The Ancestors of Uncle Max Braun

Us and the Brauns

I don't generally spend a lot of time looking at the ancestors of the people who married into my family, but there are exceptions.

Here are my great-grandparents and their seven children, excluding the three sons who died very young. (I am using the names, as we knew them in America, rather than their Jewish birth names from east Galicia.)

Morris is my grandfather.

The subject of this post, Uncle Max Braun, married my grandfather's middle sister Mary (Miriam). They moved from Pittsburgh to Miami in the early 1940s, so I never knew them. In Europe, the Brauns (then called Brunn) lived in and around Zalosce, which is also where my great grandmother's Kwoczka family lived. My grandfather and his older sibling were born there too. So there is a good chance that there is a family connection further back.

In addition, my great-grandfather's older sister Leah married a Braun, Uncle Max' uncle. According to his 1903 passenger list, Uncle Max (as Michael) went to Pittsburg to his uncle Jakob Braun.

Uncle Max' father was Mordecai Lipe and his father - based on Yaakov Hersch's tombstone - is Israel Aryeh.

 

The Elinoffs, the Katzes, the Zwiebels, the Fleischmans

 

 We are not related - so far as we know - to the Pittsburgh Elinoffs, but we have mutual cousins. 

 

The Elinoff grandmother (Clara/Chaje) is the sister of Harry Katz who married my grandfather's sister Aunt Becky, so we and the Elinoffs are both second cousins to the Katz cousins.

 

The mother of Clara Elinoff and Uncle Harry Katz is Beila (or Beila Nesya) Zwiebel who is a sister to Jute (maybe Jute Leah) who married the brother (Pinchas Kwoczka) of my great-grandmother Ita Leah. That means that the Fleischmans (and some others) are third cousins both to us and to the Elinoffs.

This is not endogamy. It's simply marrying among known families from the same area and often from within those families.

Elinoff DNA

I have been meaning to get some Elinoff DNA, not to test any specific hypothesis, just to see what might come up. As it happens, there is a Pittsburgh Elinoff who lives about twenty minutes from me and we now have his Family Finder results. (I would like to get some more of them to test, although I did find one other who was already on GEDmatch.)

The two Elinoff tests showed expected levels of matching DNA with our three mutual Katz cousins and a bit with the more distant Fleischmans. But they also showed a non-negligible amount of shared DNA with the Brauns - likely fourth cousin territory.

Particularly surprising was a segment (over 13 cM) shared by both Elinoff cousins with a descendant of Leah and Yaakov Hersch Braun. And that is what brought me to delve into Uncle Max Braun's ancestry. Because there is a hint of a connection between the Braun and Katz/Elinoff families that is independent of the rest of us.

Brunn and Wachs

The second record on the above page is Uncle Max' birth record. He was born on 22 March 1883 in house 428 in Zalosce. (His Social Security documents say 12 March.) He was given the name Mechel on the eighth day. His mother is Sara Dasel Brunn, daughter of Moses Jakob and Marjem of Zalosce. The sandak is Joseph Wachs and on the far right Mordche Lippe Brunn acknowledges paternity. That would be because their marriage had not been registered by the civil authorities. It appears that Mechel/Max was Brunn from both parents.

Sara Dasel's father Moses Jakob Brunn died 28 August 1891 in Zalosce, also in house 428. He was 63.

His parents names appear, which is not always the case with older people. His father is Mechel and his mother is Rosa Basie. 

Uncle Max had an older sister named Rose, who lived in Pittsburgh, so both were named for their mother's paternal grandparents. My own research produced records showing three additional sons (Wolf, Josef and Abraham Jakob) who died as babies and another (Aron) who died at age twenty-one. I have birth records for two of those sons and in both cases the sandak is Joseph Wachs.

That does it for now for Uncle Max' mother's Brunn family. Uncle Max' father Mordecai Lipe is a harder nut to crack as I see no reference to him in JRI-Poland except the births and deaths of his children. (There is a birth for a Mordecai Lippe Brunn in Zalosce but 1877 is too late to be Uncle Max' father.) Nor was I able to find anyone whom I could identify as his father Israel Aryeh. There are lots of "Israel" and similar but I have no way to sort them out. Yaakov Hersch's Penssylvania death record has his mother as "unknown."

But we have a twenty-three page tree in outline form of the descendants of Schewach Wachs. Remember Joseph Wachs was the sandak for Uncle Max and at least two of his brothers. Some of the Wachs family lived in Pittsburgh. 

Herb Braun, the younger son of Uncle Max, was named after Hersch Wachs despite the fact that his own grandfather Hersch Pickholtz was living at the time. Herb told me that his mother, Aunt Mary, was partly raised by the Wachs family, so there was a significant connection there. 

Unfortunately, there is no Joseph Wachs in those twenty-three pages.

Mordecai Lipe Braun is mentioned in the Wachs tree, but in a way that makes no sense. He is listed as the wife(!) of Israel Wachs. No one seems to know exactly who put this together and what it is based on.

Good luck making sense of THAT.

I don't know that there are more records. I don't know if more DNA might help - Brauns, Elinoffs or others. Sometimes one person's DNA can hold the key.

 

But here is where we are holding for now.

Narrowing It Down Using The X

As I have mentioned before, every few months I review the newest autosomal matches on my many Family Tree DNA kits to see which are the best candidates to investigate further with GEDmatch. Maybe a third of those respond to my inquiries and of those perhaps one or two, maybe three, will show anything useful. On this last round, I sent out about eighty-five inquiries and was surprised how many people got back to me in the first forty-eight hours. This is the story of one of these.

The match is a woman named Donna who was adopted and is looking for information that might lead her to her birth parents. One of her two matches with my families was this, a quite ordinary segment of 16 cM with seven Pikholz descendants.

Jean, Sarajoy, Judith and Amy are my sisters. Uncle Bob is my father's brother. Roz is my second cousin on my grandfather's side. Marshal is my double second cousin - our grandfathers are brothers and our grandmothers are sisters. The seven matches triangulate; they all match one another. So this looks to be pretty straightforward. This segment comes from either my great-grandfather Hersch Pikholz or my great-grandmother Jutte Lea Kwoczka.

But this segment is from chromosome 23, the X.The chromosome that never passes from father to son.

Roz gets to our great-grandparents through her mother and grandmother, so both Kwoczka and Pikholz are viable sources for her segment. But the others are all from sons of our great-grandparents, so they would have no X from Hersch Pikholz. Which means this is a Kwoczka segment.

But that cannot be right either. Uncle Bob would have to have received the segment from his father, which is clearly impossible. Uncle Bob received this segment from his mother. That option works for my sisters and for Marshal, but Roz has nothing to do with my grandmother's Hungarians and Slovakians. The Pikholz and Kwoczka families lived in the Tarnopol area of east Galicia.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Three and a half years ago, I discovered a segment shared by two supposedly unconnected parts of my families, one being my grandmother's Hungarians and the other the Galicianers on the non-Pikholz/Kwoczka side of the family of my cousins Rhoda, Roz and Pinchas. 

I have since found about forty strangers who share this segment with matches of anywhere between twelve and twenty centiMorgans. I wrote all of them, but have not gotten any firm leads on how, when and where my two families connect. It is a good ways back, as the families have been in the same places since the mid or late 1700s, but it's recent enough to preserve this 20+ cM segment intact.

Wendy and Carolyn, at JGS Maryland, 2016,

my earliest cousins on this segment

I have also written about this segment of chromosome 21 here, here and most recently here.

My guess is that the same ancestor who gave us the segment on chromosome 21, gave us the newfound X segment, though I cannot prove it. Until now, I have had seven surnames to work with, five from the Hungarians and two from the Galicianers. Of course there was no reason to assume that the common ancestor actually used one of those seven names - if he (or she) used any at all. But they were starting points. 

Now, we know that two of those lines are completely irrelevant. The X cannot be from my third-great-grandfather Lasar Bauer or his wife Rosa Lowinger, because it could not have been passed to Cousin Shabtai Bauer. One of the forty "strangers" has a Bauer ancestor, so that was a candidate for chromosome 21. But it cannot be for the X.

The others are still possibilities simply because we do not have other known descendants of those families who might share the segments in question. We can neither confirm nor eliminate them. Here are the earliest known ancestors in each family.

On the Hungarian side:

Salomon/Yehoshua Selig STERN ~ 1805-1862, son of Izak Leib of Paks could have received this segment from his unknown mother.

Jakob GRUNWALD of Perkata whose daughter was born about 1806 could have received the segment from his unknown mother.

Fani/Feige HERCZ, Jakob Grunwald's wife, could have received the segment from either parent.

On the east Galician side:

Shimon Leib ZWIEBEL, ~1825-1910, son of Isak, from the Tarnopol area, could have received the segment from his unknown mother.

Ester Chava LEWINTER, ~1831-1907, from the Tarnopol area, could have received the segment from either parent. She is Shimon Leib Zwiebel's wife.

I would love to see some tests from any of these families. Zwiebel is probably the easiest place to start.

It feels like progress. I'll certainly notify the forty-odd strangers.

Developments in Chromosome 21

Some months ago, Jessica Feinstein, the editor of the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain quarterly Shemot, asked me to write a brief piece for their winter DNA issue. That publication came out recently and my article is reproduced below.

There is, however, something new which came in after Shemot was already closed. I have added that here in red.

Chromosome 21 – Perhaps My Favorite Brick Wall

Israel Pickholtz

Background  - The Bauers and the Sterns

I manage DNA kits of over 120 people – about two-thirds of them Pikholz descendants and most of the rest known members of my other families. Those include two grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren of my father’s maternal grandmother Regina Bauer Rosenzweig and one grandson (Shabtai) of her brother. Regina Bauer was born in 1870, one of five daughters and two sons of Simon (Shemaya) Bauer (1833-1902) and Fani (Feige) Stern (1842-1911).

The Bauers were a large family in Kunszentmiklos Hungary, about an hour south of Budapest;  in the 1700s they had lived in Apostag, about half an hour further south. We have many Bauer records from both places.  Fani Stern was born in Kalocsa, another half hour further south, and her father Salomon (Selig) Stern (~1805-1862) was from nearby Paks. Fani’s mother was a Grunwald from Perkata, which is across the Danube from Kunszentmiklos.

Regina’s paternal grandmother was probably a Lowinger and Fani Stern’s maternal grandmother was a Hercz, so I have five of Regina’s ancestral surnames to work with. Jewish research being what it is, I have no other great-grandparent with that many ancestral surnames.

When I first learned of DNAPainter.com nearly two years ago, I mapped out twelve segments where Shabtai matches multiple descendants of Regina with at least 18 cM. The largest of these are 61, 57, 47, 38 and 35 cM.  Using the “Segment Search” tool on GEDmatch Tier1 (this was previously known as “Matching Segments Search”), I was able to see other people who match those specific segments. Most of my larger segments of interest had few outside matches, but I wrote to the matches where I could and none of them knew anything helpful.

Robbie

While reviewing my Family Tree DNA match alerts, I found Robbie from Chattanooga Tennessee. Robbie showed matches with my father’s sister, my second cousin Susan, my brother, one of my sisters and me – and Shabtai. The match was 19-21 cM on chromosome 21 (where our segment with Shabtai is only 23 cM) and clearly showed that Robbie had a common ancestor with Regina Bauer. It is his only match with us. I asked Robbie about his ancestry, but he is adopted, so could not tell me anything.

But this is only half the story.  Here is Robbie’s full match with us on chromosome 21.

In addition to the six Bauer descendants, he matches three of my cousins on my father’s paternal side – Pinchas, Rhoda and Roz. Rhoda and Roz are my second cousins, first cousins to one another. Pinchas is our third cousin.  But it’s more complicated than that. Pinchas is a third cousin of Roz and Rhoda on a second path that has nothing to do with the Pikholz family. That second path is almost certainly what is in play here.

The great-grandmothers of Pinchas, Rhoda and Roz are the sisters Beile and Jutte Zwiebel and their mother is Ester Chava Lewinter. The Zwiebels and the Lewinters are from the Tarnopol area of east Galicia and have nothing to do with anything Hungarian, since 1800. Nonetheless, the three of them triangulate with the six Bauers – everyone matches everyone else on this segment.

This is a classic case of Jewish endogamy, where my Hungarian family and my Galician cousins have some sort of common ancestor. Maybe on the Bauer side, maybe on the Stern side. Maybe on the Zwiebel side, maybe on the Lewinter side. Who knows! But a common ancestor there is – recent enough that the match between the groups survives yet far enough in the past that it predates the known geography of the families. The fact that Robbie has only this one segment with us sounds like it is further back than the 20 cM segment might otherwise indicate.

We have no cousins of either Regina Bauer or Beile and Jutte Zwiebel, so we cannot determine whether our segment 21 comes from their fathers’ sides or their mothers’ sides.

The Other Matches

Recently I went back to the Segment Search tool on GEDmatch Tier1 to see who else matches on that segment. There are about three dozen who match our chromosome 21 with more than 12 cM. Five of those have a match of 18.0-18.2 cM and another’s match is 16.8 cM. The rest are 12.0-15.1 cM. Robbie’s match of 19.3 cM is still the largest. A few of them are managed by people I know as researchers – or even know personally. A few are related to one another. By and large, these are kits that – like Robbie’s – don’t have significant matches with us outside of chromosome 21.

I wrote to all of them. Fifteen responded.

One – Andrew – has a Bauer grandmother. He writes:

My line of the Bauer family, and most likely yours too, originated from Moravia, and from there Northern Hungary (what is now Slovakia), particularly in Hluboka, Nyitra County. In the early 19^th century, there was a great movement of Jews (and also Slovaks, or Tóts) to south-eastern Hungary, where more opportunities opened up at that time. Your Bauers were not that far there from  my Bauers, they may have visited each other, but how they were related, I don’t know; perhaps you can find out. I have looked at your Kunszentmiklos Bauer database, many names are similar to my list, but they are clearly not the same people.

Regina Bauer spoke German, in addition to Hungarian, so there may be something to this. And if it is real, it may or may not include chromosome 21.

 Andrew has no Bauer candidate for a Y-DNA test, so we cannot compare his line to mine.

Another match is the daughter of a woman named Zendel and suggests a similarity to Zwiebel. I don’t think so.

Another dozen said they did not have any of the seven surnames on my side or any geography of real interest. The rest of the matches never replied.

Nava

Last week, I received a note from a woman named Nava, with whom I had corresponded earlier about chromosome 21. Nava's match to us on chromosome 21 is small, about 10 cM with Robbie and a bit smaller with my six Bauers. It does not match Pinchas, Rhoda and Roz who start a bit further to the right on this segment, but that does not bother me.

Nava writes:

I've built out much more of my family tree since we communicated last, at which point I was just beginning the research. I took a look again at the info you shared in your email and have noticed a possible connection. 

I've followed my mother's line back to my great-great-grandmother. Her name was Szara Hercz, born 1830 in Berczalja, Saros, Kingdom of Hungary (current-day Slovakia). I wonder if that could be the link we share on your Hungarian branch as you mentioned the name Hercz? She married Saja Czigler (born 1829) and their daughter, Anna (b. 1859) emigrated to the states in 1892. One of her daughters was my great-grandmother, Blanche Zuckerman, who died in New York when I was a child.

So perhaps this segment come from a common Hercz family. Or not. Our relevant towns are 156 miles apart which proves nothing one way or another. (Actually, her Hercz family lived quite near my great-grandFATHER's family.)

Nava has no one with an MtDNA line to her second great-grandmother so the fact that I have one to my fourth great-grandmother (H10a1b). 

Nava has no matches with our six Bauers (or Robbie) over 10 cM on any other segment, though she does have a small match with my brother and my cousin Susan on the same segment.Of course, that needn't be from the same ancestor as the one on Chromosome 21.

This brick wall will fall

How, I don’t know. More testers, more patience by me, more DNA analysis tools – for the DNA itself and for the test results – more older records, more traditional genealogy research to find additional descendants of these families, even cleaning up the Kunszentmiklos cemetery.

When, I don’t know that either. I’d like to think it will be in my lifetime.

For now I need to keep shining a light on this corner of my family genome. We never know what will prompt a breakthrough.

But this brick wall will give up its secrets.

Israel Pickholtz is a US-born professional genealogist who has been living in Israel for forty-six years. His flagship work is The Pikholz Project, which means to identify and reconnect all Pikholz descendants. He blogs at http://allmyforeparents.blogspot.com, writes and speaks on genealogy in Israel and abroad as the opportunities arise and is a member of the Israel Genealogical Society, Gesher Galicia, the Guild of One-Name Studies and a number of SIGs and research groups and a two-time alumnus of the Genealogy Research Institute of Pittsburgh. In 2015 he published his book "ENDOGAMY: One Family, One People" about his successes with DNA and lessons that are relevant to all genetic research. He has recently relocated from Jerusalem to Ashkelon and can be contacted at IsraelP@pikholz.org .