I started by trawling through the records, trying to trace my new mystery cousin - the "Private Morris" of post #1. I was hoping that I would be able to find out how he was linked to the Simon Morris who appeared in his Tree. Maybe in the course of this search I would be able to discover how they were related to me. I'll come back to this later, because this line of research was soon overtaken by one that proved to be much more significant.
Clusters
I had just started playing about with Clusters. This is a technique for putting the DNA matches you share in common with someone into groups, in which each member of the group matches each other member, or at least matches most of them. If you're lucky, you could end up with a limited number of clusters whose members match each other more than they match anyone else. If you're really lucky, you might be able to identify each cluster as representing a different branch of your family. So Cluster #1 might be recognisable as your paternal Smiths, cluster #2 might be your maternal Joneses, and so on. If you're really really lucky, you'll get 8 clusters that you can pin onto your 8 great-great-grandparents, one cluster each. Genealogy solved, at a stroke. Simple.
I should be so lucky.
Endogamy
Unfortunately, DNA inheritance is not that straightforward for people of Ashkenazi Jewish heritage. We are historically an endogamous community, descended from what was initially a relatively small number of people - maybe only a few hundred at first - who moved eastwards across Europe during the Middle Ages. Later generations continued marrying within the community, each time passing down and recombining bits and pieces of the same original pool of DNA. We end up looking, to the DNA-analysing algorithms at least, as though we are all related to each other.
Nevertheless I gave it a try, just to see what would turn up. Here's what turned up.
My first Cluster run
There were a dozen or so fairly clear clusters, each in its distinctive (randomly allocated) colour, and a host of scattered grey dots that indicate people who were related to a second group in addition to their main one - endogamy in dots, as it were. Scanning through the names - not shown here - I spotted my mystery man, Private Morris. He's in the green cluster near the bottom, along with half-a-dozen other people, and as you can see, it's the most fully-formed cluster of all.
Take a moment to take that in. The green cluster is offering me a group of DNA matches which includes my mystery cousin and 6 others, who are all related to each other - and to me, of course. In other words, it identifies for me a group of people who all share a common ancestor with me. Wow! But which ancestor? Which branch of my family?
Which side are they on?
I already suspected that Private Morris would probably turn out to be on my paternal side, as he didn't match a known 1C1R on my mother's side. Neither did he match a 2C1R on my father's mother's side. So he must be something to do with the family of my father's father, Movsha Schreibman, who were from Pinsk, in Belarus. You may recall that his father was Nevakh Schreibman, and his mother Shprintsa Zaturensky.
Needless to say, I didn't recognise any of the people in the cluster, and could see no clue in their surnames. Three of them matched me at over 100cM, so were possibly 3C; the other 3 were in the range 50-70cM, maybe a generation further out. And as we saw in the earlier post, Private Morris shares over 180cM with me, so he could even be a generation closer. The good news was that all bar one of them had Trees, and this is where the fun really starts.
Fun with Trees
Here we go.
(I'm using my matches' given names here, but not their surnames)
Paul's Tree:
and:
Dorie's Tree:
So, between the four of them, they have:
names: Turnansky, Turiansky, Terensky, Terensky
births: Pinsk, Pinsk, Minsk, Pinsk
dates of birth: 4 different ancestors born between 1863 and 1882
deaths: Los Angeles, Peoria, Houston, Los Angeles
Plus, Rebecca seems to have:
- Simon turning into Sam, with slightly different dates
- Simon/Sam changing his surname from Turiansky to Morris
- Simon's father named as Herman
One family?
At this point it looks like we are looking at four descendants of the same original family, each telling substantially the same story, albeit with minor differences:
i) they all claim descent from some variant of T*r*nsky
ii) they all reference Pinsk, or Minsk, which could amount to the same thing - it was the regional capital (and is now the capital of Belarus)
iii) two of them - with surnames recalled differently, so possibly from different branches - end up in Los Angeles
iv) the variation in the surname passed down suggests that they may not be as close as 1C to each other, and so may not know each other's stories
v) and the DNA says they are all related to each other, and are all around 3C-4C to me
You know what? I'm beginning to wonder whether there's enough here to suggest that the name T*r*nsky, from Pinsk, might be derived from my Zaturensky, from Pinsk ...
NB: If you have your DNA data on MyHeritageDNA, there is a basic clustering tool available on-site. Otherwise you'll need to go to Genetic Affairs, where the genius that is Evert-Jan Blom has developed a tool that will do clusters - and a whole lot more - for profiles on FTDNA and AncestryDNA.
If you're interested in how Clustering works, MyHeritage has a good explanation.
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