Genetic Groups on MyHeritage: 3 Mapping the Past, or Not

 

MyHeritage AJ Genetic Group 5215, distribution 1850-1900

Ashkenazi Genetic Groups
MyHeritage has discerned 24 distinct genetic groups for Ashkenazi Jews, based on their analysis of the autosomal DNA of the people who have tested with the company. I must say before we even start, that I don't think this has ever been attempted before. It is a huge advance on the vague, confusing and inaccurate "Ethinicity Estimate" approach that they and other companies have been using up till now.

I must also say that unfortunately, the most visually appealing element of the initial roll-out of Genetic Groups, the historical distribution maps, are presented in a highly misleading way. This post attempts to explain how this happens.

My 5 GGs
MyH has allocated me to 5 of the 24 AJ groups, which in itself is of interest. It suggests that I do not have much, if any, genetic affinity to the members of any of the other 19 groups. In other words, AJs are not all related to each other. It suggests that our endogamy is within our own genetic groups, and not across them. Which makes sense, but also raises an intriguing issue: many of these AJ Genetic Groups appear to cover quite wide geographical areas (see the map in the post First Thoughts), and many of these Groups appear to be in the same areas at the same time. How did they manage to keep the groups genetically distnct? Did they not inter-marry?

Also of interest, to me at least, is the fact that I do not appear to connect to any of the Sephardic Groups. That knocks that family myth on the head.

From Trees to Maps
One of my AJ groups is numbered 5215. About half the people in Genetic Group 5215 have posted family Trees on MyH. The company has used the location information included in these Trees to map the geographical distribution of the ancestors of group members over time. 

The map above purports to show where the ancestors of the members of Genetic Group 5215 were living in the period 1850-1900. There are other maps for each of the 50-year periods between the years 1600 and 2000, and it is highly instructive to see how the distribution of population shown on these maps evolves over the years.

A bit of a puzzle
The families of all 4 of my grandparents are documented in Eastern Europe in the period shown on this map - my mother's side in Central Poland, and my father's in Belarus. The map above shows a just a light smattering in Belarus, some in Central Poland, some in the Austria-Hungary area, and stronger concentrations in the Netherlands and in Britain. Were my 5215s really more concentrated in England than in Belarus or Poland in the late 19C? This is a bit puzzling, because we know that the mass immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe to the UK only began after 1880, and the bulk of it was after 1900. So why does the map suggest otherwise?

A little look at Belarus
Before we delve further into this, let's have a closer look at Belarus.

When we zoom in on Belarus in the 1850-1900 map, we can see that the 5215s are indeed represented in my three paternal-side areas - my Schreibmans and Zaturenskys are from Pinsk (bottom left), my Levins from Gomel (Homyel, bottom right), and my Ilyutoviches from Lida (upper left). But there are some wide open spaces in between. Some of my other Genetic Groups have even less presence in Belarus, so this might still be an indicator that this is indeed where my families are from. Unless, of course the pinpointing of these three areas has arisen at least in part from the information I have put into my own MyH Tree - in which case, we're going round in circles.

Pause for thought
At this point, we should pause, and remember where the information that has gone into these maps comes from. MyH has found that amongst the people who have tested with them, there are 1330 whose autosomal DNA is sufficiently aligned to justify the creation of a Genetic Group specifically for them, GG5215. Just under half of these - 623 - have Trees on MyH. The company has combed those Trees for whatever ancestral date and place information it can find, in particular births, marriages and deaths. It then maps this material in 50-year periods. So far, so good.

However, what they have not done, and cannot do, is DNA-test all the ancestors that appear on those Trees. They may not all be GG5215s. In fact, we know that many of them are not; for a start, they have allocated me to 4 other AJ Groups. The descendants who have tested may show sufficient genetic characteristics to warrant being allocated to this Group, but many or most of them will also have ancestors from other AJ Groups, or who are not AJ at all.

For instance
A couple of examples from my own case will illustrate this point. As I mentioned before, half my ancestors are AJs from Poland, half AJs from Belarus. I have both sides documented in those places back to +/- 1800. So I would be happy to accept that GG5215 covers both areas, and both sides of my family. But none of my genetic ancestors were in western Europe or the UK in that period, and I very much doubt that any of the AJ ancestors of other members of the group were there either, for the reasons outlined above. So what is the genetic connection between GG5215 members and these places? It can only be that some of them have ancestors who were not AJ. So I'm expecting to see evidence of non-AJ ancestors in the Trees of at least some of my fellow GG5215 group members, and specifically of ancestors from Western Europe and Britain.

Close to home
And I don't have far to look. Consider my 1C1R (first cousin once-removed), Katy. We share my paternal line - her grandfather was my Uncle Mick, my father's brother. Mick married Margaret, a non-Jewish English woman, so although Katy got enough of the characteristic GG5215 DNA from Mick to qualify for the Group, she also has 25% English ancestry through her grandmother Margaret. MyH have picked her English ancestors up from her Tree, and put them on the 5215 map. Where they don't belong.

And this is all exacerbated by the fact that people with English ancestry can generally take their lines much further back that AJs can, with the exception maybe of a handful of rabbinical lines, and this applies to places as well as names. So when you look at the earlier maps for GG5215, you find that the places where records are available show up much more strongly than those where they're not. And the further back you go, the greater the disparity, and the more skewed the results will be. 

Reductio ad Absurdum
And you end up with this absurdity:

MyHeritage AJ Genetic Group 5215, distribution 1600-1650

But there weren't any Jews in England in 1600-1650.

They had been expelled in 1290 and were not re-admitted until 1656. (See From Expulsion to Readmission, by Ariel Hessayon, for the background to both of these episodes). And even then they were mostly Sephardim, originating from Spain and Portugal, not AJs - including no doubt my GG5215 ancestors - who to the best of our historical knowledge, originated in Germany, moved towards the east in the late Middle Ages, and were by 1600 well established in Poland and probably settling in Belarus as well.

So whilst these maps do represent my GG5215 ancestors, to the best of our limited collective knowledge, they also represent the ancestors of all members of 5215 who have Trees on MyH. And this includes those of their ancestors who were not 5215ers, or not Jews at all, and could have come from anywhere, especially, it seems, from Southern England and the Netherlands.

So it's not my ancestors on these maps, it's theirs.

Genetic Groups on MyHeritage: 2 Who I Am and Who I Am Not

 

Who I am not

Well, that looks interesting. Under the heading 'Your ethnicity results', MyHeritage appears to be informing me that in addition to being 91% Ashkenazi Jewish, I am 2.9% Celtic Fringe, 2.8% Middle Eastern, 1.9% Mizrahi Jewish, and 1.1% West Asian. I must say that this comes as a bit of a surprise, as we have always considered ourselves to be 100% AJ, my mother's side coming from Poland and my father's from Belarus.

At first glance the 2.9% figure seems to be suggesting that one of my great-great-great-grandparents might have been from one of the Celtic areas of Britain. However, I have researched all 4 of my grandparents' lines back to this level - to 1800 or earlier - and as far as I can tell there's no sign of an Irishman anywhere. There's Leweks and Jankels, Movshas and Chaims, but absolutely no Paddys. There's no indication that anyone from Ireland, Scotland or Wales migrated to Poland or Belarus, married a local Jew, and forwarded their DNA down through the generations. And the same goes for the other "ethnicities" that I seem to have been allocated.

Something's not quite right.

Who they are

The list is wrongly labelled. Look at the subheading under 'Ethnicities' at the top. This is not the distribution of my own ethnicity. It's the distribution of ethnicities across all of the people who match me. It's not who I am, it's who they are.

Which could be of interest in its own right, of course. How come I share DNA with over 2000 people whose DNA has a strong element of Irish, Scottish and Welsh?

How it comes about

Let's do a mind exercise.

This is what my Ancestor Chart, back to my 16 great-great-grandparents, looks like, with me at the bottom. Yours will be similar.

Now here's the Descendant Tree for one of these couples, Shmuilo Gronim Ilyutovich b 1825 and his wife Tauba Belagratsky (they are at the top here, and this chart also shows their parents). They're from Lida in NW Belarus. I've taken it down as far as my own generation.

The chart is illegible because there are 83 of us in my generation. At least those are the ones I have been able to trace, there may be a few more yet to be discovered. There are also a number of people down the generations who I have been unable to follow through, and there will certainly be some who have slipped through the net entirely, especially in 19C Belarus where the records can be patchy to say the least. But I do have names and places for the intervening generations of all the 3Cs shown here. None of these cousins, nor any of their Ilyutovich ancestors, were in Ireland, by the way. However, one or two of them may well have married people with Irish ancestry, once they reached countries where there was Irish immigration as well as Jewish, such as the UK or the USA.

Now consider that this is the Tree for only one of my g-g-g'parent couples. There are seven more couples at this level, each of which may well build up through the generations as this one does. Even if they "only" come down to half the size of this family, say to an average of around 40 in each family in my generation, that is potentially another 300 or so 3Cs.

I have developed some of these families to a similar level to this one, and the same arguments apply. However there are a few families I know little about. Those 40 potential 3Cs may well exist in these families, I just don't know anything about them. I have no idea who their ancestors married, or who they had children with. Did they move elsewhere in Poland or Belarus? Did they emigrate? Were they killed in the Holocaust? Might one of them have married an Irishman or woman?

What about his brothers and sisters?

But there's more. Take Shmuilo Gronim, for instance. He was one of seven children. I have information on just two of his brothers, and that dries up around 1900. I have no idea what happened to them or any of their families. Some of them may have had descendant charts as fully populated as that of Shmuilo. Their descendants would be 4Cs to me, and there could be another 400 potential cousins out there. I have no idea if they even exist, let alone whether any of them might carry any Irish DNA.

And of course, we can repeat this exercise for the siblings of each of my 15 other g-g-g'parents. There could be another 400 unknown 4Cs in each of those families. That's 6000 more cousins. As if I didn't have enough already.

Celtic Connections

And there's a good chance that somewhere along the line, an ancestor or two of at least a few of these unknown thousands might have married a Celt. And when a descendant of theirs in the 2010s or 2020s takes a DNA test with MyHeritage, their Celtic DNA will show up in their results, along with whatever AJ DNA has come down to them.

It's not me that has Celtic DNA, or Middle Eastern, or Mizrachi, or West Asian - it's my matches.

What about my brother?

My brother also has his DNA on MyH. Here's his Ethnicity results:

Oh? Wot, no Irish?? My brother has a similar number of matches to me with Celtic ethnicity, over 2000 of them. However, he doesn't seem to share any of their DNA. He also has more West Asian, plus a trace of Central Asian that I don't have, but none of my Mizrachi.

Of course, although my brother and I received our DNA from the same two parents, we only actually coincide on 36% of it. The other 64% of my DNA consists of segments that he doesn't have, and vice-versa. This explains why our match lists can seem so wildly different, outside of known cousins. Even with known cousins we share significantly different amounts with many of them, and often share on different segments.

So it shouldn't be surprising that we see a difference in the ethnicities of some of our respective matches. I have segments, some of which my brother doesn't have, that I share with matches who have Celtic, or Mizrachi, origins. Conversely, he has segments that I don't have, that he shares with matches who have Central Asian origins.

Again, it's not us, it's them.

Genetic Groups on MyHeritage - 1 First Thoughts

 

MyHeritageDNA have introduced 'Genetic Groups', a new feature which I think could have a huge impact on our understanding of Ashkenazi Jewish (AJ) history in general, and of our own families' histories in particular. The same will undoubtedly apply to other groups across the world.

MyH has published an account of how they have put these Groups together. Briefly, they base them on the segments of DNA, including very small ones, that you share with other people. These patterns of shared segments can be regarded as the signature of a Genetic Group. These shared segments must have come from a common ancestor, who may well date from long before any of the ancestors that most of us can trace by traditional genealogical methods. MyH then combines this shared segment information with the historical and geographical information contained in those people's Family Trees.

This technique will not point directly to a specific common ancestor, but the fact that you share a Genetic Group with someone should help narrow down the field, and may suggest likely areas for further research. It should eventually provide a more reliable, and potentially much more informative, indicator of ancestral origins than merely looking at shared matches, or vague "ethnicity estimates". 

My Genetic Groups

The map above shows the geographic reach of the 5 AJ Genetic Groups that they have found for me, based on shared segments and the date and place information my matches have included in their Trees. Of course, not everyone has a full Tree, but when the numbers of people providing this information are high enough, MyH can begin to see patterns emerging. These patterns show that people who match me on particular segments tend to have ancestors that come from particular geographic areas.

You can see immediately from the map that these Genetic Group areas cover distinct territories. There are two Groups in smaller regions that have a definite western bias, running from the Netherlands across to Poland; one of these reaches a bit further north than the other. Another Group has an eastern bias, reaching from Poland to central Russia. One of the Groups seems to cover much of the map, stretching most of the way across from Germany to Ukraine. The fifth Group is centred in the East, across Belarus and Lithuania. My matches in each of these Genetic Groups share a DNA signature with me that corresponds with these areas of origin. You can almost see the Litvaks and the Polacks peeking through.

My mother's parents both came from central Poland, and my father's from various places in Belarus. Jews came into these areas from Western Europe during the Late Middle Ages, moving gradually eastward over a period of several centuries. You can sense the pattern of this migration even in the roughly-drawn areas on this map. I have documented Trees back to 1800 or so for the male lines of the families of each of my four grandparents, but I do not as yet know where any of these families were living before they moved east, nor when they moved. Any source that can suggest answers to this is worth looking at.

My initial thoughts are that a common ancestor for me, with someone who is in one of the more western groups, will probably date from medieval times, and will be correspondingly hard to trace. Matches from the two groups that cover the eastern areas may well trace back to more recent times. My Polish matches could come from any of the five groups, as the map shows that all five of them include the central part of Poland.

I'll be looking more closely at my five Genetic Groups, from the geographical, historical and genetic perspectives. What can they tell me about the stories of my ancestral families?

NB: Roberta Estes has posted an excellent guide to using this feature, on her DNAeXplained site: Introducing Genetic Groups at MyHeritage

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #17 Shipped to Peoria

Shipped to Peoria Illinois by Sloan and Shelton

 

Joseph?

Throughout the story of Dora (see #10 There's more to Dora .. and thereafter) I have been trying to establish the identity of her first husband. Every reference in her own documents, and in those of her children, refers to him as Joseph Kawin. That seems pretty clear, then. 

However, I have not been able to find a single document that shows them together, nor any that refers to him in his own right, apart from a couple of entries in Directories for Peoria, in 1890 and 1896. By 1898 the entry is for Dora Kawin, "widow of Joseph". This suggests he died some time in 1896-98. However, searches on the usual online sites reveal no references to a Joseph Kawin dying in Peoria or anywhere else during that period. Nor is there a marriage record for Joseph and Dora, in Peoria or anywhere else. Nor any records of the births of their children - Abraham in 1888, Sam in 1889, both of whom appear as born in Peoria, or at least in Illinois, in later documents.

Or Jacob?

At the same time, there are abundant references to a Jacob Kawin, born in 1862, who came to the USA in 1871 with his mother and siblings, to join up with his father who had emigrated earlier. The whole family is in the 1880 Census in Peoria. Jacob got himself naturalised, and started up a business with his brother Nathan, and they are in and out of the Directories and the newspapers through the 1880s and into the 90s. Nathan married in 1885 in Chicago, but there does not appear to be a marriage record for Jacob.

What we do find, however, is a death record for him - or at least, his headstone, in the Mount Sinai - ie, Jewish - section of the Springdale Cemetery in Peoria. He died in 1897. Just about the time we believe Joseph Kawin, husband of Dora, died.

Was this a coincidence? That the only two J Kawins in Illinois both died in the same year?

I went back to the Peoria Directories, and looked a little closer. I found that from around 1886, Jacob seems to have left the family home, and he no longer appeared as a partner in the business. 'Kawin Bros' had become 'Kawin & Co', run by Nathan, and Jacob was nowhere to be seen.

Or William, John or George?

Then a suspicious series of one-off Kawins started appearing in the Directories. Over the course of a few years we find William, John, George, and Joseph, all making fleeting appearances, with a variety of occupations and addresses - but no sign of Jacob.

This led me to conclude that maybe some of these mysterious Kawins might in fact be Jacob in disguise. Could they all, including Joseph, be the same person?

Was Dora's husband really Jacob, even though her records always referred to him as Joseph? I convinced myself that this was the most likely explanation, and added him to my Tree as Jacob, as he was known in his family. And I wrote up Dora's story accordingly.

Irene

Then I found this:

It's the headstone for Irene Kawin, Nathan's daughter, who died in Chicago in 1976. There are a couple of other names on it, female Kawins: Gertrude and Helen. I didn't recognise them - Nathan's other daughter was called Ethel - and I thought they might be connected to a Chicago Kawin family that I had noticed, but which didn't seem to be related to the Peoria Kawins. In any case, my focus is on Dora and on finding out who her husband is, rather than on any wider Kawin family.

Nothing doing here. I switched my attention elsewhere for a while.

Gertrude

A few months later Gertrude cropped up again, and this time she drove a horse and cart through my interpretation of Dora's story:

The marriage of Jacob Kawin and Gertrude Goldstein in Chicago. This immediately caught my attention, because Jacob's brother Nathan had married a Goldstein - Lotte - a few years earlier. The Kawin brothers had married Goldstein sisters. Don't ask me why I hadn't noticed this before, but I hadn't.

Later censuses show Gertrude with a daughter Helen, born in 1894. So this Helen must be the third person on the headstone above. And then I found directories and newspaper articles showing Jacob and Gertrude running a Kawin & Co business in La Salle, halfway between Peoria and Chicago, in the early 1890s. So the reason Jacob stops showing up in the Peoria Directories, is, he wasn't living there any more.

Where does this leave Dora?

Joseph the Elusive

Well, she clearly wasn't married to Jacob. She must have been married to Joseph, as the documents insist. So, why did I persist in ignoring the evidence? Why had I been unwilling to accept that Jacob was Jacob, and Joseph was Joseph? And that Dora was only married to one of them?

In my defence, please remember that I had not been able to find a single record of a type that might be expected to show them together, such as a Census. Indeed, the only Census they would both have been present for was the 1890 one, and that is not available to us - it was destroyed in a fire. Directories in some places show the name of the spouse, bracketed alongside the head of household; not so in Peoria. I could find no record of their marriage, or of the birth of their children. To obscure matters further, Joseph appears to have masqueraded as George for a couple of years, in the Directories at least. And then, I could find no record of Joseph's death, just later references to Dora as "widow of Joseph".

And of course the mysterious Jacob and the elusive Joseph both seem to have died in the same year: 1897. However, I have no death record for either of them, only the headstone for Jacob in Peoria, with minimal information.

Going Local: Peoria

Time for a change of plan. How about local information sources? Was there anything available at town or state level, that hadn't been opened up to the websites that I had been using?

Well, yes.

I found that the Peoria County Office has an online database of births, marriages and deaths, that covers the period I am looking for. I didn't find a marriage for Joseph and Dora, but they may have married in Chicago. Maybe it was not possible to have a Jewish wedding in Peoria; I have not yet checked establishment dates for Peoria synagogues, but I have seen elsewhere that couples sometimes had to travel to other towns to get a kosher marriage.

Sam and Moritz

But I did find a couple of birth records for them, that do name them both. This is the one for Sam:

Several points of interest:

- Dora and Joseph on the same document!

- Sam is shown as Dora's 3rd child; Abraham was born a year or so earlier, although there doesn't seem to be a record for him. This suggests that there must also have been another, earlier, child, that didn't survive.

- the address, 303 Gallatin Street, is confirmed by Directory entries for 1890 and 1891.

- Dora's maiden name, Zaturensky, is shown as 'Darengsky'. Love it!

There is another birth record, for Moritz, b 1894, shown as Dora's 4th child. He does not appear in the 1900 Census, where she says she had had 4 children, of whom 2 were living; these must be the two living with her, Abraham and Sam. The two who did not survive would thus be this Moritz, and the putative earlier child mentioned above.

Mr Kawin

And then I had a look in the deaths database.

- no given name, not even an initial!

- 36 years old, so born 1861; died 24 Dec 1897

- married

- 13 years in Illinois, so immigrated 1884 or earlier

- ill with tuberculosis for 5 years

- died at 221 Howett Street, in Peoria

- buried in the Jewish Cemetery, in Peoria

It has to be Joseph, all the dates fit with what we have seen for him in other documents. In particular, it shows him in Illinois only since 1884, whereas we have a passenger manifest for Jacob's immigration in 1871.

Further, I have just come across Joseph's entry in the 1897 Peoria Directory - as Joseph Kavan - that shows him at this address, 221 Howett Street. So he died at home, not in a hospital. Earlier Directories have him as a peddler, but the 1896 and 1897 lists show no occupation for him. It looks like his illness must have prevented him from earning a living.

It's puzzling that no given name is shown, as Dora was almost certainly in Peoria at the time of his death, and you would have thought that she would have been the informant.

If only we could find a similar record for Jacob.

Jacob in the Records

He's not in the Peoria death records, which were entered by hand in a register book, in chronological order, as they were reported. You have to assume that if a death is not in this book, it didn't happen in Peoria.

So where did he die? I tried Chicago. He doesn't appear in any Chicago - or other Illinois - records available online, so I tried the Illinois State Archives. They wouldn't let me in. Literally: 'the server where this page is located isn't responding'. I checked with people in the USA, and they can get in OK. Apparently some US archives are blocking access from Europe; it's something to do with the GDPR data protection scheme. Some kind friends did a look-up for me - but Jacob isn't there.

Jacob in the Trees

Time for an indirect approach. What had other researchers found? I had another look at references to Jacob in online Trees, and came across something I had noticed before - that a couple of them had him dying in San Antonio, Texas. Moreover, they had a specific date, 10 Feb 1897. This is the date shown on his headstone, and sometimes headstones can be wrong; however the Trees didn't show any other source to corroborate either the date or the place. I had not given much credence to San Antonio, presuming it probably referred to someone else. Why should he go to Texas? It's a thousand miles away. Maybe they were trying to expand their business down there? However, there don't seem to be any Kawins in the records there.

Going Local: San Antonio

Nevertheless, I checked San Antonio, expecting either I'd be blocked, as in Chicago, or draw a blank, as everywhere else. And guess what - they too, like Peoria, have a database, with records available which do not appear on the usual sites.

And guess what again?

In the entries for February 1897, there he is: J Kawin, 34 years old, married, native of Illinois. As far as they go, these biographical details more or less fit our man. It also tells us he'd been ill for a year, and had been in San Antonio for 9 months, which implies in turn that, if this is him, he'd have left Peoria around May 1896.

But, as we've seen, "our" Jacob's headstone is in a cemetery in Peoria, over 1000 miles away. Can this really be the same person?

What does the right-hand page tell us?

He died of heart failure due to pneumonia, on the 10th of February, which is the date that appears on his headstone and in the Trees I had seen. I have since seen that San Antonio was promoting itself as a spa resort around that time, with a couple of "Hot Sulphur Natatoriums". If Jacob had fallen ill a year or so earlier, around February, and then gone down to San Antonio in May - maybe he'd gone to take the waters?

He died at 503 Pinto Street, which seems to be a residential address, and his body was ...... Shipped to Peoria.

Jacob and Joseph

So here we have it. Issue resolved. Jacob and Joseph are two different people. Jacob died on 10 Feb 1897 in San Antionio, Texas, and Joseph died in Peoria 10 months later, on 24 December. Jacob's body was taken 1000 miles across America to be buried in the Jewish section of Springdale Cemetery in his home town Peoria; Joseph was buried in the "Jewish Cemetery" there, which may well be a reference to the same burial ground.

Joseph was the husband of Dora, my great-grandmother's sister. Jacob was not, and is probably not related to me at all.

Next steps

I now have to go back through all the material I have gathered on these families, everything I have written, the Trees I have constructed, the DNA matches I have attempted to analyse, review it all and re-write where necessary.

And attentive readers will recollect that there are still a number of documents I have not yet been able to find. I do not have passenger manifests for either Joseph or Dora; I do have one for Jacob, by the way, but I don't need that now, do I? I do not have a marriage record for them, nor birth records for their son Abraham or for the mysterious first child, nor a death record for the latter. Of course, some or all of these things may not have happened in Peoria, or in Illinois, or in the USA, even.

Two things I don't have for events that did happen in Peoria, are a death record for their 4th child Moritz, and the location of Joseph's burial. The latter could be particularly helpful, because if his grave has a headstone, it may carry his father's name, which in turn may help me work out whether he is related to Jacob's family.

I am currently consulting with some of the finest genealogical brains in Illinois. Hopefully they will be able to advise me where to go next. Watch this space.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #16 The Person Who Will Always Know

Who is this Joseph?

Whilst researching the members of my Terensky DNA Cluster, I kept coming across documents for a Joseph Teranski (and versions thereof). The Cluster does not include any of his descendants, and I haven't managed to identify any from amongst my AncestryDNA matches. The documents showed him to be following a similar trajectory to my Zaturenskys - Russia to Peoria to Los Angeles - although I couldn't find anything to pin him down as a member of this family. After they moved to LA in the mid-1920s Joseph and his sons Sam and Myer anglicised their surname to 'Trent'.

This alerted me to another clue. In the Tree of Cousin Jennifer, a member of the DNA Cluster and a descendant of Shmuel Zaturensky aka Simon Morris, she shows one branch of the family adopting the surname 'Terensky', and another taking on 'Trent'. She didn't show any descendants of these branches, but at least this shows that her family were aware of the existence of these other branches.

One too many Josephs

Things began to get rather confused when I started looking more closely at a Joseph Terensky who definitely was one of mine - several of his descendants were in my DNA Cluster. This Joseph also followed the family trail from Pinsk via Peoria to Los Angeles. He's a son of Meir Zaturensky, who we came across earlier in this saga as the father of Rochel Leah Teransky. I'll be following this Joseph, and his brother and sister, in later posts.

 

The two Josephs appeared to have different birth dates, and their wives and children appeared to have different names; on the other hand, they were both shoemakers. They made the move from Illinois to California at different times, but there were periods when they were both living in the same town. On several occasions I came across documents and was not sure who I should allocate them to. Were they the same person, leading a very complicated life? We've already seen at least one like that in this family. Or were they two related people with (more or less) the same name? If they were related, how closely? Was this new Joseph Teranski indeed one of my clan?

All you need is a document

I have probably amassed more documents on this Joseph than on any of the other members of this tribe, but frustratingly I have been unable to find any mention of a specific place of birth. I want him to be born in Pinsk, of course - but all I see on Census returns is 'Russia', 'Russ Polish', 'Latvia', and 'Lithuania'. On the birth certificate of his son Samuel, in 1898, Joseph is shown as 'Polish' and born in 'Poland'. This is prescient, as Pinsk did indeed become part of Poland - but only 20 years later, after the First World War and the Polish struggle for independence from the nascent Soviet Union. And Latvia and Lithuania are hundreds of miles away, off the map. No mention of Pinsk.

Nor could I find any mention of Joseph's father's name. Joseph died in 1965, but my online searches have not turned up a death certificate, or a headstone, either of which might, if you were lucky, show a father's name. Ideally I would like him to be a son of my great-great-grandfather Movsha, or failing that, of his brother Meir. Or there could be an as yet unknown third brother.

However, even without confirmation of his place of birth, or his father's name, I was convinced that there was enough evidence in the surnames and the life-journeys, and in Jennifer's Tree, to suggest that Joseph was fairly closely related to my Zaturenskys.

All I needed was a document.

And then I found one.

I was following up Abe 'Albert Allen' Morris, born in 1912 in Peoria, the youngest son of our old friend Shmuel Zaturensky aka Simon Morris. Abe is probably the father of my mystery match, Private Morris. He was drafted into the US Army in 1940, and this is his draft card.

The 'person who will always know your address' is Sam Trent. And Sam Trent is Albert Allen Morris's cousin.

Cousin? Cousin??

Cousin? That implies that one of Albert's parents must be a sibling to one of Sam's.

Albert's parents are Simon Morris aka Shmuel Zaturensky, and Rochel Leah Teransky. Shmuel and Rochel Leah are First Cousins, children of the Zaturensky brothers Movsha and Meir respectively. Sam's father is the new Joseph Teranski. So Joseph should be a brother of either Shmuel, or Rochel Leah. And his father should be either Movsha, or Meir.

Just a minute. Meir already has a son Joseph - the other Joseph, the one we keep getting mixed up with this one.

So this new Joseph must be a son of Movsha, my gg-g'f. And Joseph's grandchildren, if I can find them, will be my Third Cousins.

When we were looking at Dora, we surmised that Movsha was probably married twice, and that his first wife may have been called *Bajla, and his second wife, *Chana. *Bajla would be the mother of my g-g'm Shprintsa, b 1858, and of Shmuel (Simon Morris) b 1861, and appears to have died by 1865. *Chana would be the mother of Bejla b 1866 and Dora b 1870. Joseph appears to have been born somewhere between 1866 and 1872, according to which document you are looking at, so he would probably be a child of *Chana.

As it now stands

So Movsha's family now looks like this:

We have no documentary evidence for either of Movsha's two wives, only that different family Trees suggested different names for their respective gg-g'mothers. The DNA evidence suggests that I am closer to Shmuel's descendants than to the other lines, so I am happy to suggest that he and my g-g'm Shprintsa are children of a first wife, whilst the other three are from a second wife.

We do not have documentary evidence for *Chana's daughter *Beila, but somebody with her name would fit very nicely. DNA evidence suggests that I have a closer connection to Dora's descendants than to *Beila's, so I am surmising that there may be a Kawin link further back, possibly via *Chana, that was reinforced when Dora married Joseph Kawin.

In Joseph Teranski's case, there is fairly good circumstantial evidence in the surname and the family journey from Russia to Peoria to Los Angeles, but crucially there is one document that clinches the relationship. It tells us that Sam Trent is Albert Morris's cousin, and that he is The Person Who Will Always Know.

Moshe Chaim, Czar of Pinsk: #15 The Beila Hypothesis

The mystery of the missing sister 

The last post (#14 Dora and Ockham's Razor) left us wondering whether we should be looking for a sister for Dora Zaturensky. We need to find a mother for Benjamin Gitelman, and she needs to be sufficiently closely related to Dora such that:

a) Benjamin can say on his passenger manifest in 1922 that he was going to his 'half-brother", Dora's son Sam Kawin

and

b) my tentative analysis of my DNA matches with Cousins David (descended from Benjamin) and Paul (descended from Dora) still makes sense

So a sister would fit the bill on both counts. It wouldn't fully account for the 'half-brother' designation on Benjamin's manifest, as if their mothers are sisters, Sam and Benjamin would be first cousins. But I think I've exhausted the possibility of a half-sibling relationship - I just can't see it. So I'm going for sisters, and consequently, cousins.

Beylya Terensky?

Then I recalled this snippet from Cousin Jennifer's Tree on Ancestry, which I referred to in an earlier post, but we weren't looking at Gitelmans at that point.

In this Tree, Benjamin's father is a Gitelman, but his mother is shown as Beylya Terensky. Not Dora. At the moment we have no idea who this Beylya Terensky is. There is no mention of a Lipschitz; nor, by the way, does the name seem to appear anywhere else in relation to this family.

This looks to me very much like one of those half-recalled family stories, passed on to later generations by someone who is pretty certain of some details but a bit woolly on the rest. Which is not surprising, because the whole story is getting *very* complicated, and it's several generations back, pretty much lost in the mists of time. And Beylya's birth date of 1888 must be a typo - Benjamin was born in 1885 or 86, so if she's his mother she must have been born some time in the 1860s.

Beylya Turansky?

And then I remembered seeing that Jennifer has another version of this Tree, which uses the name Turansky.

This version introduces a whole crowd of new people that don't seem to appear anywhere else in either family knowledge or records. The father of the family is Morris (not shown here) - though Jennifer may have taken that name from the discussion she and I had a few weeks ago - and the name of his wife is unknown. They have 9 children, all shown with Yiddish names, all born in Pinsk.

These are the first 3 children:

Is this our Dora? And is this the Beylya that appears as the mother of Benjamin in Jennifer's other Tree? It's certainly looking promising.

No source is given for this family group. The fact that they all have Yiddish names suggests that this family did not emigrate; if they had, Jennifer would probably have known some at least of them by Americanised names. It looks to me very much as though the list has been provided by a Belarussian researcher, transcribed from one of the 'Revision Lists' compiled periodically throughout the 19C by the Russian authorities to keep track of citizens for tax and conscription purposes.

This immediately poses a problem, as we know that our family were using 'Zaturensky' in Russia, at least until they arrived in the USA. All the members of the family whose emigration I have been able to trace use some form of the name Zaturensky on their passenger documents. So how come they're using Turansky here? If it is the same family, of course ...

Notice that Beylya here is born in 1866; Dora's birth date, as we have seen, varies between 1869 and 1872, as suggested here. If this list is indeed from a Russian Revision List, the dates will probably be more reliable than those Dora gave after she got to America - the Russian authorities used to check names and dates against other records, to try to catch conscription-dodgers in particular. So if we lean towards 1872 for Dora, we have to conclude that Beylya looks the more likely of the two to be the mother of a child born in 1886, when Dora would only have been 14 years old.

Are they really ours?

Provided, of course, that this is indeed our family. Notice that there is no indication of the existence of a family for Morris by a previous wife, which is where I would expect my great-grandmother Shprintsa and her brother Shmuel (Simon Morris) to appear. However, Shprintsa had married by around 1880, and Shmuel left for the USA around that time as well. If the list was put together after 1880 there would be no reason for them to appear on it - they were no longer part of this household.

But how come Jennifer has Benjamin down as the son of Beylya, whereas when he emigrates to the USA in 1922, he says he's going to his half-brother Sam Kawin, who we know to be the son of Dora and Joseph Kawin? Surely this implies that Benjamin is also a son of Dora, but by a different father? How can he be the son of a different mother as well? What sort of a half-brother is that?

Tick-tock, tick-tock. Time for that thinking-cap again.

A Tale of Three Beilas?

Let's take a different angle on this. Let's ask, how might this putative Beylya fit in to what we know - or think we know - about this family?

Cousin Jennifer, who is a descendant of Simon Morris (Shmuel Zaturensky), shows his mother as 'Bailie', and Dora's mother as Chana. Cousin Paul, a desendant of Dora, also shows her mother as Chana. I don't know if Jennifer and Paul are in touch, but the differences in their Trees suggest they were developed independently of each other. There doesn't seem to be any documentary evidence for either name, so they may well both be reflecting the versions of the family story handed down within their own families. So the fact they both have Dora's mother as Chana could be significant, as could the fact that Jennifer shows Simon with a different mother; Paul doesn't show Simon at all.

This all seems to back up my earlier assumption that Movsha Zaturensky married twice. And at this point I go out on a limb.

If Movsha's first wife was Beila, as Jennifer suggests, and if Benjamin's mother was also a Beila, as Jennifer also suggests in a different version of the Tree, and given that Benjamin later named his own first child Beila, we can perhaps begin to construct a timeline of Beilas.

A Beila Timeline

We have previously had cause to refer to the Ashkenazi Jewish tradition of naming a child after a recently deceased close relative. Maybe that's what's happening here. Let's look at what we know, and see what we can deduce, in the light of this tradition.

1) Movsha and his second wife Chana have their first child Beila 2 in 1866, so his first wife Beila 1 must have died before then; Movsha would then be naming his new child after his deceased frst wife.

2) Benjamin's own first daughter Beila 3 was born in 1913, so it is likely that his mother - who was Beila 2, Movsha's first daughter with Chana - had died by then.

So our timeline now reads:

i) Beila1, Movsha's first wife: probably died c1865

ii) Beila 2, daughter of Movsha's second wife Chana: born c 1866, named after her father's deceased first wife Beila 1; mother of Benjamin; probably died before 1913

iii) Benjamin, son of Beila 2 and an unidentified Gitelman: born 1886

iv) Beila 3, daughter of Benjamin: born 1913, named after her deceased grandmother Beila 2

Here's how that might look in a Tree:

NB: I haven't shown Benjamin's daughter Beila 3 in this Tree, as the whole thing is just getting too crowded.

Sorted

I thought I had this sorted a month ago. I even posted #14, and thought, that's it, onward and upward. Next! However, on re-reading, there were several things I wasn't happy with. I revised, rephrased,  re-drew the Trees, then revised, rephrased and re-drew again, and eventually split the analysis into two sections. Dora's story now spreads over 7 posts, that have taken 6 weeks to put together. I'm going to stick with this version, until I see reason to change it, of course.

Many thanks to Jennifer and other descendants who have interrogated relatives, trawled through websites, paid for research, and drafted Trees, and also shared their DNA with me, whether they realise it or not. And especial thanks to Genetic Affairs, whose AutoClusters provided the clues and pointed the way.

But this journey is not over yet. There are at least 4 more Zaturenskys to come, wending their way over the water from Pinsk to Peoria. But we can relax a bit, I don't think any of their stories are quite as complicated as Dora's.