife Regina Bauer was born in Kunszentmiklos, south of Budapest, in 1870. I actually remember her. She used to give me M&Ms. I discussed her family at some length, here and here. There is a large set of Bauers who lived in Kunszentmiklos and who previously lived in Apostag. Regina's mother Feige Stern is from Kalocsa, a bit further south.

Nana's maternal grandparents and at least one uncle are in Kunszentmiklos and visiting them is particularly important. I'll explain why after I've been there.

So a year or so ago, I decided I was going and I asked my first cousin Linda to come with. Our fifth cousin Cyndi - on the Zelinka side - decided to join us and all of a sudden it's time to go. We are meeting Thursday in Prague.

But before that, on the way, I am going to Germany, a country I never expected to set foot in. As I reported here three short months ago, we just found the entire family of my maternal grandmother's older sister. The one who stayed behind in Moscow. ("We found" means my friend and colleague Galit Aviv Sisto in New Jersey, whose first language is Russian.) One of my newfound second cousins lives in Nuremberg, three and a half hours by bus from Prague. So I am starting there, with my second cousin Inna, her daughter and son-in-law Anna and Viktor, and their daughter Julia who is the only English-speaker among them. Julia's brother Ilya may or may not be able to come down from Frankfort, where he is studying. I have a DNA kit with me and of course photographs.

The idea of going to Germany is horrifying. But I have to swallow this frog. 

I hope to report on all of this as we go along. In the meantime, here is the plan.

Wednesday - Nuremberg
Thursday - bus to Prague
We may meet a Zelinka relative who lives in Prague. I am reading the Torah on Shabbat.
Sunday - pick up the rental car and head for Zilina, Slovakia, our headquarters for four days.
Thursday - Budapest. Three family graves in the city with Karesz Vandor, but mostly being tourists.