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.

Cousin Herb's Y-DNA

My father's first cousin Herb Braun was the third person to test for my family DNA project. That was five and a half years ago. We had met once, when I was fourteen but had been emailing for a few years about family history.

We met a second time, in 2013

Herb's mother is my grandfather's older sister, so he carries the mitochondrial DNA of my Kwoczka great-grandmother and Pollak second great-grandmother. At first he did the Family Finder (autosomal) test alone and then did the basic MtDNA. Later I upgraded him to the full MtDNA. That test led do a second family test, which I wrote about last year.

Herb's Braun (then Brunn) family lived in Zalosce (east Galicia, about twenty miles NNW of Tarnopol) where the Kwoczkas also lived and I figured that since the families might have other connections in the near background, I should probably test his Y-DNA as well. I ordered a Y-67 after he died last year at ninety-seven and we were fortunate that his initial swab was good enough for this fourth test.

Herb's results at 67 markers show 133 matches, one at a genetic distance of one and three at a genetic distance of two, with nothing that stood out to me. (At 37 markers, he is a genetic distance of four with our cousin Bruce who tested for the Kwoczka male line.)

One of Herb's GD-2 matches is Gary Simon, whose sister is married to a first cousin of mine. But more important, Gary's wife Judy is one of the administrators of the Y-DNA project that both Gary and Herb belong to.

Gary has a terminal SNP called Y-18621 and Judy asked me if Herb could test for that SNP with Y-SEQ. Herb, of course, can no longer test for anything and his two sons predeceased him. But I am in touch with one of his two grandsons and he agreed to my request to do the Y-SEQ test.

I guess we'll see what happens.

Join projects. It can help you and as it helps others.

Our Genetic Portrait - Part One

DNA Painter
A few months ago, I came to the conclusion that I have been spending entirely too much time on the trees and not enough on the forest. I would hear from people who think they may be related to my family and I'd look at their GEDmatch kits, comparing them to my 110+ project members looking for segments with multiple matches of 10 centiMorgans or more to see what patterns would show up.

Most of them showed some direction, but nothing really specific, appearing mostly to be too far back in time to do anything with, especially without the benefit of common surnames, geography or multiple family kits

I decided I needed to do some chromosome mapping in order to attribute particular chromosomes to specific ancestors. I had used Kitty Cooper's wonderful Chromosome Mapper a few years ago, but I was far from comfortable with it. I circled the Chromosome Mapping course at GRIP next June and wondered if it would relate to the specific issues of endogamy.

A couple of weeks ago, someone on Facebook mentioned a new tool called DNA Painter and I decided to give it a try. This is a report on my first efforts. The chart below shows my first 183 segments - 60 on my father's side and 123 on my mother's side. And there will be more.

In the course of creating this map, I have been in contact with the developer and he has welcomed my comments and questions. There is a lot to like here.

The data comes from the GEDmatch one-to-one and X-one-to one results.

What you are probably supposed to do is take all your matches with a particular person and copy them into the Painter, but this is not a responsible way to deal with families from endogamous populations.

For us, we have to go segment by segment, analyzing each one, looking for matches with multiple people that are based on more than "I match cousin so-and-so, so we must be related IN THE MOST OBVIOUS WAY." Not necessarily. I'll get into that in greater detail on my mother's side.

First note that this profile is called "Israel Pickholtz family," not just "Israel Pickholtz." I saw no reason to use only my own segments when my brother and four sisters have segments from those same ancestors which can only enhance my map. That decision required calling this profile "female" because my sisters have a paternal X, even though I myself do not.

I decided to take the next, obvious step - the ancestral matches of my father's sister and brother, Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob, since all their ancestors are also my ancestors. But their matches are not the same as my father's matches (as represented by his children), so there will be places where the final map will include segments from both my grandfather and my grandmother AT THE SAME PLACE. This is a good thing, because it fills out the ancestors, but it will require extra care when some new person comes into the picture with a match that needs defining.

Mapping my father's side
I began with my fourth cousin Anna, the great-granddaughter of Uncle Selig about whom I have written several times.

This chart may be familiar to you from my DNA presentations.

The circled matches on Anna's chromosomes 3, 8 and 15 are definitely from our second great-grandmother Rivka Feige Pikholz and are the basis of the demonstration that Anna and her half-brother David are descendants of Uncle Selig. I also included Anna's matches on chromosome 21, as these are clearly from the same source.

But I tend to be conservatiive, so on chromosome 15 where Marty and Anna share 50 cM, I decided to record as certain only the 22.6 cM that Anna shares with Marty and Herb. The rest of Anna and Marty's long segment I recorded as "possible," though I could have chosen "very likely." Here is how that segment appears in full.

Another set of Rivka Feige matches came from my father's half second cousin Lia who contributed five segments to the map. These are the Rivka Feige segments from Anna and Lia.

Note that on chromosome 15, one segment is pink rather than red. That is Marty's "possible" segment.

The second easy match was with Debbie from North Carolina, whom I wrote about in May 2016. She has one large match with us on chromosome 2 and and another on the X. The first is definitely from my second great-grandmother Mari Zelinka and the second is either from her or from my grandmother's Bauer/Stern side, but since I have seen no other indication this might be the case, I attributed the segment to the Zelinkas and called it "very likely."

Together with two segments from my fourth cousin Milan in Prague, this is what we have from Mari Zelinka.

There is also a single segment in purple which we received from Mari Zelinka's father - based on a match with my fifth cousin Cyndi Norwitz on chromosome 18.

Two other easily identifiable ancestors on my father's side are my great-grandmothers Regina Bauer and Jute Lea Kwoczka. The first I established using fifteen matching segments with my father's second cousin Shabtai and the second using nineteen segments with my father's second cousin Bruce and another eleven with my third cousin Pinchas. Here is how those appear.

This gives me a total of sixty segments of low-hanging fruit on my father's side, supposedly representing 36% of my the ancestral DNA from that side.

But in fact that is not correct. As you can see clearly on chromosomes 3, 8 and 18 there are overlapping ancestors. Different versions of the same segment from different ancestors. Here is where I have to be very careful when I want to look at matches with new people. And the 36% is nםt representative of all the ancestors on my father's side - it just refers to segments which have at least one ancestor represented.

Perhaps I shall redo the map later, so I can show a separate set of chromosomes for each of my paternal grandparents.

My mother's side is a different story entirely and I hope to tell you about that next week.

For now I shall wish you all a happy, healthy, peaceful and prosperous 5778 and that you and your families should be written in the Book of Life.

לשנה טובה תכתבו ותחתמו

Housekeeping notes

When I visited the cemetery in Vienna a few months ago, I reported that several of the family graves had no tombstones or had tombstones in very bad condition. I was kind of hoping that close family members might address this and I can now report that one actually did. The grandson of Isidor Riss sent me photographs of the stone he put up for Isidor (who died in 1937) and his wife Ernestina who was killed in Auschwitz. 

In other news, I had a look at my Ancestry DNA matches for the first time in a long time and dropped a note to a woman named Andrea whom I didn't recognize but who seems to be fairly closely related. Turns out she is the daughter of a second cousin on my mother's paternal side. I knew her name but we have never met. I asked her to join GEDmatch and she said she would. Meantime we are now Facebook friends.

Jutte Leah Kwoczka's Lazarus Kit

Last summer at the IAJGS Conference in Seattle, I gave a new presentation called GEDmatch.com’s Lazarus Tool As It Applies to Two Kinds of Endogamy. It was well-received but I felt it needed some changes. I also received a few more kits that I had to add. I am beginning to work on those for the Orlando Conference in July. This is the summary I submitted with my proposal.

Lazarus is a tool offered by GEDmatch.com, which can create a partial genome of a person based on autosomal test results of descendants on one hand and non-descendant relatives on the other. This recreated kit can be compared to other kits in order to help determine and clarify relationships. 
But for endogamous families, this is more complicated, especially when you consider that there are two distinct types of endogamy. 
This presentation will address the two types of endogamy and the way to best use Lazarus while reducing "contaminated" input inadvertently introduced due to multiple relationships. It will also address the use of Lazarus as a tool for DNA analysis. 
The presentation – much of which is based on the speaker's recently published book "ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People" – will use examples from the single-surname Pikholz Project.

The talk will take place on Tuesday 25 July at 2 PM in a room called "Osprey 2" and will be introduced by Mindie Kaplan. The handouts are mostly tree charts so people will be able to follow the family structure.

The kit I am most interested in recreating in this presentation is my great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz (~1853-1931), but along the way, I shall recreate kits for my father, my great-grandmother and Hersch's mother Rivka Feige, with a nod to my grandfather as well.

People who have done Family Finder tests are shaded in green.

It is the kit of my great-grandmother, Jutte Leah Kwoczka (~1855-1926), Hersch Pikholz' wife, which I wish to comment upon here. We have Family Finder tests for fifteen of her descendants - three grandchildren and twelve great-grandchildren. 

Those fifteen descendants should be fine as Group 1*. (Actually we have two more great-grandchildren, but I am not using their tests as their parents are already included.)

For Group 2*, I used the grandson of one of Jutte Leah's brothers and a great-grandson of the other. That gave me a Lazarus kit for Jutte Leah of 1490 cM, not quite enough for GEDmatch to make it useful for one-to-many comparisons to other people.


I figured I should be able to make up the missing 10 cM and then some by testing a great-great-grandson of Jutte Leah's brother Pinchas.

The "and then some" turned out to be more than one hundred cM and the new kit was 1816 cM, more than enough for batching.

Finally - well not quite finally - this week I received Family Finder results for a sister of the great-great-grandson that I had added previously, giving me a fourth person in Group 2. The total cM went up by another 16 cM, for a total of 1833 cM. Not very much gained there.

But there are definitely false matches in that total. Aunt Becky's husband, Uncle Harry, is the son of Pinchas Kwoczka's wife's sister. 

That means that Aunt Becky's two granddaughters share Zwiebel/Lewinter DNA with the three descendants of Pinchas - DNA which has nothing at all to do with Jutte Leah Kwoczka and should not (MUST NOT) be included in her Lazarus kit.

So I had no choice but to remove the granddaughters of Aunt Becky and Uncle Harry, leaving thirteen members of Group 1*. This reduced the size of Jutte Leah's kit to 1644 cM. The irrelevant Zwiebel/Lewinter DNA was 189 cM, a very significant amount.

Please note that the last day of Passover begins this evening (Sunday) - the last two days if you are still in exile. I'll not be reacting to comments made during the holiday until my Wednesday morning.

* In fact, GEDmatch gives you only slots for ten kits in Group 1. But I have more than that in this case, so I had to reverse Group1 1 and Group 2. That doesn't matter to the computation.

Chromosome Mapping - It's Not So Simple

At the end of last week, I put my toes into the water of chromosome mapping to show which bits of my own DNA came from which of my father's ancestral lines. I looked at family matches with Debbie and Cyndi on the Zelinka line, Fred on a combination of the Rosenzweig and Zelinka lines and Shabtai on Bauer and Stern lines. That was on my grandmother's side. On my grandfather's side, I looked at Bruce, Pinchas and Ben on the Kwoczka side and the Baar and Riss cousins as descendants of my great-great-grandmother from her first husband.

I tried to be conservative, leaving out a number of segments that were small or otherwise suspect and looking for additional matches within the family.

The result was forty-five segments, totaling something over 550 centiMorgans or about one-sixth of the DNA that I received from my father. Not a lot, but a start.

Debbie's segments
Well, it may be a start, but it's a rough one. First there is this:

Erika is one of the Riss cousins, a descendant of my great-great-grandmother Rivka Feige from her first husband. Debbie's segment is part of Erika's segment and yes they triangulate. They are on the same chromosome 11. None of this "maybe on my mother's chromosome 11."

Although I overlooked this when I did the mapping last week, I should not have been surprised. Debbie matches my family in multiple ways and I have begun using her matches in my Power Point presentations to illustrate endogamy.

From one of my Power Point slides, showing Debbie's multiple matches with my families

Right there in point 3, I note that Debbie has matches with Rivka Feige's family, not only with the Zelinkas.

In fact, I discussed that specific segment on chromosome 11 when I introduced Debbie several months ago.

So I misattributed this segment to the Zelinkas when in fact it comes from Rivka Feige.

And what about the third of Debbie's three segments from last week's mapping, the one on chromosome 19? I mentioned that too in the original blog about Debbie's matches, but without showing the chromosome browser. So here it is.

This segment where Debbie and I match has also reached me from Rivka Feige. (Jane is my fourth cousin on that side.) So that's two segments that move from "Zelinka" to "Rivka Feige."

There could be a similar problem with Cyndi's two segments, but we thus far have not identified any effects of endogamy with Cyndi, so I'll leave that alone. For now.


Shabtai, Fred, Bruce

But that's not all. In reviewing last week's mapping, I saw this - a three-chromosome round robin of conflicting matches with Shabtai, Bruce and Fred - each of them supposedly unrelated to the others.

(Shabtai and Bruce have the same Y-haplogroup, but too far from one another to be considered a Y match.)

None of the three pairs triangulates. Not even the pair on chromosome 5 where the end point appears the same for Shabtai and Bruce. So this is not showing us that Bruce and Shabtai have a common ancestor we don't know about. Nor do Bruce and Fred. Or Fred and Shabtai.

(To be precise, they do have matching segments - in fact Bruce and Fred have two - so there is common ancestry between each pair. But not on chromosomes 1, 5 and 15. And not in any of their matches with me.)

For each pair, there are two possible explanations. One might be a match on my mother's side - after all, I have two chromosomes each numbered 1, 5 and 15, one from each of my parents. The other explanation is that catch-all, circular answer that one (or both!) of those matches is IBS, Identical By State, a false match. Although I know better, I think of the IBS answer as a refuge of scoundrels.

So let's see if anyone can be from my mother's side. As I have explained before, six cousins on my mother's side have tested: my first cousins Leonard and Kay, my second cousins on my grandfather's side Ruth and Judy and my second cousins on my grandmother's side Beth and Sam. Each of those pairs are first cousins to one another.

On chromosome 1, Fred matches only my cousin Ruth, but not on the segment where he and Bruce match me. That does not prove that he cannot match me there on my mother's side, but it is something of an indication., especially since he doesn't match the other cousins on my mother's side ANYPLACE.

Bruce's matches on chromosome 1 include Ruth, Judy and Sam, but interestingly not my first cousins - whom he doesn't match at all.

Bruce's matches with Ruth, Judy and Sam and with me, my sisters and family on my father's sides.

There is no triangulation here between Ruth, Judy or Sam with me, nor do those segments triangulate with any of Bruce's other matches on my father's side, so Bruce does not appear to match me here on my mother's side.

So since neither Fred nor Bruce appears to match me on this segment on my mother's side, one of them must be IBS - a false match. I will nominate Fred for IBS since his 7.85 cM segment is smaller than Bruce's 10.49 cM segment. My match on this segment would therefore be on Bruce's Kwoczka side. But there is a large dose of guesswork here.

On chromosome 15, Fred matches no one on my mother's side and Shabtai's matches with Leonard and Sam do not line up with mine, so we are pretty safe in saying that neither is on my mother's side. Fred's segment with me is 14.49 cM and Shabtai's is only 6.06 cM, so Shabtai's is almost certainly the IBS and this segment is on Fred's Rosenzweig or Zelinka side.

Chromosome 5 is a bit more complicated. Shabtai and I have a 35 cM segment and he has segments of just over 5 cM with Leonard and Sam.

Theirs do not triangulate with mine.

With Bruce, there is no triangulation and no matching at all with me. So here too, this is not from my mother's side.

But Bruce's match with me is 12.42 cM - a bit large for IBS. Yet, I haven't much choice. Shabtai's 35 cM segment is certainly not IBS. So I must ignore Bruce's segment and attribute this DNA to Shabtai's Bauer or Stern lines.

Endogamy is hard and the results of this kind of mapping are far from certain. Throwing it all into a machine and cranking out results makes a pretty, multi-colored chart, but I wouldn't try to take it to the bank. Even with tweezers and a microscope it's no simple or certain matter.

Some Basic Chromosome Mapping

Chromosome mapping
Two years ago, I had my first interaction with chromosome mapping, when I sat with Kitty Cooper in Salt Lake City. Kitty had developed a chromosome mapper, in which she could see which segments of her own DNA came from each of her ancestors. I liked this, of course and blogged about it here. The meager results looked like this:

I didn't take this any further even as more family members tested, because I was more interested in the reverse - reconstructing the ancestors. But I knew it was something I should get back to and maybe four months ago, I actually put it on my to-do list.

The graphics aside, the theory behind chromosome mapping is fairly simple. If I have DNA that matches that of the descendants of my great-great-grandmother Rivka Feige from her first husband, then both they and I must have gotten those segments from Rivka Feige. In fact, five such descendants have tested and I match four of them, with a total of seventy-four segments. Fifteen of those segments are five cM or more and four are between 9.65 cM and 17.95 cM. (I am using 5 cM as a minimum because that is the default on the Family Tree DNA chromosome browser.)

Two of those segments are shared by more than one of the cousins.

The orange is Lillian, my father's half second cousin. The others are my half third cousins.

I should be wary of the small segments, of course, and I must be aware that there were marriages between Pikholz family members during that period, so some of those matches may have come to both them and me from someone else.  I am, however fairly confident that the seven largest segments - 7.93 cM and greater - are from Rivka Feige. These.

I am going to do this from scratch, with tweezers, not using Kitty's mapping tool. I'll deal with the graphics later.

My grandmother's father's mother's side
There isn't much to do with my mother's side. I have two first cousins who have tested, plus two second cousins on each of my mother's sides - in both cases, first cousins to one another. So the best I can possibly do is to label my DNA as "Mother's mother's side" and "Mother's father's side." And even that with reservations.

So I went to my paternal grandmother, where I have a bit more to work with.

I have discussed Nana's father's mother's Zelinka side here, not long ago. So let's start with Debbie who is definitely on the Zelinka side, even though we haven't yet figured out the specific relationship. Debbie and I have nineteen matching segments, including 20.78 cM on chromosome 2, 7.32 cM on chromosome 11 and 5.96 cM on chromosome 19. The one on chromosome is beyond all doubt - it's the one I wrote about a few months ago.
 

Debbie in orange, then Marshall, Lee, Fred and Susan.

To make sure that the smaller segments are not stray bits that came from someplace else, I looked at them vis-a-vis my four second cousins on that side (on the left) and (below) Uncle Bob and Aunt Betty.

Well, we know for sure that Debbie's two smaller matches are not from my mother's side. These look good for Zelinka.

Then I looked at my definite, documented Zelinka fifth cousin, Cindy. I have only two small segments of 7-8 cM with her, plus thirty under 5 cM.

The four second cousins don't match either of them nor does Debbie but Uncle Bob matches both and Aunt Betty matches one.

These are probably Zelinka segments, but I say that with something less than full confidence.

My grandmother's father's father's side

The only cousin on Nana's father's father's Rosenzweig side who is comparable to Cyndi and Debbie is my fifth cousin Miki, but I do not have a match with him according to FTDNA. What I do have is a nice set of matches with my half second cousin Fred. His only Jewish DNA is from his grandmother, Nana's half sister. So my matches with Fred are almost certainly either Rosenzweig or Zelinka.

Fred matches me (above) on only twenty-three segments altogether, ten of them over 5 cM and five of those 9.33-14.49 cM.

Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob (left) match him on eight of the ten. I saw no point in checking Fred's matches with the other second cousins.

Nana's mother side
On Nana's mother's side, all we have to work with besides the second cousins (without Fred) is my father's second cousin Shabtai. Nana's mother's parents are Bauer and Stern and we have no way to differentiate between them. Both sides are from Hungary - the Bauers from Apostag and later Kunszentmiklos and the Sterns from Kalocsa.

I have forty-one matches with Shabtai. Six are between 5.13 cM and 7.65 cM. Six others are more than 15.98 cM, including segments of 47.13 cM (chromosome 4) and 36.16 cM (chromosome 5). I assume that some of these are Bauer and others Stern.

Marshal, Lee and/or Susan match eight of the twelve, but only four of the six large ones. None of them share the 19.53 cM on chromosome 18 or the 17.03 at the right end of chromosome 5. Below on the right, we can see that Aunt Betty and Uncle Bob also have only eight of the segments that I have with Shabtai, demonstrating that my father received some Bauer/Stern DNA that his brother and sister did not.

It appears therefore that I have twelve identifiable segments from Bauer and Stern, perhaps ten from Rosenzweig & Zelinka (matches with Fred) and five unambiguously Zelinka (matches with Debbie and Cyndi). Add to that at least four and perhaps as many as fifteen from Rivka Feige Pikholz.

The Kwoczkas

Then there is the matter of my father's paternal grandmother's Kwoczkas. My great-grandmother had two brothers. One has a grandson - Bruce - who has tested. The other has a great-grandson and a great-great-grandson - Pinchas and Ben, uncle and nephew. I have eighty-four matches with these three, twenty-five over 5 cM.

Of those twenty-five, ten are 10.49 cM or more. The four largest and two others are with Bruce. Three other matches of the top ten are with Pinchas and Ben's is identical with one of those three. The other fifteen are 7.71 cM or less and I think I'll ignore them for now.

Here are the remaining nine. No need to count Ben's which matches Pinchas. But I am going to move this comparison to a GEDmatch browser because there are more people are involved. (FTDNA's chromosome browser can take only five kits at once.)

Click the image to enlarge

So those matches that I have with the descendants of my great-grandmother's brothers are shared pretty liberally and convincingly by other descendants of my great-grandmother.

This is both partial and needs review. Expect to hear more on this in the coming weeks.

"Tip of the Iceberg"

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the inquiry into the possibility that the Skalat Pikholz Y-DNA goes back to Iberia. Our project administrator Rachel Unkefer spoke about the project in Seattle. You can see her presentation "Tip of the Iceberg" here. Very near the end, there is a reference to a red map pin which may be moving soon. That's us.

Baruch Dayan Haemet  ברוך דיין האמת

Miami Herald

My father's first cousin Herb Braun passed away Tuesday at age ninety-seven.

I met him once when I was fourteen and once when I went to see him in Miami three years ago. Regular readers will recognize his name as he was one of the first to test for our project.

ROZ!

I could call this post Herb's MtDNA (Part Two) because it's the continuation of something I wrote more than eighteen months ago. I even wrote at the time "I hope there will be a Part 2." But it's worth starting this from scratch. You can go back and reread Part One later.

Prologue - Mutations in Y-DNA
Back when I first started looking at DNA, I had a brief discussion with Bennett Grerenspan of Famliy Tree DNA about the rate of mutations in Y-DNA. At the time, Zachy Pickholz and I had a perfect Y-37 match and I was trying to get a handle on how my g-g-gf and his g-g-g-gf are related. FTDNA's TiP Report said that there was a ~93% chance of having a common ancestor six generations ago and I did not find that answer satisfying.

Bennett  responded:

[T]his is about as close a percentage as you can expect from [Y] DNA since mutations happen unpredictably.
[F]or example I am 36 of 37 with my own father, dad having passed a mutation to me that he did not pass to my brother.

In time, Zachy upgraded to Y-67 and we added a third line from Filip. We all matched perfectly at Y-67 even after 200+ years, so I was not going to spend much time worrying about mutation rates.

Aunt Becky and Aunt Mary
My great-grandparents, Hersch Pickholz and Jutte Leah Kwoczka had seven children who survived childhood.

The seven children in birth order

Aunt Becky and Aunt Mary, being the two older girls, were apparently close. They even crossed the ocean together, barely into their teens, to join Uncle Max. They were the two I never met. Aunt Becky died first, long before I was born and Aunt Mary, though she died last almost exactly forty-one years later, had moved to Florida before I was born. I knew the four brothers and I remember going to see Aunt Bessie before she died in 1953.

Uncle Max had no children. The other three brothers were in business together and their children were mostly the same age cohort - younger than the children of the three sisters - so I knew those cousins (both in my father's generation and in my own) well. And Uncle Joe and my grandfather married sisters. That is why I never knew my second cousin Roz, Aunt Becky's younger granddaughter, even though she lived in the neighborhood and was in my brother's high school class!

I had, however, developed a relationship with Aunt Mary's younger son Herb, though until recently we had met only once, when I was fourteen. When I started with DNA testing, my first priority was the older generation and I was comfortable asking Herb to do both a Family Finder and an MtDNA (Mitochondrial) test on his mother's line.

Herb's Mitochondrial DNA (MtDNA)
MtDNA is passed by the mother to all her children. Males have it but do not pass it on.

Mt great-grandmother, Jutte Leah Kwoczka, had two brothers, so only her descendants are useful for MtDNA in that line.

Aunt Becky and Aunt Bessie each had one son whose only daughters have since done Family Finder tests for our project. But their MtDNA would be their mothers' sides, so they would not help us here. Each of the aunts also had a daughter with one daughter each, but I am not in touch with either of them. One of those is Roz.

Herb's sister had no children.

So Herb is the only source we have for MtDNA in that line - my Kwoczka great-grandmother of Zalosce, my Pollak great-great-grandmother of Jezierna and my third-great-grandmother for whom all we have is a given name, Chaie Sara.

Herb initially did the lowest level MtDNA test and later I upgraded him to the full test.

He has no perfect matches. But as of nineteen months ago, he had thirty matches at a genetic distance of one.  That is, he and they are the same, but one mutation away. That number has grown from thirty to fifty-five but I shall continue referring to them as "the thirty."

It occurred to me then that if the thirty are one group, perhaps the mutation that Herb carries is fairly recent, since he has no exact matches. In MtDNA terms, that can be two or three hundred years ago or it could have originated as recently as Aunt Mary or my great-grandmother. But if it is recent, then I should treat the thirty as if they were exact matches to Herb, for the purpose of further inquiry.

I asked one of the thirty, someone I know who lives here in Israel, to check those matches and when he did not respond promptly, I asked another of the thirty - Dr. Richard Pavelle - who agreed immediately

Dr. Pavelle was a perfect match for the other twenty-nine, which means that our line broke away from theirs. (In theory, they could have broken away from us, but since they are thirty and we are one, that is highly improbable.) I confirmed that by looking at the actual mutations. Herb has one extra mutation: something called C6925Y.

Herb's mitochondrial mutations, representing my Kwoczka great-grandmother's maternal line

So I went to work on the thirty. First I looked at the Family Finder matches of those who had done that test. I didn't see any point in chasing after people who were remote matches or no match at all. There were only a handful of the thirty who were third-fifth cousins or closer to Herb. There was next to nothing coming from any of them in response. I also contacted the nine who had not done Family Finders - FTDNA was willing to offer them a special price. No takers.

The effort petered out, as expected. After all, there was a good possibility that our line had separated from theirs two hundred or more years ago, so what was the point. We didn't know enough to chase down relatives that far back anyway.

Roz
Yet in the back of my head was this nagging feeling that maybe our mutation was very recent. Really really recent. I could call Roz - still in the neighborhood - and have an awkward conversation which would end up costing me a few hundred dollars for nothing. Keep in mind, that in the last two years, I have become acutely aware of the importance of doing Family Finders for as many people as possible, so I'd have to have Roz do both tests.

I had spoken with Roz' cousin Rhoda - who had already tested - so I knew that Roz had no Internet or email, but Rhoda gave me her phone number.

Then FTDNA had their Mothers' Day sale with a package for MtDNA and Family Finder. I called Roz. She knew who I was, knew (from Rhoda, I suppose) that I was working on the family genealogy with the help of DNA and was only too happy to oblige.  I ordered the kit and promised to see her when I come to Pittsburgh for GRIP-July.

FTDNA's track record on getting results on time leaves much to be desired, but Roz' Family Finder results were nearly two weeks early. Roz' results were what I had expected and I have not had the time to look more deeply. I phoned Roz and set up to go to dinner the Monday of GRIP. And I wrote Rhoda.

I also redid the numbers for the Lazarus talk I am preparing for Seattle, to include Roz.

Roz' MtDNA results came in a few hours ago - also nearly two weeks early. She matches Herb at a genetic distance of one. She is a perfect match with the entire group of thirty - now fifty five. Herb's mutation is his and his alone. We cannot know if it was  created by my great-grandmother Jutte Leah or by Aunt Mary. In any case, it ends with Herb.

It looks like we have threaded the needle here and Roz' test was not money thrown away. What it does mean it is that the group of thirty could include some relatives close enough to make the effort worthwhile. We have pretty much pinpointed the MtDNA mutation. Now how do I use this to our advantage?

I'll see Debbie Parker Wayne soon enough - perhaps she'll have some tricks to suggest. I hope there will be a Part Three.

Housekeeping notes
Last call for ordering books in advance for Seattle.  I will have some with me, of course, but if you order now, you are guaranteed my having one signed for you.

Once again, my speaking schedule begins in Buffalo Grove Illinois next Thursday and is laid out in full here.

I submitted two proposals for RootsTech, to be held in Salt Lake City the second week in February. If that works out, I'll be available for speaking, probably with new material. Anyone interested, please drop me a note.

Stats and Summaries

It's not generally my way to summarize at the end of the Gregorian year when we have a perfectly good Jewish New Year for that purpose, but between the end of the FTDNA sale and my upcoming trip to the US, it seems a convenient time.

Ester Pikholz and Marcus Stern
I first ran into the family of Ester Pikholz and Marcus Stern about a year ago and reported on that here. They have a daughter Sadie born in 1889 who was married to a Benjamin Francis, whose brother Sam Francis was married to my grandfather's first cousin Sarah/Sadie Frankel. Sam and Sadie lived in Denver. I had no idea who this Ester is, where she was from, who are her parents.

I saw them again in some Social Security Claims records a few months later, but that didn't add much.

Finally, Steve Pickholtz saw a reference to Esther and Max (as they are called in US records) in a tree on Geni.com. Steve actually found four people there of interest, but only this one replied to my inquiries. Turns out that Esther and Max Stern had a number of children who married in the US around the time of WWI. Earlier this week, I heard from a great-granddaughter and we have been carrying on a lively discussion all week. She says that Esther died in New York, which means there should be a grave and a death certificate with information on her parents.

I'll be meeting with this great-granddaughter in Philadelphia before my talk there next month. More on all of that as it happens. (I have not put this family on my website because I hope to learn where exactly they fit in. No sense in doing extra work.)

The DNA in my project
There are now ninety-two people who have tested (or at least ordered tests) as part of my  family projects. All but one has done a Family Finder and others have done MtDNA and various levels of Y-DNA from

Y-37 up to my own BigY.

The chart on the right shows how that breaks down among my families and also notes how many ordered their tests after publication of ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People last summer.

There are eight Pikholz families of four or more generations who have not tested at all (not including the Sterns whom I mentioned above). Two of the missing eight are from Skalat, four are from Rozdol and two we can only guess at. There are also some smaller families and individuals but those do not seem to have living descendants.

There are quite a few in families who have already tested whom I am after to join the project. The excuses are many and varied.

Statistics from my personal matches
I have finally gotten past 5000 matches on Family Finder and as of today I have 5238, fifty-four of which are from the project. That would be 44 Pikholz, 2 Kwoczkas (we don't have results from the other two), two on my father's maternal side (the third has not sent in the kit yet) and all six on my mother's sides. So my remaining matches total 5184. Many of the testers in the project have more, some over 6000.

The statistics below are for my own matches.

I have six matches who are defined by FTDNA as suggested second-third cousins, what they call "close relatives." (That's aside from fourteen known relatives in that group.)

As is probably typical, though I haven't seen statistics, three of the six have not bothered to list their ancestral surnames and geographic areas. Of the three who have, only Jack S lists a familiar surname - Gordon, which is my mother's paternal side. I have been talking to Jack and although he insists we are closely related, I don't really see it in the numbers. Our longest match is under 30 cM, which is nice, but hardly blows me away.

David and Jack have the same surname, but except that name itself, the names they list do not match one another.

The interesting thing here - and I expect it is typical of Jewish matches - is that all six have about 3000 matches in common with me. That's 54-62% of all my matches which I share with these strangers. Those are very large numbers, it seems to me. (Others will say "I thought you matched EVERYONE!")

I did a chromosome browser to see how the six matched up with me in individual segments. This is not a scientific study - they may do better when compared to my sisters or cousins - but it is illustrative.

FTDNA's chromosome browser is limited to five matches, so I added David S at the bottom in orange, on the relevant chromosomes. The threshold here is matches of five or more centiMorgans. As you can see, there are some nice matches among the group - with me - on chromosomes 6, 9, 12, 15 and 18, plus some others.

Of course, this being endogamy, not all those are expected to be in the same directions. The group of three on chromosome six and the group of four on chromosome 18 may well come from different common ancestors, even though I match the same three people in both cases. It would help if we knew the ancestral names.

But these matches are small. How small? Here is the same chromosome browser with a threshold of 10 cM.

The only matches greater than 10 cM are on chromosomes 9, 14, 16 and 17 and aside from a very small overlap on 9, none of them match each other.

These are not close relatives of mine. And these six are seen by FTDNA as the closest  matches I have, aside from my known family!

Suggested second-fourth cousins
What FTDNA calls "Distant Relative" includes suggested second-fourth cousins and suggested third-fifth cousins. I have one hundred suggested second-fourth cousins, seven of whom are Pikholz descendants.

Of the remaining ninety-three, fifty-one have been kind enough to list their ancestral surnames. I keep thinking I should write the others and ask them, but I really don't have the time and patience. The ancestors listed by the fifty-one include less than a handful with names that match mine.

One that I wrote to replied dismissively that his ancestor is from a different city in the same country, less that seventy miles away. He concluded with "So we are related somehow, but figuring out how is very difficult." I am not sure how he hopes to do that figuring if we don't follow up matching names from matching countries.

Of the ninety-three, for about half, the longest matching segment is in the 16-17 cM range and another quarter in the 18-20 cM range. There are five between 26 and 35 cM and two of those are a father-and-daughter.

As far as the common matches, I only checked a few, but even the furthest of the suggested second-fourth cousins have about 3000 matches in common with me. That's endogamy for you.

This whole set is more likely to be fourth-fifth, even sixth cousins, probably multiple ways,  rather than seconds or thirds. One of the seven known relatives is a third cousin, the others are further out.

Eighty-two pages of "distant relatives," ten a page - 814 altogether.

I started this exercise thinking I would go as far as suggested third-fifth cousins, but now that I take inventory and see that there are 714 of those, I decided to leave it.

But just for sport, I looked an the number of common matches I have with the last five on the list. Three of them have 279, 278, 270 and 304 pages. The fifth is named McKenzie - he has 135 pages in common with me.

Housekeeping Notes
I am still working a couple of possibilities for west coast talks during the week following RootsTech. Not with Jewish genealogical societies. Stay tuned.

Mazal tov to fellow blogger Jeanette Rosenberg on being awarded OBE by Queen Elizabeth.

UPDATE:
For anyone who wants genetic genealogy tote bags or T shirts without shipping charge, we just added a "deliver at RootsTech" option to our order page.

My Father and Uncle Selig - The Solution?

I have discussed my great-grandfather's Uncle Selig at length here, here and most recently here and I thought I had said everything there was to be said, considering the paucity of records and the few known descendants.

I am now certain that Uncle Selig is the younger brother of my great-great-grandmother Rivka Feige Pikholz and that this is the relevant family structure.

The children of Isak Fischel and Rivka Feige were born in Podkamen, near Zalosce.

I do not actually know that Uncle Selig's mother is Rojse. Due to the age difference, I suspect he may be from a second wife.

I first learned of Uncle Selig when my father sent me a note many years ago saying that his grandfather Hersch had an uncle, Selig Pikholz, and that they lived in the same area. No one else of my father's generation - at least none that was alive when I began my research - had ever heard of Uncle Selig. and I always wondered how it was that my father knew any of this. My father's grandfather Hersch died when my father was eight, so I don't imagine they had meaningful conversations. 

Great-grandfather Hersch had lived with Aunt Mary and Uncle Max for some years and their son Herb - who is five years older than my father - had never heard of any Uncle Selig.

When I found an actual reference to Uncle Selig in the records, I saw that a son was born in Skalat in 1862 and that his wife was Chana, the daughter of Markus Kaczka. The distance between Skalat and Zalosce according to the JewishGen Gazetteer is 36.7 miles (59 km) from Zalosce, where I knew my great-grandparents had lived. This does not really sound like "in the same area" for that time and place. I later found Skalat references to two older daughters.

Yes, some of the records say Pick or Pik or even Pyk rather than Pikholz.

I began considering that my great-grandmother's name, Kwoczka, was a local version of the more common Kaczka, both related to poultry. I had seen that Kwoczka is unique to Zalosce and that almost all the Kaczkas in east Galicia are from Skalat. Not to mention that the fathers of both my great-grandmother and Uncle Selig's wife are named Marcus (=Mordecai). So my first theory was that we were related to both Uncle Selig and his wife, Chana, so that had something to do with why my father had heard of him.

Not very convincing, is it?

Then when we found that Uncle Selig was present at the circumcision of his great-grandson David Eisig Lippmann in 1911, I wondered if perhaps Uncle Selig had lived into my father's lifetime and it was his longevity or perhaps his death which had brought him to my father's attention.

That theory lasted until I found Uncle Selig's death record, in 1913, some ten years before my father was born.

Then, a few days ago, because of my obsession with this particular issue - I mean it's the only real bit of genealogy that my father knew - I took a step back and saw it all fall into place.

Rivka Feige was named after (by one of the daughters of her first husband) in 1862*. She was dead by the time Hersch was ten years old. Hersch's brother Jachiel would have been no more than about seventeen, maybe a few years younger. I don't know when Isak Fischel died, but he was named after by his daughter Bassie in 1873 when Hersch was probably twenty. He could have been dead five or ten or more years. And even if Isak Fischel lived to marry off his first three children, who knows if he is the one who raised them after his wife died.

The four children seem to have been born in Podkamen, near Zalosce. Jachiel married a woman from Skalat and lived in Zalosce. Leah married a man in Zalosce and went to Pittsburgh in the mid-1880s. Bassie married a man from Skalat and her children were born there, before one-by-one the family went to the US. Hersch followed Leah to Pittsburgh - Uncle Max in 1901, the first two sisters in 1902, Hersch himself and Uncle Joe in 1903 and his wife and the three youngest in 1904.

I think it went something like this. The four motherless children were raised - at least for a time - in Skalat. Probably by Uncle Selig and his wife Chana. They surely knew their grandfather (Isak Josef) who died there in 1862. At some point, Jachiel married a local (Skalat) girl and went back to Zalosce, which was near his birthplace Podkamen. Leah too went to Zalosce and married there.

Bassie married in Skalat - not because she was sent there to marry someone the family knew, but because she was already there.

Hersch may have gone to live with Leah or perhaps the Kaczka-Kwoczka connection is real and Uncle Selig's wife arranged him a shidduch with someone in her family in Zalosce. Or maybe both. Hersch and Leah must have been close, because he followed her to Pittsburgh.

And that's why my father knew. Because someone must have said - to him or in his hearing - that his grandfather was raised by his Uncle Selig. He heard, paid attention, remembered and passed it on.

And with all that back and forth, Zalosce and Skalat were not so far apart after all.

And while I am on the road between Skalat and Zalosce, let me touch base with another family. There is an unidentified Leib Pikholz of Skalat who was married to a Rachel Qualer or Kwaller or Kwahler of Zalosce who had children in the late 1870s and through the 1880s.

The given names there include Taube, Markus, Leiser and Moshe Hersch. Sounds to me like Leib is a son of the known couple Mordecai and Taube. They have a son Aryeh Leib who had children in the 1850s and 1860s. His wife died in 1874, so this could be the same Leib with a second wife, though I don't really think so.

Most of the Pikholz-Qualer children have both death and birth records, so I have no idea if there were descendants even in 1900.

There is a Kweller family from Zalosce who may have something to do with these - a descendant of that family was in my high school class. There were quite a few Zalosce families who went to Pittsburgh during the same period as my family.

* This is why I only now noticed the fact that Hersch was orphaned young. Only now have I established that there was a first husband who had children who named their first daughters "Rivka."


Housekeeping Notes
You can hear my December 1 interview on Savory Spotlight here.

Kitty Cooper had an excellent review of my book, including this

It is as easy to read as it can be, given that genetic genealogy is not easy to understand.  

My winter speaking schedule now includes 2 February at 6 PM at the Utah Jewish Genealogical Society. That's the evening before the RootsTech convention.

My full schedule (as it stands at the moment) can be found here. There are some available dates 25 January and the week following RootsTech.