Mendel (Morris) Pickholtz, 5657-5717 (1896-1957)

Twenty-fifth anniversary, 1946

My grandfather died on the ninth of First Adar - that's Monday evening - sixty years ago. He has been dead almost as long as he lived.

Everyone thought I was too young to go to the funeral, or even the unveiling - something I resented until, well forever. He had had a serious heart attack just before I was born and there was some concern that I would bear his name, but happily he recovered. He kept the extra name "Chaim" that was added during the illness.

In the end, it was a "cerebral vascular accident." Twelve hours from onset until death. I knew without anyone's telling me.

They lived in this house since sometime in the 1930s until I think 1952.

From the 1940 federal census

 
Sometime in the 1940s, my grandmother's mother moved in with them, until her death in 1950.

My father and Aunt Betty both went to their weddings from that house.

The family lived in Zalosce, east Galicia, and my grandfather's first seven siblings (four of whom survived childhood) were born there. Maybe the next two as well, but Zalosce birth records are available only through 1890, so we are not sure. My grandfather, the youngest was born in Bogdanowka, in house 95, on the holiday of Hoshanna Rabba, during Sukkot.

This Jezierna birth record is from the All Galicia Database of Gesher Galicia

Within a few years, the family began it's multi-stage migration to the Pittsburgh, where his father's sister had settled in the 1880s. My great-grandmother came last with the three youngest children, not through Baltimore or Ellis Island like the others, but through Montreal and the St. Albans Vermont border crossing.

With U. Dave (center) and U. Joe (right)

My grandfather was in the wholesale grocery business on Miller Street with two of his brothers, Uncle Joe and Uncle Dave, a business which closed when Uncle Joe turned sixty-five. I remember being there.

The children of the three brothers (the eldest, Uncle Max, had no children) were close in age and that and the business connection made my father's generation and mine closer with them then with the three sisters' children, who were older. (Not to mention that my grandfather and Uncle Joe married sisters!)

My grandfather had first cousins in Pittsburgh on both sides of his family, but the family connection didn't survive much after that first generation - until I began doing genealogy.

1953. Getting ready for the first seder on Northumberland Street, after leaving the house on Phillips Avenue.
I share the head of the table with my grandfather. Six people in this picture are still with us.

The Pittsburgh Jewish Criterion (thanks to The Pittsburgh Jewish Newspapers Project) recorded many of the key events in his life, including his regular listing as Vice-President of the Poale Zedeck Men's Club (and my grandmother's as President of the Sisterhood). Here are a few.

And finally...

Not mentioned are Aunt Becky and Aunt Bessie who predeceased him.

May his soul be bound in life. תהא נפשו צרורה בצרור החיים.

Housekeeping notes
I am speaking here in Israel in English - 16 March 2017, 7:30 – IGRA, Beit Fisher, 5 Klausner Street, Raanana
Lessons in Jewish DNA: One Man’s Successes and What He Learned on the Journey

I have had four proposals accepted for the IAJGS Conference in Orlando 23-28 July. No times or dates yet. But if anyone wants me to speak in the US before the Conference, now is the time to speak up.

And for the attention of any program chairs (or anyone who knows program chairs), I'll be available in the US late April-early May of 2018. Another bar mitzvah in Chicago.

Wendy and Carolyn

About a week ago, I received an inquiry about a week ago from a woman named Wendy who begins:

Hi Israel,

I am trying through a process of elimination to figure out my mom’s fathers side. Through Gedmatch, there are 3 relatives that you tested who have matches with my mom. She doesn’t know who her father is but she is 20+% Ashkenazi.

She gave me her mother Carolyn's GEDmatch kit number and the three of my kits that she matches and the chromosomes where the matches occur. I didn't pay much attention to the three people she mentioned but went straight to Carolyn's match list where I saw that she actually matches thirty of my kits.

In looking at the list of thirty, I saw that one was a match of nearly 12.5 cM with my father's second cousin Shabtai. This would be on my grandmother's mother's Hungarian side. I did a chromosome browser for that part of my family and quickly saw that all the action is on chromosome 21, at the far right end.

To remind everyone, Susan is my second cousin, Aunt Betty is my father's sister and Sarajoy is one of my sisters. So this is a nice family group. Not a large segment and probably not much use for someone looking for a birth father, but it does hint at geography as we know our Bauers were in the same area since the 1700s.

So I reported to Wendy:

This group points to my pgm's mother's family. her father is a Bauer from Apostag and Kunszentmiklos in Hungary and her mother is a Stern from Kalocsa.

I don't have more but that will give you some direction.

I also saw in the match list that Carolyn has matches with two second cousins on my father's father's (Galician) side, Rhoda and Roz who are first cousins to each other. But there were no matches with other of my Pikholz second cousins. There is, however, a match with my third cousin Pinchas. Pinchas is a third cousin to Rhoda and Roz as I am but is also a third cousin to them in a direction having nothing to do with me - their Zwiebel and Lewinter families, also from the same area of east Galicia. (It could be a Kwoczka match, but no other second cousins of mine appear.)

So I did a chromosome browser for just those three. And got this:

OK. So Carolyn has a match with the Zwiebels or the Lewinters.

Then I realized that this too is chromosome 21 and that a chromosome browser for both groups gives me this:

This really looks like one group, especially when I note that my start point (41,302,925) is the same as Shabtai while my end point (45,746,864) is the same as Pinchas.

I triangulated the two groups just in case one matchs Carolyn of her mother's side and one on her father's side. (This was unlikely as Carolyn's mother has no known Jewish ancestry.) The two groups triangulated perfectly.

So it appears clear that someplace back in genealogical time there is common ancestry between Shabtai's Hungarian Bauers or Sterns and the east Galician Zwiebels or the Lewinters. Back in time, but recent enough that segments in the 11-13 cM range were preserved in both groups.

Here's to endogamy. Even if it doesn't help Carolyn very much.

Carolyn and Wendy live in Maryland and both plan to attend my presentation at JGS Maryland at 1:30 on the twenty-fourth. That's at Hadassah, 3723 Old Court Road, Suite 205. Come join us. It's my one non-DNA talk other than Seattle. Maybe they'll meet their cousin Pinchas, if he comes.

Beyond A Reasonable Doubt:

What We Know

vs

 What We Can Prove

Housekeeping notes
I'm off to the US for the next four weeks. GRIP, the IAJGS Conference, programs in half-a-dozen places, some private mentoring on Y-DNA and meeting with a few relatives I haven't seen in forever.

Perhaps the most exciting thing will be meeting a male-line descendant of the Pikkel family from Vajnag, which is across the river from Vyshkovo. If you have forgotten the significance of that, review this blog from six weeks ago. I'll have a DNA test kit with me.

I'll blog as I can.

NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK

A few weeks ago, I received an email from a fellow in England, as follows:

I should like some research conducted about a distant relative whose family may have settled in the UK and Israel.  He was the nephew of ...Getzel [who] lived in Odessa.  His youngest son, Hyman K[redacted] (my grandfather), who was born in 1878, came to the UK in the 1900s.  He told people that his father had a sister, Sadie, who had a son who was also living in the UK.  It his his relatives who I am trying to trace.  The only information I have is what my grandfather once said, which was that the man's name was Berman (though that could be Burman, I suppose), that he was about my grandfather's age, perhaps a little younger, and was living in the Edgware Road in London in the 1950s.  He had a kiosk which sold newspapers but which may have been a small department store.  Berman had a sister in Israel (who married someone named Chainin) and a son in London who was a senior civil servant, who would have been born in about 1910.  Both Saul [who had recommended me..IP] and I thought that the best way to trace Berman was through his brother-in-law.

Please let me know whether this is the sort of research which you would be prepared to undertake.

As a rule, before answering this kind of inquiry, I poke around a bit, without turning on the meter, to see what the likelihood is that I can accomplish anything useful. As often happens, my first task is to understand what it is that the inquirer has told me. Many times the story of a family structure suffers from antecedent ambiguity. It may be perfectly clear to the writer whom each "his" refers to, but it is not always clear to the reader. Had I actually taken this case, I would have drawn up a chart based on what I understood the family structure to be and sent it back to the client for confirmation and with notations such as "Born when?" (More often than not, the client sends it back with all kinds of corrections and clarifications. Sometimes he just goes away and it's probably for the better.)

I attended a lecture by Dr. Neil Rosenstein at one of the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies (IAJGS) conferences, on the difficulties of doing rabbinic genealogy which is his specialty. Although linking to a prominent rabbinic line is considered analogous to getting onto a major highway, once there, you often find that the antecedents are very confusing, there are few mentions of years and the punctuation does not always meet the needs of the modern reader. He brought one example where a particular rabbi's line was described something like this:

His father was xxx and his mother was xxx and his father was xxx and his father was xxx and his father married the daughter of xxx and her mother was the daughter of xxx and his father was xxx...

The way Rosenstein told the story, he published a work describing this nine-generation lineage, realizing only later that it seemed like too many generations for the number of years involved. Only several years later did he realize that the "her" that I marked in bold blue actually refers to the mother of the rabbi at the bottom of this lineage rather than the person immediately preceding that pronoun.

In the case the man in England presented, we seemed to be talking about a woman named Berman or Burman who married a man named Chainin a couple of generations ago. No given names here, except that the woman's mother was Sadie.

The first question, of course, is how you write Chainin in Hebrew, since there is no Hebrew letter that sounds like the English "ch." People unfamiliar with languages other than their own often think that sounds transfer from one language to another simply and unambiguously, not realizing that a name with a simple spelling can be written half-a-dozen ways in another language. In Hebrew this is complicated by the absence of vowels. (In one memorable instance, I was looking for someone with the uncommon name KERN, but in Hebrew it is written the same as the very common KEREN. Client was not happy.)

The name that made the most sense to me as a representation of Chainin was what I would write as Sheinin and there are probably 150 households by that name in Israel. So even assuming this is correct AND that the name hadn't been changed either by the original couple or by subsequent generations AND that the family had sons to preserve name going forward AND that they even remained in the country, finding someone would be no simple matter.

And it's one thing to look for a needle in a haystack.  At least when you find the needle, you know you have completed the task. In the case of many searches you have to wonder how you will recognize a positive result even if you happen across it. There may be many needles - which is the right one? Or it may not be clear if what you find even qualifies as a needle.

There is one possible solution, of course. That would be to write letters to all those 150 households and ask if there was a Berman woman in their past.  Or Burman. Or Borman. I have done this kind of thing before. About ten percent of the letters are returned by the post office. Probably another thirty or forty percent are not answered. Of those who do answer, many tell me their life stories and expect me to find answers to their family questions. It isn't the kind of thing I want to do, even if I had the time, which I don't.


Another possible solution is to put this story out in places where such things are discussed. For the most part, the potential client shouldn't need me to do that, aside from some very basic guidance. But as he pointed out when I mentioned using this as a blog topic, maybe someone reading my blog will recognize the people.